The problem of agency in relation to action is perhaps a dominant ethical issue but it is a secondary concern to the primary concern of action. There are events and then there is an awareness of action - our capacity to determine actions out of events is one of our defining human capacities. Water, falling drop by drop on to a hard surface, might amount to a series of events. determining the historical possibility of abrasion illustrates our understanding and need to understand action. We might rail that the world, in its actions, takes no care for our actions (building a house near the sea) and in our railing we ascribe motivations if not agency to the actions of the world. This might be anamistic but it is also defining of our agony (awareness of the struggle we are always, everywhere, implicated in by just being).
Finding/ascribing patterns of action from one dimension to another is part of our larger struggle to make sense of sensible beings in a world of insensiibles.
cheers
keith russell
Oz Newcastle
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