Phenomenology of Activity – Basics, Irreducibility, Typology and Unity

• Applicant: Dr. Christopher Erhard
• Subject Area: Practical Philosophy ; Theoretical Philosophy
• Term: from 2017 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 377574638

While some things merely happen to us, some are brought actively into being by us. In this sense, an essential part of human self-understanding seems to entail the idea that we are capable to intervene actively in the way of the world in order to realize our goals and purposes. In doing so, typically, our own actions are so intimately given to us that we seldom pay attention to them and tend to take them for granted. However, ongoing discussions in philosophy show that the nature of being active is anything but obvious. Furthermore, contemporary debates in philosophy of mind and action theory, often influenced by reductive and functionalistic versions of naturalism/materialism, have assumed for a long time that human agency can be understood without reference to the subject’s first-personal agentive experience. In contrast to this trend, the goal of this project is to take experiential activity (or, in other words, the phenomenology of activity) as its starting point. Unless the phenomenal dimension of agency is taken seriously into account, philosophical theories of action run the risk of marginalizing its originally active nature. According to one of the motivating ideas of the project, theories that are biased in this way have serious and often problematic implications for how human freedom and moral responsibility are assessed. This is why the project of a thoroughgoing clarification and defence of experiential activity is of high philosophical importance. Thus, the project’s overall aim is to explore the experience of being active and to present in detail its philosophical fruitfulness and implications. One central thesis is that experiential activity amounts to an irreducible, multifarious and pervasive form of phenomenal consciousness manifesting itself in various ways of intentional “Being-in-the-World”. While the project is primarily systematic in nature and wants to contribute to highly topical research surrounding the “phenomenology of agency” and "enactivism", it also aims at enriching contemporary debates by drawing from the methodological tools and rich conceptual resources proposed by neglected writers belonging to the so-called “early phenomenological movement” (ca. 1900-1927). Although there do already exist notable accounts of particular types of phenomenal activity, what is still missing are proposals that try to systematically classify these various types and their constitutive aspects and to explore their interconnections and relations towards one another. This is where the envisaged project will start. It will proceed in three steps: first, methodological and conceptual issues regarding the phenomenology of activity are addressed; second, I will defend the idea that experiential activity is real and irreducible to other phenomenal traits; third, a classification and characterization of basic types of activity is developed. At the end, it is asked whether there is a (phenomenal) unity across these various types of agency.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: Denmark
• Host: Professor Dr. Dan Zahavi