Doing Things with Acts

Abstract

DOING THINGS WITH ACTS and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson by Jonathan Kramnick. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010, Pp. 307. $65 cloth, $24.95 paper, $24.95 e-book.Jonathan Kramnick's absorbing new book explores how philosophers, poets, and writers of fiction grappled with conceptual problems surrounding nature of human action between roughly 1650 and 1750. Kramnick presents action as an interface between and mind. In a typically aphoristic phrase, he observes early on in book that Actions extend into world (3, his emphasis). A commonsense account of action might be to say that actions occur when people decide to do something and then perform physical motions that cause things to happen in world. Kramnick, however, is especially interested in writers who investigated possible reversibility of this sequence, thus bringing the into mind (5). Against standard narratives of deepening inferiority, Kramnick shows how writers from Thomas Hobbes to Samuel Richardson emphasized role of external causes in shaping of intentional acts.Kramnick's book is exemplary for clarity with which it divides up spectrum of philosophical positions on human action. Probably most important crux for Kramnick's authors was problem of defining difference between intentional acts and physical events. This difference is nicely illustrated in beginning pages through contrast between historic appearance of Halley's Comet in 1682 and cutting of Belinda's hair in Alexander Pope's The Rape of Loc (1714). Asking why Baron cut Belinda's hair involves issues of intention that are irrelevant when we ask why comet returned to skies. The distinction between intended actions and physical events might seem simple on face of it. But describing and accounting for this difference turns out to be exceptionally difficult.The problem of action is bound up with problem of consciousness: puzzle of explaining how it is that some clumps of matter seem to possess consciousness whereas others do not. Kramnick is especially interested in counterintuitive conclusions to which thinkers were sometimes driven by their efforts to explain consciousness and its connection to intentional actions. At one extreme was position that consciousness is an illusion and nothing and no one really has it. The other extreme was position that everything in nature possesses at least some consciousness. In both cases, distinction between things that people do and things that things do disappears. Many writers, however, found themselves somewhere along continuum between two extremes, often reaching compromise position that consciousness is a property that emerges from particles that are not themselves conscious.The upshot was that actions of conscious agents could not be easily disentangled from nonconscious that enfolded them. The idea that Baron's decision to cut Belinda's hair might not be so different in nature from return of Halley's Comet had to be taken seriously. Pope himself points to possibility that am'rous Causes operating on Baron may be just as irresistible as gravitational forces operating on Halley's Comet. Kramnick shows how writers tried to account at once for mind-bound nature of intentional actions and also for their implication in a causal network that extends outside into beyond self.Kramnick's method is to focus on a series of cases in which a problem about nature of action emerges in a text or in space between texts. He begins with debate on free will between Hobbes and John Bramhall in which Hobbes contended that will behind any human action can be traced to antecedent causes in world, whereas Bramhall argued that will is formed independently of these causes. Kramnick then turns to problem of consciousness by way of dueling translations of Lucretius's De Rerum Natura by Thomas Creech (in 1682) and John Wilmot, second earl of Rochester. …