Abstract
The paper addresses the question of how to approach consciousness in unreflective actions. Unreflective actions differ from reflective, conscious actions in that the intentional description under which the agent knows what she is doing is not available or present to the agent at the moment of acting. Yet, unreflective actions belong to the field in which an agent experiences herself as capable of acting. Some unreflective actions, however, narrow this field and can be characterized by intentionality being inhibited. By studying inhibited intentionality in unreflective actions, the aim of the paper is to show how weaker forms of action urge us to expand our overall understanding of action. If we expand the field of actions such that it encompasses also some of the involuntary aspects of action, we are able to understand how unreflective actions can remain actions and do not fall under the scope of automatic behavior. With the notion of weak agency, the paper thus addresses one aspect of unreflective action, namely, “inhibited intentionality” in which an agent feels a diminished sense of authorship in relation to her possibility for self-understanding. The notion of weak agency clarifies how agency itself remains intact but can involve a process of appropriation of one’s actions as one’s own. With a diachronic account of consciousness in unreflective action, the paper accounts for possible self-understanding in cases where none seems available at the moment of action.
Highlights
At any moment in any man’s waking and conscious life there is always a set of possible true answers to the questions—“What is he doing now?” For human beings, to be conscious is to have active intentions. (Hampshire, 1970, p. 169).Which behavior deserves the status of an action or what characterizes human action is, and has been, widely debated
How do we describe consciousness in unreflective actions, and can such forms of behavior be described as actions at all? According to standard accounts in the philosophical theory of action (Bratman, 1987; Anscombe, 2001; Davidson, 2001), what constitutes an action is that it is done for a reason and that the agent knows the description under which his action is intentional
I argued that the two basic and intuitive assumptions concerning the interrelation between consciousness, action, and responsibility can be kept if we accept a diachronic perspective on responsibility in cases of unreflective actions
Summary
At any moment in any man’s waking and conscious life there is always a set of possible true answers to the questions—“What is he doing now?” For human beings, to be conscious is to have active intentions. (Hampshire, 1970, p. 169). Despite the fact that I greet my colleagues for a reason, and that my action is intentional under this description, I still intuitively feel responsible for aspects of my behavior of which I am not consciously aware. By contrast, appropriating my actions diachronically means to engage with my behavior and try to realize for how long I have acted like this and, in responding to these doings, to understand them as something done by me for a reason This might lead to doubts whether responsibility can be construed retrospectively and to the objection that forms of antirealism concerning action will be unavoidable. If we could not diachronically come to realize our own reasons for action, our theory of action cannot explain why today, upon acquiring this consciousness, I should feel responsible, or importantly characterized as an agent, by my own past self-inhibition. The therapeutic relation serves as an example of diachronic appropriation, as it displays the mode of questioning and existential commitment
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