Philosophy, activity, life

This paper, written to honor Prof. Vladislav Lektorsky on the occasion of his 90th birthday, addresses a subject to which Lektorsky has returned many times in the course of his long and distinguished career: the concept of activity. I begin with the distinction between activity and action, arguing against the view, associated with Leontiev, that actions are components of activities. In my view, the distinction between activity and action is an aspectual rather than ontological or mereological one. I then draw on the analysis of intentional action offered by G.E.M. Anscombe to argue that her understanding of action, intention and practical knowledge, when supplemented by insights from MacIntyre, McDowell and others, provides grounds to endorse three theses central to the activity approach (theses I find in Prof. Lektorsky’s recent summation of the tradition): that (i) consciousness, the inner plane of our mental lives, can be understood only in relation to the forms of our activity as embodied beings; (ii) human agency and behavior cannot be described or explained without essential reference to the social, cultural and historical context; and (iii) selves or persons are constituted in and through their activity. I then consider the objection that my analysis is too focused on the intentional activities of the individual, at the expense of the collective. I reply that the unit of analysis is neither the individual nor the collective, but the human life form. There is plenty of room, as there must be, for countenancing joint, shared and collective intentionality, and for recognizing that individuals and collectives do many things unintentionally. But no sense can be made of any of that without a robust account of intentional action. I believe my findings are congenial to three themes that characterize the legacy of Vladislav Lektorsky: (i) respect for the phenomenology of everyday thought and experience; (ii) humanism; and (iii) the belief that much is to be gained by bringing Russian philosophy into constructive dialogue with fruitful trends in Anglo-American philosophy.