THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF RATIONAL AGENCY

24 THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF RATIONAL AGENCY Roberta De Monticelli All life is position-taking. (Husserl 1911/2002: 290) The state of the art Phenomenology is experiencing a renaissance thanks to its powerful contributions to the embodied/enactive approach to consciousness and cognition, which has become a prominent paradigm in contemporary consciousness studies. The embodied-enactive perspective puts the perceiving subject back into the world, stressing the dynamic reciprocity between embodied agents and the environments with which they interact (Varela et al. 1991; Gallagher 2005; Hanna and Maiese 2009; Colombetti 2011; Bower and Gallagher 2013). Nevertheless, contemporary phenomenology still lacks a satisfactory overall account of normativity and rationality, up to the standards set by classic works in phenomenology (see this Handbook, Part A). This contribution aims to bridge the gap between work on the embodied mind and rational agency or personhood. The first part of the present contribution addresses the state of the art in contemporary debates. The second offers some relatively original developments toward a full-fledged phenomenology of rational agency. More specifically, the proposed theory of acts should be read as a genetic phenomenology of embodied and individualized personhood. For we are probably born to become rational agents, more or less reasonable, accountable, and morally sensible persons and we are definitely not born rational (or responsible) agents, capable of giving reasons for our actions. Still less are we born “pure” or disembodied moral agents. Phenomenology A short clarification about how to understand the term “phenomenology” is in order here, especially as the ambiguity of this technical word is bound up with that of another crucial term, “intentionality.” Intentionality is widely understood as “a specific property which, if instantiated, makes minds of or about objects and facts” (Salice 2018: 604). This aboutness which distinguishes conscious mental states from physical states is undoubtedly what 360 The phenomenology of rational agency Brentano had in mind when he first introduced intentionality as the fundamental concept of empirical psychology in 1874 (Brentano 1874/1995). “Aboutness” remains a core feature of the richer Husserlian notion, although not its only feature, as developed by Husserl in the Fifth Logical Investigation and taken up by most early phenomenologists. The additional core feature of Husserl’s enriched notion of intentionality is positionality or position-taking (Stellungnehmen) and concerns the subjective (or “noetic”) pole of an intentional relation. By contrast, aboutness focuses on the objective (or “noematic”) pole of intentionality, or what the noesis is about. We shall unpack the concept of positionality in the course of this contribution, since it is due to this second core feature that a phenomenological account of consciousness and action, as opposed to a psychological one, is already an account of reason. Positionality, in fact, accounts for the normativity to which our consciousness is subject even in basic perceptual and emotional experiences, as we shall see in full detail. This suggests an initial gloss for the term “phenomenology” as used here, albeit a negative one: it does not mean psychology, if psychology is about mental facts. Phenomenology is a method of philosophy. Adopting the phenomenological stance toward any object requires clarifying how that object appears from an appropriate intentional, that is, first-personal perspective, e.g., a perceptual one, if it is the object of a perception, or an emotionally characterized one, if it is the object of an emotional experience, and so on. A phenomenology of rational agency requires adopting the perspective of an agent intending to act in a certain way and thereby uncovering the factors that determine whether acts count as right or wrong, in a variety of different senses (e.g., as useful, efficacious, convenient, expedient, just, elegant, appropriate). A phenomenologist adopts this perspective by putting herself “ideally” in the place of such an agent. To do that “ideally” means to “bracket” whatever is contingent for an actual subject, e.g., the particular person I am, focusing instead on whatever necessarily pertains to agency as such. As a piece of ideally examined life, a phenomenology of agency, unlike its counterpart in psychology, has to ask, moreover, about the very sources of normativity, in relation to which actions appear as right or wrong. The truncated conception of intentionality as the property of aboutness enjoyed by conscious mental states explains not only the current lack of distinction between psychology (as an empirical study of mental facts) and phenomenology (as an inquiry into the essential features of whatever object can be presented in a direct or intuitive mode, from a first-personal, idealized perspective). It also encourages a narrowing of the sense of “phenomenology” into a specialized part of psychology that deals with the analysis of “phenomenal consciousness,” leaving intentionality for separate treatment. This further restriction, definitely postBrentanian, underlies current usage of the word in the contemporary academic discourse. Its meaning is now shaped by a distinction (or a “gap”) between intentionality as aboutness (i.e., as what makes a mental state a representation of something in the external world) and “qualia” or “phenomenal” consciousness, a distinction that motivates the “hard problem” of consciousness, the idea that consciousness is impenetrable by any functional account distinguishing our conscious minds from functionally well-equipped zombies (Chalmers 1996; for an argument against separating intentionality and phenomenality see Horgan and Tienson 2002). A phenomenology of agency in this further restricted sense would describe what it is like to act or to be active by leaving the objective nature of action and agency entirely out of consideration. That approach could – even if it need not – be a kind of phenomenalism, perfectly compatible with an “eliminative” or a reductive approach to (phenomenal) consciousness, albeit not implying it. “Phenomenology” would then describe the “mere” appearance of agency and not how agency really works. Or else, it could endorse a dualism of sorts, severing any ontological bond between the outer and inner world, objectivity and 361 Roberta De Monticelli subjectivity, mind and body. Actions as “lived” would certainly “appear” as steered and even constituted by what an agent “intends” to do, but as seen objectively, from a third-person perspective, they would be nothing but natural events (Davidson 2001). Yet what an agent intends to do (in the usual sense of doing something on purpose) will tell us in most cases which action is being performed (e.g., bribing somebody versus repaying a debt). True enough, intentionality (as aboutness and positionality) does not imply “intending” in the usual sense: a perception has intentionality without having a purpose and even actions are not done on purpose sometimes – such as stepping on somebody’s foot. Yet voluntariness seems to be essential to acting as such: if you unwillingly step on somebody’s foot, you were actually trying to do something else, e.g., going your way. Such that actions are not separable from intentions (even though intentions can be left unrealized). Indeed, identifying intended actions is necessary for our first being able to ascertain one of the most striking, dramatic (and philosophically interesting) phenomena of human agency, namely, the discrepancy between what we intend to do and what we actually bring about, whether as individual agents or collectively. To sum up, what I will develop here is a full-fledged phenomenology of (rational) agency, distinct from both a psychology of agency and a mere description of agential phenomenal consciousness. A full-fledged phenomenology of agency proceeds from the bottom up by capturing the essential features of voluntariness and its normative constraints beginning from the most basic phenomena of conscious life, like perception and emotion, and thereby bridging the explanatory gap between embodied consciousness and personhood, i.e., rational agency. Rational agency A rational agent is an agent capable of acting based on reasons, including values of all sorts, e.g., hedonic, vital, economic, moral, legal, political, epistemic, aesthetic, and religious ones. Indeed, all sorts of values can be reasons for action. Rational agency isn’t restricted only to “instrumental” or strategic rationality and valuebased rationality. That is, it includes more than – in Kantian terms – conditional and unconditional reasons for acting, economic calculation and commitment to ideals or moral duty. It also includes making things with words, thereby complying (or not) with various syntactic, semantic, pragmatic constraints; making goods with things, such as building houses and artifacts with stones or wood; making sense of facts, whether explaining them or sublimating them in the light of art; and so on. Or, at least, there are no obvious reasons for resisting such a wide conception of the domain of rational agency. This domain is, in fact, the one outlined by Husserl in his Prolegomena, his attempt to inquire into the sources of normativity for all the “practical” and “normative” disciplines, from logics to ethical, legal, political theories, and from aesthetics and the theories of the arts to all possible technologies (Husserl 1900–1901). As soon as we recognize a plurality of (spheres of ) values in view of which people act, we shall have to admit all sorts of corresponding norms by which their deeds show up as right or wrong, in many different ways, e.g., as a good piece of reasoning, apt professional conduct, a morally justified deed, correct city planning, as well as the opposite of all these. In fact, if values are reasons for action, and if there is, as we shall argue, objectivity and corrigibility in value experience, grounded largely in emotional experience, then a full-fledged phenomenological approach to rational agency promotes a redefinition of reason, questioning the traditional opposition between emotion and reason while integrating 362 The phenomenology of rational agency emotional sensibility as a part, and even a fundamental part, of rationality (Hanna and Maiese 2009: ch. 5; De Monticelli 2019). Last but not least, we could not be rational agents unless we were capable of highly irrational actions. Rationality is not only a functionally based disposition but also a willingness to take ownership of one’s actions by giving (good) reasons for them. It involves freedom to violate norms or to reject values of all sorts. Only rational agents can lie, i.e., take advantage of pragmatic constraints, such as the rule by which an assertion counts as the expression of a belief, by violating them. Only rational agents – that is, persons – act based on value judgments and value priorities. As such, only persons can become criminals. Only persons, moreover, can go mad in the psychiatric sense. Practical intentionality Against this background, having highlighted the variety of ways that we can act on desire-independent reasons (on all sorts of duties, universal or particular, moral or deontological, and professional, and on all sorts of obligations, legal norms, political strategies, personal commitments, or according to all sorts of rules, of etiquette, cultural, epistemic, pragmatic, aesthetic, technical, etc.), one feels the inadequacy of the so-called “Classical Model of Practical Rationality.” That was in fact the mainstream view until the 1980s. According to it, an intentional action is understood as an event which is causally determined by mental states like beliefs and desires or, more generally, by preceding motivational and cognitive states. This model incorporates a very classical form of compatibilism. Voluntary actions are determined by causes, exactly as any other event in nature. The only difference between the former and the latter is the kind of cause. Voluntary actions have psychological causes, such as beliefs and desires, rather than physical or biological causes. This model thus involves an account of free will resembling the standard empiricist account found in such historically disparate figures as Locke and Davidson (Davidson 1971, 2001). Prima facie, provided one can distinguish inner compulsion and external constraint from psychological determination, it would seem there is no harm in describing free or voluntary actions as causally determined by the relevant states of belief and desire, i.e., the sort of “psychological” or mental causes called “motives” or “reasons.” John Searle, who is famously opposed to this model, takes it to be a representation of human rationality as essentially the rationality of apes with some added complexity. Human rationality is distilled to no more than the following sort of happening: you are thirsty, you see a bottle of what you take to be water before you, so you decide to drink the water (Searle 2001). This is definitely a reasonable decision: but would the decision not to drink it, because – say – you choose to quench a child’s thirst instead, be irrational? In recent decades a shift occurred within contemporary action theory away from that simple belief-desire (BD) model to the belief-desire-intention (BDI) model of practical intentionality. Adding to Searle’s skepticism about BD, Michael Bratman showed how much is lost in translation when intentions – that is, the conative states attributed to the agent of intentional actions – are reduced to beliefs and desires (Bratman 1987, 2007). There are at least three features of intentions that cannot be accommodated by the sort of practical syllogism leading you from a desire and a belief to an action as on BD. The first is commitment, i.e., a sort of self-obligation that is revocable if it is only intrapersonal and that is distinct from mere desire. Making a decision imposes a commitment on the decision-maker, generating an “ought” from the decision. The second feature of intentions absent from BD is planning, however vague, about what is needed to reach a goal (Bratman 2014: 15ff.), meeting the 363 Roberta De Monticelli constraints characteristic of the practically possible, e.g., practical non-contradiction, temporal irreversibility. Importantly, such constraints do not reduce to beliefs and desires (Bratman 2000). The third feature is causal self-referentiality (Searle 1983: 86ff.). This requires that the intended state of affairs be realized by the subject, thus narrowing, as BD fails to do, the range of possible intentions held by an agent. John Austin had already shown in a celebrated paper that you can do something intentionally without doing it on purpose, and that neither sort of case requires deliberate action, thereby showing, among other things, that an intention can be a mere part of a purpose, a means to an end, e.g., when, say, “I needed money for the horse races, so I dipped into the till, intending all the while to put it back as soon as I had collected my winnings.” There my intended theft is just part of a plan whose purpose is not to steal (Austin 1970: 275). With Bratman, we can generalize the idea, by taking intentions in general to be parts of plans, which in turn reflect policies, or standing practical commitments, like the policy of writing at least a page each day (Bratman 2000: 33–34). Another component of the BDI is reflexivity. Before Bratman’s intervention, Harry Frankfurt had identified personhood or rational agency with a reflexive capacity that human agents – as opposed to “wantons” or non-human animals – have of endorsing their motives for action in second-order desires consisting of the will to be, or not be, determined by first-order desires. The first-order desire actually causing the action is thereby an instance of “free” will only if it is endorsed by a second-order desire (Frankfurt 1982). Bratman seems to give reflexivity an even more important role, distinguishing weak reflexivity, i.e., the Frankfurtian capacity to have higher-order attitudes for or against first-order desires, from strong reflexivity, i.e., the same capacity but insofar as it is embedded in a policy and therefore part of a plan organizing future life (Bratman 2001: 103). A BDI-consistent model of this kind nevertheless suffers from at least two shortcomings. First, it grants only a very restricted scope to rational agency. Small children can feel responsible for what they do and be asked to explain or to justify their deeds before they can plan actions or adopt policies. Agents have, in addition, a (more or less adequate) responsiveness to given data and circumstances not yet captured by their plans, policies, or ends. If, for instance, you come across a scoundrel assaulting a girl, you may feel it as your duty – but not exactly as your wish – to rescue her at the risk of your safety: can morality be irrational? The second problem is much more general. It is shared by all “causal” theories of action, according to which an action is voluntary only if it is caused by relevant mental states of an agent. BD and BDI may differ on the sort of states that are ultimately required, as Davidson’s model differs from Searle’s or Bratman’s. But on all of those views the mental state of the agent rather than the agent himself is (causally) “responsible” for the action performed. This description is utterly inadequate to the full-fledged phenomenology of intending to do something. Whether or not my intention of getting up in the morning is reducible to my desire to get up, whether or not it is part of my plan for the day or a policy for my wakeful time to do so, the intention itself is not sufficient to bring about the getting up, unless I myself perform the act, which I may indefinitely put off as I lay in bed all day with a growing feeling of guilt (Hornsby 2004; Searle 2004; for a discussion of agent causation, see Chapter 19 in this volume). A theory of acts How are we to give account of the role of the acting subject? Can we do better than to characterize an (intentional) action as an action “caused” by a conative state? 364 The phenomenology of rational agency The notion of a state certainly plays a central role in any broadly naturalistic account of our life, whether mental or non-mental. Contemporary philosophy of mind has by and large adopted this notion in order to account for our mental life. In fact, according to a widely accepted jargon, mental life is a sequence of mental states (e.g., beliefs, desires, emotions, intentions). The nature of a sequence of mental states is generally described either as a stream, having a temporal order of succession, or as a succession of states each of which stands in causal relations with the states preceding and succeeding it. Yet, if mental is merely a succession of mental states, then the mental life of a person is even less than an imitation of ape rationality. It does not obviously set itself apart from the sort of life characteristic of an ant, or even the “life” of a Turing Machine, which may also be defined as a causal succession of states. This suggests a way to define ontological naturalism about persons: it is (or it is based on) the reduction of acts to states.1 Phenomenologically, this description is not at all true to the life of persons. It fails to capture our mental life as we know it “from the inside,” and it fails even more profoundly to capture our grasp of other persons’ meaningful behavior. Far from being a mere flow of states of consciousness (a description fitting dreams), a wakeful life and any span of it looks much more like a series of acts linked together by a relation of motivation that is not obviously causal, as we shall see. Note that this use of “act” is more inclusive than what is usually meant by “action.” Consider an example. A friend comes in. I perceive her and feel joy. This response is an act – and not just a state that I may or may not endorse, according to the classic Kantian picture: for my joy is an appraisal of my friend’s importance to me. This joy might motivate me to stop what I’m doing, run up to her, and hug her. But surely this joy will not motivate me to do those things without my “consent.” If I were to see her while in the midst of a public talk, I would not endorse this desire (one more act), as I would prefer not to interrupt my presentation. To cut a long story short, many mental “states” don’t seem capable of “causing” the following ones without the subject’s endorsement. This endorsement, by which the subject takes a stance concerning the state (either assenting to it or withholding assent), makes an actual motive out of an otherwise merely possible one. Without this endorsement, no possible motive could become an actual one. We can define a possible motive as a motive lacking causal efficacy in the absence of an endorsement, even if an endorsement is no sufficient condition of causal efficacy. This seems to be the essential difference between causality and motivation. (For a Frankfurt-style account of this difference, see Hanna and Maiese 2009: ch. 4.) Endorsing a mental state (or the opposite stance) is an instance of positionality, a “position” being the essential or distinctive feature of an act in a strict sense, conferring “act-uality” on it. Now we can better see, maybe, how the standard notion of intentionality is faulty. Intentionality has not only a first-person perspective but also a first-person actuality. Living as a subject (and experiencing oneself as such), even pre-reflectively, is responding more or less adequately to the surrounding world, which presupposes neither concept mastery nor taking on propositional attitudes. Positionality changes a reaction into a response, and a stimulus into an object, a possible truth-maker for propositional acts (see below). Kinds of acts So far, I have argued that neglecting positionality, thereby reducing personal acts to mental states, results in a subjectless account of conscious life. Agency is an essential component of subjectivity. The usual opposition between the firstand third-person perspective is better understood in terms of an opposition between the 365 Roberta De Monticelli engaged and the merely observational perspective, or between being committed and merely having a point of view (Bilgrami 2010: 25). An incomplete theory of intentionality blurs this second and more fundamental opposition. However, we should avoid conceiving of positional acts as a strange form of “mental” action, indulging in a form of Cartesian dualism as if there were some spectral agent or ego over and above the person. We can do that by conceiving positional acts as a special case of acts, involved or presupposed by acts of all the other kinds. On a provisional analysis, surely in need of elaboration, this word, “act,” denotes actions enjoying one or more of these features: (1) punctuality, as in shooting, jumping (in contrast to running), highlighting the present occurrence of an action, as in “caught in the act of . . .”; (2) some sort of self-manifestation, and in particular, self-commitment, either relative to one’s future behavior, to others, or to both. Notice that an implicit reference to the acting subject’s power of initiative (Spiegelberg 1986) is present in both cases (in contrast to the “actions” of a machine), while “acting” in the sense of “playing a role,” e.g., on stage, further extends the idea of a subject and its dispositions being manifested. Both nuances are present, too, in the legal sense of “act” (e.g., a “jobs act”), which refers to the product of legislation (being in this case the equivalent of the Latin participle actum). To sum up, we can subdivide these two overlapping types of act into still further types: 1 2 3 4 Punctual actions (as opposed to temporally extended actions and activities); Actions manifesting attitudes or dispositions, possibly with positive or negative value (e.g., an act of friendship, an act of courage); possibly ritual acts (e.g., of worship, of faith); Speech acts, that is, doing things with words, as with assertions and questions (most of which are also social acts); Social acts, including speech acts like performatives, commissives, and directives (which generate social institutions, reciprocal contractual bonds, roles, and deontic powers, i.e., obligations and rights (Searle 2010)), as well as institutional acts like sentences, laws, government decisions, which have legal and political ramifications. Classes 3 and 4 are particularly interesting for a theory of rational agency, since they contain most of the desire-independent reasons for action (e.g., pragmatic commitments, selfobligations, legal obligations, commands) acknowledged by philosophers who, like Searle, naturalize intentionality but not rationality. Here positionality as expressed by an act’s illocutionary force changes, to use the Husserlian terminology, the “quality” of the act, if not its “matter.” That is, it enables changes in the kinds of things one can do with words (e.g., make statements, pose questions, venture hypotheses, offer prayers, give commands, make promises). Making decisions Are there pre-reflective and non-linguistic positional acts? Perceptions, emotions, and even a large class of decisions appear to qualify as such. (Vis-à-vis the list of kinds of act just enumerated, we might assign them the ordinal number 0. For a similar focus on a fundamental category of essentially embodied acts, see Hanna and Maiese 2009). Adopting the Cartesian and Brentanian terminology, we could call them “mental” acts, alongside propositional acts like judgments.2 That language is misleading, however, if what is meant is a sort of “inner” 366 The phenomenology of rational agency or “mental” action (a curious kind of causally inert action). Gilbert Ryle’s criticism of the very idea of mental actions is compelling: Nobody ever says . . . he has performed five quick and easy acts of the will, and two slow and difficult ones between breakfast and lunch. (Ryle 1949/2000: 64) Here Ryle is making fun of the idea that there is a little inner agent, a “ghost” hidden inside our body. But if we reject the idea of the inner agent and regard a decision as the actual exercise of that ordinary capacity to make decisions that is called “will,” Ryle’s sarcasm loses its bite. We can count decisions. We can even say that some are difficult, others not so much, and so on. Husserl himself warned against the mythology of mental actions.3 Nevertheless, it would be absurd to deny that decisions exist or that we “make” decisions. In fact, a decision is a very specific positional act, one of endorsing a possible motive for action and making it an actual one, as described above. That is the very nature of practical intentionality, as masterfully analyzed by the most insightful phenomenologist concerned with understanding the will, Alexander Pfänder (Pfänder 1911, see Chapters 2 and 3 in this volume). A theory of the will, capable of accounting for a decision’s specific Aktcharakter, as opposed to the mere content (Materie) of an “intention” or a purpose (which may or may not be endorsed and made effective), appears to be virtually absent from discussions within contemporary philosophy of mind, as is the distinction between (positional) act and state (yet see Hanna and Maiese 2009 for an exception). Exploring the world, learning from experience, doubting: validity claims As has been rightly observed, Husserl’s distinction between the quality and matter of an act bears a certain resemblance to the current distinction between the attitude (or mode) and content of mental states (Gallagher and Zahavi 2008: 115). Yet, there is much more to the act’s quality than there is to a psychological attitude. Quality includes a specific validity claim, by which any positional act falls “under the jurisdiction of reason” (Rechtsprechung der Vernunft) (Husserl 1913/1983: 159) or is subject to possible assessment. This point needs clarification. We remarked that the truncated concept of intentionality current in contemporary philosophy of mind encourages a subjectless view of the ground level of conscious life, failing to take care of its commitments. But how can a passive and unquestioned sequence of perceptions and emotions, without commitments to their veridicality or appropriateness, still be called “experience”? How could one ever discover perceptual or emotional illusions, if perceptions and emotions did not “claim” to be veridical or appropriate, thereby eliciting our commitments? How could experience be fallible, and how could we “learn from experience,” that is correct past experiences by new ones, if not by assessing (or rejecting) the corresponding claims of validity? Positionality is precisely what accounts for the naïve, “unquestioned” claim of validity that perceptions and emotions contain. We may see this point better by contrasting perceptions and emotions with acts of imagination, which essentially do not have any claim of truthfulness (at least not in this basic sense), which do not raise any doubt about their adequacy, and which typically have a “neutralized” positionality (in Husserl’s terminology). 367 Roberta De Monticelli Ordinary perceptions and emotions, however, are corrigible. A claim of validity can be canceled by a modified position (e.g., in one of perplexity, doubt, rejection). Hence, if by “experience” we mean not just the causal impact of external reality on an organism, but something we can learn from, something which is or can fail to be veridical or appropriate, something which can provide evidence for our judgments of fact and value, then we must take positionality into account. In summary, the difference between acts and states is the difference between experience as evidence for (possible) true statements (of fact or value) and experience as the effect of causal impact of reality on an organism. But the experience through which we explore the world, for example, in the act of looking around or directing our gaze on a particular object, the experience we “learn from,” is of the first kind. It is always more or less adequate and could not be subject to critical doubt without positionality. Even playing baseball, an intentional activity which is not primarily assessable for truth, does presuppose perception and evaluation and their corresponding claims of validity. As a final observation concerning the distinction between acts and states, we may say that states are merely the effects of the world’s causal impact on an organism, whereas (basic) acts are adequate or inadequate responses to reality. Hence, positionality is the foundation of normativity. (For a similar conclusion, tying this foundation of rational normativity to pre-reflectively conscious, essentially embodied “caring,” see Hanna 2015.) A hierarchy of acts In the preceding sections, we have found persons to be the subjective pole of the intentional relation by discovering the place of agency and reason in experience. We have in a sense de-naturalized intentionality by showing how mental life is subject to the “jurisdiction of reason.” Yet it is highly unlikely that we are born conscious of this subjection, of our fallibility and free will. How, then, do we acquire full-fledged rational agency and come to exercise the capacities that go along with personhood? In the following sections, I shall outline a genetic phenomenology of rational agency, as constituted by and through one’s acts of position-taking. Positionality is to the subject of an intentional relation what the mode of presentation is to its object. It is how the subjective pole of an intentional state is given or made present to itself, i.e., the way persons experience themselves as such, as subjects. From a full-fledged notion of intentionality we learn that, as persons, we come to a full-fledged being only on the basis of those acts through which “we” learn to respond appropriately in the long apprenticeship of reality and value characteristic of the neotenous creatures we are. The following outline sketching the hierarchy of acts will suggest how and why that is so. The basic level of our entire personal life comprises what we may call basic acts containing first-order positions. There are two classes of such basic acts (well intertwined in their actual occurrence): cognitive and emotional, or, more simply, perception and emotion. Basic cognitive acts, or perceptions, are characterized by first-order “doxic” positionality (doxa, Greek for “belief ”). Basic emotional acts, however, feature “axiological” positionality (axios, Greek for “valuable”). Doxic positionality consists in recognizing a perceived thing’s existence. It is a kind of assent or denial, although it is immediate, not reflective (as is, e.g., propositional belief ). It is not a “judgment,” if we mean by that the illocutionary act of stating a propositional content, even if not worded or voiced. A perception can be illusory as such, in its own content. But it could not do so if there were no doxic position, which, by contrast, is absent in 368 The phenomenology of rational agency acts of imagination or day-dreaming (where veridicality is not an issue). Doxic positionality confers on perceptions their distinctive (defeasible) claim of veridicality. First-order axiological positionality (what Husserl calls Wertnehmung) involves the acknowledgment of the positive or negative salience or value of a given thing or situation. Emotions generally include such positions or “valences” and can be appropriate or inappropriate (imagine, e.g., feeling terror in the presence of a peaceful kitten). The negative axiological stance (including the “flight response”) of the inappropriate experience is, in that case, clearly wrong in some sense. First-order positions are not freely taken. I cannot help but endorse the existence of what I see or touch. I cannot choose to take the opposite axiological stance when I come across an object of fear or horror. This holds even if a thing’s existence turns out, in the further course of experience, to be illusory (something perceived as a living thing turns out to be a scarecrow), or if an object of fear turns out not to warrant a fearful response after all. For this to happen – for the stance taken to be modified retroactively as “crossed off,” a mode of perceptual doubt, or, in short, a new stance – there must be an antecedent stance. When addressing intentionality, Husserl uses the term “Akt” as more or less synonymous with “intentionales Erlebnis.” Yet, to identify act and intentional lived experience would not be entirely satisfactory, because no act can be reduced to the lived or conscious experience of it. Acts – even “mental” acts – can exceed their conscious aspects. Like anything effective, an act in part transcends consciousness. There is more to it than is experienced, as we shall see shortly. First degree of personhood’s emergence: facing objectivity A person is a subject that “emerges” from a sequence of biological and mental states by virtue of the positional component of perceptions, emotions, and behaviors insofar as these are subject to normativity (being right or wrong). Such basic pre-reflective, norm-driven experience stands out from behavior that is simply adaptive or biologically driven (e.g., for the satisfaction of needs). One might wonder what makes experience “norm driven.” Grasping this is crucial for correctly understanding our notions of emergence and subject. A stream of psychological states through which an animal – say, a dog, a dolphin, a chimpanzee – interacts with its natural and social environment is not sufficient for the constitution of a personal subject. Animals seem to experience reality as what resists their drives and desires or satisfies them, but not as what reveals doxic and axiological positions as wrong or right. We first learn that positions are right or wrong by sharing the habits and norms of the life-community in which we are born. Learning from positional acts, knowing what to do next – these are paradigmatic forms of norm-driven behavior. Although some non-human animals could be subject to perceptual and emotional illusions and maybe capable to correct them, only humans seem to have developed into “normative animals.” As a matter of fact, social learning may be part of reaching adulthood for (some) non-human animals. What seems to be characteristic of humans, though, is cultural or norm-based learning (Tomasello 1999: 37–39), typically requiring joint attention and cooperative dispositions, as a condition to introduce coherence, organization, and order in even the most basic responses to the environment. In that way, “meaningful” structures of behavior gradually emerge from relatively unorganized sequences of reactions to inner and outer stimuli. Reinforcing right responses, discouraging wrong ones, jointly executing right positional acts, and the like are ways that care-givers and the community provide the 369 Roberta De Monticelli foundations of an emerging subjectivity. Thus, a form of shared intentionality is necessary for the emergence of the infant as a subject of a motivational chain of acts from a mere flow of states, as Max Scheler first pointed out (Scheler 1923/2008). Second degree of personhood’s emergence: managing experience But we can go further. We also manage the states arising in this contact with reality. In basic acts we experience reality as objective and experience as well our grasp of it as limited and fallible. But regardless of whether we get things right or wrong, the use we make of prior basic positional acts is, within certain limits, up to us. It is in our power to further expose ourselves to reality, that is, to accept or reject data as actual motives of subsequent life (experiences and actions). This observation leads us to recognize what we may call a second degree of personhood’s emergence. We manage our states by a second class of acts, involving second-order positions, that is, positions that we take relative to basic acts and their correlates (states of affairs). As opposed to basic acts, these “managing acts” are, in a broad sense, free. A first-order stance denying reality to what I perceive to be real is not in my power. Yet, resisting the motivational weight of a perceived fact (or a felt value) is in my power. I can receive a piece of bad news, or learn about a very painful fact, and, above and beyond that, I can let myself be motivated by it. I can also “repress” it, by ignoring it, not allowing it to motivate my further acts, e.g., my emotions, thoughts, decisions, or behavior. I may look away, or “neutralize” the first-order position. With this act, I can manage my experience by regulating my exposure to further experience. To endorse or ignore basic inputs is to take up a second-order position. Second-order positions count as acts that are free in a broad sense. By “in a broad sense” I mean to emphasize a typical feature of this second class of acts. Such acts are neither necessarily nor entirely conscious. We can manage our passivity in the dark, as it were, like when we repress grief, thereby forestalling the possibility of working through that grief, yet without admitting to ourselves that we are doing so. This is, as it were, the “gray area” of spontaneity, where we act without explicitly assuming responsibility for our acts and where most of our life is spent. Third degree: the emergence of personal identity To better grasp the essential features of the third and final class of acts, we might think of the just-discussed second degree of personhood as the management of one’s passivity. This paradoxical-sounding expression reminds us that experience is never completely “passive.” Otherwise we could not even say that we “grow up” through experience. Yet, the “path” that each of us takes through the world, so to speak, by managing passive motivations and regulating their influence on further experience, need not be a series of choices, conscious or otherwise. Doubtless, what we call personality and character traits manifest themselves in second-order acts. These can always be clarified in retrospect, and alternative possible plots can be brought to consciousness, although that is not necessary. However, by regulating exposure to the onslaught of information we are struck with in basic acts, we undeniably exert a power of some sort, attesting to an efficacy entirely absent in basic acts. We do or do not authorize a given experience to exert its motivational force on us in the further course of experience. Further experience, though, does not necessarily mean further action. By tacitly endorsing or ignoring data and states as motives in our ongoing life, we do not necessarily engage in active 370 The phenomenology of rational agency or overt behavior. To avoid working through bereavement, for example, is not active behavior. The fully conscious management of motives comprises only a subclass of free acts. Such acts are, in fact, authorizations to proceed, licensing one to make something of the factual and axiological data of a given experience. In that way we give ourselves license to actively behave in such and such a way, for example, to get involved in reading about medicine or philosophy, or, at a more basic level, to run up the hill for the pleasure of it. In either case, we may thus take the first step in acquiring a habit or skill. Our acts shape us. By making something out of the data of a given experience we also make something out of ourselves. These are the acts we may deem free in the strict sense. This is the exact sense in which a phenomenological theory of freedom goes well beyond the kind of compatibilism involved in the Classic Model of Rationality (the BD-model discussed in Section 3). Those acts by which we endorse (or reject) data as motivations or reasons for action are acts that are free in the strict sense. These acts are essentially – even if only to a minimal degree – commitments to one’s future behavior. What characterizes this class in its most exemplary instances is the engagement of one’s future self, which can take the form of obligations we impose on ourselves with respect to ourselves or others. Decisions are paradigmatic instances of the former, promises of the latter. Acts that are free in the strict sense are self-constitutive acts. By endorsing a reason for action, I not only make a commitment involving my future self, I also accept responsibility for what I shall be. In this sense, decisions are paradigmatic instances of self-constitutive acts, even if we might, by further analysis, discover that the essential nature of a decision is better clarified by taking it to be a sort of promise made to oneself. A decision truly engages one’s future self, and, conversely, one bears responsibility for one’s past decisions only in so far as one is responsive to other people’s expectations. We may ultimately discover, as Nietzsche first suggested, that personal responsibility was, genealogically speaking, linked to social acts of promising before becoming the amazing power of self-imposed obligation that we now attribute to our (free) will. Conclusion. Actuality, subjectivity, and personhood – the individualized rational agent Phenomenology encourages the de-naturalizing of intentionality through the embodiment of rationality. No perplexity needs arise from biology, pace Searle. At the same time, rational agency cannot be just a function of language and social institutions, as though it were nothing “before” them, again pace Searle. Nor does it show up only at the highest level of planning, pace Bratman. Austin is right to hold that “intentionally” does not necessarily mean “on purpose” or “deliberately.” But Austin still did not see that one can act spontaneously without intending what one does and that even non-intending admits degrees. Acting freely, too, admits degrees, pace Frankfurt. “Actual” experience is proto-agency, and the bedrock of personhood. “All human living is position-taking,” says Husserl, though that need not mean taking a side. Stances can be (socially) questioned and corrected. The consistency of a mind is founded on the minimal adequacy of positional acts. In a sense, our openness to truth is constitutive of personhood. We may sum up the argument outlined above in three claims: (S) A person is a subject of acts. Here the notion of personhood is not presupposed but rather explained by the notion of an act. Our living is not reducible without remainder to “personal” living. Digestion, for instance, does not qualify as an act, while eating and – even more so – sex do. 371 Roberta De Monticelli (A) To live as a person is to emerge from one’s states by one’s acts. Recapitulate our analysis, without basic acts we cannot stand up as subjects facing (each other and) objects, exploring the world and learning from experience. Only by managing experience do we in a way rise above it as, to a greater or lesser degree, directors of our lives. But only self-constitutive or self-committing acts are sources of personal identity through time. Unlike Boethius, who defined personhood as the individuality of a reasonable nature, contemporary philosophers ignore the problem of individuation. Phenomenology, however, teaches us that rational agency is not only embodied, but highly individuated. (F) A certain subset of acts is a necessary condition for the emergence of an individual personality, namely, the one consisting of free acts. At its most basic level, positionality grounds subjectivity. At its highest level, it shapes a person’s identity, which solidifies in habit. Between those levels, personality or character is manifested. Our acts shape us. Personhood is constituted not only in the Husserlian sense of being experienced as exercising positionality, but also in the sense of being shaped by that exercise. The exercise of positionality is what makes the self. Related topics See Chapters 2 (on Pfänder and Husserl), 3 (on Pfänder), 7 (on Reiner), 19 (Horgan and Nida-Rümelin), 20 (Smith), 21 (Hanna), and 25 (Drummond). Notes 1 Mental states are what they are in virtue of the causal and functional role they have in our mental life, independently of how this role is physically implemented. This idea has been fundamental to standard cognitive science, since it was the cornerstone of the project of naturalizing our mental life lying at the heart of this paradigm, dominated by such figures as Quine, Dennett, Fodor, Dretske, and the Churchlands. In a nutshell, the idea is to show that mental states can be properties of the world as studied by the natural sciences. 2 This language has its roots in St Augustine, De Trinitate XI, II, where he speaks of the “act of seeing” that “keeps the sense of the eye in the object seen.” Brentano refers to Descartes’ two classes of mental acts (iudicii, volitiones) as corresponding to his two classes of Akten (Urteile and Akte des Interesses/ Gemütsbewegungen), both based on simple “representations” (Descartes’ ideae). Mental acts involve one of two opposite stances or position takings: acknowledgment/denial (Anerkennung/Leugnung) and like/dislike (Liebe/Hass). Curiously, Brentano does not incorporate these central features of his theory of positionality into his theory of intentionality (cf. Brentano 1874/1995: 198). 3 “In talking of ‘acts’, however, we must steer clear of the word’s original meaning: all thought of activity must be rigidly excluded” (Husserl 1901/2001: 393/102). In a footnote to this passage Husserl approvingly quotes Natorp against a “mythology” of mental actions and operations: “We too reject the ‘mythology of activities’: we define ‘acts’ as intentional experiences, not as mental activities” (Husserl 1900–1901/2001: 354). References Austin, J. (1970) “Three Ways of Spilling Ink,” in J.O. Urmson and G.J. Warnock (eds.), Philosophical Papers, second edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Reprinted from The Philosophical Review 75/4, 1966, pp. 427–440). Bilgrami, A. (2010) “The Wider Significance of Naturalism – A Genealogical Essay,” in M. De Caro and D. 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