The Act Structure - Knowing, Imagining, Willing

It appears most crisply in Proposition XIV of Dooyeweerd's propositions for a philosophical anthropology. Glenn Friessen's website gives us: "The act-life of man reveals itself in three fundamental directions: knowing, imagining, and willing."

The act structure is the triad of inner human mental acts: knowing, imagining and willing. As such, this is very similar to the traditional triad delineated by Huitt's as cognition, affect and conation [thanks to Michael Morbey]. To Dooyeweerd, the common thread through the three is intentionality, and he never deals with knowing or imagination apart from intentionality.

The Proposition XIV has been translated from the Dutch by Bruce C Wearne as follows [to whom many thanks] - I have emphasised certain key phrases:

"By the 'acts' the Philosophy of the Law Idea understands all activities (verrichtingen) which come forth out of the soul (or spirit) but which function within the enkaptically structured whole of the human body. By these activities, under the leadership of normative points of view, man directs (richten op) himself intentionally (bedoelend) to states of affairs in reality or his world of imagination. By relating these (now) intentional states of affairs to his 'I'ness he makes them internally his own. The act-life of man manifests itself in three fundamental ways, n.l. knowing, imagining, and willing. They must not be isolated however as three separate faculties, because they are completely intertwined. In the intentional character of the 'acts' lies their 'innerness' (innerlijkheid). It is the performance (activity) which actualizes (realizes) the intention of the act. By this performance the knowing act, imagining act, and the act of volition are intertwined in the motivated process of decision making, which decision is then translated into deed." [emphasis mine]

So the notion of act structure seems to be an attempt to account for the multi-aspectual activities that are 'inside' the human mind and which we experiences as acts that actualize intention, such as knowing, imagining and willing. Certainly, whereas believing is an act qualified by the pistic aspect, and loving by the ethical, knowing does not seem to be qualified by any aspect, but extends across all aspects.

The reference to enkapstically structured whole might be an attempt to forge an unbreakable link between these and the human body, so as to prevent any notion of a divide between body and soul as had grown out of the Greek Form-Matter motive. This may be found in Dooyeweerd's 'Doctrine of Man', where he says that there are four individuality structures enkaptically interwoven in the human body, as follows:

• the material structures qualified by the physical aspect
• the living structures qualified by the biotic aspect
• the structures of feeling, qualified by the sensitive aspect
• the act structure "(i.e. the typical structure of human acts)".

This feels odd to me: we step nicely along the aspects and then suddenly come up with a different notion. It seems that this jump is necessary in order to maintain the dogma that while animals are qualified by the sensitive aspect, human beings are not qualified by any aspect.

See the Thinknet discussion from which some of this material is informed.

Index of Dooyeweerd's Entries about Act Structure

"acts are not aspects; Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl conceive of an 'Erlebnis' as an intentional act of human consciousness; many psychologists consider feeling to be the undifferentiated origin of the other classes of 'Erlebnisse'; but an Erlebnis is not a 'sensation'; then feeling can be no act, but is the general term for the affective aspect of human experience" II:112

"every real act functions in the intgral modal horizon of human experience embracing all the modal aspects" II:112

"an inner act of experience as a concrete Erlebnis cannot be restricted to its feeling aspect" II:113

"animal psychology; the volitional, the intellectual, the fantasy directions of human act-life" II:114, 115

"Affects" II:116

"in man [act structure] qualifies his temporal existence" III:88

"phantasy" III:15.

COMMENT

But do you know from where Dooyeweerd got this triple: knowing, imagining, and willing?
Why these three?
Why *only* these three?
Why are these three philosophically (transcendentally) necessary?
Or are they derived only empirically?

There was a useful discussion, from which I have compiled the information above. But the discussion did little to convince me that there are only three, or that the notion of act structure is necessary in Dooyeweerd's approach. For example, I received the following replies to "Why these three?!, expressing a doubt similar to my own:

"These appear to be traditional terms from /the theory of mind/. How does Dooyeweerd avoid a "faculty psychology" or does he? mmm"

and from HDN

"Anyone knowledgeable about Hannah Arendt? Didn't she use those three categories?"

I found myself still dissatisfied with the notion of act structure. Here are some facets of my dissatisfaction:

• I see no philosophical need for it (unlike his notions of aspects, things and time, for which I do see a philosophical need if one begins from the Creation-Fall-Redemption ground-motive.)
• I find it too conveniently like the thinking of the time, and not radical enough (unlike his notions of aspects, time, entities).
• It also seems to rob the notion of multi-aspectual human functioning of its elegance and harmony, by introducing a completely different notion when you get to one aspect, viz. beyond the sensitive/psychic. That is not an indication that it is false, but it does mean I don't like it.

• Is knowing really an act, in the way imagining and willing are? Learning (coming-to-know) might be, but knowing seems to me a state rather than an act. Maybe this is what Dooyeweerd meant by 'knowing'. Learning does seem to be a multi-aspectual non-qualified act, and it has always troubled me as such.
• Is not willing an act qualified by the formative aspect, rather than being a non-qualified multi-aspectual act? I have always taken it to be so, and indeed Dooyeweerd somewhere does link will with the formative aspect.
• I find other mental activity that seems on a par with knowing, willing, imagining that are more than these, e.g. accepting or rejecting, appreciating, learning (if not what Dooyeweerd meant by knowing), remembering, blocking-out, judging, loving, and the like. Now, I know it is probably possible to put many of these into aspectual categories, but if so, why not put will into the formative category?
• Why three? Why these three (knowing, willing, imagining)? Why not add 'functioning'? I see no fundamental philosophical answer to why there are three parts to the act structure, and not thirteen or thirty-three. (In fact, Dooyeweerd might hint that there might not be just three: on p.115 of [NC, II], "as for instance human acts of thought and remembering, volitional acts, acts of fantasy, and so on." [italics mine]. Note that here be also includes memory, which is likewise multi-aspectual.

• I find it is possible to account for the three parts of the act structure by other means. It is easier to do so now that we are no longer motivated by the need to emphasise that thinking etc. are more than rational. See alternatives below.

• I wonder to what extent this piece of Dooyeweerd's thought might have been given shape by his desire to distance himself from rationalism, from the neutrality of reason, and from the prevailing presupposition of the time that thought and knowing were synonymous with their rational forms.
• It also seems to be a conceptual artifact of a dogma that all things must be qualified by a single aspect, and that the human being is not qualified by any aspect, a way to get round certain problems that arise from that dogma.

• If we look at where Dooyeweerd gives his main exposition of the act structure in [NC, II:112-116] we find that the main purpose of this whole section seems not to be a definitive attempt to explain the act structure, so much as an attempt to prevent psychology over-reaching itself and absolutizing the sensitive aspect. If this is so, then it is dangerous indeed to put too much weight on the notion of act structure that emerges there.

An Alternative

To put forward an alternative, I need to be able to account for the things that Dooyeweerd did via his act structure.

• To ensure a link between bodily and conceptual human activity, and avoid the mind-body split: This is already ensured if we take all human activity to be multi-aspectual and adopt the shalom principle, that every aspect is equally important. Giving due regard to the relatedness of all the aspects also helps.

• To avoid absolutization of the psychic aspect, which occurs when psychologists and others try to attribute all human mental activity to this: This is already ensured by the fact that there are many post-psychic aspects.

• But to recognise there is something 'mental' about knowing, willing, imagining (etc.): This is ensured if these are all activities qualified by post-psychic aspects, since these aspects all exhibit foundational dependency on it.

• To differentiate knowing, willing, imagining: This may be done on the basis of aspectual qualification or aspectual profile. Knowing seems to me a generic multi-aspectual thing like functioning and being; see the page on multi-aspectual knowing. But willing and imagining seem to be able to be qualified by certain aspects, even though we may will or imaging things in any aspect. Willing is a mental act in which the formative aspect is specially important. Imagining seems to be of two kinds, which, to me at least, are not the same: (1) simple imagination as in "Imagine a nice sunny day in a garden" (2) creative imagination that is important in genius and innovation. If we ask ourselves what we are doing in each, I find that the first is similar to creating a sentence or utterance, i.e. forming a symbol that signifies something, but this time in my mind rather than external to myself. In the second, I find myself bringing together all my (tacit) knowledge into harmony of counterpoint to create something new. This suggests to me lingual and aesthetic aspects.

• Aspectual mental acts. In fact, perhaps we can find a mental act led by each aspect, as follows: thinking about words (lingual), about friends (social), about resources (economic), about minerals (physical), and so on. However, maybe that is not what Dooyeweerd meant.

• Multi-aspectual nature of human being. This is already foundational to Dooyeweerd, and needs no further explanation.

References

Acknowledgements

This page, "http://dooy.info/act.structure.html", is part of The Dooyeweerd Pages, which explain, explore and discuss Dooyeweerd's interesting philosophy. Questions or comments are very welcome.

Compiled by Andrew Basden. You may use this material subject to conditions.

Written on the Amiga with Protext, in the style of classic HTML.

Created: 16 March 2009. Last updated: 18 January 2025 canon, bgc; completed incomplete stuff; new .end,.nav .