ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author tries to repair the Faustian split between acts and words, especially in the moral domain where he thinks words like “good” and “bad” or “right” and “wrong” are best understood as actions, not descriptions, and as choices, not announcements. He discusses the standpoint of the agent, the conceptual irreducibility of action, the constitutive role of the resistant other, and the taxonomy of action into transitive performances, intransitive activities, and human states. As our language shows, to adopt the standpoint of the agent in philosophy is not to renounce reflective thinking in favor of decisive action, but to engage in action vicariously, at a slower pace and with more careful self-reflection than is possible in real action. Transitive and intransitive actions resemble the Kantian forms of space and time, in that when divided they yield not simple parts but other actions, just as space divides into spaces and time into times.
