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In his summary of "identity description," which he ultimately applies to Jesus, Hans Frei speaks of "the irreversible passage or movement from . . . intention to action. The enactment of intention always differs from the intention to enact; and each person has inside knowledge of how he passes from one state of affairs to the other directly and without a break. Our identity is constituted by the enactment of central and, in that sense, characterizing intentions, but it is not constituted by the intention alone. . . .
"For in that case the intention or decision to act would account for everything, and actual enactment for nothing. On the other hand, enactment . . . also does not constitute a human identity, just because it does not pertain to a centred self, but only to a piece of overt behaviour."
Frei does go on to find a role for "external events" in the formation of identity, but my question is with his initial claim about the "irreversible" passage from intention to action. That seems overly simplistic. Don't our actions open up the possibility of new intentions, things we could not even have imagined intending until we had broken through (by our actions) to new circumstances? Doesn't it make as much sense to say, "I formed an intention to do this because I had already done that" as it does to say, "I did this because I intended it"?
And it seems that without recognizing this reciprocity, we haven't really arrived at a temporal account of action or identity, since actions follow from intentions and never help form new intentions.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, August 20, 2007 at 07:26 PM
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