Shaping Actions and Intentions – Introduction

How do actions and intentions come into being and how are they shaped over time? These questions entail an implicit critique of those theories of action that downplay or overlook the processual aspects of actions, such as in cases where our knowledge of our intentions might not or not yet be fully formed. By focusing on this aspect, in particular, this special issue attends to contemporary insights that shed light on the existing theoretical debate on action.

According to Elisabeth Anscombe and Donald Davidson, intentions play the decisive role in two respects when it comes to deciding whether something is an action. First, intentions are the hallmark of the description-dependent determination of a behaviour as an action. Actions are events that are “intentional under some description”.¹ Whereas an action can have many descriptions, it is important to Anscombe and Davidson that the agent is aware of some such description that makes her or his doing intentional: “to say that a man knows he is doing X is to give a description of what he is doing under which he knows it”.² Second, intentions are the reference point in the rationalization of action. In stating intentions, agents respond to the question: what did you do? Accordingly, intentions function as reasons for actions in the sense that an agent refers to intentions when asked the question “why did you do X?”.³ Typically, forms of comportment such as bodily reflexes and automatic behaviour are not considered actions, as they are not intentional under any description. When the why-question finds no application, we no longer speak of intentional action.⁴

A third reason why intentions are of central importance in the theory of action can be added. According to the standard theory of action, intentions, practical reasoning, and the interpretative principle of charity help us account for the generation of actions. Larger contexts of extended actions can be individualized and understood as units with the help of overarching intentions.⁵ In this way, intentions can be used, on the one hand, to constitute actions that have not yet been completed. Thus, I can mark out the unity of an action by saying, for example, “I intend to tidy up my room”. Similarly, we refer prospectively (ex ante) to future units of action, as when we plan to take a trip to Italy, study philosophy, etc. On the other hand, intentions also serve ex post attributions of complex courses of action, such as when we talk about Röntgen discovering X-rays or person A planning to murder and murdering person B, etc. To summarize, according to the standard theory: (i) actions are characterized as doings that are unified by an intention that is known under some description;⁶ (ii) an intention is conceived as something for which the agent can provide reasons;⁷ (iii) going back to intentions we can characterize an action as carried out over time.⁸ In all three respects, the possibility of well-defined or well definable intentions that can be immediately known or possibly identified by an agent is necessary to the characterization of an action.

In contrast to the theories of action sketched above, the present special issue, “Shaping Actions and Intentions”, investigates the cases where no clear intention seems to mark the outset of an activity. The aim is to question the boundaries of the field of doings that we designate as actions. Sometimes, the agent might not be immediately aware of what she is doing, as she performs a certain action; or sometimes the agent is not aware of why she is doing something in a particular way at the moment she is doing it. But also in these cases, it is reasonable to say that she is engaged in an activity with the structure of an action, but the temporal delay and the temporal formation of her intention suggest that we can think of actions in a broader sense of the term. It is not sufficient to say that under some description the agent might know she is active or involved in an activity, since what is at stake here, is the processual aspect of intentions. According to Anscombe, these situations would be cases where the agent has no clear answer to the question “why are you doing X” and thus the agent would not be acting intentionally. In the context of acting and communicating about actions, however, we do not have to be satisfied with this answer. In contrast, it is often useful to understand behaviour as intentional in a broader sense.⁹ In such cases, we try to figure out what was done by looking more closely at the behaviour, whether past or present. In this way, we discover, for example, an intentional context of some past behaviour, or we discover how an intention may emerge while the agent is doing something, and only in the process of this doing does she shape an intention to do something.

Imagine, for example, the following situation: During a long and somewhat dull conversation on the phone, you reach, without really noticing it, for a pen that is at hand. More precisely, it is your hand that does so and begins to scribble on a piece of paper lying in front of you. Some parallel strokes, interlocking circles emerge. All this happens before your eyes without you being able to say that you have the intention to draw these random straight and round lines as a way to pass the time. You certainly do not intend to draw anything in particular. However, gradually you begin to be more and more interested in the spectacle before your eyes, and you finally attend fully to the activity of drawing. At some point, you discover a figure in these lines and circles. This discovery now awakens your intention to make the figure stand out more clearly. You begin to reinforce and add to the lines and circles. The phone call has now become secondary, while the drawing captures your attention so much that you continue working on it for a while even after having hung up. You disappointedly throw away the small picture created in this way or – depending on the result – perhaps put it in a book as a bookmark. This experience offers a simple example of an emerging intention. It is hardly possible to determine when this intention arises, but it is possible to determine when it does not yet exist and when it already exists. It arises in an activity that gradually develops from an unintentional behaviour into an action whose intention is precisely to bring forth this picture.

The case of doodling draws our attention to phenomena of action where the initial character of the action or the initial intention to act changes. Here an action emerges only gradually, as intentions arise during the process of doodling. Further, we can think of cases where a doing is not experienced as emanating from a prior or concurrent intention, as some of our habitual doings might suggest: I always tie my left shoelace before the right, it feels wrong, when I don’t; or when I freestyle and improvise my own tunes, my songs always sound alike; or when I greet my colleagues, I greet them differently for no explicit or apparent reason that is known to me at the point of greeting them. Such cases challenge the archetypical idea of an action as being something done by the agent for a reason where this reason is known as an intention under some description. Such cases make it necessary to investigate different aspects of how we explain the formation and unification of actions that fall within the scope of what we might call an extended field of actions. This means, we have to consider a wider field of doings and activities in which knowledge of intention in the moment of action might not be available to the agent.

In the literature, several attempts have been made to conceive of less demanding forms of action and to investigate the processual aspects of action. Studies of sub-intentional actions such as tongue movements¹⁰ and fiddling with one’s jewellery downplay the mentalisation of agency by arguing for instance that the capacity to do otherwise suffices to constitute agency.¹¹ Further, by investigating habitual agency, the role of passivity in our active doings and in general reveal the shaping of agential action patterns and an agential habitus.¹² The processual aspect of actions is studied in order to show how actions are better understood when we describe their progressive aspect than when we conceive of them as completed events.¹³ The transitions from behaviour to action and the dynamic process of shaping intentions are also examined in parts of the phenomenological tradition.¹⁴ In particular, phenomenologists are interested in the experiential aspects of the intertwining of the active and passive sides of volitional and intentional action, which are connected with the situatedness of human agents. In this context, phenomenological theory of action elaborates on how actions can be performed by agents who are essentially determined by corporeality, habituality, facticity, etc. When determined in this way, the agent might not be aware of what she is doing under a description, or if she is aware, she might not be doing what she does with a specific intention, however, she is still acting or actively involved. Thus, some phenomenological approaches to activity and action question and challenge the standard requirements and criteria for what counts as an action.

When speaking more broadly of the extended field of action, what we have in mind is exactly the idea that intentions and actions can be performed without agents having to be aware of their intentions. They can, for example, be discovered as guiding intentions of a habitual action only afterwards, or they can be modified in the course of an action or even emerge from behaviour being shaped as we act. The basic problem we address is how it is possible to adequately analyse such cases of habitual action, unreflective doings, or inattentive activity by way of a theory of action. Granted the extended field of action, we must also be able to account for cases where intentions are weakened or inaccessible to the agent. Therefore, a more encompassing theory of action should also aim at elucidating these cases, which could be done by discussing, for instance the roles of notions such as “situation”, “phenomenological field”, “foreground-background of awareness”, “attention”, “affordance”, “affectivity”, “habituality”, “trauma”, and “motivation”.

In the contributions of this special issue, the following perspectives strike us as particularly relevant for the debate on the extended field of action. The role of passivity in the formation of intentions; the role of commitment in the continuously modified and refined intentions that guide our actions; the role of embodied attention in less conscious forms of action; and finally, the role affectivity and habituality play for our more conscious forms of actions as well as our practical self-understanding.

To begin with, let us look at the role of passivity in the formation of intention in action. The contributions by Nicola Spano, John Drummond and Emanuele Caminada reveal an interesting set of tensions that raise the question of whether we can conceive of the genesis of intention and action as being rooted in a pre-conscious or subconscious tendency. These contributions attend to a sphere of activity where conscious intentions are not yet shaped by propositional content. Rather, they are formed by pre-conscious drives or subconscious tendencies. Both Spano and Drummond take up the question of how passivity plays a role for the genesis of intention. Thus, Nicola Spano delivers a thorough exegetic grounding in his reading of the recently published Husserl manuscript Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins focusing in particular on will and action. From Spano’s careful reading we come to understand how, for Husserl, a voluntary action can have its genetic phenomenological origin in a non-voluntary doing, and further, how such a doing as an activity can have its genetic phenomenological origin in a passive “drive” of the will. For the genesis of intention this means that we have to consider Husserl’s notion of “passivity of the will” in order to understand more fully the idea of volitional action. John Drummond also centres his contribution on Husserlian theory of action but attends to the role of commitment in future-directed actions. Drummond turns to Husserl and his distinction between decision-will and action-will. He draws a parallel between Husserlian action-will (“Handlungswille”) and John Searle’s notion of intention-in-action as developed and modified by John McDowell. Drummond argues that the intentional structure here is that of voluntary, but not chosen, action. He suggests we conceive of future intentions-in-actions as a form of commitment. Central to Drummond’s argument is McDowell’s idea that when a future intention comes to be actualized, the future intention comes to have the structure of an intention-in-action. Drummond claims that the intentional structure of these two kinds of action is different, because the intention and the physical performances are modified, as we continue to realize the (stable) commitment. In this way, we can see how intentions over time are modified, while certain commitments are kept; this means for future-directed intentions-in-action that a larger field of actions must be taken into account when it comes to defining how commitment works.

Emanuele Caminada argues that the structure of action can be studied if we investigate the problem of values and evaluation. Caminada unfolds the idea in Paul Ricœur’s phenomenology of the will that action and evaluation form an existential unity. Rather than understanding values as something that might be expressed in an action and which is then conceptually separable from the action itself, Ricœur argues that this is not possible since values do not leave the structure of action untouched. How we project our values into actions centres on the unity of action, and this unity cannot be divided into independent elements of decision and valuing. Rather, the preconscious and the subconscious values form an active unity that structures the action. In this way, Caminada focuses on history and embodiment as roots of the involuntary that can motivate an action. Thereby, the question is posed whether we can conceive of commitment as somehow shaped by the preconscious sphere of valuation.

Whereas intention and physical action are continuously modified as we continue to realize a commitment, Diego D’Angelo develops more closely how the very interplay between attention and temporally extended agency is structured. This perspective points out how we can conceive of the role of intention in action as well as the role of intention over time. If we accept that intention is extended in time and is not in the foreground of our conscious awareness as we act, must we then accommodate this insight by extending the field of actions? This point brings us to a further investigation of the role of attention in action. In his contribution, D’Angelo revisits Williams James’ theory of attention. D’Angelo shows how attention, according to James, is transcendental, active, structuring, and embodied. This implies, according to the author, that the genesis of the intentions to act must be located in attentional movements and comportments towards the surrounding world. Whereas attentional processes could be considered as highly conscious, D’Angelo’s phenomenological reading of James allows for embodied attention to play an explanatory role for the genesis of intention. Rooted in involuntary movements at first, the “voluntary life” is given form by embodied memory.

In his paper, Flavio Artese revisits Gurwitsch’s theory of consciousness with the attempt to integrate Gurwitsch’s phenomenological insights concerning the role of embodied marginal attention into our understanding of situated cognition. According to Artese, Gurwitsch’s notion of the field of consciousness can help recent radical embodiment theories in systematically clarifying their understanding of situated and embedded cognition just as the empirical studies of attention can support Gurwitsch’s idea of how embodied attention and consciousness are intertwined. Both authors, Artese and D’Angelo, emphasize the role of embodied attention and the role of passivity for the genesis of intentional action.

Finally, weaker forms of agency are at stake in emotions, habits, traumas. In these cases, a tension comes to the foreground of one’s agential experience. Whether blinded by love or anger, whether panicking in certain situations, or whether certain ways of doing things blur one’s rational outlook, emotional tensions can affect the general structure of intentional acting. The experience of agency differs from that of being a conscious author of a certain doing and of being in full control of what one is doing. These kinds of experience challenge the aspects of the standard model that emphasize authorship, autonomy, and control in action. In his contribution, Jan Slaby approaches the question of consciousness in action by looking at affectivity and habitual actions as they take part in and play a role in practical self-understanding. Slaby discusses what he calls an active mind approach that revolves around the claim that what is “on” a person’s mind is in an important sense brought on and held on to through the agent’s self-conscious rational activity. He further engages with two categories of our mental lives that seem to speak against construing the mind as active, namely affectivity and habituality. As a response to these two objections, Slaby argues that the notion of a practical self-understanding plays a central role in the active mind approach. The result is a defence and expansion of the active mind position. In his paper, Stefano Micali argues how, in the cases of trauma, conscious action is less in the foreground. When acting out an intention that is structured by a former trauma, the agent is seldom aware of what she or he is doing; however, we would not say that this person is not acting. Suffering from traumatic experiences keeps the traumatized person incapable of responding to his or her own past. Responsiveness and being-acted-upon are structures that must play a role for a theory of action capable of conceiving of traumatized agents. By studying processes of dissociation, Micali argues that by working through the trauma, the traumatized person might become active again as a creative agent with respect to his or her own past; he or she might again become capable of responding to what has happened in the past.

To sum up, by investigating the genesis of action and intention the present special issue has raised the question of whether we can expand the field of action. The debates in this issue touch on the role of preconscious states, embodied attention, responsiveness and passivity as action guiding and action shaping principles; these structures are crucial to our understanding of intentional action. Rather than starting when the intention is fully shaped and the action can be accounted for, we consider the preconditions with the hope of adding nuances to the ongoing debate of practical self-understanding in the theory of action.

We would like to thank all contributors to this volume for taking up and discussing in detail the question of shaping actions and intentions in the context of their respective research interests. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their thorough comments on the submitted articles. We also owe a heartfelt thanks to Darian Meacham, editor of the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, for the inclusion of our volume in the journal and his excellent supervision of our project as well as the very good editorial cooperation. Furthermore, we would like to thank the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, for their financial support for our project Intention Formation and Habitualisation: Transitions between Behaviour and Action. Phenomenological Analyses. The present volume is part of this project.

Notes

1 Anscombe, Intention, §§ 19–20, pp. 28–30; cf. Davidson, Actions and Events, 50.

2 Anscombe, Intention, § 6, p. 12; cf. Davidson, Actions and Events, 3f., 50.

3 Cf. Anscombe, Intention, §§ 5–8, pp. 9–15; cf. Davidson, Actions and Events, 3ff.

4 Anscombe, Intention, §§ 7–8, pp. 12–15.

5 Bratman, Intention, Plans, Reason; Faces of Intention.

6 Anscombe, Intention; and Davidson, Actions and Events.

7 Anscombe, Intention; Davidson, Actions and Events; Darwall, ‘Being-With’; Crowell, Normativity and Phenomenology; and Brandom, Making It Explicit.

8 Bratman, Intention, Plans, Reason; Faces of Intention.

9 Summa and Mertens, ‘Attention and Ascription’.

10 O’Shaughnessy, The Will.

11 Steward, ‘Sub-intentional Actions’.

12 Owens, ‘Habitual Agency’; Velleman, Practical Reason; and Webber, ‘Habituation’.

13 Stout, ‘Ballistic Action’.

14 Husserl, Experience and Judgment; Studien; Reiner, Freiheit, Wollen, Aktivität; Ricœur, Voluntary and Involuntary; and Erhard, ‘Unifying Agency’.