On the importance of a human-scale breadth of view: Reading Tallis’ freedom
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Jan Halák
Abstract
This paper is my commentary on Raymond Tallis’ book Freedom: An Impossible Reality (2021). Tallis argues that the laws described by science are dependent on human agency which extracts them from nature. Consequently, human agency cannot be explained as an effect of natural laws. I agree with Tallis’ main argument and I appreciate that he helps us understand the systematic importance of a human-scale breadth of view regarding any theoretical investigation. In the main part of the paper, I critically comment on Tallis’ interpretation of several more loosely associated topics from a phenomenological perspective. Firstly, I reconsider Tallis’ account of intentionality as a factor that opens a distance between the cognizer and the world. Whereas Tallis emphasizes that agency requisitions aspects of the world to achieve its goals, I point out that agency does not determine the meaning of things unidirectionally and independently of all context. A self-controlled agency is provisionally reached through a process of ‘deindexicalization’ of our passive intentional capacities, that is, by creating and maintaining new, different worldly contexts. Subsequently, I analyze Tallis’ description of our intentional relation to spatiotemporally distant possibilities. In my view, Tallis underestimates the extent to which our intentional relation to possibilities is pre-reflexive and pre-predicative and hence independent of propositional attitudes. Finally, I consider Tallis’ interpretation of nature and show that it is deeply influenced by the sciences of nature. In contrast, I argue that agency can be properly described only if we understand it as an intervention in a lifeworld already imbued with sense, not merely a physical or material nature.
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© 2022 Institute for Research in Social Communication, Slovak Academy of Sciences
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction a book symposium on Raymond Tallis’s Freedom: An impossible reality
- Disarming causation in the service of agency: Tallis on Hume
- Causation without the causal theory of action
- Free will: Dr Johnson was right
- Jail break: Tallis and the prison of nature
- Free will: An impossible reality or an incoherent concept?
- Libertarianism in disguise
- Freedom: An enactive possibility
- On the importance of a human-scale breadth of view: Reading Tallis’ freedom
- The seemingly ordinary complexity of daily life
- The ontology of freedom
- Freedom. An impossible reality
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction a book symposium on Raymond Tallis’s Freedom: An impossible reality
- Disarming causation in the service of agency: Tallis on Hume
- Causation without the causal theory of action
- Free will: Dr Johnson was right
- Jail break: Tallis and the prison of nature
- Free will: An impossible reality or an incoherent concept?
- Libertarianism in disguise
- Freedom: An enactive possibility
- On the importance of a human-scale breadth of view: Reading Tallis’ freedom
- The seemingly ordinary complexity of daily life
- The ontology of freedom
- Freedom. An impossible reality
