H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA -- LA CONVERSAZIONE -- I VERBALI: STEFANINI

 G.: We ought to begin by deciding whether we mean to talk about action, an act, the actum, or acting. S.: Which is already four seminars, and not one. G.: Quite. But Thomson will want the distinctions clean before he lets us darken them again. S.: And Stefanini gives us azione, which appears simpler until one notices that Italian philosophy can make a single noun do the work of an entire English gerundive household. G.: Exactly. Azione is hospitable in a way English is suspiciously not. It can mean deed, act, acting, conduct, operation, practical initiative, and almost the whole metaphysical dignity of a person in motion. S.: Whereas in English, once you say act, you have already half-invited trouble. G.: More than half. “An act” sounds completed, individuated, countable. “Acting” sounds processual. “Action” floats ominously above them both, as if it were the philosophical umbrella beneath which each may sue for shelter. S.: And actum? G.: Ah yes. The scholastic ghost that one ought not to invoke before lunch. Actum is useful precisely because it sounds as if someone has already done the deed and left us only the corpse. S.: So we should ask what Stefanini wanted by choosing azione in 1914. G.: Yes. The year matters. One cannot write on action in 1914 and pretend one is merely polishing vocabulary in a monastery. S.: Because 1914 is already pressure, mobilisation, Catholic activism, Blondel, modern crisis, and then very quickly war. G.: Exactly. And the thesis on Blondel’s Action is not innocent of that whole atmosphere. It is a title about philosophy, but also about practical life, decision, will, and the insufficiency of purely spectator theories of thought. S.: Then Stefanini begins from Action because Blondel had already made “action” into a site of rebellion against static intellectualism. G.: Quite. Blondel says, in effect, that willing outruns what reflective thought can stabilise, and that the life of action reveals demands that theory alone cannot satisfy. S.: Which sounds dangerous to idealists and suspiciously attractive to Catholics. G.: Very good. Dangerous to idealists because action refuses to be a mere shadow of contemplation, attractive to Catholics because it lets one talk about transcendence through lived insufficiency rather than through scholastic deduction alone. S.: And Stefanini, still young, under Aliotta, chooses to engage that. G.: Or is chosen by the problem as much as he chooses it. The personal and institutional setting matters. Padua, Aliotta, Blondel, Catholic associationism, and then the increasingly unavoidable fact that Europe is moving from words to shells. S.: Which gives azione an urgency that “agency” in English rather lacks. G.: Agency is a bureaucrat’s action. Azione has blood in it. S.: You say that because English philosophy overdomesticates the topic. G.: Often. We ask whether a man raised his arm intentionally. Stefanini’s world asks what it is to live as a person whose being unfolds only through action and relation. S.: Then when he says azione, the word already leans toward personhood. G.: Precisely. And that is where I begin to become both sympathetic and cautious. S.: Because of personalism. G.: Because of personalism, yes. The moment Italians say persona, one fears that a perfectly good interpersonal structure will be burdened with too much metaphysical upholstery. S.: Yet Stefanini’s action is not merely the person preening in motion. G.: No. To be fair, his whole inter-personalismo is meant to resist the self-enclosed subject. Action is not a monadic emanation. It is an opening toward the other. S.: Then perhaps azione in Stefanini corresponds less to “an act” than to the enacted interval between I and thou. G.: Very good. That is exactly the better line. S.: Whereas Thomson and you, in an Oxford joint seminar, are likelier to begin with the question what makes a bodily movement count as an action. G.: Yes. We are apt to ask when behaviour becomes something done, under what descriptions, with what intention, and with what relation to reasons. S.: So your action is analytically decomposed, while his azione is existentially thick. G.: Nicely put. We dissect; he inhabits. S.: Though you would protest that reasons too are lived. G.: Naturally. I should protest that the analytic distinctions are not anti-vital. One cannot understand action by declaring it thick and then refusing to say where the thickness lies. S.: Then let us say what lies in azione. Will, decision, relation, manifestation of the person, and perhaps a certain refusal of contemplation as sovereign. G.: Yes. Add also the Blondelian sense that action reveals deficits in merely discursive adequacy. One wills more than one can account for; one acts under pressures that theory later tries, usually too late, to recapture. S.: That begins to sound almost like your later point that meaning outruns saying. G.: There is a structural affinity, yes. Just as what is meant may exceed what is said, what is enacted may exceed what is first reflectively grasped. S.: So we might say in the seminar that Stefanini’s azione is to conduct what your implicature is to utterance. G.: Dangerous, but tempting. One must not make every Italian into a pragmatist in disguise. S.: Still, the parallel is there. G.: Yes. In both cases the overt vehicle does not exhaust the rational content at work. Action, like utterance, is underdescribed by its surface event. S.: Then Thomson will ask what the surface event is. G.: He always does. He wants the bodily movement, the occasion, the circumstances, the descriptions under which it falls, and the conditions under which one description rather than another is relevant. S.: While Stefanini would ask whether those descriptions have forgotten the person. G.: Exactly. And there the seminar becomes interesting. S.: Then how should we stage it? G.: I begin with the Oxford puzzle. Suppose a man raises his arm. Is that an act? Only if done under a description, with intention, in a context where reasons attach. S.: And I reply with Stefanini: the arm is only the visible ripple of a deeper azione in which the person manifests himself toward a world and an other. G.: Good. Then Thomson says we must not smuggle metaphysics in before distinguishing arm-raising from signalling, swearing an oath, hailing a cab, or striking a child. S.: And Stefanini would say that those descriptions are not merely linguistic conveniences but practical determinations of the person’s being-in-relation. G.: Excellent. That would bring the room alive. S.: Especially if Hare looks worried. G.: Hare always looks worried when ontology starts dressing as moral phenomenology. S.: And you? G.: I look polite and begin separating what is useful from what is upholstered. S.: Very Oxford. G.: Entirely. Now, we must also mention 1914 more explicitly. Stefanini’s title is not a tranquil postscript. It is written on the edge of mobilisation, though the actual wound on Sass de Stria comes later. S.: But the war retrospectively stains the topic. G.: Yes. Once one knows that he will be called to arms, wounded by shrapnel, and leave the front a captain, one cannot read azione as a merely classroom noun. S.: So action acquires literal battlefield credibility. G.: Or danger. One must avoid making him sound as if war vindicated the thesis. But the biographical pressure matters. The philosophy of action is not being written in a century that can still pretend that action means only ethical initiative in the abstract. S.: Then the consequences of choosing action as a thesis subject are double. It ties him to Blondel and personalism, but also to an era in which action is no longer conceptually innocent. G.: Exactly. Thought after 1914 cannot speak of action as though action were a clean counterword to speculation. It now means mobilisation, sacrifice, command, obedience, damage, and the body under force. S.: Which perhaps explains why later personalism needs communication and relation, not just willing. G.: Very good. If action were left merely voluntarist, it would become too available to darker politics. S.: Such as those of the ventennio. G.: Precisely. Stefanini’s interpersonalism later resists that by insisting that being itself is personal and that what is non-personal enters as medium of manifestation and communication between persons. S.: So action is not command from a solitary ego, but relational disclosure. G.: That is the charitable Stefaninian line, yes. S.: And the Gricean line? G.: That rational agency is already interpersonal at the level of reasons. One acts not in splendid solitude but under descriptions, norms, expectations, and recognitions that are often public. S.: So you do not need metaphysical personalism to get interpersonal action. G.: Exactly. That is one of the points worth making. I do not deny the importance of the other; I only deny that one must inflate the person into a metaphysical absolute to secure it. S.: Then perhaps the seminar should contrast interpersonalismo with personalismo. G.: Yes. With the warning that the former is a structural necessity for reason, whereas the latter is often an ontological temptation. S.: That sounds like a sentence Thomson will underline. G.: He will underline it only if he thinks he can later divide it. S.: Which he can. G.: Unfortunately, yes. S.: Let us go back to the English. If Stefanini says azione, what do we say? Action or act? G.: Both, depending on what we are after. If we want the thick philosophical noun, action. If we want the individuated item, an act. If we want the process or mode, acting. If we want scholastic completion, actum. S.: Then azione corresponds most naturally to action, but with more existential charge. G.: Precisely. “Action” in English is often too abstractly nominal or too cleanly analytic. Azione in that milieu still carries the practical weight of living deed and personal initiative. S.: Could one render it as praxis? G.: Only if one wishes to invite a different party and perhaps never get rid of them. Praxis is too historically marked in another way. S.: Fair. So action it is. But then what of actum? G.: Actum may be useful when distinguishing the done from the doing. There is a difference between the action as occurring and the act as accomplished under some completed description. S.: So if Stefanini emphasises azione, he may be privileging the living performance over the finished deed. G.: Yes. That is quite plausible. The deed deadened into record is already too late for the philosophical pressure he wants. Blondel’s action is always larger than any single completed item. S.: Which means the actum is almost a betrayal of azione. G.: A useful betrayal, but still a betrayal. S.: Then Thomson will insist that we need betrayals of that sort if we are ever to know what to say about responsibility. G.: Quite. Without individuated acts, law, blame, praise, and description collapse into vaporous existential weather. S.: And Stefanini would reply that responsibility itself belongs to the personal relation, not first to legal atomism. G.: Very good. That is the seminar in embryo. S.: Then how much of Blondel do we need? G.: Enough to show that Action is not merely a topic but a method. Blondel does not simply say action exists; he uses action to expose the insufficiency of detached intellectualism. S.: Which would have appealed to a young Catholic in Padua. G.: Enormously. Especially one active in associations, already wary of merely academic idealism, and formed amid practical religious culture. S.: Yet later he resists fascist idealism too. G.: Yes, which is another consequence worth noting. The early concern with action does not end in sheer activism. It gets rerouted through the person and the interpersonal relation. S.: So action becomes medium, not idol. G.: Precisely. That is the best way to save him from the century. S.: And you would add that in ordinary conversation action and meaning are interlaced anyway. G.: Yes. Much of what we do conversationally is action by saying, showing, implying, declining, consenting, refusing, warning, inviting, all under public norms of intelligibility. S.: So a philosophy of action that ignores communicative action is incomplete. G.: Very much so. If Stefanini helps us see that action is relational and manifestative, then he comes nearer to my own concerns than the idealists ever did. S.: But you still refuse “being is personal.” G.: I refuse it as unnecessary metaphysical inflation. I am happy to say that many central forms of reason, agency, and meaning are interpersonal without thereby making being itself a personal substance. S.: That distinction should probably come early in the seminar. G.: Yes. Before anyone mistakes sympathy for surrender. S.: Should we mention his father’s tintoria? G.: Only if tactfully. It is tempting to say that manifestation, medium, and communication between persons sound unusually apt in the household of a dyer. S.: You are too pleased with that. G.: I am never pleased beyond reason. S.: That is false on the face of it. G.: Good. Keep some spirit for the room. Now, Aliotta. Do we bring him in? S.: We must, at least as supervisor and context. He had just begun his brief Paduan period, and the thesis was written under that eye. G.: Yes. Which means Stefanini’s Action is not only Blondelian but also filtered through local academic politics. S.: So once again, a thesis-title is never just a thought-title. G.: Exactly. It is an institutional object as well. We should say that outright. S.: And the war? G.: Mention it not as a romantic vindication, but as the historical sharpening of what “action” would soon come to cost. S.: So the line might be: in 1914, action could still be chosen as a philosophical problem; within a few years it would become an unavoidable biographical and collective ordeal. G.: Very good. That is almost too good for a joint seminar. S.: You may spoil it in delivery. G.: I probably shall. Now, let us rehearse the central conceptual distinction once more. Action as event, act as countable item, acting as process, actum as the done. S.: And azione spanning all four while leaning toward the lived and relational. G.: Exactly. That will be our first board sketch. S.: Then the second will be personalismo versus interpersonalismo. G.: Yes. With a dotted line from Stefanini’s ontological personalism to my more modest pragmatics of persons among others. S.: And Thomson? G.: Thomson will ask for examples and distinctions, which is his proper office. S.: Arm-raising, promising, warning, refusing, marching, praying? G.: Good. Add perhaps saluting and obeying, because 1914 and after make those examples less innocent than one would like. S.: That will darken the room. G.: Philosophy of action ought to darken the room occasionally. S.: And then lighten it with distinctions. G.: Precisely. Otherwise one has only atmosphere. S.: You really do distrust atmosphere. G.: Only when it starts calling itself depth. S.: Then our closing move should be what? G.: That Stefanini’s azione reminds us that action cannot be reduced to bare movement, because it is always already tied to person, meaning, and relation; but that analytic philosophy reminds Stefanini that relation without act-description risks becoming devotional weather. S.: That is severe. G.: It is meant to be balanced. Each side saves the other from a characteristic vice. S.: Stefanini saves you from bloodlessness. G.: And Thomson and I save him from sacral fog. S.: Perfect. G.: Nothing is ever perfect. S.: Joint-seminar perfect, then. G.: That is a lower and perhaps safer standard. S.: One last thing. Do we call the seminar “Action and the Person” or “Azione and Act”? G.: “Azione and Act” is better. It announces the friction immediately. S.: And the subtitle? G.: “On Stefanini, Blondel, and the English Habit of Dividing What the Italians Prefer to Live.” S.: That is very nearly rude. G.: Then it is a proper beginning. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Paduan, with one shell-burst in reserve.