Voluntary Action, Chosen Action, and Resolve

ABSTRACT

This paper provides a phenomenological account of the intentional structure of action. To establish the context, I first distinguish (a) physiological changes and the bodily motions manifesting them that one passively undergoes in response to external causes from (b) actions as such. With respect to actions, I further distinguish among what I call incomplete actions, voluntary actions, and chosen actions. I shall frame my discussion in terms of three similar distinctions, although my position will intersect but not coincide with any of them. The three distinctions are Edmund Husserl’s distinction between action-will and decision-will, John Searle’s distinction, as amended by John McDowell, between intention in action and a prior intention-to-do, and Aristotle’s distinction between voluntary and chosen action. The paper concludes with a discussion of a particular instance of chosen action that I call “resolve” and its relation to personal identity.

KEYWORDS:

• Action
• intention
• volition
• choice
• resolve

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Karl Mertens translates Entschlußwille as “resolve” (1998, 129) and “resolution-will,” reserving “decision” for Entscheidung (2021, 15–16). He also notes that Husserl uses the term Vorsatzwille for the idea of a “purpose-will” or plan that has the same intentional structure as a resolution-will but does not involve prior deliberation about future action and, where competing alternatives are present, does not involve decision, whereas resolution-will involves both. I have reserved the term “resolve” for a special case of an Entschlußwille with a unique intentional structure.

2 I use “perception” here in a broad sense, including the emotional perception of a value-attribute. Husserl employs the terms Wahrnehmung and Wertnehmung (Husserl 1989b, 10–11). The latter is an intentional feeling or emotion that, upon “taking” the situation truly to have certain properties, “takes” the situation as “truly” having a value-attribute. Insofar as the foundedness of the axiological sense of the object incorporates the sense of it as having particular non-axiological features that intentionally motivate the attribution in the emotion of a value attribute, the Wertnehmung encompasses the Wahrnehmung.

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