Raymond Tallis – The Modern Frame

Human Action

Human action takes place within the space of the human world. But while the human world is the stage upon which human actions are performed, it also provides the context which renders our actions intelligible to others as well as ourselves. There is no such thing as an abstracted human action, existing apart and independently from its context–such a thing is unintelligible. Human actions, therefore, must possess the property of intelligibility.¹ In order to avoid potential misunderstandings, it is important to remember that I am talking about those actions which are distinctively and characteristically human. Breathing could be construed as an action: the taking in of oxygen and expulsion of carbon dioxide by the lungs. But breathing is not a human action because it does not properly take place within the human world.² Speech, however, is an example of human action, since to speak a language is to communicate within a given context of a shared social understanding. We must begin with considerations of human action if we wish to sufficiently understand not only the notions of virtue and practical rationality (ethics), and the narrative character of human life, but also to place ourselves in a position to evaluate competing views in ethics, personal identity, and others.

The Individual and The Human World

Up to this point, I have used the word “world” without disclosing what is meant by it.¹ Yet this should have gone more or less unnoticed, since it is part of the nature of our existence to be embedded within our world, and thus its context provides us with many underlying assumptions which we take for granted. The world I am speaking of is what I will call the human world, which makes up “a world within the world”, so to speak. It is a world which–though metaphysically inseparable from the physical and especially biological aspects of our existence–nonetheless transcends them. An understanding of the depth and complexity of this will be necessary if we are to make certain concepts and observations sufficiently intelligible, and its articulation will help us better understand our situation, placing us in a better position to evaluate the phenomena we are considering. In this initial exposition, I am drawing heavily upon the work of Hannah Arendt and Raymond Tallis.²

A Sketch of The Workaday World

We live in an age of work for work’s sake, of production, acquisition, and consumption, of income and expenses, GDP and unemployment percentages. Production, acquisition, and consumption have come to be the definitive organizing principles of our lives, conceived–or rather, lived out–as ends in themselves.¹ This provides modern man with what the Greek’s called telos–an end or purpose–and thus structures our lives in a specific way. The tasks of income, wealth, and its management become our primary concerns, and within this Economic sphere, efficiency likewise becomes an end in itself. This situation is unprecedented in history.²