Action and Trying

Action and Trying

Davidson once memorably said, “We never do more than move our bodies; the rest is up to nature”. This aphorism has the sound of an illuminating truism, but does it stand up to critical examination? Suppose you are suffering from paralysis, total or partial, following an accident. Your physiotherapist asks you to try to move your arm and you find you can’t move it: wouldn’t you think, “I’m trying, but I’m not succeeding; nature won’t let me”? Your body is part of nature and it is not cooperating, so you can’t act; isn’t this just like trying to lift a weight that is too heavy for you? Your act of trying can’t overcome the dictates of nature, whether your own body or the world outside it. Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say, “We never do more than try to do things; the rest is up to nature”? There is our will on the one hand and nature on the other, i.e., the world outside our will. When you lift your arm do you move the bone in your arm but not the clothes on it—is the latter part of nature but not the former? What if your arm is partly prosthetic? What if you always carry a gun in your hand? The distinction between body and nature is artificial, but the distinction between will and nature is not (of course, the will is also part of nature). The correct aphorism is: We never do more than try to do things; the rest is beyond our control. That is, we only have direct control over our will; the rest is a matter of whether the world beyond cooperates. Adopting the terminology of basic actions, we can say that our basic actions are acts of trying (willing); anything else is non-basic, i.e., consequences of acts of trying. The body thus has no privileged position in the philosophy of action. What indeed is the body: does it include the hair on the body, sweat, clothing, tools, machines, other people? Nature and the body merge, with the will attempting to manipulate them. All we really, basically, do is will things; the rest is out of our control—that’s a matter of whether nature chooses to go along with our will. It’s not the body-nature division that matters (not that this is a real distinction); it’s the will-world division. So it would appear.

Is it true that whenever we act we try to move our bodies? And is that really all we try to do? Neither proposition is correct. Surely, we try to do many things beyond moving our bodies—we try to fix things, go places, have careers, find love. The intentionality of trying is wide in scope and not limited to the body’s movements. And do we always try to move our bodies when we try to do these other things? Do we try to contract our muscles, or activate our efferent nerves? We do not—we may not even think about these things. Our mind is not concentrated on our body: you might be trying to score a goal, but you don’t think about your leg at all—you take that for granted. Your brain causes your leg to move thus-and-so, but you don’t give it a second thought—you have your mind set on the goal and goalie. Trying to move your leg in a certain way may hinder what you trying to achieve—there are only so many things you can think about at the same time. Your attention is on the goal not the leg. So, it isn’t that trying to move the body is basic and essential to acting; trying is far more protean and plastic for that to be true. Trying goes with intention and desire, which generally concern ends not means. In principle, you could try without even having a body: you could be a disembodied mind that is suitably causally connected to the external world (isn’t that what God is supposed to be?). What is essential to action is the will (capacity to try) and a causal link to external reality; the body is just one means for getting things done, not a sine qua non. We never do more than will; the rest is up to causality. The basic actions are acts of trying. The body is not at the center of the philosophy of action—it is not even an essential component of the subject. So it would appear.

It might be objected, however, that we are underestimating the role of the brain. Doesn’t the brain (in terrestrial animals) cause and control the body, so it must be occupied about the body, even if the person (or other agent) need not pay the body much attention? This must be conceded: the brain has to have the wherewithal to initiate movements of the body, and this must be detailed and representational. The brain needs a “body image” in order to go about its business. And it must act with that body image “in mind”; it can’t ignore the body as the conscious agent can. Isn’t the brain then part of the philosophy of action of embodied creatures such as ourselves? If so, a philosophy of action that focuses exclusively on what the agent tries to do is incomplete; we need to add what the brain is up to as well. A human action (as well as the actions of other animals) consists of a mental act of trying and a physical act of brain initiation. The combination is the true nature of action as we find it: agent trying plus brain stimulation. In creatures lacking mind (think worms) action is just brain stimulation—efferent nerves and muscles—and such creatures can be said to act equally. Conscious trying is superimposed on this basis, and is presumably a later evolutionary development. Both aspects need to be acknowledged in an adequate philosophy of action—we thus have a double aspect theory of action. Indeed, we have a double ontology theory, since the act of trying is not to be identified with the brain’s action of causing bodily movements. The action of raising your arm consists of two actions—your act of trying to raise your arm and your brain’s action of innervating the relevant muscles. Both need to be described and explained, and integrated. A good philosophy of action has a mental component and a physical component, because two things are involved; an action is both of them together not one separately. The motor part of the brain confines itself to the body, down to the fine details; the conscious agent is more concerned with ends and results and has little time for the physiological machinery. What we call action straddles these two domains and it would be a distortion to limit it to one of them. The agent and the brain are both centrally implicated.[1]

[1] The work of Davidson on action and O’Shaughnessy on the will form the background to this paper. I am adding the brain as an essential component to the story. Both philosophers were too monistic, though in possession of important truths. Human action is Janus-faced. (Let me add that the philosophy of action is a remarkably tricky subject.)