CHAPTER FIVE. ACTION.

I act all the time; I am always in flux, in process, doing something.

(I use the terms “action,” “to act,” etc., to cover all of my doing, whether it is, to use Schutz’s terms, covert, purely mental (e.g., going over something in my mind, thinking to myself), or overt, “gearing into the outer world.”¹ Action, as we shall see, can be deliberate, done on purpose, or purely habitual and automatic, with no forethought, or anywhere in between. What distinguishes action from mere behavior is the possibility of deliberate intervention or control, even if this possibility is not actualized, as in the case of purely habitual action. Thus, the beating of my heart, the involuntary knee-jerk reflex, etc., are not actions.)

That I am an agent is one of the most central features of the self. We have seen that the intentional aspect of both percepts and concepts consists in that I am oriented to action regarding their intentional objects; my emotions call for expression, and my moods and pervasive bodily feelings have a continual influence on the style of my activity; and much of my self-concept consists of action-schemata, knowledge of what I can and cannot do and what I should and should not do, and evaluative feelings and thoughts regarding what I do. Thus, all of the elements of the self which we have considered so far relate in one way or another to action. Since this is the case, it seems curious that action is extremely difficult to describe from the phenomenological point of view. When I am acting, doing things out in the public world or thinking to myself, my attention is focused on the objects of my action, the things or people or concepts that I am dealing with, not on the character of the action itself, or on the noetic and subjective elements of my experience of action. The case is exactly parallel to trying to observe and describe transitive states of mind; if I stop to pay attention to what I am doing, I am no longer performing the action that I want to investigate. Instead, I am performing the action of trying to observe and investigate it. Even when I stop and try to retain an experience of action that has just passed, I find it difficult to “see” all of what was there, because the vividness of the retention depends on the amount or degree of attention in the original experience – the more attention, the more retention, i.e., the more can be called back to mind. Nevertheless, persistent and repeated observation of myself over a long period of time, coupled with non-phenomenological reflection on (thinking about) myself, has revealed that I am aware of and can become conscious of what happens when I act in various ways. I can become conscious of the feelings and thoughts (which merge into operative interpretations) that accompany my action, and thereby learn to apprehend and characterize my action.

There are three kinds of feelings and interpretations concomitant to my action. I can become conscious of impulsions to action, of the broad emotions and moods that occur correlatively to my action over long periods of time, and of specific feelings and interpretations that accompany specific actions or types of action.

There is a specific type of feeling that I call “impulsion to action.” This kind of feeling is like a “least action;” it is action in an incipient stage, not yet fully realized. If I actually do what I have an impulsion to do, then the impulsion itself is, as it were, drowned out by the action-experience, with its focusing of attention on the objects of action, and is overlooked. I become aware of impulsions to action when I don’t do the action – my attention remains fixed on the impulsion, not on the object of the action.

Impulsions to action arise from two major sources. The first is bodily feelings. Many bodily feelings are appetites – I feel hungry, so I eat; I desire a cigarette, so I smoke one; I feel restless from being inside all day, so I take a walk; etc. Other bodily feelings are painful and lead to trying to reduce the pain – I have a headache, so I take aspirin; I have a stiff back, so I exercise; etc. The other major source of impulsions to action is my emotions. Emotions, as I have said, call for expression in action – I feel angry, so I want to hit someone; I feel a little lonely, so I look for somebody to talk to; etc. Thinking, the other major component of my subjective life, does not lead to overt action unless it is accompanied by a noticeable emotion. If I am merely idly thinking, I do not feel any strong impulse to tell others what I am thinking, but if I think of something that excites me or something relevant to a goal that I want to accomplish, I feel a stronger impulse to tell others or to do overtly what I have thought of doing.

It is worth noting that feelings are expressed in action in structured, patterned ways. No matter how angry I feel toward someone, I do not ordinarily hit that person. I may attack him or her verbally or refuse to cooperate with him or her, or even try to turn others against him or her, but I don’t actually strike that person. Thus, just as I introject attitudes about the world and images of myself from others and from my society in general, so I learn acceptable and unacceptable ways of expressing emotions. Emotion always leads at least to impulsions to action, if not to overt action. Emotions call for expression, and if I persistently refuse to express certain kinds of emotions, then they tend to remain hidden from my conscious attention which, again, does not mean that they don’t exist. As a child I was taught, in various subtle ways, that it was no proper for me to cry – as a consequence, I have had to learn how to cry in order to get in touch with my emotions.

Another kind of feelings that accompanies my action is the broad emotions that arise correlatively to the course of my actions over a period of time. Church says that “in general we are aware of ourselves only in terms of the total feeling states that accompany behavior . . . .”² A total feeling state is not the feeling of an individual action, but the unity of feelings arising out of a whole sequence of actions – all the individual feelings associated with individual actions combine over a period of time to form a larger feeling with a character all its own. To become conscious of this feeling is to be reflective, to “look around” when there is a pause in my course of actions and notice how I am feeling in general. In this way I become conscious of my feelings of action on a broader scale than single actions; I approach my actions from the opposite direction from impulsions to action.

Finally, there are specific feelings and interpretations that arise concomitant to specific actions. There are two types of emotional-interpretive complexes, corresponding to two types of action, deliberate and habitual. Actually, most of my action is neither purely deliberate nor purely habitual; I am going to abstract these two extremes as ideal types, but most action falls somewhere in between.

Deliberate action is action that I envision or plan beforehand and then decide to do and go ahead and do according to my plan. The distinctive feature of deliberate action is that my attention is split up between the objects with which I am dealing (things, people, concepts, etc.) and my plan, design, or project which I have in mind. The initial creation of a habit is an example: I must plan out ahead of time the sequence of actions that I want to do and then do them, being always guided by my plan. The more habitual the sequence gets, as we shall see, the less I have to attend to it for it to get done. Another example is a meeting I once had with a friend of mine whom I see infrequently. I had in mind that I wanted to meet him as deeply and fully as possible. I kept my attention on him, looking at him and listening to what he was saying, as well as being conscious of the emotions and attitudes he was expressing. Correlatively I tried to be as conscious as possible of my own feelings and tried to express them well and fully. Occasionally I would have a flash of self-consciousness, “seeing” what I was doing, comparing that with my ideal, and feeling exhilarated because I was living up to my ideal, acting according to what I had in mind as my goal. This was one of the clearest and most intense experiences I have had of a sense of agency, a sense of I-doing, a sense that included deliberate action according to a set of maxims, the reflective knowledge that I was so acting, and the exhilaration (an evaluative feeling) of doing so. My attention was devoted to my friend and to myself to the exclusion of extraneous thoughts and things in my environment. Thus I was more fully conscious of each aspect of the experience, by virtue of having a clear idea of what I wanted to be doing, than I am when my attention is dispersed over the whole field of objects present to me. All of the elements of the experience concatenated into a continuing sense of vitality, activity, and well-being.

Similar to this sense of agency is the sense of myself I get when I am in the process of making a decision. When I am making a decision, straightforward action is stopped; I am hung up between contemplation (in the mode, “having them in mind”) of two or more possible courses of action that I might take. I do not have so much a sense of agency as a sense of frustration of agency – but this too yields knowledge of myself as agent. Again in the situation the crucial element is that my attention is split up. I compare the possible courses of action against each other and against various criteria. Perhaps I must also rank the criteria in order of importance. I am conscious of how I feel toward each possibility, of images of myself in each of the conflicting possible situations, of thoughts of the past and anticipations of the future. I have a very painful sense of the frustration of action, and a clear sense of myself as the one who is making and must make this decision. When there is no decision to be made, my attention is out in the world, absorbed into the things with which I am dealing; but when a decision hangs up action, I become acutely conscious of myself, because my attention can no longer be out there in the world.

Most of my action does not partake of this sense of agency so acutely; but in all but the most unthinking, routing, habitual action there is some dim glimmering of this sense. William James calls attention to one variety of this ordinary sense of agency:

And has the reader never asked himself what kind of a mental fact is his intention of saying a thing before he has said it? It is an entirely definite intention, distinct from all other intentions, an absolutely distinct state of consciousness, therefore; and yet how much of it consists of definite sensorial images, either of words or of things? Hardly anything! Linger, and the words and things come into the mind; the anticipatory intention, the divination is there no more. But as the words that replace it arrive, it welcomes them successively and calls them right if they agree with it, it rejects them and calls them wrong if they do not. The intention to-say-so-and-so is the only name it can receive. One may admit that a good third of our psychic life consists in these rapid premonitory perspective views of schemes of thought not yet articulate.³

We may extend his remark and speak of the intention-to-do-so-and-so which is present in the fringe of my experience whenever I engage in more or less deliberate action. (“Intention” is used here in the ordinary sense of having a design, project, or purpose, etc., and should not be confused with perceptual and conceptual intentionality although there is some parallel in that all forms of intentions and intentionality involve a kind of pointing beyond what is immediately given to some other state of affairs.) The more fully this sense of I-intend-to-do-so-and-so is present, the more deliberate is the action, the more there is a sense of agency, of I-doing. This sense of agency is the means by which I apprehend certain of my actions as my deliberate doing.

There is another type of action, which is also my doing, but in another sense, the sense merely of I-and-not-someone-else-doing. This is habitual action, action in which I am relatively unaware of doing the action – my attention is directed elsewhere. In the most extreme cases, such as going through my routine of getting up in the morning, my thoughts are usually quite unrelated to what I am doing, I may be thinking of what I am to do that day, or remembering my dreams, or imagining something else altogether. I am aware of my environment only in the most minimal way. It is often the case that I think of doing something not included in the routine – that I want to take a certain book with me that I normally leave at home, for instance – and then realize after I have done the routine that I forgot to do that one nonroutine action. The habitual routine does itself automatically; there is little or no sense of agency. Habitual action is prereflective action – or perhaps postreflective, in that I can, if I want to, remember initiating the routine, but now that it is established I no longer have to think about it. Habits that I have deliberately initiated are me in a double sense: they are me in that it is I and not someone else who does the habitual action, and they partake in a residual way of the original deliberate initiating of them. Habits that I have simply fallen into, without deliberate intent, lack the residual sense of agency; they are me only in a single sense.

Most of my action is neither purely deliberate nor purely habitual. When I do my tasks and interact with people in an ordinary, everyday way, my action is habit-like in that it is typical – the things I do I have done before and will do again, according to the same patterns; I know how to do them and I don’t have to think about what I’m doing or am conscious of myself very much. But my typical routine and semi-routine action is also somewhat deliberate in that I do have some vague idea of what I am doing and why. When I am at my job writing computer programs, I am often paying attention only to the program in front of me and to the envisioned goal of what I am to have the machine do, how I should construct the program in order to achieve the goal, etc. Action here is less habitual in that my attention must be directed to the job in front of me and not into far regions of daydreams or extraneous thinking. But I am not conscious of myself to any great degree; I am aware that I am doing what I am doing only vaguely, and I don’t pay much attention to how I feel – except intermittently, as when I throw down my pencil in disgust or complete a section of the program and sit back to enjoy the feeling of accomplishment. In fact, most of my daily actions are of this semi-routine, semi-deliberate type. I go to the store to buy certain things, I prepare and eat dinner, I read my books, etc., but all without being aware of myself very much. Much of my interaction with people occurs this way, too. I nod and say hello to people on the street; I chat about the weather or politics or theology or what-not; I discuss my job with my co-workers; etc. In all of this there is a certain minimal level of my subjectivity involved, but it gets expressed in a straightforward, unreflective way. Sometimes I come home and feel slightly empty, out of touch with myself, after having been unaware of myself throughout the day.

What are the kinds of attendant subjective elements involved in habitual, routine or semi-routine action? I shall use the term “attitude” to refer to the inner, feeling and thinking side of action of this sort. By being aware of my attitudes, I am aware of my semi-routine, object-oriented action. Church uses the term “attitude” much as I do. All specific schemata, he says, “are subsidiary to more general patterns of orientation which we might call attitudes; these show up both in the valuative coloring of the environment and in the way we carry ourselves, in our personal style.”⁴ An attitude is an object-oriented complex of feelings, interpretations, and action-schemata. To perceive an object, a state of affairs, a person, or myself as valuatively interpreted is to have an attitude toward that object, state of affairs, etc. Attitudes include intentions (in the ordinary sense) with respect to my actions and expectations of how the object will behave, knowledge of what to do with it, or with respect to it, perhaps theoretical knowledge of its place in the general scheme of things. But more importantly, an attitude includes feelings toward the object, person, state of affairs, etc., feelings of liking or disliking it, approval or annoyance, etc. Evaluative feelings such as these of course lead to expression in typical actions, or at least to impulsions to action. Routine use of a dictionary, avoidance of eggplants because I don’t like them, giving material aid to civil rights groups, eager pursuit of a woman – all these are the expression of attitudes. Attitudes are the “inside” of routine and semi-routine actions; such actions are the “outside” of attitudes.

Attitudes may arise out of my own contacts with people and the world and my reflection on my experience, they may be deliberately adopted; or they may have been absorbed through imitation of my parents or my peers or instilled in various subtle ways from my society as a whole, that is, they may be unreflectively and undeliberately adopted. Often times different attitudes, gotten from different sources, are in conflict – I enjoy talking with my black friends, but am occasionally very conscious that they are “colored” and am made uncomfortable by their actions.

Both routine and semi-routine action-patterns and attitudes can be changed; and a change in one leads to a change in the other, for they are the outside and the inside of the same thing. Attitudes, for instance, may be deliberately adopted, “put on.” I may deliberately put on an attitude of interest in someone’s work, not because I am interested, but because I want to be polite or because I want something from that person. If a group of my friends have distinct political views, I may adopt those views myself, in order to keep their friendship. This sort of thing may lead, of course, to a masking and frustration of my truer feelings, sometimes to the point where I am no longer conscious of them, but only of those that I have adopted. It is very difficult to remain cynically adopting an attitude that conflicts with another feeling. Either I will drop that attitude or will repress the feeling. Of course, not all deliberate adoption of attitudes is cynical in this way; many of my own deepest attitudes toward life and other people have been adopted as a result of lengthy reflection on myself and my situation.

I can govern my actions and behaviors from the inside by adopting attitudes; I can also govern them from the outside by adopting or changing my habits, or my typical routine ways of doing things. Habits and routine actions have a sort of inertia – the longer established and more often repeated they are, the harder they are to change. This puts a very real limitation on the freedom of the self. (See the discussion of freedom in Chapter Seven, Part B, “The Self in Relation.”) In order to change a habit I must keep in mind the new habit that I want to substitute for it and keep watching that I do not revert to the old one. I must exert an effort of will. In cases like this, the element of thought is crucial, for if I forget to think about it, the old habit will tend to reassert itself and take over. James goes so far as to assert that keeping an idea before the mind is all that an effort of will consists in:

The essential achievement of the will, in short, when it is most ‘voluntary,’ is to attend to a difficult object and hold it fast before the mind . . . and it is a mere physiological incident that when the object is thus attended to, immediate motor consequences should ensue.

. . . This strain of the attention is the fundamental act of will.⁵

I don’t agree that this is all that is involved – I can have the idea of not smoking cigarettes firmly in my mind, but unless I want to stop smoking and keep overcoming my impulses to reach for a cigarette, the mere idea will not stop me. Nevertheless, James is correct in asserting that if the idea were not there I should make no change in my actions at all – for then I would be absorbed into the action itself or into something else and would be carried along by force of habit.

Attitudes may be more or less trivial, or more or less central to the self and to my feeling of who I am. Here, as with subjective processes generally, the marks of the importance of an attitude in the context of my self as a whole are duration and intensity [2013] and frequency of recurrence. An immediate reaction of dislike at a mother scolding her child in the subway is a fleeting and mild attitude, one that may lead to no more action than wrinkling my brow; it is thus a trivial occurrence, one that has no deep meaning or reality for me. But my attitude toward my own mother’s scolding me may have a pervasive and important influence on my life, shaping my attitudes and actions toward all the women that I meet. That I don’t like eggplants and never eat them is a repetitive but mild attitude-habit; that I don’t like racism and give material aid to organizations that oppose discrimination on the basis of race, religion, sex, etc., is a more intense, less merely repetitive attitude which will have more influence on my life than my tastes in food. The most influential attitudes are the most pervasive – whether I eagerly accept novelty and other people or whether I fearfully retreat – and the most intense – having faced death I a traffic accident I tend not only to drive more carefully but to appreciate the everyday details of life more than I used to.

Finally, we should note that it is a fundamental characteristic of the self to form habits and that my habits are a very basic element in who I am. I myself must do much more investigation before I am sure of this, but it seems to me that whenever I perform some action, overt or covert, I have a tendency to repeat it unless something else intervenes. In other words, everything that I do, if not already a habit, is at least incipiently the beginning of a habit. This can be seen in the case of making judgments. Recall Peirce’s example of first seeing a clean surface and then seeing that it is dirty. If I had only one perception of the surface, if I never returned to it, I should go on believing that it was clean; I should automatically go on holding to my original perceptual judgment. Schutz, summing up Husserl’s discussion of the typicality of the world of everyday life in Erfahrung und Urteil, notes that “what is experienced in the actual perception of an object is apperceptively transferred to any other similar object, perceived merely as to its type.”⁶ In other words, when I make a perceptual judgment as to the characteristics of something before me, I habitually believe that judgment to be true of all other objects of the same type, unless further experience disconfirms my anticipation of such typical conformity. If it is not disconfirmed, it becomes my “lasting acquisition.”⁷

Whether or not it is true of all my actions that they are at least incipiently the beginnings of habits, it is true that most of my overt and covert action is habit-like in that it follows typical repeated patterns. It is a basic characteristic of the self to form habits – that is clear even if I myself am not yet sure exactly how basic it is. Since this is the case, it follows that a basic element in the composition of the self is the totality of my habits. Habitual action is what I do most of the time; thus, the concomitant emotions, moods, feeling states, etc., are pervasively present in my subjective state, forming a large part of who I am.

My habits are fundamentally me, as Natanson says, following Mead, and my deliberate action is I happening, me in the making.⁸ Because my habits are stable, I am stable and continuous. Not only do my habits make up me as I have been in the past, but I can rely on them to be me in the future, for they have inertia and repeat themselves again and again. Contrary to what Sartre says,⁹ the past is not totally inefficacious; I know that I shall be more or less the same person tomorrow as I am today because of my habits.

There is one more type of action, which I shall mention briefly for the sake of completeness, a kind of action that is in a class by itself – ecstatic action. My action is ecstatic when I am acting with no idea, no mental concept, of what I am doing. It is similar to habitual action, except that in this case I have never done this action before, it is something completely new. This kind of experience happens most intensely when I am conscious of what I am doing (in the mode, “it itself”), but not letting being conscious of it interfere with the action. In ecstatic action I surprise myself, I just let myself happen, I discover that I can do things I never thought of before. Examples of ecstatic action are improvising dancing or spontaneously making a joke, or improvising music. I heard someone say, after hearing a Moby Grape record, “He couldn’t have known what he was doing!”

With this, we have reached the end of our description of action. But a doubt arises. We have described the subjective and noetic elements that accompany different types of action and give to these different types their distinctive character. But what of the self that is the agent? Who am I who act? Surely we should be able to apprehend and describe the self which initiates action and does it, no matter what the type, the self which is the source of action. But try as I might, I cannot find any element present to pure consciousness which is an agent. Emotions, bodily feelings, and impulsions to action provide the motivating force, as it were, but they do not do any action. My conceptual map of the world and my operative perceptual noeses channel and guide action, and my self-concept governs my typical style and range of action; but they do not initiate action, they are not the source of action. When I act in habitual and routine ways, my action is done automatically, I do not have to pay attention to it. But even in the clearest cases of deliberate action, where does the initial aim come from, who or what does the envisaging of the goal and plans action leading to the goal? We rule out causal and psychological explanations. These are interpretations that may or may not have some truth, but we are concerned simply with reflectively “seeing” what happens when I act, and such purported causal factors are not elements in the actual experience of action. I look around in vain for any object present to pure transcendental consciousness that is the agent, the doer, the source of action.

I am in the same situation as when I tried to become conscious of the Self which is itself conscious. Now, as then, I find no such entity, no such object in my experience. And yet action is done, I am always in action, there is always activity of some sort going on. To live is to act; cessation of action is death. The process of learning how to cope with the world is a process of channeling action into useful patterns, reducing the element of randomness. But action itself always is – even in my sleep I dream and my heart beats. Action wells up from some source inside of me, from somewhere, I know not where – when I am writing, the ideas occur to me and get expressed in words; the most I can do is accept all that happens and pick out the significant parts. I learn to guide and channel the … shall I call it creative urge? Just as the transcendental Self, I-who-experience, is a kind of ultimate, something which there is no way to get “behind” to make it an object of which I can be conscious in the mode, “I myself,” so it seems that the self as agent, as that-which-acts is a similar kind of ultimate. I cannot become conscious of I-who-am-aware, and I cannot become conscious of I-who-act.

Let us make the obvious judgment, then (for surely I am a single person who both experiences and acts), and say that the transcendental Self is both witness-consciousness and agent, both that-which-is-conscious and that-which-acts. It is what can never become an object for me, and it is the source of all my action. The transcendental Self is the unintuitable core of the self, the wellspring of all being conscious and all action. It is that to which the empirical self is present as object and that whose action is channeled and patterned through the empirical self on its way to effective actuality in the world.

(As I mentioned in Chapter Two, this is Husserl’s view. Numerous others have come to essentially the same conclusion. To mention only one of the most recent and one of the most ancient: Whitehead says that the most fundamental characteristics of each actual entity, of which the human self is one, are consciousness (“prehension”) and activity (“creativity”);¹⁰ and the unknown authors of the Upanishads, ancient mystical-religious-philosophical texts of India, state that the Atman, the innermost Self of each person, is both pure transcendental consciousness (“the unseen seer, the unheard hearer . . .”¹¹) and pure activity, the ultimate life-energy (“When the life goes out of it, this body dies, but the life does not die. This finest essence . . . : that is the real: That is the Self: That you are . . . .”¹²).)

With this, we approach the end of our quest for the self. I have described the major components of the self from a subjective-phenomenological point of view, and have noted the curious but indispensable presence in absence, being in the mode of not being, of the transcendental Self, I-who-experience-and-act. Now we can summarize these findings and present a coherent picture of the self.

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