Maverick Philosopher

One doesn’t have to read much Blondel to realize that he uses ‘action’ in a broader way than is philosophically usual. Thus he does not oppose it to theory or contemplation. It includes the latter. Action in Blondel’s sense is a "synthesis of willing, knowing, and being . . . it is the precise point where the world of thought, the moral world, and the world of science converge." (Action, 40) Thus action is not the same as will when the latter is contrasted with intellect: action is at the root of both intellect and will. Action, we could say, is man’s Being, as long as we do not oppose Being to willing or knowing. (I write ‘Being’ rather than ‘being’ to mark what Heidegger calls the ontological difference between das Sein und das Seiende – but I can’t explain that now.)

So action, for Blondel, is man’s Being. As such, it is close to what Heidegger calls Existenz. Existenz is the Being of Dasein, where Dasein denotes the beings that we are. It is important to realize that Heidegger uses both Existenz and Dasein in philosophically idiosyncratic ways. Existenz is not to be confused with the scholastic existentia; the latter Heidegger refers to as Vorhandenheit (presence-at-hand). Existenz names a mode of Being that belongs to Dasein alone. As for Dasein, in ordinary philosophical German it just means existence, and contrasts with Sosein, whatness. Anything that exists, that is at hand, has Dasein as this term is ordinarily used. But for Heidegger, only we are cases of Dasein. Thus we don’t have the Being of tools (Zuhandenheit) nor the Being of naturally occurrent items like rocks (Vorhandenheit): we have a unique mode of Being that cannot be understood in terms of these other modes of Being. Thus, human beings cannot be adequately understood in Aristotelean terms as rational animals, for, on such a scheme, man is apperceived as a thing at hand in the world possessing a fixed essence.

The commentator Jean Lacroix quotes Blondel as saying, "The substance of man is action; he is what he he makes himself." (Maurice Blondel: The Man and His Philosophy, Sheed and Ward, 1968, p. 33) The substance of a thing is its essential being. So Blondel is saying that man’s essential being is action. Thus humans are not static entities with a fixed nature, but dynamic in their Being. In existentialist jargon, man is a project, a being who is essentially futural. The paradox should not be missed: man’s ‘essence’ is to lack a fixed essence.

That should remind you of Jean-Paul Sarte’s dictum that, in the case of human beings, existence precedes essence. In an artifact, something made for a purpose by an artificer, essence precedes existence: both logically and temporally the essence comes first, and then the realization of the essence. In man, however, existence comes first. But long before Sartre popularized this idea in the ‘forties, Heidegger wrote: Das ‘Wesen’ des Daseins liegt in seiner Existenz. (SZ 42) "The ‘essence’ of Dasein lies in its existence."

The scare quotes indicate that ‘essence’ is not being used in its traditional sense. Thus, Heidegger is not charitably interpreted as saying that human beings have an essence but that said essence is existence – which borders on a contradiction – but that humans beings lack an essence in the traditional sense.

Would Blondel go as far as this? I don’t know. Let’s not forget that Blondel is a traditional theist. For him, man is a creature. How is man’s creaturely status consistent – if it is consistent – with action (in Blondel’s broad sense) being man’s substance? If man "is what he makes himself," as Lacroix quotes Blondel as saying, then how can man be a creature in any traditional understanding of creaturehood? But to expound this problem requires a separate post.

Herewith, a first batch of notes and critical/interpretive commentary. They are to be consumed cum grano salis: Blondel is a slippery Frenchman and I am not sure that I have quite grasped his terminology, methods, and intentions. This set of notes is on the material up to p. xxx + 36. Numbers in parentheses refer to pages in the Blanchette translation.

Caveats to one side, Action appears to be a great work by a neglected philosopher. I know that I must work through the whole of it, for the good of my soul even if to the detriment of my eyes, blogging as I proceed. It appears to combine a fair degree of rigor with seriousness of intent. The opening line is magnificent: "Yes or no, does human life make sense, and does man have a destiny?" (3)

Action is a necessity, not a fact. (4) What Blondel means, I think, is that one must act. Even inaction is a mode of action, a privative mode of action. I am free to will this or that; I am not free to will not to will. I must will; it is my nature to be a willing being, a nature over which I have no control. To say that action is not a fact is to say that it is not a contingent fact.

I assume that Blondel is not confusing the conditional necessity of action given that there are actors (agents) with the absolute necessity of their being agents. There might not have been any (finite) agents; but given that there are agents as a matter of contingent fact, these agents have the property of being agents essentially. To put the point in 'possible worlds' jargon: I don’t exist in every metaphysically possible world, but in every such world in which I do exist, I act. Of course, this is not the way Blondel puts the point. Question: Are action and will equivalent concepts for Blondel? It seems that I cannot act without willing to act (e.g., I cannot replace the brakepads on my mountain bike without willing to replace them). Is it also true that I cannot will without acting? What if my will to do X is thwarted and does not issue in a (physical) action? Is willing itself an action, a mental action?

There is a crucial distinction in Blondel between volonte voulante and volonte voulue, between willing will and willed will. So far, however, the distinction has not been explained adequately.

Perhaps the distinction is as follows. The willing will is the will that is not in my power. I can will this or that, but I cannot will not to will. I cannot will myself out of my nature as a willing being. The willing will is the will as necessary. The willed will, by contrast, is the will congealed in freely chosen objects of willing. The willed will is the will as free. Suppose I freely choose A over B (e.g., I choose to blog rather than work in the yard). By freely choosing A, I not only will A, I will my willing of A: I will that my willing will be specified by (congeal around) action A. Willing, as a form of consciousness, has a reflexive structure: to will X is simultaneously and en parergo (Aristotle), nebenbei (Brentano) to will one’s willing of X just as to be contemplatively aware of X is to be simultaneously aware of one’s awareness of X. Now Blondel hasn’t come out and said this so far, but I suspect something like this to be going on between the lines.

If this interpretation is right, it explains the curious phrase, ‘willed willing.’ One might think that when one wills to do X, it is X, or the being done of X, that is willed, and not the willing. But that is not quite accurate since it is not merely the being done of X that is willed but X’s being done by my doing. Thus while running that 10K race yesterday, I had the standing will to finish the race without stopping or slowing down no matter how great the pain. What I willed was not merely my finishing the race without slowing down, but my finishing the race without slowing down precisely as a result of my doing/willing (as opposed to as a result of some external factor such as a huge tailwind).

Thus willing has a double aspect: it is a willing of something external to the agent, as one would expect from its being a mode of intentionality, but also a willing of itself as willing something external to the agent.