Action, doing something is a most essential thing in our Western culture. This
is illustrated even by the importance of the verb "do" in the English
language. We greet somebody "How do you do". Our literature consists
mainly of descriptions of actions. Natural or man-made environment is only a
background, a scenery for these actions. To say that a person is active, is
to say something positive about him.
Our language is well adapted to describing actions, it is very much a language
of action. This is shown by the importance of action and active persons, e.g.
creators in our mythology and the survival of such images in a more latent form
both in our everyday thinking and philosophy, as e.g. in our ideas about forces,
laws and causality. The analysis of these examples indicates that our languages
suit better for describing actions than facts, that we always have a tendency
to see the world in patterns dictated to us by our language. i.e. by our models
of description and explanation.
An explanation can be seen as a series of answers to questions about something.
Our way of asking questions exemplifies our inclination to see the world as
a field of action, not as a set of facts, of things which simply take place.
The frequent use of the interrogative word "why" both by children
and by adults is another example of this. It is completely natural to ask e.
g. "Why did you open the window?", but is not as natural to ask "Why
is the sky blue?" or "Why is there so much suffering in the world?"
A great bulk of what is called mythology, theology and philosophy, consists
in fact of tentative answers to such questions. Their essence can be summarized
under a question "Why is the world as it is?" Perhaps Hegel was the
last great philosopher whose life work was an attempt to find answers to this
question.
Modern philosophy has become more and more conscious of the mythological and
theological bias of of its classical inheritance. And, of course it has tried
to get rid of it what meant also replacing the description and explanation of
the world as actions by the description and explanation of the world as facts,
as something taking place. In a way, it has attempted to answer to the question
"What is really taking place in the world?"
As some people believe there must be a new heaven and a new earth some modern
philosophers believed that there must be a new language. Beginning with Comte's
positivism, Husserl's phenomenology, Mauthner's and Wittgenstein's "Kritik
der Sprache" a big effort has been taking place to create this new language.
This proved to be much more complicated than many philosophical modernists assumed
in the beginning. One of their stumbling blocks was certainly the problem of
describing what really is intentional behaviour, human action, culture and history.
Some philosophers rejected any possiblility of dualism and assumed that thee
can be no fundamental differences between explaining e.g. the bouncing of a
ball and the actions of a little girl playing with it. The difference is only
on of complexity, but in both cases the ideal description and explanation would
be physicalist, not mentalist. These ideas have not proved wrong in principle,
but practically impossible to implement. In his writings on the theory of action
Georg Henrik von Wright has proposed to keep the dualism as a kind of an inevitable
compromise. Those attempting to describe actions simply as something taking
place are going too far over the limits imposed upon us by our language. The
world may be one, but we cannot describe it in one type of language.
The notion of action is connected with some other important notions like intention,
ends and means, thinking, rationality, person and culture. A person is
one capable of action, of intentional behaviour. Intentional behavior needs
rational analysis, thinking. A culture is a set of rules and ways to describe
and explain intentional behaviour. Anything or nearly anything in a culture
has an intentional explanation, is considered as an action. Inside a culture
we may ask about anything, why it is done. We buy shoes because the old ones
have been worn out and the autumn is approaching. We go to the dentist
because we have a toothache. We participate in a ritual because it gives us
some material or spiritual help.
Both our actions, our behaviour inside culture and our understanding of it,
describing and explaining it are a product of a long co-evolution and have influenced
one another greatly. In a culture, we describe what we see and see what we describe.
And mostly we see and describe our intentional behaviour. We stay up, we wash
our hands, we take a book, we open the window. In a way, these actions consist
of myriads of other actions and movements which cannot be described as actions.
Impulses run in our nerves, our muscles contract, our eyes blink, images flow
in our consciousness, we swallow saliva, feel an itch somewhere in our body,
breathe. Clearly we cannot call an action something we are not conscious of,
what we do not feel, as e.g. the growing of our nails and hair. But there are
many other things happening that cannot be called actions, although we are well
conscious of them. Such things are e.g. our thoughts, emotions and dreams.
The descriptions of these things are sometimes very similar to descriptions
of real actions, although often there are even linguistic differences between
them. We say "I love you" but "I fell in love with you",
"I dreamed of you", "I feel sorry for you", "I think
of you".
Our actions are always two-layered. They need attention, they need us being
conscious of them, describing them and judging them in our consciousness. We
can say that an action is something of which we can say that it has been done
properly, correctly or not. We can behave properly, dance properly, write
correctly, speak a language correctly, but we cannot fall in love properly,
dream properly or feel cold properly. Can we think properly or is "thinking"
simply a pseudo-description of something that is really no action at all? We
can act properly because we can follow our actions and judge them. Can we follow
our thinking? We can only judge its results, called thoughts when ready and
formulated. I am inclined to think that the idea of "thinking" is
an example of the intrusion of the language of action and intentionality outside
its proper sphere of validity. Already Fritz Mauthner has written that it could
be more correct to speak instead of "Ich denke" "Es dhnkt mich".
Every description of our actions, of our activity consists of a series of elementary
or atomary descriptions. The core, the nucleus of these descriptions are sentences
and the core of these sentences is a verb. Most verbs are indeed the result
of a long evolution, the transitive verbs make up a list of what we are accustomed
to consider as our most common and important actions.
There are some interesting verbs in some languages that are holistic and impersonal,
describing mostly atmospheric phenomena as e.g. Finnish "tuulee",
"valkenee". But nowadays most verbs in most Western languages are
not holistic. They need a subject, a something or somebody. The subject of the
verbs of action is a somebody, a person, although, linguistically the picture
is far from clear: we can say both "The terrorist bomb destroyed the building"
and "The terrorists destroyed the building". But in principle the
picture is clear. Every action presupposes a person, a somebody. Even more:
a somebody, a person is something which can be seen, described as an actor,
as the subject of an action.
As a culture is the set of all possible actions (in this culture), then a person
is somebody who can perform a part of these actions. A person has his/her role,
a set of actions he/she must perform. In our culture an animal or an inanimate
object is not considered a person. A psychically normal human being is considered
a person, a member of the society, a subject of many verbs. Both him/herself
and his fellow human beings pay by far most attention to his/her actions, these
actions are judged, planned, evaluated, narrated, etc. In this way many aspects
of a human being simply remain outside description and attention. Often
people don't even notice them or consider them unimportant. Such things are
e.g. dreams and many feelings when they do not surpass certain limits. As a
rule, we are not very conscious of our own body and even of our own psychology.
In our culture and probably in most cultures a person is determined from outside,
mostly by his/her actions.
Against this background of strong links between the idea of a person, his actions
and the ways of describing and explaining his/her actions it would be interesting
to have a look on some different ways of thinking about a human being in his
social and natural environment.
In several texts which could perhaps be called mystical we find the notion of
non-action or non-doing. Probably the best known example of such texts is the
Chinese classical book "Daodejing" which is ascribed to the ancient
sage Laozi. Chapter 48 of this book reads:
Learning is daily filling.
Following Tao is daily diminishing,
until you reach non-doing.
There is non-doing, but nothing is left undone.
You govern the world
forever doing nothing.
If there is action, the world cannot be governed.
The notion of non-action (wu wei) is often used in Far Eastern Mahayanic texts,
probably under some influence of Taoism. But there are similar thoughts expressed
in India too, for example in one of the most popular religious books "Bhagavadgita"
where we read:
Who sees action in non-action and non-action in action, is sage amidst men,
the dedicated one, accomplishing all the deeds.
Whose all deeds are free of desire and intention, whose desires have burned
in the fire of wisdom, this man is called The Awakened One by the learned.
Having abandoned attachment to the fruits of action, always content, without
hold, although busy with action, he does nothing.
Such thoughts are found also in the Christian mystical tradition, as e.g. in
the writings by Suso: "The action of a man who has written off himself,
is this abandonment itself and his doings are a rest, because he remains still
in his action and in his doings is doing nothing."
We can also keep in mind that one of the most essential points in Luther's theology
was his conviction that it is impossible to achieve salvation by any deeds,
only by belief which by Luther is also a kind of a non-action, acceptance of
God's grace, not seeking for it. The negative attitude of most Lutherans toward
any mysticism is the result of their interpretation of mysticism as an effort
to reach God whereas only God can reach us. We could perhaps say that the Lutherans
think that we can never meet Christ when we actively seek after him, he can
come to us only when we have abandoned ourselves and even our wish to meet him.
As all mystical teachings, the Lutheran theology is essentially paradoxical.
It is interesting that mystical traditions so disparate as Taoism, Hinduism
and Christianity speak sometimes the same language about action, personality
and intention. It is extremely improbable that there were mutual influences
between these three traditions; their similarity can be only the result of some
basic affinity of human experience and thinking everywhere. Many people have
had similar experience in similar situation and interpreted it in similar way.
The basic traits of this experience and its interpretation are these:
there is a big difference between a common man and a sage, a mystic, an ideal
person. The difference lies essentially in the different understanding by a
common man and a sage of his self, his actions and intentions. Following a main
theme in any religious teaching we can say that a sage is a man who has succeeded
in getting rid of an erroneous image of his self. This self--image is something
the Western philosophy has not studied much. It has been taken for granted even
in the theological tradition where there has been much discussion about the
immortality of the human soul but far less talk about what the soul really is.
The soul, the personality has most often be remained outside the limits of what
was investigated. It has remained an axiom, an essence, something given, created
by God. There was much ontology and little psychology in the Western rationalism,
be it theologically or liberally oriented. The exception is mysticism, but the
problem is the exceptionally poetical and metaphorical tradition used by such
people as Eckhard, San Juan de la Cruz or Thomas a Kempis. Their descriptions
are difficult to analyze when we do not share their ardent belief.
The situation is different in the Far East where the Buddhists tried to analyze
the self, atman as a non-essence, a complex of attributes, arriving in this
way to the destruction of our self-image, treating it as an illusion. The later
Mahayanistic approach reminds of the modern existentialist approach. One of
its essential points can perhaps be resumed in a simple phrase: our self-image
is not our self, is not ourselves. If we understand this, our attitude to ourselves
and to everything else changes radically, we are liberated from the prison we
have built around ourselves of erroneous ideas. The Taoist attutude toward self
is basically similar. The book of Zhuangzi as many other classical texts point
to the fact that a human being is a psycho-physiological complex without a centre,
an "ego" which coordinates its activities. Everything in our body
and mind happens spontaneously, by itself (ziran). In principle, man is a self-regulating
system and as such, similar to Nature and its subsystems, if we use this modern
way of expression. The Taoist ideal of "diminishing" as opposed to
learning in the text quoted can be interpreted as abandoning the self-image,
the image of a ruler, a God or a soul governing the body-mind. When there is
no self-image, there is also no activity, what we do, cannot be analyzed as
intentional action with its motives, goals and means, but is rather a part of
the Great Natural Process, of the Tao itself.
The active man belongs certainly to culture as opposed to Nature. The non-active
Taoist belongs to or strives to belong to nature. In fact, the word itself (ziran)
means both nature and "spontaneous", "by itself". In its
own way the Far-Eastern thinking has also tried to overcome the dualism between
facts and deeds, as well as between thoughts and deeds, the two-layeredness
of ourselves. The difference between the two is that the Chinese or Japanese
were much less interested in theory than in practice. For them, theory was mainly
a guidance for practice, for action or non-action. We should certainly also
judge them according to their practical achievements which are impressive especially
in the field of arts, in creative activity. The efficiency of the mystical non-action
could give us some impulse for analyzing and investigating it in our own way.
In any case the mystical experience is something to be included in any serious
study of man, his activity and language. We have enough proof of the fact that
our self-image, our ideas about our self, our intentions and actions are only
one of many possibilities. We can imagine that some of our favorite ideas are
similar to the idea of ether of absolute space that the modern natural science
has abandoned. Certain people in certain situations can probably have no self-image,
no self and act by means of non-action. Our common way of organizing ourselves,
our activity and experience may well be just a special case as Eucleidean geometry
or Newtonian physics.