Doing and Speaking, Created and Uncreated

Abstract

Doing and Speaking, Created and Uncreated Guy Mansini (bio) "When all is said and done, more is said than done." This (I think) modern proverb nicely expresses a sort of typically American penchant for results, a penchant for "practical results," for "getting the job done," that we alternately deplore or take satisfaction in. It is a sort of proverb of our popular pragmatism. Just as stated, however, it seems to be true. In human affairs, where many alternatives are explored in speech before a course of action is decided on, more things are spoken of than enacted. There are many designs for a new World Trade Center, but only one will be built. There are more World Trade Centers that are said, that exist in speech, than will be done or built. Just as stated, moreover, the proverb brings to speech what is doubtless a very important, a very basic, distinction, the distinction between human speaking and human doing. When we do something, we change things, we rearrange the furnishings of the world. When we speak, on the other hand, we display what is but do not change anything. Of course, we may change someone's mind about some practical course to be taken, a course that involves "doing" something, and it may be our purpose so to change another's mind, and [End Page 105] so to have the world changed in the proposed way. For St. Thomas, practical reason is not only apprehensive but causative, and one who commands another causes what happens "as imposing necessity."1 But in the first place, a mind is not a thing, and changing a mind or informing a mind with a command is not directly to change the world of mice and microbes, electrons and elephants. To change a mind is to change how things appear to it. But "appearing" itself is not one of the things that appears, though doubtless it, too, can be made to appear to the philosophical mind.2 In the second place, if the world does get changed through my changing someone's mind, it gets changed only through being displayed in a certain way.3 In speech, I contrast what is and what could be, and thereby show the desirability of what could be, its goodness, and in that way I persuade another to act directly on the world. My persuading or presenting something as to be done would be a moral act, praxis, but it would not be poesis. And of course, in the third place, sometimes we speak purely and entirely only to display the world, simply to show it, and perhaps to show it in such a way as to make manifest that it cannot be changed, or cannot be changed by us, or maybe should not be changed by us. We could say, in other words, that among the illocutionary speech acts, such things as promising and pronouncing judgment and persuading, there is also simple description or the giving of information.4 We could say that in addition to practical reason, there is speculative reason. The distinction between doing and saying is sometimes occluded. This happens popularly and politically where speech, or some kind of speech, is said to be not only an incitement to violence but itself a form of violence, and name-calling is made to be battery. This happens more speculatively where there is a theoretical attempt to reduce human speech to animal signaling.5 Speech then turns out to be only one of the species of doing by which animals alter their environment. Evolutionary epistemology pushes things in this direction. Going the other way, things like the liturgy or architecture or couture are likened to language or said to be languages. This is not [End Page 106] said without justice since the articulations we make in speech can be embedded in the way we act in or arrange the world, in worship, in buildings, and in clothing.6 Where the embedding is a transcription of speech and has no immediate end except the very storing of the articulations of speech, there are books or document files. Where the embedding depends on or could be brought to the...