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At this point we can step back and condense our brief historical analysis into some kind of working vocabulary and grammar of action. Each of the accounts that we have considered stresses particular features of action. Human actions as such are a subset of movements or behaviors. Practical action (praxis), making (poiesis), "being in the world," and doing (Handeln) are all examples of such subsets. The Aristotelian-scholastic tradition describes the unique aspects of the formulation or genesis of an action on the part of an agent aiming for an ultimate kind of good; the German idealist tradition stresses the intelligibility of action either relative to a transcendental subject or a broader totality, or world, of which the agent is, at best, only a part. The former tradition provides a vertical telos of action projected from desire in the agent to change in the world; the latter an integrally horizontal and normative view of rational action that fulfills the actor.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230355460_5

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