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Agency and Patiency:Back to Nature?1

Mikael M. Karlsson

1.

Fundamental to any theo-ry of agency is the distinc-tion between acting andsuffering, between agencyand patiency, betweenwhat an agent does andwhat befalls him. One con-temporary writer who hastaken seriously the task ofmaking out this differenceis Fred Dretske. “A dogbites your neighbor,”Dretske writes:

That is . . . something the dog does. It is something that happens to your neighbor.Clyde loses his job and Bonnie gets pregnant. These are things that happen to them,not things that they do.

The difference between things we do and things that happen to us feels familiarenough. . . . [I]t underlies our distinction between the active and the passive – betweenpower, agency, and action on the one hand and passion, patience, and patient . . . onthe other.2

Whereas most philosophers have aimed specifically at an account of action, thatis, human or intentional action, Dretske aims to give an account of a much more“general notion”:

Philosophical Explorations • Volume V (1) • January 2002 • 59-81

Abstract

The distinction between acting and suffering underlies

any theory of agency. Among contemporary writers,

Fred Dretske is one of the few who has attempted to

explicate this distinction without restricting the notion

of action to intentional action alone.Aristotle also devel-

oped a global account of agency, one which is deeper

and more detailed than Dretske’s, and it is to Aristotle’s

account (with some modifications) that the bulk of this

paper is devoted. Dretske’s sketchier theory faces at

least two ground-level problems. It is shown in the

course of the paper how these can be handled by the

Aristotelian account, in a way which is friendly to

Dretske’s approach.

1 An earlier, and fuller, version of this paper was presented at the international conference “Super-venience, Causality, Mind and Action”, Université de Provence (Aix-Marseille 1), Aix-en-Provence, 9-11 May 1999. I would like to thank Thorsteinn Gylfason, Logi Gunnarsson, Torfi Sig-urdsson, Andri Björnsson and Lynne Rudder Baker for their helpful comments and criticisms. Myresearch on causality and explanation, which forms the background for this paper, has been sup-ported by the Icelandic Council of Science and the Research Fund of the University of Iceland.

2 Dretske (1988), p. 1.

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. . . one that applies to animals, plants and perhaps even machines in very much thesame way it applies to people.3

Animal behavior is what animals do. Human behavior is what humans do. If plantsand machines do things, then whatever they do is plant and machine behavior.4

This general notion, for which Dretske favors the term behavior, would apply toall human doings, whether or not we would like to call them intentional actions,as Dretske emphasizes through examples:

People shiver when they get cold. That is something that they do. They also perspirewhen they get hot, grind their teeth when they are asleep, cough, vomit, weep, sali-vate, blush, tremble, hiccup, inhale, exhale, choke, fumble, stammer, fall asleep,dream, wake up, and a great many other things . . .5

In short, Dretske’s notion of behavior:

. . . applies to people [even] when there are no purposes or intentions, those factorsthat allegedly qualify a system as an agent and its purposeful activity as voluntary.6

And this permits its application as well to such non-human beings as plants ormachines, where intention is not in the picture.

Dretske’s key idea is evidently that behaving, or doing something, is in somesense self-movement, whereas having something happen to one comes down to beingmoved by another agent:

When a rat moves its paw, that is something the rat does, a piece of rat behavior[Dretske says]. When I move its paw, the paw still moves, but the rat doesn’t move it.There is no rat behavior. . . . If the cause of the movement lies elsewhere [than in theanimal], then something is happening or being done to it: its paw is being moved.7

The distinction between doing and being done to, between self-movement andother-movement,8 rests, for Dretske, upon “the locus, internal or external, of thecause of the change.”9

Although Dretske doesn’t mention Aristotle, this view has a very Aristotelianflavor. Consider Aristotle’s account (in Physics II) of the proper motion of thethings that “exist by nature” – things such as the animals and their parts, theplants and the simple bodies (earth, fire, air, water):10

3 Dretske (1988), p. 3.4 Dretske (1988), p. 1.5 Dretske (1988), pp. 3-4.6 Dretske (1988), p. 3.7 Dretske (1988), p. 1.8 I.e. being moved by another agent; frequently referred to below as “other-motion”.9 Dretske (1988), p. 10.10 Physics II, 1: 192b9-11.

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All the things mentioned plainly differ from things which are not constituted by nature.For each of them has within itself a principle of motion and stationariness . . . [N]atureis a principle or cause of being moved and of being at rest in that to which it belongs primar-ily, in virtue of itself and not accidentally.11

Aristotle further describes a nature as an intrinsic starting-point for, or dispositionto, change:12 an internal source of movement and rest which belongs to a thingessentially rather than coincidentally. Putting these points together, we can say,then, that a natural being is a being which has an intrinsic source of motion, ornature; and such motion as derives from this source is its natural motion.13

One can hardly avoid understanding Aristotle to mean, here, that naturalbeings, whether animate or inanimate, are self-movers: beings capable of bringingabout their own motion and likewise of bringing themselves to (and maintainingthemselves at) rest.14

This impression is reinforced by some of the passages where Aristotle con-trasts natural motion with violent or constrained motion. For Aristotle maintainsrepeatedly that “motion is always due either to nature or constraint”;15 and:

. . . “nature” means a source of movement within the thing itself, while a force is asource of movement in something other than it or in itself qua other . . .16

Likewise, in his discussion of voluntary and involuntary action in NicomacheanEthics III Aristotle says that a person acts voluntarily when “the principle thatmoves the instrumental parts of the body in such actions is in him.”

Those things . . . are thought involuntary [and thus suffered], which take place undercompulsion . . . ; and that is compulsory of which the moving principle is outside,being a principle in which nothing is contributed by the person who acts . . .17

The examples he immediately gives of compulsory action are “a man carriedsomewhere by a wind, or by men who had him in their power”;18 but it is easy tosee that in such instances, the man himself is hardly acting; rather he is beingacted upon. Voluntary actions may thus be viewed as the natural movements ofhuman (or animal) agents;19 involuntary movements of the kind just describedare violent or constrained.

11 Physics II, 1: 192b12-15, 21-23.12 Physics II, 1: 192b17-18.13 Cf. Metaphysics V, 4: 1014b19-21, 1015a13-15; On the Heavens III, 1: 298a24-298b1.14 As W. D. Ross remarks, “In book ii φυ� σις is spoken of as an �ρ� κιν�σεως �ν α�τ�� , and we

are apt to form the impression that Aristotle thinks of it as a power, resident in natural objects,of absolutely initiating movement”; Ross (1936), p. 25.

15 On the Heavens, III, 2: 301b19-20.16 On the Heavens, III, 2: 301b17-19. Cf. Physics, VIII,4: 255b32-34: “[T]he motion of all things that

are in motion is either natural or unnatural and violent, and all things whose motion is violentand unnatural are moved by something . . . other than themselves”; but of this passage, morelater.

17 Nicomachean Ethics III, 1: 1109b35-1110a3.18 Nicomachean Ethics III, 1: 1110a3-4.19 See for example Physics VIII, 4: 254b14-20.

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Mikael M. Karlsson

This looks very much like Dretske’s contrast between what a subject does(apparently a kind of self-movement), where movement of the subject is broughtabout by an internal cause, and what it suffers, where movement of the subject isbrought about by an external causal agency.20

In the remainder of this paper, I explore some telling problems confrontingDretske’s account (§2), problems which I believe cannot be dealt with withoutdeepening the account considerably in the way that Aristotle in fact did. In §3, Ioutline Aristotle’s ideas about natural motion,21 self-motion and “violent” motionand use this discussion as a vehicle for making a basic point about the distinctionbetween acting and being acted upon – between agency and patiency. My claim isthat there are importantly different reference classes against which to draw thiscontrast. In §§4-8, I expand further upon the themes of natural motion and self-motion, relying heavily upon Aristotle, but also innovating in certain non-Aris-totelian ways. In the course of this discussion, I show how the problems con-fronting Dretske can be dealt with using tools provided by the deeper Aristotelianaccount. In §5, the notion of an “agent system” is introduced, partly in responseto a lurking problem repeatedly adverted to by Donald Davidson. In any case,§§4-8 give us a fuller understanding of the alternative ways of drawing theagency-patiency contrast. §9 reflects upon what has been accomplished in earli-er sections.

2.

There are, it seems, two problems – or at least two – which attach to Dretske’sidea that something acts (as opposed to being acted upon) when, and only when,a movement is brought about in it by a cause internal to itself.

The first problem is that the theory produces some extremely uncomfortableexamples. For if the distinction between acting and suffering is to be made out interms of “the locus, internal or external, of the cause of the change,”22 thenDretske will evidently need to say that a man who goes bald in the normal wayor who has a heart attack or an epileptic fit is acting rather than suffering, as insuch cases the “locus . . . of the cause of the change” is surely within the man him-self.23 But something has gone seriously wrong; for losing one’s hair, or having anepileptic fit, seem prima facie to be paradigm cases of having something happen to

20 I do not maintain that Aristotle makes Dretske’s distinction between causal processes and the bod-ily movements which are the expression of such processes, which is to my mind Dretske’s mostimportant innovation.

21 There I focus upon the example of the so-called “simple bodies”.22 Dretske (1988), p. 10.23 In fact, he does say these things, or near enough; see Dretske (1988), p. 10 where he says that

where hair loss occurs in the normal way, “it is something a man does” and pp. 5-6, where heurges the adoption of a “more liberal taxonomy . . . more in accord with the usage of behavioralscientists . . . [such as] “behavioral biologists, embryologists, endocrinologists, and pharmacolo-gists . . . [who have] no trouble classifying as behavior . . . such things as respiratory and cardio-vascular activity . . ., penile erections . . ., the secretions of endocrine and exocrine glands, mus-cle spasms, convulsions, seizures, involuntary eye movements . . . and all sorts of reactions . . .whose internal production remains well below the level of consciousness or voluntary control.”

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one rather than of doing something, if anything is: we suffer hair loss, are victims ofheart attacks and epileptic fits.

What is at fault here? Is the distinction between internal and external causesa mistaken basis for distinguishing between doing and suffering? Or is the diffi-culty rather that of seeing how the distinction is to be made out? Dretske recog-nizes this problem in a footnote, and admits that it is not always clear how thedistinction is to be drawn.

It should be understood [he further remarks] that internal does not simply mean insideor underneath the skin, fur, fins, feathers, or whatever. It also includes the idea of aproper or integral part of the system exhibiting the behavior.24

I think that Dretske’s comment here is on the right track, but as it stands it does-n’t go very far. In particular, Dretske doesn’t make use of this thought to fend offthe kinds of examples we have just been discussing.

Further, Dretske evidently assumes that the distinction between what’s insideand what’s outside of a “system” can be made independently of the analyses inwhich agency is attributed to something. For, as we have seen, the locus of thecause of the change, internal or external, is the basis for distinguishing betweenwhat a thing does and what happens to it, in Dretske’s view.25 What I think, how-ever, is that viewing a causal factor as internal or external, in the sense that mat-ters for agency,26 is a part or concomitant of viewing something as an agent orpatient. If I am correct, then it may be that Dretske has mistaken the problem forthe solution.

The second problem may be called the puzzle of passive powers.27 Considersome Dretske-like examples: a splinter of iron is attracted by a magnet, a footballis sent flying by the kick of an Arsenal forward, a field mouse is carried off by anowl. In these transactions (we are tempted to say), the magnet, the forward, andthe owl are the agents; the splinter of iron, the football and the field mouse arepassive; they do not act, but are acted upon; being attracted, kicked, and carriedoff are evidently not things that they do, but things that happen to them. InDretske’s language, these are not examples of iron-splinter, football or field-mousebehavior.

But now let us think about these cases from the standpoint of Dretske’saccount. The fact that a magnet can attract a splinter of iron depends, amongother things, upon a certain property of the splinter; it must be susceptible toattraction by a magnet.28 A splinter of copper or aluminum, for example, will not

24 Dretske (1988), p. 3n.25 Paraphrase of Dretske (1988) p. 10.26 For there are, of course, all kinds of other reasons for making (various) internal-external distinc-

tions.27 This subject is raised by Aristotle in Physics VIII, and he gives an account of passive powers in

Metaphysics IX.28 Similarly, the ball must be susceptible to being sent flying by a kick; it may not be too heavy for

example. Imagine an Arsenal forward kicking a bowling ball which had been painted to look likea football by an envious team-mate. And similarly for the mouse; it must be abductible by theowl, as not everything is: the owl could not carry off a house, for instance, or a tree. This is dis-cussed much more fully below.

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be attracted. This susceptibility is an example of what we may call a passive power;a power of something to be affected by something else in a certain way, which isexercised in transactions in which a susceptible subject is affected in the relevantmanner.29 But this susceptibility is intrinsic to the splinter30 and the exercise of it“internal” to it according to any standard mentioned or hinted at by Dretske.Being attracted by the magnet has thus evidently been made out, by Dretske’sanalysis, to be something that the splinter does, not something that happens to it.

But surely agency should not be attributed on the basis of the exercise of a pas-sive power, this is rather a reason for attributing patiency. Yet, the exercise of pas-sive powers is every bit as internal as that of active powers, so Dretske’s analysisof agency permits us – indeed, requires us – to attribute agency to a thing on thebasis of its susceptibility to being pulled by magnets, sent flying by kicks, or beingabducted by owls, for example.

Evidently, what we ought to say is that a subject acts or does something, asopposed to being acted upon or having something happen to it, insofar as its motionis brought about by the exercise of an active power: a power to do rather than tobe affected, an ability rather than a susceptibility. This activation is the wantedinternal cause and no other kind of factor, however “internal” will do as a basisfor attributing agency. If this is right, then the problem becomes that of distin-guishing between active powers and passive; and for that purpose, the distinctionbetween “internal” and “external” as such will evidently be of little assistance. Butthis problem looks suspiciously like the problem with which Dretske began, i.e.that of accounting for the difference between doing and being done to.

3.

In connection with these problems, Aristotle’s discussion of the natural motionsof the “simple bodies” or “elements” – earth, air, fire and water – provides instruc-tion, even if grounded in an obsolete world view.

Aristotle viewed the so-called simple bodies as things “constituted by nature”and having, therefore, intrinsic principles of motion and stationariness, ornatures, “in virtue of what they are and not accidentally.” In the case of the sim-ple bodies, these intrinsic principles amount to natural tendencies to seek a cer-tain position: The “heavy” elements, earth and water, move “downward” (i.e.towards the center of the universe) if not impeded, and the “light” elements, airand fire, move “upward” (i.e. away from the center), unless something preventsthem from doing so; “and this is what it is to be light or heavy.”31 So, a bit of earthreleased from high up, moves, seemingly of its own, toward the center; this is itsnatural motion.

When Aristotle says that the simple bodies have these tendencies “in virtue ofwhat they are and not accidentally,” he means that these tendencies attach to themas simple bodies; lightness and heaviness are tendencies of the simple bodies assuch.

29 Physics VIII, Metaphysics IX.30 Clearly, it derives from the splinter’s quality of being made of iron.31 Physics VIII, 4: 255b15-16.

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Not everything has intrinsic tendencies of this kind:

. . . a bed and a coat and anything else of that sort, qua receiving these designations

. . . have no innate impulse to change [no nature]. But insofar as they happen [acci-dentally] to be composed of stone or of earth or of a mixture of the two [sic] they dohave such an impulse, and just to that extent.32

An ordinary coat tends, if not impeded, to move downward; but this is becauseit is made of heavy stuff. If you could weave a coat out of airy material, it wouldtend to move upward. Hence, such a motive tendency belongs not to the coat assuch, but to the stuff or stuffs of which it is made, and the coat is only acciden-tally light or heavy. Put in other terms, the explanation of a coat’s having a down-ward tendency would be “It is made of heavy stuff” and not “It is a coat”.

Heavy stuff can move unnaturally as well as naturally. When it moves unnat-urally, Aristotle says, it is usually quite obvious that it is being moved by some-thing else. If we want to explain the unnatural motion of a clod of earth, we mustrefer to something beyond its nature and, indeed, beyond itself. We noted earli-er that Aristotle says more than once that unnatural motion is violent or con-strained motion. But his account of violent motion is not entirely clear. Some-times he says that all motions are either natural or violent. If that’s the case, thena violent motion would be any motion other than that which is accounted for bya nature; so, for a clod of earth, that would be any motion other than by thestraightest path toward the center. On this account, all motions of a coat, quacoat, would be constrained, since none of its motions are natural.33 But in otherplaces, Aristotle seems to say that violent motion is that which is contrary to, orcontravenes, the natural motion of something. So, for a clod of earth, upwardmotion would be violent, as its natural tendency is downward. In that case, manymotions – for instance the sideways motion of a clod of earth – would be neithernatural nor violent. And none of the motions of a coat, qua coat, would be vio-lent, since it has no natural motion to be contravened.34 For certain reasons, Ithink that the latter theory is better, and so I will henceforth attribute it to Aris-totle.

Now it has appeared so far that natural motion, such as the downward motionof a clod of earth, was a kind of self-motion. When an unhindered clod of earthmoves downward, this appears to be something that it does on its own; the expla-nation of its motion would be in terms of its nature and not in terms of anotheragent. When a clod of earth moves upward, it does not do this on its own; indeed,it resists moving in this way. The explanation of such motion would have to referto some other agent which moves it in a direction contrary to its natural tenden-

32 Physics II, 1: 192b16-21.33 Violent motion on this account is any motion other than an x qua x would exhibit if it were unim-

peded.34 Violent motion on this account is a motion that an x qua x would resist, and which it would undo

if left alone. If I raise up a clod of earth, it resists the upward movement (exerts an opposingforce), and if I release it, it moves back down. If I move a clod of earth sideways, it does not resist(or at least clearly not to the same extent), and if I release it, it does not return in the directionfrom which it was moved.

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cy. This would not be self-motion, but other-motion, so to speak, i.e. movementby another; it would be, in Dretske’s terms, something that befell the clod of earth.

However, in a remarkable discussion in Physics VIII, 4 Aristotle argues that thesimple bodies do not move themselves. Their natural motion, he maintains, is notself-motion but other-motion. But being natural motion, it is certainly not violentmotion; and this tells us that violent or constrained motion is not the same asother-motion, at least according to the account of Physics VIII, 4.

Aristotle gives a variety of reasons for denying the status of self-movers to thesimple bodies. He begins the chapter by telling us that:

Of things to which motion is essential [such as the things endowed with natures] somederive their motion from themselves, others from something else; and in some casestheir motion is natural, in other cases violent and unnatural. Thus in things that derivetheir motion from themselves, e.g. all animals, the [self-derived] motion is natural . . .[for] whenever the source of motion is in the thing itself we say that the motion of thething is natural.35

This opens the door to a possibility not yet contemplated, namely that a motionof something whose source is in that thing might nevertheless not be derivedfrom the thing itself; but at the same time, Aristotle reiterates the point made inPhysics II, that natural motion is motion whose source is intrinsic to the thingitself (being the “nature” of that thing).

Aristotle then tells us that motion which is natural but not self-derived is dif-ficult to discern, because in such cases it is difficult to pin down the origin of themotion. The motion is likely to appear to be self-derived. Such, Aristotle thinks,is the natural motion of the simple bodies. But, he says:

It is impossible to say that their [natural] motion is derived from themselves: this is acharacteristic of life and peculiar to living things. Further, if it were [self-derived], itwould have been in their power to stop themselves . . . Moreover if things move them-selves, it would be unreasonable to suppose that in only one kind of motion is theirmotion derived from themselves. Again, how can anything of continuous and natural-ly connected substance move itself? In so far as a thing is one and continuous . . . it isimpassive . . . Therefore none of the things that we are now considering move them-selves . . .36

We may find these reasons for denying the status of self-movers to the simplebodies variously weighty. However, it appears in context that what Aristotle hasfirst and foremost in mind is that the simple bodies cannot initiate their own nat-ural movement; and it is the possibility of things initiating their own movementthat is his chief concern in Physics VIII. The nature of a clod of earth is its ten-dency to move downward to its proper position (the center of the universe), butthis requires that it is not already there. Now, a clod of earth cannot get itself upto where its downward tendency becomes operative; nor can it remove obstacles

35 Physics VIII, 4: 245b12-18.36 Physics VIII, 4: 255a5-18.

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that may prevent it from moving toward the center. Thus, if we imagine a uni-verse containing only the four simple bodies, it would be a static universe, withspherical layers of water, air and fire arranged around a central mass of earth. Thefact that the simple bodies are in motion points to their natural motion being ini-tiated by another agent. A comparison may help here: Aristotle might be thoughtof as comparing the natural motion of the simple bodies with the rebound of arubber band that has been stretched. If we focus simply upon the snapping of theband, we might suppose that the motion is self-derived, for the band rebounds“of itself”; but in fact it is I, who stretches and then releases the band, who bringsthe motion about.37

Thus Aristotle concludes:

. . . it is clear that . . . [in the case of the simple bodies] the thing does not moveitself, but it contains within itself the source of motion [cf. the elasticity of the rubberband] – not of moving something or of causing motion, but of suffering it.38

In other words, Aristotle has concluded here that the natures of the simple bod-ies are what we called “passive powers” or “susceptibilities”.

I will not be concerned here to evaluate Aristotle’s argument for this conclu-sion. Instead I want to consider Aristotle’s classification of motions, to seewhether we can learn anything from it about the difference between action andpassion. It might be diagrammed like this:39

Motions

Of natural things Of non-natural things Non-natural

Other-motion

Natural Non-natural Non-violent

Non-violent Other-motion

Self-motion Other-motion Violent Non-violent

Which of these categories, if any, captures those motions which are doings asopposed to sufferings? My suggestion is that none of them does – not becauseAristotle’s classification is defective (although it may well be), but because I thinkthat the distinction between doings and sufferings is not a single distinction. It

37 Cf. Physics VIII,4: 255b28-31.38 Physics VIII, 4: 255a23-256a3, esp. 255b-31.39 The classification here presented depends upon the way in which I have interpreted Aristotle.

Certain aspects of my interpretation are quite controversial. In this diagram, the latter of the twoaccounts of violent motion is presupposed. On the other account, violent motion would coincidewith non-natural motion.

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depends upon the contrast that one wants to draw. “Doing” and “suffering” arecontrast terms which can attach to a variety of contrast-classes. Thus, self-motionsmight be contrasted as doings with all the rest, which are other-motions (move-ments by another agent) and which would then be counted as sufferings. We sawthe appeal of this earlier; it is one way to understand Dretske’s central intuitionabout doing and suffering. But we might also want to contrast the natural motionsas doings with all the non-natural motions, which we would count as sufferings. Theappeal of this would be to count as a doing whatever has as its source a principleof motion intrinsic to the agent. Dretske seems to equate the latter contrast withthe former, but Aristotle argues against that equation. Thirdly, we might want tocontrast the violent motions as sufferings with the non-violent motions, which wouldcount as doings. In other words, to talk about a doing would be to talk about amovement of a subject which was not forced upon it. It appears to me thatDretske sometimes conflates this third possibility with the other two, while Aris-totle arguably distinguishes them (since some other-motions are unconstrained).The basis of all of these contrasts would, however, be causal: self-motion, naturalmotion, and violent motion are all essentially causal concepts.40

It is important to notice that nature is the key to the whole scheme: The dis-tinctions between natural and non-natural things, and between natural and non-natural motions, depend, of course, on nature; self-motion is a kind of naturalmotion; and violent motion is the contrary of natural motion. Some of the exam-ples which appeared earlier to present problems for Dretske can be used to throwadditional light upon the character of natural motion and the way in which naturecan be appealed to in marking out differences between doing and suffering.

4.

Among the examples we considered were those of the football sent flying by theArsenal forward and the mouse abducted by the owl. The problem was that theirmovements could be seen as depending upon internal causal factors – the activa-tion of certain inherent tendencies – and thus on Dretske’s account as doings oractions of theirs (or rather as the expressions of such doings), while the internalpowers which gave rise to them seemed to be passive, rather than active, pow-ers – susceptibilities, as we called them.

Let us think here about the football.41 The reason why we think of the foot-

40 I do not necessarily mean to recommend this Aristotelian classification as it stands; and even ifwe were to accept it, I don’t think that it would cover all the cases. I have so far employed it herechiefly to aid us in reflecting upon certain perplexities emerging from Dretske’s account, and toillustrate the point about “doing” and “suffering” as contrast terms which can attach to various,different contrast-classes. But whatever its merits or defects, we can now exploit this classificationfurther.

41 Since a football is an artifact, it is clear where Aristotle would place its motion in the scheme wehave described. For Aristotle maintains that artifacts do not have natures, and so any motion ofa football (that is qua football, not, say, qua heavy body) will be classified as motion of a non-nat-ural thing: non-natural, non-violent, other-motion. However, my idea here is not that we shouldapply Aristotle’s scheme as Aristotle would have applied it, but that we may use it to help us thinkabout our examples, and about action and passion, in a broadly Aristotelian way.

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ball’s sudden flight as something that happens to it, rather than something that itdoes, is obvious: there it sits, immobile in the grass; and it will sit there unmovingas long as it is left alone. Without some intervention, it will not go flying off; thatis not something that it does (or can do) on its own. What eventually moves it isanother agent, the Arsenal forward, who gives it a smart kick; as Dretske wouldemphasize, the cause of the movement is external. But the movement also dependsupon the football’s own qualities and “powers”. The football has to be such that itcan be sent flying with a kick. Is this, as we claimed earlier, a passive power?

Well, the matter is not so clear; just as it is not so clear that Aristotle rightlydescribed the natures of the simple bodies (their weight and lightness) as sources,“not of moving something or of causing motion, but of suffering it.” The relevant“source of motion” in the football is not simply kickability – that it can be kicked –but rather a certain combination of qualities such as lightness, shape andresilience that are deliberately built into footballs. If it didn’t have these qualities,it wouldn’t go flying when kicked by the forward; and after all, that was the move-ment that we wanted to explain. If it were too heavy, or too flat, or too squishy orfragile, it would just remain immobile, or perhaps take a short flop, or break intofragments.42 So there does seem to be a sense in which the movement of the foot-ball is or expresses something it does, and not merely something which the Arse-nal forward does; only it is true of course, that qua football it doesn’t do anythingunkicked.43 We can make this a bit more precise, I think, by saying that while thefootball does not initiate its motion, it sustains, and even in certain ways defines,its own motion. Our football, therefore, does seem to possess a certain kind ofactive power, which comes into effect when the football is kicked.

This is in certain respects similar to what Aristotle says about the naturalmotion of the simple bodies: they do not, he claims, initiate their movement. Buteven if that’s true, it is still the case that they define and sustain their own natur-al movement, once it is initiated, in virtue of the “source of movement” withinthem. Thus, take this bit of earth, and this bit of fire, and bring them just to here(say, two meters above the earth’s surface), and now let them go. The bit of earthmoves down, the bit of fire moves up; and while they are moving down or up, noother agent is pushing, pulling or otherwise affecting them; or anyway that isAristotle’s view. Let us say that their natural motions are, in this way, kineticallyindependent of other agents. In Physics VII, Aristotle maintains that “there are fourkinds of locomotion caused by something other than that which is in motion, viz.pushing, pulling, carrying and twirling”;44 and when these are absent, we canspeak of “kinetic independence”.45 Given that independence, it seems a little

42 Anyone who is skeptical about this is invited to try to play football with a watermelon, or an innertube.

43 We could ask, for example, “Why did it do that, when kicked (as opposed to remaining immo-bile or breaking into pieces)?”

44 Physics VII, 2: 243a16-18; cf. On the Soul X, 1: 433b25-26. 45 I emphasize that this is not Aristotle’s term; he distinguishes no such concept, except by impli-

cation. The particular view of kinetic independence that we can tease out of Aristotle is not onethat we could accept today. But this does not mean that the notion of kinetic independence assuch is empty or dispensable: perhaps we can give an account of kinetic independence that wouldbe consistent with contemporary physical theory, and perhaps it is important to do so.

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ungenerous of him to refuse to grant the simple bodies some kind of status as self-movers, even if their self-movement depends upon their motion being initiatedby another agent.46 But in Physics VIII Aristotle is deliberately developing a verynarrow and particular conception of self-motion; and when he says that thenature of the simple bodies is a source “not . . . of causing motion, but of suffer-ing it” his primary contrast class is self-motion in this very strict sense, which Iwill henceforth designate with a big “S”. At any rate, he does attribute naturalmotion to the simple bodies, and this, as I have been suggesting, may be seen ina certain light as a kind of self-motion (not with a big “S”), even though suchmotion be externally initiated. Why not then attribute natural motion also to thefootball, which seems also to possess a certain active potential?

There are some instructive disanalogies between the motion of the football,when kicked by the Arsenal forward, and the natural motion of a simple body.First, when the simple bodies move naturally, no other agent pushes or pullsthem down or up in the direction of their natural motion; the external initiatoronly carries them (contrary to their natural motion) to a certain place and thenwithdraws and lets them get on with it. The kick of the Arsenal forward, by con-trast, pushes the football in the direction in which it is to go, and the footballresponds by flying off in that direction. In the second place, the natural motionof the simple bodies is goal-directed, and the goal in question is associated withthe simple bodies as such. Heavy things seek the center of the universe; lightthings flee from the center. The motions of footballs, even when kicked towardthe opposing goalie, are not goal-directed in this way: footballs have no goal thatis theirs. These are two reasons for attributing a nature – a causal power of a par-ticular kind – to the simple bodies, while withholding this attribution from foot-balls.

There may also seem to be a third reason; for there appears to be a further sig-nificant disanalogy between footballs and simple bodies. Although the simple bod-ies may in fact move in various ways, they have regular tendencies for movement47

associated simply with their being simple bodies (and not with their accidentallybeing something else),48 whereas footballs as such appear not to have any such reg-ular tendency. So we can answer the question, “How does earthy stuff, as such,move?”, whereas there may seem to be no comparable answer to the question“How do footballs, as such, move?” or to the same question about coats, as Aris-totle indicates in Physics II.49 This is one of Aristotle’s principle reasons for deny-ing that artifacts have natures.50 But we do not have to follow Aristotle in this, atleast not completely. For it seems that there is a way that footballs, as such, movewhen kicked (smartly, straight and true, let us say, in the direction of the kick51); and

46 Aristotle has certain reasons – interesting to my mind, but not convincing – for not thinking ofthe self-fulfillment of a “second potentiality” of this kind as “motion”; but this is not a subject tobe pursued here.

47 They are, in other words, governed by a (defeasible) rule applying to the movement of simplebodies qua simple bodies.

48 Their natural movements are movements realizing these tendencies.49 Physics II, 1: 192b16-21.50 Cf. Physics II, 1: 192b9-33.51 I grant that it would be very difficult to make this precise; but precision is not needed to grasp,

and to recognize, the point.

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it is no accident that they do so, for they are deliberately made to do so. Motion ofthis kind is what is “essential” to a football, qua football, as an artifact. A coat, bycontrast, is not made to move, as such, in any particular way, but rather to per-form other, non-kinetic, functions, such as keeping one warm or keeping off therain.52 In the context of locomotion, artifacts are of very different kinds.

5.

Our comparison of the football with the simple bodies has brought to light threeconsiderations that Aristotle uses to attribute natural motion – and thus natures– to things: the (1) kinetic independence and (2) goal-directedness of certainmotions, which are (3) characteristic of a given sort of thing.53 I believe that theidea is this: When things appear, at least, to exhibit motions of this sort, we canposit a nature as their cause. A posit of this kind will sometimes have to be aban-doned if certain facts come to light. But until it has to be withdrawn, it has thefunction of providing, or at least pointing to, a certain sort of explanation of cer-tain motions, one which makes them out to be doings, and thus self-motions (butnot necessarily with a big “S”), of the beings from whose natures the motionsderive. Such an explanation can be deepened by finding out further particularsabout the “natures” in question and how they operate, but this ought not toundermine – but rather to strengthen – the status of the motion in question as adoing.54 We can say, using non-Aristotelian language, that such a posit attributesto certain beings an agent system,55 which in principle admits of further investi-gation and analysis.

If the contrast between doings and sufferings is taken to be that between nat-ural and non-natural motions, then what something does is a product of its agentsystem.56 Thus, some of the movements characteristic of human beings – the oneswhich are often called “intentional actions” – exhibit kinetic independence and acertain sort of goal-directedness. These, we might then say, are human doings;and relative to these, other bodily movements are sufferings. These human doingsevidently derive from a nature – human nature – or from a particular agent sys-tem with which humans, as such, are endowed.

Many have tried to say more about this particular agent system. According toDonald Davidson, a human movement is an action if it is intentional under at

52 So despite this there is no particular movement associated with being a coat, and coats do not dowhat they do by moving. Coats simply hang in the closet, or follow the movements of their own-ers. They also fall if they drop off the hanger, but not qua coats. Talk about what coats “do” is nottalk about their doings, but about their functions – what they are for. We don’t say, except perhapsas a joke: “Guess what my coat did today – it kept me warm!”

53 The qualifier “qua a thing of that kind” is built in to the idea of the motion’s being characteristic.54 The reason is that these further particulars are those that help us to understand more fully what

it is about the thing that allows it to move in kinetically independent, goal-directed and charac-teristic ways. The process is therefore not that of explaining away a nature but of explaining anature more fully.

55 The idea is inspired by, but isn’t the same as, Herbert Spencer Jennings’ notion of an “action sys-tem” (which Jennings attributes to A. Pütter); see Jennings ([1906] 1962) Behavior of the LowerOrganisms, p. 300 and passim.

56 Or of one of its agent systems; as discussed below, a thing can have more than one such system.

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least one applicable description.57 But, according to the account of “Actions, Rea-sons and Causes”, a movement is intentional in this way just in case its causal ori-gin is a primary reason, this being a certain combination of a pro-attitude and abelief.58 Of course, the primary reason must be casually effective “in the rightway”;59 a proviso that Davidson has sometimes despaired of explicating non-triv-ially.60 But problems aside, this is a sample account of what I am calling an “agentsystem”. As an account, it is extremely sketchy, but it is not empty: it doesn’tmerely suppose that there’s some such system that accounts for the relevantactions but goes on to say something about the elements and structure of that sys-tem and how it works.61

For comparison, we may consider a mechanical watch (such as people usedto own when I was young), whose characteristic movements exhibit kinetic inde-pendence and are arguably goal-directed in the relevant sense, although I will notelaborate on that here. We have plausible grounds, at least, for positing a natureas the source of such movements, even though Aristotle himself would not havedone so, on the grounds that watches are artifacts.62 To posit a nature is toattribute a kind of agent system. And for a watch it is possible to describe thatsystem – which is a mechanical system – in considerable detail. The watch iswound up, compressing a spring. The spring is allowed to re-expand bit by bit,this being controlled by a balance wheel and escapement. The force of the springpropels a gear, which is attached to other gears of various ratios, and some ofthese are attached to the hands, which indicate the time (if the watch has beenset). We could add quite a bit to the detail, but the idea is, I think, clear.

Now against an account of this detail it would be fairly easy to say, in a par-ticular case, when a movement of the watch’s hands has been derived in an eccen-tric way – Davidson’s intractable problem – from an earlier step in the system’soperations. Some of the elements in the causal chain leading to the movement ofthe hands will not have a place in the watch’s agent system as this has beendescribed, as for instance if the movements are influenced by a bug walking aboutin the works.

57 See, in particular, Davidson ([1963] 1980a) pp. 3-19 and Davidson ([1971] 1980b),pp 43-61.58 Davidson ([1963] 1980a), p. 5 and p. 12ff. The content of the primary reason is that the agent

has a pro-attitude toward something and believes that performing a certain action would beinstrumental to his obtaining or achieving that thing. Speaking more strictly in the event mode,the inner cause of the agent’s action might be said to be the formation of the primary reason inhim.

59 See, for example, Davidson ([1963] 1980a), p. 9 and Davidson ([1973] 1980c), pp. 78-80. In afootnote to “Intending” (1978), Davidson says that at the time he wrote “Actions, Reasons andCauses” (1963), he “believed it would be possible to characterize ’the right way‘ in non-circularterms”; indicating a pessimistic retreat from his earlier hope; see Davidson ([1978] 1980d), p87n3.

60 The existence of this conundrum means, for Davidson, that the straightforwardly causal accountis insufficient.

61 Dretske, through his device of viewing doings as processes, suggests some interesting, and to mymind illuminating, ways of further fleshing out this rather spare account. See Dretske (1988), esp.chapters 4-6.

62 Aristotle’s reasons, which are by no means silly, will not be evaluated here. In §7, below, I speakof the attribution of pseudo-natures to various things, mostly artifacts, thereby expanding thescope of Aristotle’s approach; but Aristotle would have probably resisted this, for various reasons.

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Presumably, too, if a primary reason brings about a bodily movement, but notin “the right way”, this is because some of the elements in the chain leading fromthe primary reason to the bodily movement do not have a place in the agent sys-tem for intentional action. But our present description of this agent system is notsufficiently detailed to make it possible for us to track down or describe what has,or might have, gone wrong, even when we are pretty sure that something has. Theonly approach to this that I see is to try to go much further in describing the agentsystem for intentional action, and I see no special reason why we should despairof the possibility of doing this.

On the other hand, it does appear to me that whatever we can say abouteccentric causation, whether pertaining to watch movement or to intentionalhuman action, can only be said in particular instances, or about instances of a cir-cumscribed kind. There will be no non-trivial global account of what it means foran internal factor to bring about a movement “in the right way”.63

6.

In addition to giving us a basis for distinguishing between normal and eccentriccausation, our account of a given agent system will be the basis of the distinctionbetween agent and other, “internal” and “external”, that is relevant to making outthe difference between doing and suffering. “Internal” means internal to an agentsystem; “external” means external to that system. Suppose, for example, that ahuman bodily movement is produced by some electrical ruction in the subject’sbrain, as in certain seizures. This is a cause external to the agent system for inten-tional action described earlier, not because it is a physical episode in the centralnervous system,64 but because it is neither a primary reason, nor an element inthe causal-systematic track that leads from primary reasons to bodily movements,nor a cause of primary reasons. A seizure is therefore not a human action, but(relative to that contrast class) something that happens to a person.

On the grounds that the causes of these things are “internal”, Dretske wantsto say that coughing, sneezing, shivering and hiccupping are things that we do,even if they are not intentional actions. Well, they are internal in some sense, andin that sense they are things that we do. But to what are they internal? On our pre-sent view, this idea of “internality” is relativized to some agent system. It is pret-ty clear that most of Dretske’s examples of human doings that are not intentionalactions are examples of what human bodies do.65 The relevant agent systems, thatis to say, are biological or physiological systems; the human natures in questionare biological or physiological natures. Dretske is perhaps right that as biologicalhuman beings, losing our hair is something we do; but as intentional agents, thisis something that happens to us. Losing one’s hair, St. Thomas might have said,

63 Thus, to the extent that such was Davidson’s intended message, I am agreeing with him; but it isnot clear to me that this was all he intended to say.

64 Both Davidson and Dretske are ontological materialists and think of pro-attitudes and beliefs asphysical states.

65 Or particular bodily organs, or particular “systems” within the body (e.g. the digestive system).

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is (or could be viewed as) an act of a man; but it is not a human act.66 Despite hisvery promising remark that “internal . . . includes the idea of a proper or integralpart of the system exhibiting the behavior,”67 with which we are now agreeingemphatically, Dretske never explores the idea of “a system” or what is “integral toa system” far enough to make it clear that the distinction between “internal” and“external” cannot serve as the starting point for distinguishing acting from suffer-ing, but is rather a consequence of having made the latter distinction through theattribution of an agent system.

Aristotle often talks as if natural beings have a single nature. And this isundoubtedly true in a sense; that is to say that a human being, for instance, is nota psychological being, a circulatory being, a digestive being and so on, all thesebeing somehow glued together. A human being is a single whole; but one that hasmany different natural functions, and in that sense many different “natures”, thatis to say “sources of movement within the thing itself,” and thus, in the languageemployed here, many different agent systems.

This means that, even given that we take natural motions as our point of ref-erence, we can go on to make distinctions of doing and suffering in either a glob-al way or a local way; this is a matter of the further arrangement of our contrastclasses. Globally we might say, adopting a Davidsonian idiom, that a movementof a subject is a doing if it is a natural motion under at least one applicabledescription. That would be true if there were any nature attributable to the sub-ject from which the given movement derives; the movement would be broughtabout through an activation of that nature. Put in terms of agent systems, a move-ment of a subject would be a doing of that subject if it is the product of at leastone agent system attributable to the subject. From this global perspective, sneez-ing, shivering and intentional arm-raising would all be things we do, and this isoften Dretske’s perspective, or close to it. But it is more common to take up a localperspective, which takes as its point of reference motions deriving from a singlenature, or agent system (or some circumscribed set of such). If our reference classis, say, that of intentional action, then arm-raising would be something we do, butsneezing and shivering not (in typical cases).

7.

Having now spent some time discussing natural motion, it is time to give somefurther consideration to what I will call pseudo-natural motion, a category not rec-ognized by Aristotle. As an example, we may revert to the flight of the football,discussed earlier. We mentioned three criteria for natural motions: such motionsare (1) kinetically independent and (2) goal-directed in the sense explained pre-viously, and (3) characteristic of a given sort of thing. We argued that the motion

66 Summa Theologiæ, IaIIæ, Q.I, Art. 1. St. Thomas actually has a different kind of contrast in mind;that between actions resulting from deliberation and choice (human acts), of which he says that“man is master”, and things that we do without deliberating, such as “[scratching] one’s beardwhile intent on something else”; the latter are acts of a man but not human acts. Even so, St.Thomas’ terminology is helpful and can be profitably exploited in non-Thomistic ways.

67 Dretske (1988), p. 3n.

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exhibited by a football, when kicked (unless something interferes), could be saidto be characteristic of footballs – the proper motion of a football qua football.Thus, “Because it is a football” can constitute a sensible answer to the question,“Why does it fly off like that when kicked?” But football motion of this kind doesnot meet the other two criteria. It is not directed at any goal associated with foot-balls as such,68 and it is not kinetically independent in the way that the naturalmotions of the simple bodies are. The football moves in a given direction and ata given speed because it is pushed, more or less forcefully, in that direction; in thatsense it may be said to take on the motion of the kick that propels it, and this isunlike what happens with the natural motion of the simple bodies (it is how theymove when they are moved non-naturally or against their nature).

Still, the football in flight exhibits a kind of kinetic independence, for it con-tinues on its course after it has left the foot of the kicker. Such projectile motion issomething that Aristotle never succeeded in explaining; and indeed, no goodaccount of this was produced prior to Newton.69 Newton credited all materialbodies with inertia – the quality of continuing on in their present state of motionwithout change in velocity or direction. Any change in the velocity or directionof a body must be due to a force imposed from without. Significantly for us, New-ton could not decide whether in attributing inertia to matter he was saying thatit was active or passive. In favor of calling it passive was the fact that the presentmotion of a given material body is always due to “forces” which have been, or arebeing, exerted upon the body; in short, like Aristotle’s simple bodies and our foot-ball, material bodies do not initiate their own motion. In favor of calling it activeis the fact that matter sustains its own motion in the absence of any present influ-ence from without; and this also may be said of both the simple bodies and thefootball. To my knowledge, Newton never cracked this nut to his own satisfac-tion.70

In any case, if we reject Aristotle’s suggestions about what keeps the footballgoing, then we may see it (as Newton would have) as keeping itself going. On aNewtonian account, however, this inertial motion would not be proper to thefootball as such, but to its matter; it would be “accidental” to the football qua foot-ball. But even if that’s the case, the fact remains that the football, due to variousqualities that have been built into it as a football, contributes to its own flight, forit reacts differently than most other things to kicks. Qua football, it exhibits move-ments which have a certain “kinetic independence”, though perhaps to a lesserdegree than that of the simple bodies as Aristotle understands them. Let us dubthis weak kinetic independence. If we think about it, there can evidently be differ-

68 Goals are generally important for the characteristic motions of artifacts – that is, of those artifactswhose business it is to move. But they are normally the goals of the makers and users of thoseartifacts, not of the artifacts themselves.

69 Aristotle thought that since projectiles had to take on their motion from something else (theydon’t move without an external impetus), the fact that they continue in motion, as the footballdoes when it has left the kicker behind, had to be explained by the continued influence of an exter-nal agent. Sometimes, Aristotle flirted with the suggestion that the air displaced by a moving pro-jectile rushed around to the back of it to fill the void left by the displaced air and thereby pushedthe projectile onward – but it is obvious that he was reaching.

70 A related question also arose for Newton in connection with gravitational attraction. It is aboutthat question that he famously declined to “frame hypotheses”.

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ent degrees of kinetic independence, and perhaps even different kinds, which arenot easily measured against a single standard.

What we have in the football is a thing whose motions fail to meet Aristotle’sstandards for natural motion; but it meets some of them to some degree, rather thanfailing utterly to meet any of them. We can classify its characteristic motion aspseudo-natural, and attribute to it a pseudo-nature from which these motionsderive. The ways in which the characteristic motion of footballs fails to meet Aris-totle’s criteria give us ways of understanding this motion as other-motion, thingsthat befall the football, rather than things it does; while the ways in which it meetsthose criteria give us ways of understanding its motion as self-motion, or thingsthat it does, and reasons for attributing to it an “inner source of motion”.

For comparison, let us here recollect the case of the mouse abducted by theowl. A mouse is a natural being, capable of natural motion of a rather robust vari-ety; for mice and other animals are capable of Self-motion, with a big “S”, at leastaccording to Aristotle. However, the movement of the mouse which is in questionhere – that whose trace coincides with that of the movement of the maraudingowl – is hardly natural motion of the mouse. This movement does not reflect anyregular tendency of movement associated with mice per se, not even of mice whenabducted.71 In other words, it is not characteristic mouse movement. Also, it is notthe kind of motion which the mouse can initiate or undertake on its own; nor isthe movement of the kind that the mouse can sustain or define. The movementof the mouse coincides with that of the owl only so long as the owl carries it: theconstant intervention of the owl is required to sustain it. In other words, suchmouse-movement is not kinetically independent, even in a weakened sense. Andin the third place, the movement in question is not directed at any goal associat-ed with the mouse, or with mice, as such. Quite the reverse, it is contrary to thegoals of the mouse, and therefore an example of violent motion. This, one mightsay, is hard-core patiency: patiency red in beak and claw.

But doesn’t this movement depend nevertheless upon what we called the“abductability” of the mouse? That was what appeared to create a problem forDretske.72 Well, perhaps it does so depend. But from the Aristotelian perspectivenow adopted, there are no grounds for thinking of “abductability” as a “source ofmovement” within the mouse: not as a nature, or even a pseudo-nature. In otherwords, “abductability” is not to be thought of as a cause of mouse-movement inthe relevant sense, or as a motive power, even a passive power (a power of “beingmoved”). To be thought of in that way, it would have to be a plausible candidatefor the productive basis of at least some motions meeting some or all of Aristotle’scriteria for natural motion, at least to some degree. But this it evidently fails to do.Certainly, the movement of the mouse when it is in the clutches of the owl doesnot meet any of those criteria. These criteria, in other words, set the terms forwhat can count as an internal source of movement – an internal cause or power– in the sense that is relevant to distinguishing doing from suffering. “Abductabil-ity” cannot count as such a source, and is indeed, not even “internal” with respect

71 Cf. the characteristic movement of a football when kicked.72 The problem was that of being an internal cause of the mouse’s movement, and thereby the source

of a doing (the mouse’s being moved by the activation of this power) according to Dretske’s theo-ry, while the power in question was evidently a passive power, or source of being moved.

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to the mouse’s movement in abductio, as it does not belong to any agent systemattributable to the mouse (and arguably not to any agent system whatsoever).

Ergo, at least with respect to this example, Dretske is not, after all, guilty ofdirecting us to attribute agency to the mouse on the basis of a passive power – apower of suffering motion. But he fails to provide us with the resources to see whyhe is not guilty of this.

Strictly speaking, on our present view, there is no such thing as a power ofmerely suffering movement. The “passive” motive powers which Aristotle attrib-utes to such things as the simple bodies – and in that case he is willing to callthese powers natures – are passive only in comparison to what he thinks of asmore active powers: powers of Self-motion with a big “S” for example. All inter-nal sources of movement – natures, and I would claim also pseudo-natures – aresources of self-movement in some sense, though in the “passive” cases, surelywith a small “S”; and therefore they are in some sense also sources of doing asopposed to suffering (but then different contrast classes are selected). We saw thisin connection with the simple bodies and the football; and it was this that per-turbed Newton in connection with matter. In all these cases we could discern cer-tain kinds of movement that fulfill Aristotle’s three criteria for natural motionmore or less well. To the extent and degree that these criteria are fulfilled, we havea basis for attributing an inner source of motion73 to the things that exhibit themovements in question; and from this perspective they are agents. Our contrastclass would be movements which fulfill the criteria less well, or not at all. To theextent and degree that these criteria are not fulfilled by these same motions, or ifwe have in mind a contrast class which fulfills further criteria for self-motion (ofwhich more shortly), the movements are seen as not deriving from an innermotive source or cause, and therefore appear to be other-motions and thus suf-ferings. If we now ask how Dretske comes out with respect to the football exam-ple, we see that it would not be fair to let him stand accused of attributing agencyon the basis of a passive power. The football’s flight, on our analysis, fulfills Aris-totle’s criteria to some extent, but imperfectly. It is not self-initiated (any morethan the natural motion of the simple bodies), and it is not kinetically indepen-dent to the degree that Aristotle considers minimal for natural motion. In theserespects, the football’s flight cannot be attributed to any inner source – anynature, pseudo-nature or power (even a passive power) – and so regarded its fly-ing off is something that happens to the football rather than something the foot-ball does.74 In other respects, the flight of the football can be attributed to aninner source, or so we argued: the football sustains, and in a way defines, its ownflight, in the wake of a kick. But the inner source for its flight so regarded is nota source of suffering motion but of producing it, and we regard the flight as a doing(the contrast class being movements which fulfill Aristotle’s criteria less perfectlyor not at all). We can, it is true, regard even this motion as suffering, rather thandoing, relative to the contrast class of more fully natural motions, or Self-motions

73 Again, a nature or pseudo-nature.74 Except if our contrast class is violent motion, that is, if we take “suffering” to consist in undergo-

ing violent motion. In this weak sense, the football’s motion, which is non-violent, would not besuffered, and would count as a “doing” by default. But this is not a very rich notion of doing; isit any real notion of doing?

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(big “S”). But what we are then remarking is that the motion does not derive froma nature (even if it derives from a pseudo-nature), and to the extent that we fix uponthat contrast, we adopt the view that there is no relevant “inner source” (i.e. nonature) that accounts for its suffering. In none of these cases is suffered movementtraced to an internal cause, and they therefore present no real problem for Dretske,although he himself nowhere makes it clear why such cases are not a problem forhim.

8.

It is now time to say something about Self-motion (with a big “S”). Self-motion inthis sense is natural motion; that is to say, it meets the criteria for natural motion;but it also meets certain criteria in addition to the basic criteria for naturalmotion, in Aristotle’s view. What he has in mind can be divined to some extentfrom the passage in Physics VIII, 4 which we looked at earlier, in which we foundhim arguing that the simple bodies are not to be considered Self-movers. Therehe says, as we recall, that the natural motion of the simple bodies is not “derivedfrom themselves”, for such self-derived motion is “peculiar to living things”:things which can “stop themselves” and whose natural motion is not simply “ofone kind”.75 These considerations evidently pertain to what we might call “self-control”.76 When a bit of earth is raised up and then released, what it then does“of itself”, namely moving toward the center, it does willy-nilly. It can only fail tofall if some other agency prevents it from doing so. Moreover, when it falls, it fallsalways in the same way; there is no variability of motion attributable to it or to itsnature.

What Aristotle is claiming seems to be that certain kinds of variability in themotion of a thing relative to a particular set of circumstances can support theattribution of “self-derived” motion to a thing – Self-motion – and that such vari-ability is generally exhibited only by living things, and not, for example, by thesimple bodies. If we place food in front of a cat, it may approach the food and eatit. Or it may not. For it may be asleep, or distracted, or satiated – or it may havean eccentric distaste for goose liver. And even when it approaches and eats thefood, the topology of its behavior differs considerably from instance to instance.That a being may hesitate in responding to present contingencies, and mayrespond to similar contingencies in a variety of ways, may be looked at asstrengthened criteria of kinetic independence – something more than the merefact of not being pushed, pulled, carried or twirled.

Although Aristotle does not say so in the passage in question, the naturalmovements of living things are also goal-directed in a stronger sense than thoseof the simple bodies.77 The natural movements of living things are, at least typi-cally, directed at goals which are good for the organism or, in some higher organ-isms, which the organism itself thinks of as good for it. Thus, plants direct their

75 Physics VIII, 4: 255a5-15. Aristotle also says there that the things which exhibit “self-derived”motion cannot be internally “continuous”, which is a comment of a different order.

76 Recalling St. Thomas’ earlier-quoted remark about human actions being those of which “man ismaster”.

77 There are other passages, and not merely in the Physics, where precisely this is suggested.

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roots toward water, and people apply for jobs; whereas nothing comparable maybe said about the goals toward which the movements of the simple bodies aredirected.

I repeat the idea that these strengthened forms of kinetic independence andgoal-directedness are thought of by Aristotle as reasons for attributing a moreactive sort of nature to a thing than can be attributed to the simple bodies – anature which accounts for the kind of motion which he describes as “self-derived”– on the grounds that the beings that exhibit such motion evidently have morecontrol over what they do in a given situation than things like clumps of earth,not to mention footballs. Just as we moved away from the criteria for naturalmotion when we spoke of pseudo-natural motion, so we move away from themhere, but by strengthening them instead of weakening them as was done for ourfootball.

It is clear that Self-motion admits of degrees, and perhaps of varieties as well.Plants and other organisms whose behavior is “tropistic” are less fully (big-”S”)Self-movers than those which do not. Their response latency to certain stimuli isless and their response repertoire limited.78 This lack of response variability givesus, indeed, a reason to wonder whether certain tropistic behaviors are not, afterall, effected by external agents; and sometimes they prove to be such (i.e. kineticindependence is found to fail). On the other hand, a proper tropism arguablyexemplifies self-motion in a stronger sense than the motion of the simple bodies,since it is normally tied to the good of the organism that exhibits it, even if it isat a fair remove from intentional action.

There is no room to pursue this topic further here; but we have gone farenough to understand what contrast is being drawn – what is and is not beingdenied – when Aristotle describes the natures of the simple bodies as sources,“not of moving something or of causing motion, but of suffering it.”

9.

Where does this leave us? It appears to me that there is considerable value inDretske’s project – which was also Aristotle’s – of investigating the general differ-ence between doing and suffering, rather than restricting attention from the out-set, like most philosophers of action, to doings of one specific sort: intentionalactions. I have nevertheless been skeptical of the idea that there is a single differ-ence, such as that suggested by Dretske, between doings and sufferings. I havemaintained that “doing” and “suffering” are contrast terms which can attach to avariety of contrast-classes.79 What counts as “suffering” is correlative, over a cer-tain domain of movements, to what counts as “doing”. This variable relativity maymake the distinction between agency and patiency appear pretty useless; but Idon’t think that it is. I think, as I have indicated in the foregoing, that there is a

78 We think of much of what living beings do as responding to stimuli. Aristotle takes some painsto show why an organism responding to a stimulus is nevertheless “kinetically” independent inimportant ways.

79 One can say, though, that the contrastive function of this pair of terms, and in that sense theirmeaning, remains one and the same, even when the contrast classes to which they attach are dif-ferent.

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“nuclear” sense of doing which is pretty well captured by Aristotle’s notion of nat-ural motion, and that doing in other interesting senses is understood by referenceto doing in this nuclear sense.

Natural motion is motion whose explanation is to be sought in a “nature” or“agent system”. Notoriously, explanations in terms of “natures” can amount to lit-tle more than empty hand-waving. But I don’t think that any explanation of thiskind will be entirely empty if a roughly Aristotelian procedure is followed; foraccording to this procedure, natural motion – and natures – are to be attributedto things only if certain criteria are fulfilled, namely kinetic independence, goal-directedness, and being characteristic of the being which exhibits the motion.These, taken together, provide us with strong reasons for thinking that theground or source (or at least an important ground or source) of these motions isnot to be found in other agents but rather that there is something about the thingsthemselves that accounts for the motions in question: that “something” is calleda “nature”.

While pointing to a nature by way of explanation is therefore, I maintain, farfrom empty, by itself it always has the status of a promissory note. Except in cer-tain cases,80 we won’t really have arrived at much of an explanation, but rather ata conclusion as to where explanatory elements are, and are not, to be looked for.It is at this point that I find it useful to switch to talk about “agent systems”.81 Forthe next move, in beginning to pay off the promissory note, will be to find anddescribe the components and structural features – mechanical, psychological,semantic or whatever, as the case may be – that allow the thing in question toexhibit natural motion.82 Typically, the “agent system” thus described will medi-ate bi-directionally between the natural thing and its environment in particularways.

A critic may be skeptical about the cogence or utility of marking off a catego-ry of natural motions based on criteria of the kind which I have teased out of Aris-totle. Certainly the criteria themselves require further unpacking and, indeed,reformulation. Aristotle’s particular idea about kinetic independence, although itmay appeal to common sense, is obviously insufficient in a Newtonian or Ein-steinian world, which is moreover a world of developed science. There are vari-ous sorts of goal-directedness, and it is not clear whether there is any particular sortwhich is necessary for the attribution of natural motion. If there is one, it is farfrom clear how this is to be described. There are also considerable difficulties sur-rounding the idea of characteristic motions; but this is evidently a key feature ofthe Aristotelian approach.

Those with broadly Aristotelian sympathies will think that there are chal-lenges here which are well worth taking on, while others may think that devotion

80 The exceptions will be when we are talking about the natural motion of things which are, or aretaken to be, ontologically primitive. About them, there may be not much more to say than thatthey behave in certain ways, and that this behavior is not to be explained as effected by otheragents. But such cases are unusual; for most things whose actions interest us are not primitive.

81 Useful in the sense of helpfully suggestive; the switch in terminology cannot, of course, answerany substantive questions in itself.

82 Davidson’s work on the philosophy of psychology suggests important limitations upon the extent towhich the note can be paid off for human action; but those suggestions cannot be followed up here.

Mikael M. Karlsson

to the project of trying to formulate such criteria is otiose.Even if we had criteria for an illuminating notion of natural motion, there

would still have to be criteria for “doings” of other sorts. These criteria might beeither weaker or stronger than the criteria for natural motion. Weaker criteriawould apply, for instance, to the pseudo-natural motion discussed earlier, andstronger criteria to Aristotle’s (big-”S”) Self-motion: for instance the kind of kinet-ic independence appropriate for talking about the natural motion of electronswould need to be supplemented if we wanted to account for the agency of cats.But if Aristotle’s idea is right, these other sorts of doings would be defined by ref-erence to the criteria for natural motion, strengthening or weakening one or moreof them.

I see nothing in such a program that is fundamentally antagonistic to theviews about agency and patiency that have been offered, or might be offered, byphilosophers who, like Aristotle, are committed to naturalism, ontologicalmonism, and explanatory anti-reductionism. Dretske is one such, and Davidsonis another. I have suggested, indeed, that a contemporary philosopher of thatstripe might have more to learn from Aristotle than might have been suspected.

Mikael M. Karlsson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iceland. He works in ethics, philoso-phy of law, moral psychology, action theory, ancient philosophy, metaphysics and the philosophy of sci-ence. His recent publications include “Roots of Legal Normativity”, Analisi e diritto 2000, P. Comanduc-ci and R. Guastini (eds.), 97-112; “Rational Ends: Humean and Non-Humean Considerations”, Sats 1:2(2000), 15-47; and “Cognition, Desire and Motivation: ‘Humean’ and ‘Non-Humean’ Models”, Sats 2:2(2001), 30-58. E-mail: mike@hi.is.

References

Davidson, D. ([1963] 1980a), “Actions, Reasons and Causes”, in Essays on Actions and Events, Oxford:Clarendon Press.

Davidson, D. ([1971] 1980b), “Agency”, in Essays on Actions and Events, Oxford: Clarendon Press.Davidson, D. ([1973] 1980c), “Freedom to Act”, in Essays on Actions and Events, Oxford: Clarendon

Press.Davidson, D. ([1978] 1980d), “Intending”, in Essays on Actions and Events, Oxford: Clarendon Press.Dretske, F. (1988), Explaining Behavior: Reasons in a World of Causes, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Jennings, H. S. ([1906] 1962) Behavior of the Lower Organisms, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana Uni-

versity PressRoss, W. D. (1936) Aristotle’s Physics, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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