What is the world doing? This is my burning question, a question which carries a host of assumptions, there first being that it is even intelligible to say that the world is doing anything at all.
First, is the world even the sort of thing which could be doing anything? The world is a scattered thing if it is a thing at all. But I think this shouldn't worry us - the most important doings are those which bring about the unity of the actor through the doing itself. Thus, action, doing, need not suppose the prior unity of the actor, but may be exactly what brings this unity about. Consider the artist, who discovers herself through the song she writes - her action is precisely a self-creation, which cannot presuppose her as complete to begin with. Were she already complete, the song would be a mere "going through the motions" of being herself - in a sense, nothing would be created.
I might even argue that a certain scatteredness is actually an ultimate condition of doing - for if all is gathered, there is nothing to be done, or at least nothing which isn't essentially destructive. Thus the lack of unity of the 'world-qua-agent' should not suggest to us an impossibility of doing, but rather indicate that a condition of doing may be met.
But still, we ought to go more fundamental and ask what it even is to do something. What is doing? There is a curious ambiguity here, which gathers the intentional together with the accidental. For example, we might say that I 'did' my laundry, or that in tumbling down the mountain, a rock 'did' something.
Perhaps one prefers to be more precise and say that there are things done, and things that merely happen. But what warrants this divide? Whence our clarity about the passivity of the majority of natural doings, and the agency only of, at most, some animal doings?
Well, the rock, one might say, displays no intention in its doings - it's activity does not ever seem to emerge from within itself, it only does anything when other things do things to it. It doesn't resist its own destruction, indeed nothing at all, it seems, can be better or worse for it, there is nothing that it wants.
Now here is a new idea, which certainly is connected to doing: wanting. For doing to be active, we think, we must have wanting. How do we know about wanting? Most immediately we know it in ourselves. Through language, we know about it in other people. And through our observation of the behaviour of animals, we impute wanting into them as well.
But it is curious: for we only know our own wanting immediately - all elsewhere we see wanting, if at all, IN doing. What sort of doing suggests wanting? Goal-directed doings, doings which flexibly tend towards or can be best explained by the existence of a goal. The rock, we say, displays no goals in its doing, and thus we can impute no wanting into it.
But what if the issue is that the rock has only very limited capacity, because of the nature of its arrangement, to pursue its goal(s)? There is an interesting point here, namely in the connection between the sort of goals we can impute to a thing, and the sort of things its body can do. An animal can search for food, or hunt, because it can eat and move about, and track objects in its environment. We can say an animal wants food, because we can see, in its behaviour, it's trying to get food. But if an animal's body we're not such that it could do these things, it would be impossible to see in its behaviour any wanting of these sorts. A rock, in virtue of its arrangement can only tumble, break apart, stand at rest - at most it could want to do these things.
So what makes us say that it merely does these things passively, without ever caring to do them? It seems that it is because the impetus to do them, as already mentioned, never comes from within itself, but is always prompted by something outside of itself. But can this really be right? It is true, that the rock doesn't display any interesting breaking in half while it is sitting still on top of the hill - if it has an interest in this, it only appears when it is struck by a hammer, and even here it may resist, preferring instead to chip of bits and to spark.
But it seems wrong to say of the rock that everything it does is only the result of what happens to it. It is true that one can produce any effect reliably by imposing an external intervention, but this does not entail that the rock is not responding, within the range of its capacity, to the situations it finds itself in. What we see, really, is that it is uncreative, that its responses can be mostly predicted, and its actions, if we can call them actions, are very brief and do not involve a process of assembling, gathering and eventually culmination which creative actions involve.
Still, I think we can find an element of creativity even here, or at least creativity is left open, we cannot remove it. That is, we cannot entirely predict how the rock will behave in any situation - what it does, is irreducible, though certain it is possible to find patterns which for practical purposes may tell us everything we care about. But if we consider the quantum level, we find that creativity may be essential, inexhaustible, in the sense that what things do turns out to be fundamentally unpredictable - it is left to the things themselves.
Let's return to the divide in doing, between things done and things that merely happen. This is an essential cosmological division which is almost universally assumed within the sciences. This division results in the so called mind body problem, the problem of how mindless material happenings, which are taken to be the ground level reality of things, somehow gives rise to intentionality, agency, active doing, mind. No one has a good proposal - the best anyone has done is point to the complexity of the brain and promise it can somehow do the job. I have been putting pressure on this divide, between mindless happening and intentional doing, and suggesting that perhaps there is a continuity all along - that on the one hand, intentional action in its most interesting form does not require mind in any full sense (which makes us seem more like rocks); and on the other hand, that there is an ineradicable creativity which can be found in the doing of so-called inanimate things (which makes rocks seem more like us).
Indeed, I think we should drop the distinction between active doing and passive happening, in virtue of the irreducible creativity found in happening, and at the same time the open-ended incompleteness of intentional doing. These are on a continuum. The result is a unified theory of doing, or of action, which can be applied to creatures but also to plants, to rocks, perhaps even to atoms - in short, to any THING.
This then is my basic suggestion: there is no action (no doing, nor happening) where there is no impulse to act. This impulse, in all things, is what drives their doing. As the structure of a thing becomes more complex, it becomes capable of coordinating the active impulses of its constituent parts in increasingly flexible and creative ways. A brain massively expands the way the creative impetus in a thing can explicate itself, as does an increasingly versatile body. This is particularly the case where the body lacks strict prior organization or mechanization, which allows it to rearrange itself and recoordinate itself in unfortold ways. This is possible only presupposing an initial disunity within the body, one akin to that of nature, which provides a space of play, for the reassembly of the body in each new context.
With all this in mind, I think it is now possible to say, in a cursory way, what I think the world is doing. It is performing a kind of meta-exploration on doing itself. Spinoza wrote "we still do not know what the body can do" - in some sense, I think the world's activity is centred around this question. It is an inquiry into what it can do - an inquiry which involves producing new forms, always posing the question (in a felt, non-mentalistic way) what shall I do; what can I do?
Having found its way, through a long course of evolution, to thinking, properly speaking as we humans do, the world now asks this question explicitly, through our very minds. Thinking, too, is something the world can do.
This doing may be for its own sake - but it also seems to be for the sake of expanding the capacity to do. But one thing which is obviously controversial but feels clear to me is that nothing would happen if nothing were doing anything. The stipulation that some things simply happen, groundlessly, feels inherently unstable. Doing on the other hand, is what makes thing happen. Why should we therefore deprive happenings of a doing within them? While much here is left unsaid, this seems to me to be the way forward: to develop a theory of doing, which unifies happenings and doings under one umbrella, and which attempts to understand mind on the continuum of the impulse, found all along, within doing.
