The Timespace of Human Activity On Performance, Society, and History As Indeterminate Teleological Events

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BOOK TITLE: The Timespace of Human Activity: On Performance, Society, and History as Indeterminate
Teleological Events
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Teleological Events
CHAPTER TITLE: 3 - The Dominion of Teleology
BOOK AUTHOR: Schatzki, Theodore
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The Dominion of Teleology
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T HE ACCOUNT OF ACTIVITY TIMESPACE DEVELOPED in the previous two chapters

presumes that human activity is teleological—directed toward ways of
being for the sake of which people act. I argued, for instance, that the tempo-
ral structure of activity lies in the self-stretching out of a person between that
for the sake of which she acts and that in the face or light of which she does
so. The unity of timespace presupposes, moreover, that teleology underlies
the place-path layouts of the worlds in which people proceed. If it turned out
that human activity is significantly or extensively nonteleological, temporality
would not be a pervasive feature of activity. Spatiality and temporality would
fall apart. My claims about the role of interwoven timespaces in social life
would also enjoy limited scope: interwoven timespaces could no longer be
essential to sociality.
The overall issue of the present chapter, consequently, is whether or not
human activity is fundamentally teleological. Is the activity of a cognitively
functional human being teleological (I thus exclude infants and those with
significant mental disease, but not those with physical disabilities) unless
something overrides or counteracts this? Are there nonteleological forms or
aspects of action and practice? If so, are these forms or aspects sufficiently
numerous or common to negate the proposition that activity is basically te-
leological? Some theorists have replied Yes to the final question. The present
chapter replies No. Although human activity intermittently assumes non-
teleological forms and more often, even omnipresently, possesses nonteleo-
Copyright 2010. Lexington Books.
logical aspects, it remains centrally and pervasively teleological.
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112 Chapter 3
The present chapter examines the bearing of emotions on human activity,

the character of ceremony and ritual, and the “primitive” religious under-
standing of the world as sacred. These are phenomena that diverse think-
ers have believed undercut the thesis that human activity is fundamentally
teleological. These topics are also vast. The below discussion, as a result, does
not aim at complete treatments of them. My objective is much more limited,
namely, to show that emotions, ceremony and ritual, and sacred worlds are
compatible with the teleological nature of human activity. My discussion of
emotions will attempt to delineate this compatibility systematically. My dis-
cussion of ceremony, ritual, and sacred worlds will examine particular aspects
or analyses of them and seek only to make the congruity between them and
teleology plausible. Together, the two discussions should disabuse anyone
who has it of the assumption that these phenomena significantly limit or over-
throw the dominion of teleology.
Before beginning, I should explain that, on my understanding, teleology
is not equivalent to rationality. An action is teleological if and only if it is
performed for the sake of a way of being or state of affairs (for an end). Al-
though the doings of such entities as organizations, systems, and nonhuman
organisms are teleological if they are directed toward an end, my concern in
the following is with human activity alone. An activity is rational, by contrast,
just in case it is a sensible way of proceeding for the way of being in the pursuit
of which it is performed. Not all teleological activities—activities directed at
an end—are rational—sensible ways of proceeding for that end; the existence
of irrational teleological actions is all too familiar from history, fiction, and
personal experience. The converse, however, holds: all rational activities are
teleological. If an activity is not directed toward something, there is nothing
by reference to which its rationality or irrationality can be determined.1 Of
course, items other than activities can be rational or irrational, for instance,
beliefs, ideas, practices, and institutions. Like the doings of nonhumans, these
items are not of present interest. I focus on activity, though some of these
other items, most obviously beliefs, bear on the rationality of activity.
A key difference between teleology and rationality as I understand them
is that rationality is normative whereas teleology is not. Whether someone
acts for the sake of something is a factual issue to be settled by consulting or
scrutinizing her. The status of an activity as rational or irrational similarly
rests on facts, for instance, the person’s end, what she does, the results of
the activity, and what she believes prior to and while acting. But the epithet
“rational” implies that what a person does is a sensible, intelligent, and ap-
propriate thing for anyone in her shoes who pursues the same end, to do. To
label an activity “rational” is to endorse it as a means of achieving a given end
and to recommend it to others should they pursue the same end in the same
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The Dominion of Teleology 113
situation. Nothing like this follows from identifying an activity as teleological.

The status of an activity as teleological implies simply that it was directed at
an end. Of course, an observer might pass normative judgment on the actor’s
end or on the course of action by which she pursues it and thereby endorse
or condemn them. This judgment, however, is based on normative consider-
ations that the observer brings to bear in the judgment. By itself, identifying
an action as teleological implies neither endorsement, condemnation, recom-
mendation, or dissuasion.
1. Outline of a Theory of Human Activity
Discussing the extra-teleological dimensions of human activity and their rela-

tions to teleology requires recourse to an account of activity that is richer than
the one utilized in previous chapters. Elsewhere I have developed the follow-
ing account at length and will only outline it here.2 In addition to facilitating
my analysis of the extrateleological aspects of activity, this outline will also
help prepare the analyses, in chapter 4, of indeterminacy and of activity as
event. I stress that the point of presenting this outline is to facilitate discussion
of teleology, emotion, ceremony/ritual, indeterminacy, and events. The goal
is not to offer a novel account of activity. The account I outline does diverge
from existing accounts on the determination of activity, the flow character of
activity, indeterminacy, emotional sense, and the nature of beliefs and desires.
But I will highlight these differences only when doing so serves the purpose
of the discussion. This purpose will also sometimes be served by emphasizing
parallels or convergences between my account and standard alternatives. I
should also point out that the first two sections of the present chapter pri-
marily engage work in philosophy. This is because, of all the disciplines that
contribute to humanistic social theory, philosophy has probed human activity
in greatest detail. The second half of the chapter primarily draws on work in
anthropology and sociology.
Human life is a flow (see next chapter). In the course of daily life, people
do one thing after another. Consider what I was just doing. I first composed
a paragraph on the computer, listened to music on the radio, and pondered
what to write next, before replying “Come in” to a knock on the door, saying
“Hello” to the colleague who entered my office, and celebrating with her an
increase in the department’s operating budget. These actions can overlap. I
continued pondering what to write next while saying “Come in” and “Hello,”
though I could have left off doing this while speaking and resumed it later.
While all this was going on, moreover, I awaited the noon ringing of the
courtyard bells and tapped my foot on the ground to the rhythm of the music.
114 Chapter 3
Any segment of objective time can encompass a diversity of doings and say-
ings, intentional, unintentional, voluntary, and involuntary.
In the flow of activity, what a person does next is usually the action that
makes sense to him to do given that such and such is the case. After typing,
for example, I listened to music on the radio because doing this is what made
sense to me given that the paragraph I was working on was complete. Simi-
larly, while pondering what to write next, I said “Come in” because saying this
is what made sense to me to do given that a knock came at the door. I call the
phenomenon of its making sense to someone to perform an action “practi-
cal intelligibility.” The notion of practical intelligibility captures the sense
that animates or informs the frequent redirections and restarts that mark
the flow of conduct, including those redirections and restarts that are not
consciously thought about or explicitly grasped. To claim that practical intel-
ligibility governs what people do is to claim that what people do next in the
flow of ongoing conduct is whatever it is that makes sense to them to do. For
philosophers I note that practical intelligibility does not govern what people
do in the manner of efficient causality (one thing bringing about another). It
does so, instead, in the manner of formal causality (cf. Aristotle’s notion of
formal cause). Practical intelligibility determines what it is that a person does
next in the flow of conduct.
Historically, many philosophers have construed actions as interventions in
the world. Like other contemporary thinkers, by contrast, I countenance as
actions such so-called mental actions as listening, thinking, imagining, and
remembering. The flow of activity is broken into a series of overlapping ac-
tions that contains interventions in the world as well as mental proceedings.
It might help clarify my account (for the philosophical reader) if I mention
two reasons for gathering “worldly” and mental actions into one class.3 One
reason is that actions of both types can be voluntarily performed. As Witt-
genstein put it, it makes sense to order someone to do them. A person can
also cease doing them when ordered or she desires this, though the existence
of urges and neurotic compulsion shows that the line between voluntary and
involuntary can be indistinct. A second reason to treat worldly and mental
actions on a par is that an action of either type can be in principle what makes
sense to someone to do at a given moment; that is, it can make sense just as
much to perform a mental action such as working out a sum in one’s head or
imagining a landscape as to perform a worldly one such as working out the
sum on paper or running through the landscape. Regardless, furthermore, of
which sort of action is signified, the determination of practical intelligibility
bears the same basic form: given such and such states of affairs, it makes sense
to perform this action for the sake of such and such way of being (or state of
affairs). In more familiar words (see below): which action is signified as the
one to perform—regardless of whether it is worldly or mental—depends on

believed, perceived, imagined, expected, presumed etc. states of affairs and
desired, wanted, sought after etc. ways of being. For example, pondering
further what to write made sense for the sake of finishing an essay given an
impending deadline and the fruitlessness of my ideas earlier in the day, just
as saying “Hi” made sense for the sake of friendship given my colleague’s
appearance. Finally, a person need not be explicitly aware of practical intel-
ligibility or its determination (that is, of a particular action making sense to
her to perform or its doing so given such and such or for the sake of so and
so). Not entertaining these matters does not preclude being aware of them in
some other sense.4
As discussed in chapter 1, the teleological and temporal characters of activ-
ity lie in its determination. As I am now describing matters, the determination
of activity is its making sense to a person, given this and that state of affairs,
to perform a particular action for the sake of this or that way of being. As I
am now describing matters, accordingly, action is teleological because what
makes sense to people to do rests on ends. Action is temporal, meanwhile, be-
cause what determines practical intelligibility (what makes sense to someone
to do) fills out the temporal future and past. (Chapter 4 will explain that the
coincidence of temporality and the determination of practical intelligibility
arise from the character of activity as event.) In addition, the present—cur-
rent activity—falls out of the past and future by way of its making sense to
perform an action given particular states of affairs and for the sake of particu-
lar ways of being. This conception of the temporal determination of human
activity resembles Alfred Schutz’s idea that action is determined by what he
called “in-order-to” and “because” motives.5 In-order-to motives are the
ends (or purposes) an actor pursues, whereas because motives are states of
affairs that so causally formed the actor in the past that he presently pursues
one end (purpose) rather than another. Because motives are not, as on my
account, states of affairs given which it makes sense to perform a particular
action (the states of affairs to which the person reacts or in the light of which
he proceeds). Schutz gave a temporal gloss to his two types of motive: the
states of affairs that are the contents of in-order-to and because motives lie in
the objective future or past, respectively. Because of this, action and its mo-
tivation—as on my account—span the three dimensions of time. Of course,
Schutz construed the three dimensions involved as modes of objective time,
whereas the three dimensions of the temporality of activity are features of a
time centered in human life. Incidentally, I affirm something like the causality
that Schutz attributes to because motives, namely, past states of affairs picking
out the ends that a person presently pursues. This sort of determination must
be supplemented by the parallel phenomenon of past states of affairs picking
116 Chapter 3
out which state of affairs in response to or in the light of which a person pres-
ently acts. This sort of determination will become prominent in section 2.
Whenever a person does what makes sense to him to do, what he does is
intentional. The above actions that I performed in my office are examples. I
mention this because the concepts of intentional action and voluntary action
are of great significance in contemporary accounts of action (not just in phi-
losophy), the concern with voluntary action dating back at least to Aristotle.
As I understand it, an action is intentional just in case the person performing
it meant to do it. Intentional actions are also ones that people will tell you that
they are doing if you stop and ask them.6 An action is “voluntary,” meanwhile,
just in case the actor bodily controls its performance and can desist if he or
she so desires. The above actions that I performed in my office are, not just
intentional, but also voluntary. Notice that a necessary condition of some-
thing a person does qualifying as a voluntary (or intentional) action is that
she is aware of it. There is much more to say on the topic of intentional and
voluntary actions, but this will suffice for present purposes.
An important feature of human activity is that some actions are performed
by way of the performance of other actions. In particular, a person carries out
at least most of the actions that make sense to him to do by performing bodily
actions. A bodily action is a bodily doing or saying that a person can directly
perform, that is, can perform without having to do something else.7 For in-
stance, a person with the physical ability can directly wave his hand back and
forth, but he cannot get someone’s attention except by way of doing something
else, either a bodily doing such as waving or a bodily saying such as calling out.
In the example with which I began, moreover, I composed the paragraph by
way of performing various bodily actions: typing words, hitting the delete but-
ton, navigating back and forth in the paragraph, and looking at my outline. I
might have also performed mental actions such as trying to keep in mind what
I wanted to write. The bodily actions involved are part of what can be called
my “bodily repertoire.” Generally speaking, the nonmental actions that make
sense to someone to perform are either actions that she can carry out without
further ado by performing actions in her bodily repertoire or bodily actions that
are themselves contained in that repertoire. (The performance of many mental
actions likewise involves the performance of bodily actions.) A familiar type of
situation in which a bodily action is signified is when a person is unable directly
to do something that is normally part of her bodily repertoire and must work
out alternatives; my hand might be in a cast, for instance, requiring me pains-
takingly to type out individual letters with my finger tips. When intentional
actions are carried out by bodily actions, the latter are not intentional actions.
(This does not mean that they are unintentional, simply that they are not inten-
tional.) They are actions, nonetheless, because they are voluntary.
As noted, the actions that make sense to people to perform are often car-
ried out through the performance of bodily actions. I use the term “practical
understanding” to denote a type of know how that is crucial to these perfor-
mances, namely, knowing how, through the performance of bodily actions, to
carry out actions that make sense to perform. Practical understanding must
be distinguished from abilities to carry out bodily actions, which are not prac-
tical understandings but—like abilities to perform mental actions—motor-
perceptual-cognitive skills.8 Notice that practical understanding does not help
determine what makes sense to someone to do. Practical understanding is,
instead, knowing how, through the performance of bodily actions, to carry
out actions that are signified as the ones to perform. This notion of practical
understanding greatly differs from the sort of omnibus practical understand-
ing that, famously according to theorists such as Bourdieu and Giddens (in
the form of habitus and of practical consciousness, respectively), lies behind
all or most human action in its finely tuned sensitivity to immediate settings
and wider contexts and histories.9
Another important feature of human activity is that, as a person acts inten-
tionally, she typically performs actions beyond those that make sense to her
to do and those by which she carries these out. Among the further sorts of ac-
tion she might perform, two are germane at present. The first type comprises
actions whose performance consists in the performance of the intentional
action plus consequences of that action. In Donald Davidson’s memorable
prowler example, for example, a person turns on the lights in his house and
thereby unwittingly notifies a prowler that he is at home.10 Notifying the
prowler of this is something the person does in addition to turning on the
lights. It is not, however, an intentional action: the person does it unwittingly
and is unaware of what he is doing. Whether the action is voluntary is less
clear, since the person controls it and could in principle desist, but is unaware
that he is doing it. The second sort of further action comprises more encom-
passing actions that are made up of, or subserved by, the intentional action
in question. For instance, turning on the lights—along with making tea and
fetching a book—might be part of preparing to read. Alternatively, turning on
the lights might be what chasing away the gloom in the living room consists in
in this situation. An action that encompasses or subsumes intentional actions
in this way can be called a “project.” In carrying out intentional actions that
subserve or are parts of a project, a person ipso facto carries out that project.
He or she also does so intentionally: carrying out the project is a further in-
tentional action. A project, moreover, might itself subserve or help make up a
wider project; preparing to read might be part of the project of getting ready
for tomorrow’s seminar, just as chasing away the gloom might be part of tak-
ing positive steps to shake off a temporary depression. If so, then the person is
118 Chapter 3
not just turning on the lights and either preparing to read or chasing away the
gloom, but also getting ready for tomorrow’s seminar or shaking off a tem-
porary depression (or at least trying to—the possibility of failure complicates
matters in ways that need not concern the present discussion). In short, in
doing what makes sense to him to do, a person performs a variety of actions,
in particular, he performs a series of intentional actions, with actions on a
given level subserving or being part of actions the next level up.
At the zenith of such a series is the pursuit of something, for the sake of
which it makes sense to perform the action that makes sense to the actor to
perform.11 The series tops off at whatever project it is that neither subserves
nor is part of yet a further project. This project—being some way or achiev-
ing some state of affairs—is the person’s end. In performing the action that
makes sense to him to perform, a person pursues an end (assuming he is act-
ing for one) and carries out whatever projects form the series of actions that
stretches from seeking his end to doing what makes sense. In turning on the
lights, for example, the person in Davidson’s example might also be chasing
away the gloom, trying to shake off a temporary depression, and seeking to
lead a healthy life, or getting ready to read, preparing his seminar, and doing
his job as professor. Whenever a person does what makes sense to him to do,
he typically also pursues an end, carries out projects, and performs bodily ac-
tions by which he carries out the signified action.
Practical significance can be described in the other direction: given (e.g.)
that I have been working in the garden, pursuing my job as professor signifies
preparing tomorrow’s seminar; given that I have not yet done the reading,
preparing tomorrow’s seminar signifies getting ready to read; given that the
room in which I read is dark, getting ready to read signifies turning on the
lights—so I reach for the switch and push it upward. Such a series of significa-
tions, which can be called a “chain of significance,” articulates the hierarchical
determination of practical intelligibility. Chains of significance bear a strong
surface resemblance to practical reasoning understood as the thought process
or inferential structure of propositions through which a person settles on
what to do in pursuit of given ends.12 Many contemporary philosophers hold
that practical reasoning is responsible for which intentional actions people
perform. The convergence of these accounts with my own can also be brought
out by redescribing the hierarchy of actions that a person performs when act-
ing intentionally in language familiar both to Heidegger and to contemporary
philosophers of action. To revert to Davidson’s example, the person turns on
the light in order to (um zu) get ready to read, which he does in order to pre-
pare his seminar, which he does for the sake of pursuing his job as professor.
“In order to” is a common way of formulating the concept of purpose: the
person’s purpose in turning on the light is to get ready to read, his purpose in
getting ready to read is to prepare his seminar, and his end in preparing his
seminar is doing his job as professor. What makes sense to someone to do is
determined by ends and purposes.
The word “purpose” is widely used both in common life and in academic
theory to explain human action. The reader might have also noticed that, in
previous chapters, in order to capture the past and future dimensions of activ-
ity, I often employed further words that, like “purpose,” are used commonly
and in theories to explain action. Examples are “desire” and “belief.” I want
now to account for both my use of these words and their common and theo-
retical explanatory employment, by relating them to the hierarchical structure
of the determination of practical intelligibility. Doing this will further posi-
tion my account of action relative to alternatives and also ready the discussion
of emotions in the following section.
It will be useful first to characterize more precisely what sort of account of
action my Heideggarian analysis is. This account uses concepts such as practi-
cal intelligibility, signifying, and for the sake of (Worum-willen) to analyze the
structure of what in chapter 1 I called human “experiential acting.” As I ex-
plained, the expression “experiential acting” indicates two things: that people
experience (live through) how they proceed in the world and that a person’s
experiences occur within the ken of his or her activity. To say that practical
intelligibility etc. structure experiential acting is to say that they structure
human proceeding (i.e., being-) in the world, which people experience as they
act. My account, however, neither presents activity as its performers experi-
ence it nor articulates the experience of that activity. Rather, it describes the
structure of activity itself, which is accessible through the experience that is a
feature of that activity.13 Incidentally, experiential acting is not separable from
the objects and events—the world—with which a person deals in acting: what
practical intelligibility and its ilk structure is acting with, at, and amid (bei)
entities and events within the world.
The structure of experiential acting is not the business or concern of people
other than scholars in their professional lives. In fact, an account of it is likely
to interest only those scholars who are attuned to phenomenological research.
Outside philosophy and psychology, terms different from those with which any
such account works are used to deal with human activity, terms such as “want,”
“desire,” “believe,” “expect,” “hope,” “fear,” “joy,” and “disgust,” not to men-
tion the immense stock of words for actions. For convenience, I will call the first
set of words “terms for mental conditions.” The use of such terms is complex,
and speakers can do a large variety of things in employing them.14 One thing
that people do with them is of particular relevance to the present discussion,
namely, to explain human action. I claim that terms such as “desire” and “be-
lief” are used to explain action because through their use the determination of
120 Chapter 3
practical intelligibility is put into words. In saying that people believe or desire
such and such, English speakers (1) formulate ways of being and states of affairs
(the such and suchs) that are responsible for actions making sense to people to
perform and (2) indicate the bearing of these ways and states on the determina-
tion of practical intelligibility. On many occasions, for example, a first person
ascription of belief puts into words the bearing of a state of affairs on what made
sense to the speaker to do. In my opening example, for instance, I might have
answered a query about why I said “Come in” after hearing a knock at the door
by saying that I believed someone was at the door (or that I heard a knock). In
response to a question about why he turned on the lights, moreover, the person
in Davidson’s example might have replied that he believed it would help chase
away the sense of gloom in his living room.15 As these examples suggest, one
prominent use of the word “believe” and its cognates is to articulate the past
dimension of action temporality.
Similarly, one prominent use of “desire” and “want” is to put into words
the future dimension of action temporality, that is, the pursuit of projects
and ends. I might, for instance, have replied to the question, “Why did you
say ‘Come in’?” by explaining that I wanted to let the person who knocked
know that he or she could enter; after further Why?-questions, I might end
up claiming that I wanted to uphold a long-standing custom of decorous
social interaction. Similarly, Davidson’s person could have explained that he
wanted to chase away the gloom, that he wanted to brighten his spirits, and
even that he wants to lead a healthy life. (As these examples suggest, exactly
what a person says is subject to myriad contingent contextual factors.) Some
philosophers argue that a person’s reason for an action is a combination of
desire and belief (or a combination of items closely related to these). I believe
it is more accurate to say that a person’s reason for an action are the ways of
being and states of affairs that determine that this action made sense to him
to perform.16 Regarding desires and beliefs, what is true is that people some-
times use the words “desire” and “belief” (among others) to answer questions
about, to specify the reasons, why they (or others) performed a particular
action—for with these terms they put into words the bearing of particular
states of affairs and ways of being on its making sense to perform that action.
I should clarify that when I write of the “determination” of practical intel-
ligibility I do not mean causally determine in the sense of efficient causality
(X makes Y happen). I mean states of affairs and ways of being combining to
specify what makes sense to someone to do: it makes sense to do something
given certain states of affairs and for the sake of some way of being. (Reason ex-
planations are thus not causal explanations, though this is a further story.)17
The use of other mental condition terms to explain actions works similarly.
For example, the states of affairs given which it makes sense to perform an ac-
tion can be picked out, not just with the word “believe,” but also with the words
“think,” “see,” “hear,” “learn,” “expect,” “hope” etc. The use of multiple words
for the same purpose at once reflects and articulates, among other things, (1)
different ways that a state of affairs comes to be that given which it makes sense
to X, (2) different ways that states of affairs contribute to the determination of
what makes sense, and (3) different past and future actions of the actor. Which
word is appropriate depends on what happened in the flow of activity and also
on the contexts in which it occurred. When, for instance, I said “Come in” to
the colleague at my office door, it is probably more accurate to say that I heard
a knock than that I believed a knock occurred. Similarly, Davidson’s person
might have more accurately explained that he had hoped—not that he had be-
lieved—that turning on the lights would chase away the gloom. The differences
captured by the uses of these different terms publicly come out in various ways,
including in the actor’s ensuing course of activity, in how she explains herself,
in how she acts in parallel situations, in the different contexts in which these
behaviors occur, and in how others respond to her.
2. Emotional Activity
By an “emotional activity” I mean an activity among whose determinants is one

or more emotions. Many thinkers have averred that the existence of emotional
activity undermines the alleged teleological nature of human activity. Underly-
ing this asseveration are, among other things, the wrought character of some
emotional actions, their occasional seeming pointlessness or irrationality, the
fact that they typically do not fit into wider plans and action sequences, and
their often apparent impulsiveness. It is a good question whether all human
actions are determined by emotions, or more plausibly, by emotions or moods
(where moods differ from emotions, prominently, in lacking a distinct target).18
I will ignore this question because the answer to it is irrelevant to the present in-
vestigation: actions that emotions determine are usually done for an end, or so
I will argue. I will also say nothing about what an emotion is, why people have
them, or their neurophysiological character or basis. My aim in the present sec-
tion is to explicate the complementarity between emotions and teleology. I will
accomplish this goal by explaining how emotions determine activity according
to the account of activity sketched in the previous section.
It will be useful to have examples of emotional activity before us. Some of
these are standard in the literature
(1) Athletes pumping the air with joy after a spectacular play, or running
towards one another and jumping into the air to bump chests.
122 Chapter 3
(2) Participants in a Shaker Sunday service whirling and crying out while
doing so19
(3) A parent crying inconsolably out of grief over the death of a child
(4) A cell phone user angrily throwing down and breaking a malfunction-
ing cell phone
(5) A child angrily reaching out and slugging a sibling who won’t hand
over her piece of pie
(6) Filing a complaint against someone because of an off-hand com-
ment
(7) With relish, destroying letters from an ex-beau
(8) Planning a rival’s demise
(9) Kissing the picture of one’s beloved, or reaching out and stroking the
hair of someone one loves
(10) Figuring out a really good gift for one’s spouse
(11) Proudly cutting a pose and strutting before a mirror after being com-
plimented for one’s good looks
(12) Bringing one’s recent accomplishments to the attention of all one’s
colleagues
(13) Bowing and cocking one’s head, or quickly leaving the room, in
shame
(14) Taking elaborate precautions to avoid shameful situations
(15) Screaming in terror at a horror film
(16) Jane gouging out the eyes of a photograph of Joan, her rival.20
Some of these actions are patently emotional given my descriptions of them

(e.g., the use of adverbs of emotion). Activities that wear their emotional
character on their sleeves are usually impulsive or spontaneous in character.
The list also includes deliberate and thought out activities that are not clearly
emotional (6, 8, 10, 14). They are not patently emotional because cases exist
where the activities as specified are not emotionally determined.
There are three general ways that emotions can determine activity, three
general types of emotional activity. These three, note, are not mutually exclu-
sive; a given action can be emotionally determined in more than one way. The
first way emotions determine activity is by picking out which ways of being
and states of affairs determine practical intelligibility. A shameful experience
can, for example, lead a person to do things that make sense for the sake of
avoiding shameful situations (e.g., speaking up at meetings only when ad-
dressed or playing games of basketball only against older opponents). Simi-
larly, pride can lead a scholar to pursue the end of informing all his colleagues
of his latest accomplishments, the specific actions carried out in pursuit of
this end varying with opportunity and context. Alternatively, to vary this
example, the scholar’s pride might cause a colleague’s mention of an accom-

plishment to be that given which it makes sense to him to boast in reply. In
this alternative scenario, pride determines that the action that makes sense to
the prideful person to perform is an action that makes sense to him given the
colleague’s comment (i.e., it makes the comment salient to the prideful per-
son). A final example is its being due to long-standing anger toward someone
that an off-hand remark by that person becomes that given which it makes
sense to file a complaint against him. It is worth adding that a way of being or
state of affairs picked out by emotion can ceaselessly determine what makes
sense to someone to do. Staggered by anger, for instance, gaining revenge can
become an idée fixe that shapes and distorts a person’s life. This phenomenon
explains some cases of neurotic or compulsive behavior.
Emotions can either be occurrent or standing. An emotion is occurrent
when it is expressed in current actions and states of consciousness. When
these expressions cease, the emotion either no longer is occurrent or has dis-
sipated (and thus was temporary). Occurrent anger, for instance, is expressed
in bodily sensations, feelings of tension and gnawing, and involuntary bodily
movements, as well as in a range of actions including some mentioned in
the above list, for instance, a child slugging her sibling because of withheld
pie. An emotion is standing, by contrast, when its manifestations in action
and consciousness are intermittent and concentrated in episodes. Anger, for
instance, can lay in wait before suddenly bursting forth in response to an off-
hand comment of the person at whom it is directed. Not all emotions can be
standing. Grief and love, for instance, can, whereas joy cannot.
The observation that emotions can determine activity by picking out which
ways of being and states of affairs determine practical intelligibility parallels
the thesis advanced by the still prevalent belief and desire causal account of
action—whose principal thesis is that beliefs and desires cause actions—that
the bearing of emotions on action is always mediated through beliefs and
desires. Donald Davidson inaugurated and was a prominent defender of this
account (the “standard account”). He claimed (1) that the reason for an in-
tentional action causes the action21 and (2) that the reason for an intentional
action consists of a desire together with the belief that the action performed is
a means of attaining what is desired (more precisely: a pro attitude—desire,
want, urge, fancy etc.—toward actions of a certain sort plus the belief that the
action performed is of that sort).22 A further feature of the belief plus desire
causal account of action (or at least almost all versions of it) is the idea that
desires alone motivate action. Although Davidson, for example, analyzed the
cause of an action as a desire conjoined with a belief, he really treated desire
as the only mental condition capable of motivating action. For desires provide
the descriptions that actions must satisfy in order to be performed, whereas
124 Chapter 3
beliefs simply certify that actions are of the desired types. As a result, the only
way that an emotion can determine actions is by “fixing” which desires cause
them. As I will explain shortly, this is one point at which my account of action
diverges from the standard account.
The “fixing” of desires consists in emotions either causing desires or them-
selves partly consisting of desires. It is important to acknowledge both pos-
sibilities. In the course of an important article, “Arational Actions,” Rosalind
Hursthouse examines how the standard account would treat the case of Jane,
who “in a wave of hatred for Joan, tears at Joan’s photo with her nails, and
gouges holes in the eyes.” Hursthouse indicates that she agrees with the stan-
dard account that Jane’s action is motivated by a desire; in particular, “Jane
does this because, hating Joan, she wants to scratch her face and gouge out her
eyes.”23 It turns out that what Hursthouse means is that the desire that causes
Jane’s action—her desire to scratch Joan’s face and gauge out her eyes—is
part of her hatred for Joan: part of what it is for Jane to possess this emotion
is for her to have this desire. Hursthouse also implicitly attributes this idea
to the standard account. She continues by pointing out that, given Jane’s just
mentioned desire, the standard conception applies to Jane’s action only if an
absurd belief is attributed to Jane, for instance, that the photo of Joan is Joan
herself: Jane’s desire to assault Joan together with her belief that this photo is
Joan causes her to assault the photo. Hursthouse concludes that the standard
conception cannot handle this case. David Charles points out that Hurst-
house overlooks the first possibility mentioned above, namely, that emotions
can lead people to pursue particular desires.24 When this occurs, emotions
exert an efficient causality that resembles the efficient causality that Schutz
attributed to past experiences that lead people presently to pursue particular
purposes and ends. Charles claims that because the standard account can
countenance this possibility, it can handle the example of Jane: Jane’s hatred
causes her desire to attack the photo.
Peter Goldie has more recently defended a propitious version of the stan-
dard view that desires alone motivate emotional actions, at least emotional
actions of a certain type.25 The type concerned comprises “reasoned actions”
performed “out of emotions.” Goldie contends that such actions, like all in-
tentional actions, are caused by combinations of desire and belief. They are
performed “out of emotions” in the sense that emotions give rise to the de-
sires that motivate them. He claims, for example, that if a person jumps over
a gate out of fear of a bull, the action is caused by a desire to escape the bull
that arises from the person’s fear of it. Such cases clearly exist. Contra Goldie,
however, it must be kept in mind that emotions can pick out, not just which
ways of being, but also which states of affairs determine practical intelligibil-
ity. Emotions, that is, can also shape actions through beliefs, expectations,
hopes, and the like. More importantly, it is even possible for emotions to-
gether with beliefs (perceptions, expectations etc.) alone, that is, sans desires,
to be responsible for actions. It might be the case, for instance, that on coming
across Joan’s photograph it made sense to Jane to attack it simply because she
hates Joan so. Or it might be the case that coming across a photo of Jeanette,
whom Jane holds up as a paragon of virtue, it makes sense to Jane to bite her
lips and nod her head just because she esteems Jeanette so.26 Although desire,
as a matter of fact, is involved on most occasions when emotions determine
action, I see no convincing reason to insist—as the standard account typically
does—that desire must always be complicit.27 Desire, cognition, and emotion
can join in varied combinations to determine human behavior; emotions,
too, can move activity.
The second way emotions determine activity is by helping to determine,
given certain states of affairs and for the sake of a particular way of being,
which actions make sense to someone to perform. Until now, I have been
presuming sotto voce that its “making sense” to perform an action means, to
use Martin Hollis’s expression,28 that it makes rational sense to do so. What
makes sense is what is rational—sensible, intelligent, and appropriate—given
an end and a particular situation. Conceptions of practical reason assume that
practical reasoning is rational in this sense. In this context, moreover, “ratio-
nal” means rational from the perspective of the actor. The action that makes
sense to perform is not one that is sensible, intelligent, and appropriate tout
court, but one that is these according to the actor’s lights.
What makes sense to someone to do can diverge from what is rational to
that person to do. In particular, rational sense needs to be supplemented by
what I call “emotional sense.” An action makes emotional sense to a person
when it makes sense to her because of an end, circumstances, and an emotion,
but it is not rational (from her perspective) given the end and circumstances.
Such an action has a rationale and seems, to the actor, to be the thing to do.
She thinks this, however, only because she is gripped by the emotion. Once
free of the emotion, she would deem the action not rational. Suppose, for
example, that a bus driver, near the end of her shift, sits second in line at a
red light.29 The light turns green, but the driver of the car in front of her is
talking on his cell phone and doesn’t notice. Suddenly, the bus driver, at great
peril, swerves to the other side of the road in front of oncoming traffic, zooms
around the stationary car, and speeds off, all the while muttering under her
breath about damn cell phones. Imagine that it is due to her fear of the re-
percussions of arriving home late that this dangerous maneuver is what made
sense to her to do given the inattentive driver and for the sake of getting home
on time. This fear inflected how the end and the circumstances combined to
pick out a particular action to perform. Her action was not rational. Things
126 Chapter 3
could have turned out disastrously, and alternative courses of action existed,
for example, leaning on her horn. Only an irrational piece of practical reason-
ing could have picked out this action. Yet, driven by fear, the driver veered
into traffic. It is due to this fear that it made sense to her to do this for the sake
of getting home on time.
As suggested, the end and the circumstances provide a reason for the ac-
tion. “Why did you do that?”—“To get home on time; the jerk wasn’t paying
attention.” This answer shows “the favorable light in which the agent saw
what [s]he did.”30 The bus driver might also respond to this question by
mentioning her fear: that if she did not get home on time her husband might
start drinking again. The fact that the driver had reasons, that something,
from her perspective, spoke for the action, is part of the point of speaking in
this case of emotional “sense.” The reasons, however, are not good ones: clear
thinking would have counseled against this action. Had the driver not been so
fearful, she would have judged this action crazy and not performed it; in fact,
it probably would not have occurred to her at all. Gripped by fear, however,
an action which needlessly flirted with mayhem and death—hers and the pas-
sengers’—made sense to her to perform.
The literature on emotions and action has ignored that emotions can shape
activity by inflecting the determination of practical intelligibility—more
conventionally formulated, by inflecting practical reasoning, e.g., desires and
beliefs (etc.) combining to select or cause particular actions. Most writers
highlight a contrast between actions that are caused primarily by desires that
arise from emotions and actions that emotions directly cause (see below).
Contemporary discussions also presume that desires and beliefs, in addition
to causing actions, rationalize actions in the sense of constituting people’s
reasons for acting, the favorable lights in which they view what they do. For
most writers, accordingly, actions are either rationally caused, the product of
reason, or emotionally caused. And emotions either feed input into practical
reasoning or bypass practical reasoning altogether. I claim, by contrast, that
emotions can also shape practical reasoning (or, rather, practical intelligibil-
ity)—either its progression, if it is treated as a process, or inferential relations
among its propositions, if it is viewed as a structure.
Lying behind the just mentioned contrast between rational causation and
emotional causation is the peculiar modern opposition between reason (i.e.,
rationality) and emotion. This opposition has played a key role in many
philosophical analyses of human life since Descartes and Hobbes, including
those of Spinoza, Hume, and Kant. An important principle upheld by those
promulgating the opposition between reason and emotion is that reasonable-
ness requires the oppression of emotions. This principle is contravened by
Aristotle’s observation that reason and emotion are potentially compatible.
Emotion can bolster and be reason’s ally, fostering actions to which reason
would also lead (virtue requires “truth in agreement with right desire”).31 The
reverse, however, is also possible, though Aristotle did not note this. Reason
can bolster and be emotion’s ally in cases where emotion leads people into
action: under the spell of emotion, reason can provide rationales for actions
that it might otherwise condemn. What is crucial is that reason and emotion
are not opposed in principle and need not be opposed in fact.
Philosophical analyses of human life based on the opposition between rea-
son and emotion were contested in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by
Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger among others. These philosophers centered
human life in teleology and treated reason and emotion as facets of teleological
life. I agree with these thinkers. Practical intelligibility is (largely) a teleologi-
cal phenomenon. It is determined by desire, emotion, and cognition (belief,
perception). Reason is a secondary notion. People’s reasons for actions are
simply the determinants of practical intelligibility, whatever these are. What
the tradition called “reason,” moreover, consists simply in actions that make
sense to people to perform being intelligent, sensible, and appropriate from
their perspectives. As explained, however, emotions can inflect the determi-
nation of practical intelligibility. Not everything that makes sense to people to
do is sensible, intelligent, or appropriate from their own perspectives.
The third way that emotions can determine activities is by directly causing
them. Many of the examples listed at the beginning of this section illustrate
this type of emotional activity, including pumping the air with joy after a
spectacular play, crying out in a Shaker service while whirling about, crying
inconsolably in grief, angrily throwing down a cell phone, screaming in terror
at a horror film, proudly cutting a pose and strutting before a mirror after
being complimented for one’s good looks, and Jane’s assault of Joan’s photo-
graph. Of course, some of these activities as specified can also be emotional
activities of the first two types. A person might cut a pose and strut before the
mirror for the sake of improving his appearance, the pride he experienced
after being complimented for his looks having picked out improving his looks
as the project, component actions of which are what makes sense to him to
perform. As for Jane, her hatred for Joan might have directly caused her attack
on Joan’s photo. Alternatively, her hatred might have determined the attack
by (1) being responsible for a desire to assault Joan’s photo or (2) making it
the case that, for the sake of getting back at Joan for yesterday’s slight, it made
sense to her to attack the photo. Knowing what actually happened requires
ascertaining—in real life—or specifying—in imagined examples—further
facts of the case.
By “directly causing activity,” I mean that emotions determine activity in
ways that bypass practical intelligibility and its determination. The actor does
128 Chapter 3
not do something that makes sense to him to do. Rather, the emotion—as the
visceral experience of compulsion and impulse suggests—produces the activ-
ity bodily. The bodily feelings and sensations and agitated and frantic move-
ments that often accompany or constitute these actions likewise point toward
bodily causality. These facts indicate that further explication of this causation
requires attention to neurophysiology.32 At the same time, bypassing practi-
cal intelligibility does not entail that the determination of these actions is a
matter of neurophysiology alone. Various phenomena such as identity, com-
mitments and values, and personal history can contribute to the occurrence
of these actions, for instance, as standing causal conditions. The key point at
present is that practical intelligibility is not involved.
Emotional activity of this third type is often intentional activity in Aus-
tin’s sense: the actor means to do it and, when asked, reports that she does
it. Not always, of course: a person, for instance, can slug a sibling despite
herself. Slugging a sibling, throwing down a phone, or whirling and crying
out in a Shaker dance can also straddle the line between intentional and
not intentional. Parallel remarks hold regarding voluntary and involun-
tary. Emotional activity of the third sort can be voluntary or involuntary.
Crying inconsolably out of grief is involuntary. This is also probably true
of much of the whirling and singing out that took place in Shaker Sunday
services. Throwing down a cell phone, by contrast, is usually voluntary: the
actor could have stopped herself. Many instances, however, are ambiguous.
Partly responsible for this ambiguity is the fact that people can struggle or
learn not to perform these actions—not to cry, not to throw things down,
not to scream at the screening of a horror film. People can likewise struggle
against the emotional selection of which ends they pursue and which beliefs,
perceptions, expectations, and hopes they act on. Their abilities to control
any of these matters also vary.
This third type of emotional action has been increasingly recognized in the
literature despite its incompatibility with the standard desire plus belief causal
conception of action. Sabine Döring, for example, explains them as follows.
Emotions have representational content. An emotion’s representational con-
tent captures the import that a state of affairs holds for the person in its grip.
The representational content of a person’s fear of a bear sitting before her on
a trail, for instance, is the bear’s dangerousness. Part of what it is to be gripped
by an emotion, moreover, is that the person who is under its spell feels its
representational content, feels the import that some state of affairs holds for
her, in this case, the dangerousness of the bear before her. This feeling trans-
lates directly into action.33 The hiker, for instance, who suddenly comes upon
this bear feels the dangerousness of it before her, and this felt dangerousness
directly causes fleeing. Note that although—as in this example—many emo-
tional actions of the third type are triggered by something perceived, this need
not be so; an example is the crying that gushes out of a grieving person.
Hursthouse, to take another example, calls such actions “arational.” An
arational action is an intentional action that is explained by current emotions
but not performed for a reason. Hursthouse argues that arational actions are
prompted by occurrent wants of a special sort that arise in a person who is the
grip of an emotion: the person performs these actions “just because she wants
to,” “for the sake of themselves.”34 According to Hursthouse, however, the
desire to perform an action just because one wants to—the desire to perform
an action for its own sake—does not amount to a reason. On my typology,
an emotional action that is performed just because the actor wants to do it
is an emotional action of the first sort: the emotion either is responsible for
or partly consists in performing this action making sense for the sake of per-
forming it. With relish destroying letters from an ex-beau is an example: con-
fronted with his letters, a person’s hatred for him is responsible for it making
sense to her to tear them up for the sake of destroying them. The case of Jane
can be analyzed similarly.35 Some, however, of the actions that Hursthouse la-
bels “arational,” in particular many “impulsive” or “spontaneous” emotional
actions, cannot be analyzed thus. When, for example, someone inconsolably
cries out of grief, the griever does not “just want to do this”; he does not cry
“for the sake of crying itself.”
Döring’s and Hursthouse’s accounts join mine in positing a direct causal
connection between emotions and activity.36 All we really know, however,
is that people in the grip of certain emotions do certain things. It is the felt
experience of impulse, compulsion, and being caught up in action, both in
one’s own case and those of others, that motivates the imputation of a causal
connection between them. As more is learned about the neurophysiology of
emotions, this experiential conviction will likely be replaced by confirmed
knowledge.
How emotions determine activity is socially circumscribed. In particular, it
is circumscribed by social practices and their organizations. It is on the basis
of practices and their organizations, for example, that such actions as berat-
ing, gauging out eyes, burning in effigy, and casting a spell might make sense
to a hateful person to perform (Döring rightly points out that expressing ha-
tred through the gauging out of eyes is reserved for women). Even how emo-
tions cause activity independently of practical intelligibility often presupposes
practices and people’s familiarity with them—think of pumping the air in joy,
whirling and crying out out of devotion, kissing the picture of one’s beloved,
and destroying the letters of an ex-beau. Of course, not all emotional activity
of the third sort is socially underpinned; examples might include crying in
grief and throwing down a broken cell phone in anger. What’s more, the fact
130 Chapter 3
that the emotional determination of activity is socially circumscribed does

not preclude people changing—through action, media, and literature—which
actions emotions cause or what can make sense to people to do in the grip of
an emotion.
The above discussion makes clear that the existence of emotional actions
does not contradict the thesis that action is fundamentally teleological. Emo-
tions determine action either by shaping practical intelligibility or by causing
action independently of practical intelligibility. They shape intelligibility,
moreover, by (1) picking out that for the sake of or given which people act or
(2) inflecting what makes sense to people to do, given particular states of af-
fairs and for the sake of certain ways of being. Usually emotions determine ac-
tion by picking out ends or inflecting what makes sense. Apart from unusual
cases such as neuroses, they only occasionally cause actions independently of
practical intelligibility. Even less frequently, emotions, independently of ends
(desires), combine with particular states of affairs (particular beliefs, percep-
tions, expectations etc.) to determine action. When emotions determine ac-
tion, they generally do so by molding teleology.
Emotions can abrogate temporality. They do so, however, only when
people perform emotional actions of the third sort. When people perform
such actions, the future and past fall away and abandon the present (current
activity). What could have constituted the past of action, motivating what
the actor does—that the cell phone is broken, that we made a spectacular
play, that my son died—instead triggers an emotional reaction. Bereft of
past and future, such activity is cut loose, without orientation, and, as a
result, agitated and typically brief. Notwithstanding whatever evolutionary
advantage such actions as impulsively fleeing in the face of fearful things
might have secured for our ancestors, social life cannot tolerate too many
emotional actions of this third sort: an emotionally atemporal life can sur-
vive—for instance, in asylums—only with assistance from those whose lives
are temporal.37
3. Ceremony and Ritual
Various scholars have presumed that ceremony and ritual are not teleological
phenomena. Many reasons lie behind this presumption, including the tradi-
tional cast of most ceremonies and rituals, their repetitious quality, the sym-
bolic character of many, the seeming pointlessness of some, and the existence
of structural homologies among the rituals of far-flung peoples. In the eyes
of these scholars, tradition, repetition, symbolism, seeming pointlessness, and
structural homology suggest the absence, or dearth, of teleology, the fact that
ceremony and ritual constitute “teleology-free zones of sociality” (apologies

to Jürgen Habermas). Is this true? If so, just how pervasive are ceremony and
ritual in human life? Some thinkers have argued that they pervade human
existence and are found in all domains of action, even characterize all actions
and practices. If these theorists are right, the reach of teleology might have to
be reconsidered.
Many analyses of ceremony and ritual exist. It would explode the current
chapter systematically to consider them. The current section will, instead,
proceed in two steps. I will first briefly discuss the starting point of, as well as
a lesson to be drawn from, a prominent multidisciplinary debate that flared
up in the 1960s and 70s about the character of so-called primitive magical and
religious practices. Working with a recent theoretical conception of ceremony
and ritual that distributes these phenomena throughout social life, I will,
second, show how my account of activity and practice analyzes them. This
analysis reveals how ceremony and ritual can be teleological phenomena de-
spite their nonteleological aspects. Section 4 will then explain how the histo-
rian-anthropologist Mircea Eliade’s account of sacred space reveals a further
facet of the complementarity between teleology and ceremony/ritual.
The second step in the current section will focus largely on contemporary
ceremonies and rituals. I do this because my interest in discussing ceremony
and ritual lies in the challenge they seemingly pose to the pervasiveness of
teleology, and they can pose such a challenge only if they are widespread in
the contemporary world and not just at earlier stages of western history or in
the lives of “primitive” peoples. Residents of contemporary North Atlantic
countries sometimes believe that they perform many fewer ceremonies and
rituals than do either their ancestors or traditional peoples generally. Social
observers have added that contemporary life is steadily losing the rituals it
does retain. These convictions reflect the fact that anthropologists and soci-
ologists have long associated the expression “ritual” with magic, religion, and
myth.38 For, according to a familiar story, science, technology, and rationality
have supplanted magic, religion, and myth in modern North Atlantic life. It
follows that ceremony and ritual can truly challenge the pervasiveness of tele-
ology only if they are not straight off restricted to magic, religion, and myth.
They must be so delimited as to encompass nonmagical, nonreligious, and
nonmythical phenomena, too. Of course, an alternative reaction to the just
cited familiar story is to claim that ceremony and ritual challenge the perva-
siveness of teleology only in “premodern” worlds. I will not address this reac-
tion head on. I will, however, indirectly consider it by recalling the starting
point and one lesson of the aforementioned debate on primitive religion and
magic and, in section 4, taking up Eliade’s stark dichotomy between profane
and sacred worlds.
132 Chapter 3
Instrumental Versus Expressive Religious and Magical Activities

One now classical way of analyzing ritual, construed as magical, religious,
and mythical activity, is to characterize it as expressive practice and to dis-
tinguish between, even oppose, expressive and instrumental practice. An
impressive line of social investigators applied this distinction to the study of
social life in the middle stretches of the twentieth century, including Bronislav
Malinowski, Ernst Cassirer, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, R.
G. Collingwood, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Talcott Parsons, Edmund Leach, Leslie
White, and John Beattie. Lying behind this dichotomy is Emile Durkheim’s
distinction between the sacred and the profane. Instrumental practice, what
I label “teleological” practice, is activity carried out for particular ends. The
ends can be of any sort, from “practical”—building a boat, reaping a good
harvest, getting revenge—to “spiritual”—appeasing the gods, inducing higher
powers to do one’s bidding, or resecuring the group’s place in the cosmos.
There is no generally agreed definition of expressive practice. It is analyzed as
activity that expresses feelings, emotions, or attitudes, that says or communi-
cates something, or that is symbolic, the variety of concepts and accounts of
expression, saying, communication, and symbolism expanding the spectrum
of preferred analyses.39
In the 60s and 70s, the distinction between the instrumental and the ex-
pressive helped shape a lively debate among philosophers, anthropologists,
and sociologists about the character of religious and magical practices. The
anthropologists and sociologists party to this debate took “instrumental” to
mean directed to an end. By contrast, many of the philosophers involved in-
terpreted “instrumental” as rational. These philosophers were as interested in
situating ritual relative to the distinction between rationality and expression
as positioning it relative to the distinction between teleology and expression.40
Their attention to rationality reflected their professional preoccupation with it
as well as their conviction that rationality is central to how an anthropologist
copes in and with another culture.41 In their hands, the issue of the relation
of rituals to ends was doubled by the question of whether rituals are sensible,
intelligent, and appropriate ways of achieving certain ends. The discussion
thereby moved onto terrain plowed by anthropologists such as Sir Edmund
Frazer, Jack Goody, and Robin Horton, who interpreted rituals as practices
that, although carried out for practical ends, are far less successful than are
those based on modern science.
This debate was partly triggered by the work of Peter Winch. In turn,
Winch’s views on ritual and religion were based on Wittgenstein’s comments
about James Frazer and about religious belief. Squarely opposing Frazer’s
attempt to portray magic and religion as inferior or faulty science, Wittgen-
stein appeared to draw a sharp contrast between expressive and teleological
activities. In his so-called Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, he wrote, inter

alia, (1) that activities such as burning in effigy or kissing the picture of one’s
beloved do not aim at anything else (instead, “we just act so and then feel sat-
isfied”), (2) that magic expresses a wish instead of aiming to bring about some
result, and (3) that rituals are spontaneous, instinctual reactions of a ceremo-
nial animal to impressive worldly phenomena—lightning, the sun, majestic
oak trees etc.—that express shared wishes, feelings, values, and understand-
ings of these phenomena.42 Regarding religion, Wittgenstein claimed, among
other things, that to profess a religious belief is not to propound a thesis or
view about reality, but instead to affirm the centrality of an idea in one’s life,
that it is something one will stand by come what may.43 Winch, building on
Wittgenstein, embraced a strong dichotomy between practices that sensibly
pursue material ends, for example, the control of nature, and practices that
symbolically express attitudes and emotions.44 Focusing his discussion on the
Azande witchcraft practices that Evans-Pritchard had made famous,45 Winch
declared that, whereas modern science consequentially seeks to control na-
ture, Azande witchcraft practices express an attitude toward contingencies
that enables the Zande to go on living in the face of adversity. This opposition
ignited a still continuing discussion about the proper analysis of magic and
religion.
Looking back, I believe it is fair to say that one important lesson to be
gleaned from this debate is that teleology and expression coexist. Instead of
trying comprehensively to show that the debate suggests this, I will cite three
witnesses for this conclusion.
The first witness is interpretive. Many commentators have claimed that
Wittgenstein viewed ritual and religion as expressive phenomena as op-
posed to teleological ones.46 Wittgenstein’s texts, as indicated, abet such an
interpretation. Other commentators, however, have argued, persuasively in
my opinion, that in criticizing Frazer Wittgenstein did not deny the teleo-
logical dimension of ritual. This second group of commentators holds that a
principal aim of Wittgenstein’s criticisms of Frazer was to suggest that rituals
are spontaneous, unratiocinated reactions (“instinct-actions”), as opposed
to thought-out ways of acting based on reasoned beliefs about the world.47
The aim of his criticisms, in other words, was to suggest that it is wrong to
construe rituals as intellectual phenomena (Frazer had treated them as in-
ferior science), not to suggest that rituals lack ends; the principal target of
these critical remarks was the intellectualist Frazer, not the instrumental one.
Another way of putting this thesis is that Wittgenstein did not dispute the
teleological dimension of rituals, but questioned the probity of judging ritu-
als to be rational or irrational. A lecture remark of Wittgenstein’s reported
by Alice Ambrose is telling here: “People at one time thought it useful to kill
134 Chapter 3
a man, sacrifice him to the God of fertility, in order to produce good crops.
But it is not true that something is always done because it is useful. At least
this is not the sole reason.”48 In this remark, Wittgenstein acknowledged the
existence of instrumental ritual actions, the existence of noninstrumental ac-
tions, and maybe also the existence of actions that are multiply instrumental,
that is, performed for multiple reasons. It is also worth pointing out—for
those familiar with Wittgenstein’s remarks—that when Wittgenstein wrote
in the “Remarks on Frazer” that burning in effigy does not aim at anything,
he was talking about effigy burnings that take place in modern western life,
in practices that are better characterized as festival than as magic or religion.
The remark, in other words, is a comment about a modern version of a long-
standing practice that might have lost the teleological significance of its reli-
gious and magical predecessors.
The second witness is one of the most insightful approaches to primitive
religion and magic to emerge from this debate. In his essay “Rationality,”
Charles Taylor notes that two cognitive achievements often opposed to one
another—the explanatory understanding of a meaningless reality and the wise
attunement with a meaningful cosmos—separated during a particular period
of western history, namely, during the emergence of modern science.49 Ever
since that period, concerns with explanation and concerns with wisdom have
been assigned to different individuals and practices, for instance, the scientist
and the sage (if wisdom is assigned to anyone). Prior to the rise of modern
science, by contrast, philosophers and theologians were concerned with ex-
planation and wisdom alike. Any attempt to grasp their theoretical practices
by classifying these practices on one side or the other of this dichotomy is
anachronistic.
According to Taylor, the strong separation between instrumental and ex-
pressive practices that marks the debate about the character of primitive re-
ligion and magic likewise arose during a particular period of western history,
one in which religion and art differentiated out as distinct realms of practice.
Today, now that this differentiation has occurred, science, engineering, plan-
ning, economy, and politics are generally treated instrumentally as practical
arenas, while religion and art are seen as expressive realms.50 A strong separa-
tion between instrumental and expressive has also taken root in those parts
of the world that the west has transformed. Any attempt to understand past
or pre-westernized practices through this strong separation is doomed to
ethnocentrism. Modern westerners must recognize that the types of practice
domain that characterize past or pre-westernized peoples differ from their
own. Correlatively, they must cease carving these other peoples’ worlds along
the types of domain that exist in the west, for instance, instrumental versus
expressive, or science, religion, economy etc. It follows that it is also mislead-
ing to label the practices of past or pre-westernized peoples “magic,” “ritual,”

or “science.” These are our terms and retain something of the opposition
found in recent western history between magic and religion, on the one hand,
and science and technology on the other.51
Nevertheless, Taylor implies, teleology and expression characterize pre-
modern and prewesternized societies as much as they do modern western
ones. The fact that different types of practice are open to different peoples
does not imply that either teleology or expression can be absent from any
social world. What varies from time and place to time and place, and across
practices at a particular time and place, is the mix of teleology and expression;
whereas we in the modern west have created practices that specialize in one
or the other, the two strongly intermingle in the practices of others. Expres-
sion, in short, is not opposed to teleology; it can join with teleology in varied
combinations.
The third witness is the growing recognition that the ethnographic record
leaves little doubt that people pursue ends in carrying out primitive magic and
religion. Practitioners of traditional religion and magic typically report, for
example, that they pursue particular ends when practicing them.52 One can
argue, as did Marx and Winch, among others, that people can be mistaken
about themselves, just as one can argue, as did Freud and Davidson, that what
people say about themselves is simply part of the total evidence on the basis of
which an interpreter does or does not attribute particular ends to them. The
magnitude of the evidence has made plain, however, that in this context these
gambits are merely theoretical. Traditional peoples carry out their rituals for
diverse purposes.53 Of course, most observers agree that there is more, indeed,
much more to rituals than simply this.
Prominent anthropologists and sociologists have long argued that the in-
strumental and the expressive combine in much human practice, including
magic. Consider, for example, this quotation from Edmund Leach:
Almost every human action that takes place in culturally defined surroundings
is divisible in this way; it has a technical aspect which does something and an
aesthetic, communicative aspect which says something. In those types of be-
havior that are (typically) labeled ritual . . . the aesthetic, communicative aspect
is particularly prominent . . . But it is equally a matter of “ritual” that whereas
an Englishman would ordinarily eat with a knife and fork, a Chinese would
use chopsticks . . . the term ritual is best used to denote this communicative
aspect.54
Indeed, John Beattie forcefully claimed that no “present-day” anthropolo-

gist denies that primitive magic and ritual combine the instrumental and the
expressive.55 Of course. what is equally true is that the penchant of (some)
136 Chapter 3
anthropologists such as Leach to cite expression or something similar as what

distinguishes magic and ritual from science and practical activity obscured the
fact that ritual and magic are also instrumental.
Beattie offered an instructive analysis of ritual as both expressive/symbolic
and instrumental. By “expressive” and “symbolic,” Beattie meant that a ritual
says something, respectively, represents abstract notions that those perform-
ing it greatly value. A ritual is also carried out in pursuit of something, i.e.,
for a purpose. Beattie had an insightful idea about the connection between
the expressive/symbolic and instrumental dimensions of ritual: the instru-
mental character of ritual, the fact that practitioners carry it out for particular
purposes, rests on their belief in the instrumental efficacy of the fact that
the ritual says or stands for something, i.e., it rests on their belief that the
expressive or symbolic qualities of the ritual are what bring about the desired
effect.56 Suppose, for instance, that a rain dance symbolizes rain and that its
practitioners perform it with the idea that will bring about rain. They do so
in the belief that it is because the dance symbolizes rain that performing it
will, say, induce the powers and spirits that watch over the world to bestow
rain. Incidentally, Beattie contrasted the magico-religious, which mixes the
expressive and instrumental, with art, which he treated as purely expressive.57
An analysis that parallels his account of the magico-religious can, however,
be given of art. Art, to be sure, is symbolic or expressive. Artists, however,
produce art for this or that purpose, including for the sake of making a liv-
ing, in order to communicate something, and for its own sake. Just like ritual
practices, therefore, practices of art are both expressive and instrumental. It is
the product of these practices, art qua entity, that is more plausibly character-
ized as purely symbolic.
Beattie also characterized rituals as ends in themselves.58 This characteriza-
tion parallels Hursthouse’s claim that arational actions are performed for
their own sake. The characterization also implies that the performance of
ritual serves two ends, namely, the performance itself and what its practi-
tioners seek to achieve in performing it: ritual is both an end in itself and a
means toward a further end. Like Leach, among others, Beattie averred that
expression and symbolism distinguish ritual from practical activity: ritual is
symbolic-expressive, and practical activity is not. It turns out, however, that
Beattie thought that rituals differ from practical activities also in that people
perform rituals both for their own sake and for the results they promise,
whereas they carry out practical activities only as means. Although Beattie did
not point this out, this difference provides a teleological ground for contrast-
ing ritual and practical activity.59
Anthropological research teaches that ritual does not preclude teleology.
Even those anthropologists who emphasized that the distinguishing mark or
center of gravity of rituals is expression and symbolism conceded that people

have purposes, and take themselves to have purposes, in carrying rituals out.
What’s more, the main opponents of expressivist and symbolist analyses of
ritual treated rituals as instrumental phenomena, comparable, albeit unfavor-
ably, to instrumental practices based on modern western science. All thinkers,
finally, acknowledged that, whatever the nature of ritual, much of the lives of
premodern peoples is spent in practical end-oriented activity. In short, the
debate on the character of primitive magic and religion strongly points to-
ward the conclusion that these phenomena do not challenge the near ubiquity
of teleology.
Teleological Ceremony
I will now defend the same conclusion regarding the ceremonies and rituals
of modern life. I will first appropriate a conception of ceremony and ritual ac-
cording to which these phenomena are prevalent in the contemporary world
and not just in traditional ones. I will then spell out how ceremony and rituals
so conceived are analyzed on my account of activity and practice. This analy-
sis will show that teleology inhabits all ceremony and ritual.
I begin, once again, with a list of recent or contemporary ceremonies and
rituals.
(1) Singing “My Ol’ Kentucky Home,” alternatively, “The Star Spangled
Banner,” at the beginning of a University of Kentucky basketball
game
(2) A Sunday Shaker worship service
(3) Shaking hands with other people
(4) The Blessing of the Hounds performed at the start of the fox hunt
season at the Iroquois Hunt Club in Lexington, Kentucky60
(5) A wedding ceremony
(6) A funeral
(7) Burning someone in effigy at a political rally
(8) Lighting the menorah at Hanukkah
(9) A Native American rain dance
(10) Burning sins at New Year61
The sociologist Steven Lukes defines ritual as “rule-governed activity of

a symbolic character that draws the attention of its participants to objects
of thought and feeling which they hold to be of special significance.”62 This
definition resembles Beattie’s definition of symbolic activity. Two significant
differences are that the activities concerned are conceived of as rule-governed
138 Chapter 3
and that they draw attention to objects of thought and feeling instead of stand-
ing for them. Lukes’s definition of ritual as a kind of rule-governed activity
is important: ceremonies and rituals do seem to be more “rule-governed”
than are other social activities. Focusing on rule-governedness nevertheless
obscures other dimensions of ceremony and ritual. A wedding ceremony, to
be sure, is governed by rules. Equally if not more essential to the ceremony,
however, is the fact that some of those involved carry it out for the sake of get-
ting married. Gilbert Lewis has suggested, moreover, that because those who
carry out a ritual know that it is supposed to follow precedent in order to be
effective or proper, they expect rules to exist and ask for them whenever they
are not sure how to proceed.63 As a result, those in authority or with special
knowledge are sometimes called on to make rulings about what is supposed
to occur (or about what this or that action, event, or entity means). This
dynamic implies both that the purpose of rules is often to eliminate circum-
stantial uncertainty regarding ongoing performance and that rules are not
necessary to the extent that performance is sure-footed. Lewis’s observations
thus suggest that rituals are less rule-governed than it might seem. A theory
of ceremony and ritual must clearly highlight factors other than the rules that
determine and circumscribe action.
Expanding Lukes’s analysis, Paul Connerton suggests that rituals, presum-
ably because of their rule-governedness, evince repetition, if not also styliza-
tion and stereotypification.64 Rituals, for sure, are repetitious; they are also
sometimes stylized and stereotypical. Above all contemporary rites, however,
can leave open considerable latitude for how people perform what is repeated.
Burning in effigy is an example, as is shaking hands. Connerton also claims
that calling people’s attention to objects of thought and feeling articulates
meanings and values that color activities beyond the ritual itself. This holds of
the sorts of monumental public ceremonies (e.g., massive Nazi commemora-
tions) that Connerton has in mind, but it is not obviously a feature of many
contemporary rituals. I am not sure that whatever thoughts and feelings shak-
ing hands calls attention to—and it is not clear how often shaking hands calls
attention to these—are significant for other activities. Burning sins at New
Years is an interesting example in this regard, since it is supposed to have
this effect but probably rarely does. Something similar can be said about the
ceremonious singing of songs before sporting events.
Lukes’s definition attributes considerably more ritual to contemporary
western life than is recognized by the equation of ritual with magic and re-
ligion. It is insufficiently capacious, however, to support the contention that
contemporary life contains considerable ceremony and ritual, let alone the
thesis that all practices are partly ceremonial in nature. Let me turn, then, to
a recent analysis by the anthropologist Wendy James. James argues that the
consignment of ritual to religion and magic, buoyed by the modern western

separation of the instrumental from the expressive that underlies this con-
signment, has hobbled the study of primitive ritual. For it associates primi-
tive ritual with western religion understood as a domain of activity and belief
separate from science and the practical sphere. This consignment has also
blinded theorists to the prevalence of ceremony and ritual in all domains of
contemporary life. According to James, another baleful idea that arises from
the separation of religion and science is that ceremony and ritual are distinct
practices, as opposed to qualities of all practices. In her eyes, “Ritual, symbol,
and ceremony are not simply present or absent in the things we do; they are
built in to human action.”65
James develops this thesis without defining ceremony straight out. Invoking
a Wittgensteinian notion of grammar as forms of agreement in practice, she
instead introduces the idea of ceremonial grammar, of “forms of agreement in
the way we ‘dance’ with one another.”66 Pursuing the analogy with dance, she
construes this ceremonial grammar as a “layered choreography” that pervades
social life. This grammar, or choreography, comprises “rules about space,
time, a sense of sequenced action within an anticipated or designed event, and
of formal relations between participants.”67 I think, although James does not
state this, that space should be understood as including the place-path layout
of the world. As David Parkin has emphasized, “directionality, movement, and
spatial orientation” are essential to ritual; every ritual embraces a place-path
layout.68 (Similarly, time should include the temporality of activity, though
averring this begs the basic issue in this chapter.) Other features of dance that
pervade social life include the “counterpoint of style and rhythm,”69 the “vital
etiquette of personal encounters,”70 and the production of meanings open to
contestation and interpretation.71 I believe that it is fair to say that ceremonial
grammar specifies an amalgam of interwoven timespaces and objective times
and spaces for ceremonial activities. According to James, finally, ritual—as
opposed to ceremony—is deliberate ceremonial performance.72 All in all, in
focusing on ceremony instead of on ritual, and thereby sidestepping the as-
sociation of ritual with religion, magic, and premodern or precolonial ways
of acting, James brilliantly makes plausible to modern ears the claim that
something associated with dance is ubiquitous in social life.73
The examples of ceremony and ritual listed at the beginning of this subsec-
tion all evince ceremonial grammars, layered choreographies embracing rules
or senses of space, time, the sequencing of action within greater wholes, and
relations and interactions among participants. Even something as potentially
perfunctory as hand-shaking exhibits a grammar since timing, an etiquette
of grasping and shaking, an understanding of one’s own actions as part of an
interaction, and the institution of relations among participants are features of
140 Chapter 3
this dispersed practice. Singing anthems before sporting events likewise fits
this specification, as evidenced by the actions of standing at one’s seat, fac-
ing the flag, and putting a hand over one’s heart (or not doing these things),
as well as by the pace of the singing, the connectedness of the audience in
the activity, and the shared anticipation of both the end of the song and the
commencement of the competition. More complex rituals such as wedding
ceremonies and funerals embrace more elaborate choreographies of such
matters. So, too, does the Native American rain dance. Any such dance makes
a specified use of space, involves movement and directionality at an elaborate
place-path array anchored in a setting, occurs at certain moments in the year,
requires that individuals have a sense of timing, and comprises actions that
must be performed in the correct sequence and at the proper places in order
for the dance to count as proper and to be potentially successful in influenc-
ing higher powers.
How does my account of activity and practice analyze ceremony and ritual?
Recall the conception of practice drawn on in previous chapters. A practice is an
organized, open-ended array of doings and sayings. This array is organized by
a set of (1) action understandings, which combine abilities to perform actions,
to recognize others’ actions, and to respond to those actions, (2) rules, which
are formulated directives, instructions, admonishments, and the like, (3) a
teleological-affective structure, which embraces a range of ends, projects, ac-
tions, combinations thereof, and emotions that participants should or accept-
ably pursue or exhibit, and (4) general understandings of matters germane to
the practice involved, including the abstract notions that Beattie and Lukes
claim rituals, respectively, stand for or call attention to. Organizing Shaker wor-
ship practices, for example, is an understanding that dancing is a form of self-
purgative, ecstatic activity in which war can be prosecuted against sin and evil.
The organizations of practices contain and lay down the ceremonial
grammar that James attributes to social life. Consider a wedding ceremony.
Regardless of what specific practices a particular wedding enacts (multiple
such practices might be available at a given time and place), the ceremony, as
Lukes observes, is rule-governed. Rules that are either articulated by parents
and officials or written in manuals and guides are bound to specify some of
the following features of the ceremony: (1) spatialities and spaces (e.g., prin-
cipals before the audience at a designated place; processionals through the
audience along aisles as paths toward that place), (2) objective times (e.g., the
length of the ceremony, vows, and musical interludes), (3) action sequences,
and (4) formal relations and interactions (e.g., between the person officiat-
ing and the persons marrying, between parents and future sons- and daugh-
ters-in-law, between the principals and the best men and ladies in waiting).
Rules, however, are only one component of practice organization; ceremonial
grammar is not laid down by rules alone.74 Some of the above matters might
be delineated by general understandings—such as those of matrimony and
union—that inform the wedding (and possibly other) practices. The teleoaf-
fective structure of the wedding practices, moreover, delimits acceptable or
enjoined ends, acceptable or prescribed projects to execute for these ends, and
acceptable or enjoined activities to perform for these projects. The teleoaf-
fective structure thus embodies, prescribes, and circumscribes spaces, times,
sequences, and formal relations that characterize the ceremony. Even people’s
common and shared understandings of how to carry out particular actions,
for instance, walking down the aisle, giving speeches, and exchanging gifts,
underlie ceremonial grammar. All of this organization conspires to guaran-
tee, finally, that the timespaces of those carrying on or attending a wedding
ceremony are common, shared, and orchestrated.
A practice and an activity are ceremonial (or ritualistic) in different senses.
A practice is ceremonial to the extent that its organization specifies spaces,
times, action sequences, action rhythms, and both formal relationships and
nuanced interactions among participants. All practices are ceremonial in this
sense. Indeed, much of what practice organization imposes on human activ-
ity amounts to ceremony. What varies among practices is the extent of their
ceremonialness and the relative contributions of the different components of
practice organization to it. The ceremonial quality of the dispersed practice
of shaking hands lies in proper spatial uses and directionalities of the hands
and body, a sense of the proper time to act, a sensitivity to the specific move-
ments of the other person, and the establishment of new relationships. The
first three features are carried in handshakers’ common or shared action
understandings, whereas the fourth feature is carried in their common or
shared general understanding of acquaintanceship. The ceremonial character
of the practice of singing anthems before sporting events, meanwhile, reflects
understandings of these sorts and also rules as well as a simple teleoaffective
structure. The strongly ceremonial character of Shaker Sunday worship, the
Blessing of the Hounds, lighting the menorah, burning sins at New Year,
funerals, and the Native American rain dance likewise result from all dimen-
sions of practice organization.
Whether an activity, by contrast, is ceremonial or not depends on the or-
ganization of the practice of which it is a part: an activity is ceremonial just
in case it is governed by a component of practice organization that specifies
ceremony. An activity that is governed by a rule about either the spatial ar-
rangement of people or the place-path layout at a wedding ceremony is a
ceremonial activity. So, too, for example, is any activity whose position in an
activity sequence reflects a prescribed or acceptable end-project-action com-
bination (e.g., the sequence of actions that the principals perform or the order
142 Chapter 3
in which toasts and speeches are made), as well as any activity that reflects a
general understanding of relations between participants (for example, hug-
ging a new in-law). This delimitation of ceremony leaves considerable room
for nonceremonial activities: much of what people specifically do and say at
a wedding is not governed by those components of practice organization that
specify space, time, sequence, relations, and interactions.
The ceremonial character of an activity does not exhaust the nature of that
activity. In particular, a person can, and usually does, act ceremonially for
a purpose. At a wedding, for instance, the principals carry out the complex
sequence of ceremonial actions for the sake of getting married (or of marry-
ing them). At a Sunday Shaker worship service, Shakers stood and began to
dance for the sake of initiating more ecstatic and frenzied activity; they carried
out the ceremony, moreover, for the sake of shaking off the flesh. A person,
meanwhile, shakes another person’s hands for the sake of friendliness, for the
sake of instituting a relationship, or for the sake of upholding acquaintance
practices. And people burn others in effigy for the sake of demonstrating
hatred or loathing, burn sins at New Year’s for the sake of publicly affirming
their resolve to act differently in the new year, and perform their part in the
Blessing of the Hounds for the sake of bringing good fortune to the hunt, get-
ting the first hunt going, or upholding tradition.75
Circumscribing the teleological character of ceremonial activities is the
organization of the practices of which they are part, in particular, the teleo-
affective structures of these practices. Any practice prescribes and/or deems
acceptable a variety of ends. The range of acceptable ends extends well beyond
those prescribed. The practice of singing anthems before sporting events, for
instance, admits various acceptable ends for the sake of which people might
stand up and sing, including expressing allegiance to country, expressing
one’s identity as member of a group, doing what others do, and not stand-
ing out in a crowd. Wedding practices similarly delineate acceptable ends for
participants to pursue. For the wedded, these include joining in indefinite
union, getting rich, combating loneliness, and keeping on good terms with
one’s parents, while for the official presiding these include doing one’s job,
fulfilling a contract, doing someone a favor, substituting for the minister, and
so on. A participant in a ceremony usually acts for one of the acceptable ends
delimited in the organization of the relevant practice.
Because ceremonial activities can be, and usually are, carried out for a
purpose, they can be strategic. A strategic action is an action performed pur-
suant to a scarce item in knowledge of other people’s actions and plans. The
scarce item can be money, property, goods, consumables, power, prestige, a
desired sexual object, the favor of authority, and so on. It was once thought
that the symbolic and expressive qualities of ritual precluded its strategic per-
formance. Over time, however, myriad anthropologists have described how

people manipulate, deceive, and control through ritual conduct. Indeed, ritu-
als can be a medium of power and domination as well as a site of contestation
and competition, say, for scarce resources or for legitimating leadership roles.
Ceremony and strategy are not mutually exclusive.
The ends for which people perform ceremonial actions can, though need
not, be group-oriented. A Shaker might get up and commence dancing for
the sake of our—not his or her own—shaking off the flesh (which we can
only do together). Similarly, someone might help burn an enemy in effigy
for the sake of demonstrating our hatred of that person, or perform his part
in the Blessing of the Hounds for the sake of bringing good fortune to our
hunt. When an end is we-regarding as opposed to self-regarding and can be
attained only by coordinated actions from those forming the we involved,
I call the end a “collective” end. A common end, by contrast, is an end that
is prescribed either of anyone participating in or of some specified set of
participants in the practice(s) concerned. Attaining a common end might
or might not require coordinated actions, and the end itself can be either
self- or we-regarding. An important subtype of collective and common
ends alike comprises ends that are ascribed to ceremonial practices either
in the sayings that help compose those practices, in texts that are believed
to guide them, or by authorities who watch or preside over them. It might,
for instance, be part of the Native American Rain Dance to chant, or for the
priest to intone, that the proceedings will induce higher powers to bestow
rain. (Whether those carrying on the ritual do so for the purpose of influ-
encing higher powers is a further question.) Of course, social investigators
have long attributed purposes to practices and institutions that diverge from
those formulated by native or member sayings, texts, and authorities. They
have also sometimes affirmed a tight connection between such purposes
and those pursued by participants in the practices or members of the insti-
tutions. Regardless of what one thinks about such ends and purposes, it is
important to keep them separate from the ends and purposes (1) for which
people perform the actions that compose practices and institutions or (2)
which people formulate and attribute to their practices and institutions. My
present concerns are with the latter two sorts alone.
So-called functionalist anthropologists and sociologists have also long
sought to identify the functions of ritual and ceremony. They have argued
that ritual and ceremony, among other things, strengthen social solidarity,
foster group identity, resolve personal and social problems, reaffirm a group’s
moral principles, or symbolize or present the central concepts, motivations,
and anxieties that organize and give meaning to people’s lives. Functions such
as these can be theoretically analyzed as either feedback-secured causal effects
144 Chapter 3
of the performances of ceremonies and rituals, achievements ipso facto real-

ized in these performances, or the point of carrying out ceremony and ritual.
Functions so analyzed might in fact characterize many overtly ceremonial
practices and institutions. Functions, however, must be distinguished both
from the ends people pursue in carrying out ceremonial and ritual actions and
from the ends and purposes they attribute to their ceremonies and rituals.
How is the practical intelligibility that governs ceremonial and ritual activi-
ties determined? Consider the shaking of hands. The intelligibility at work in
such an activity might take the following form: given that Jones has just intro-
duced us and that the person introduced is initiating the act of shaking hand,
it makes sense, for the sake of being friendly—or for the sake of initiating a
relationship or for the sake of upholding decorum—to shake hands. Simi-
larly, the practical intelligibility that governs a priest calling his tribe together
to begin a rain dance might take the following teleological form: given that
the sun rose today at the midpoint between the two sacred mountains (as seen
from a certain spot outside the village), it makes sense, for the sake of appeas-
ing the gods—or for the sake of doing what is incumbent on priests—to call
the tribe to gather.
In these two examples, practical intelligibility is teleological in nature. The
practical intelligibility that governs ceremonial or ritualistic actions, however,
need not be teleological. Vis-à-vis hand shaking, for instance, it might be that
it makes sense to shake hands simply because Jones has introduced us and
doing so is customary. Similarly, it might make sense to the priest to call out
the tribe because the sun rose today at the midpoint between the two moun-
tains and when this occurs priests are supposed to do this. In cases such as
these, it makes sense to people to act ceremoniously or ritually because the
ceremony or ritual is enjoined or customary, and not for the sake of anything
(“customary” = what is done, what we do, what one does). It is even possible
for activities and practices to be so taken-for-granted, or better, “lived into”
(eingelebt) as Max Weber put it,76 that in certain circumstances its making
sense to people to perform them does not even rest on the shouldness or
customariness of the performance. It might make sense to shake hands, for
instance, simply because Jones has introduced us—tout court. Likewise, it
might make sense to the priest to call out the tribe simply because the sun rose
at the midpoint between the mountains. These possibilities bear some resem-
blance to those cases of emotional action in which emotions pick out which
states of affairs determine practical intelligibility. Practices, too, can do this.
Some theorists have argued that ceremonial and ritual activities gener-
ally are ateleological in these ways (or that this is the character of traditional
activities generally).77 What is true is that people can ateleologically perform
the actions that compose simple ceremonies such as handshaking. They can
also ateleologically perform some of the actions that make up more elaborate
ceremonies such as rain dances, the Blessing of the Hounds, lighting the me-
norah, funerals, and even weddings. In the midst of carrying on a ceremony
or ritual such as these, a person can purposelessly observe a rule or purpose-
lessly perform an enjoined activity: now, for instance, that my compatriots
have begun carrying out one part of the ceremony, it can make sense to me to
commence the next part simply because this is the prescribed sequence and
my role is to perform the next part. Ceremonies, finally, can be initiated sim-
ply because they are enjoined or customary. As suggested, it might make sense
to the priest to call out the tribe simply because this is what priests should do
when the sun rises at the midpoint between the two mountains. In these sorts
of case, a person, without pursuing an end, does something simply because it
is enjoined or customary.
Norms and customs can, therefore, neutralize teleology, the future dimen-
sion of action temporality. I described above how emotions can extinguish
the future and past dimensions of temporality and reduce action to a bodily
reaction into the world. Norms and customs do not extinguish the future.
They, instead, pre-empt it: they short circuit the teleological determination of
practical intelligibility by themselves specifying what makes sense to people
to do. Usually, furthermore, norms and customs leave the past dimension of
activity intact: what makes sense to someone to do is what makes sense given
such and such states of affairs and such and such norms and customs.
I do not believe, incidentally, that practices (norms, customs, traditions)
can determine activity in the third way emotions can do this—by causing
it independently of practical intelligibility. Ceremonial actions are never
wrought causal reactions. What is true is that the prescription or customa-
riness of activities such as shaking the hand of someone to whom you are
introduced and calling out the tribe when the sun rises at a certain place,
need not help motivate ceremonial performance; the motivation for such
performances can be exhausted by the states of affairs that occasion them
(e.g., the approaching hand, the sunrise between the mountains). Usually,
however, what norms and customs prescribe contributes to the motivation of
the performance: the enjoinment or customariness of the action is part of the
reason it is performed. Even when this is not the case, the actor, if queried, is
typically able to summon up the prescriptive status of the action as a further
reason for the activity.
I have been describing ways that ceremonial activities can ateleologically
conform to norm and custom. Many such actions, however, are performed
for the sake of something. For example, what norms and customs prescribe
often fills out, not the motivations that lie behind ceremonial actions, but the
purposes or ends for which they are carried out. A person, for instance, might
146 Chapter 3
shake the other’s hand in order to do what is customary and not because doing
so is customary. A person can also perform ceremonial actions, not only in
order to do what is prescribed, but also in order to do what others are doing:
even though he hates the ceremony, the person might shake the other’s hand
so as to do what others do. In addition, the flip side of a possibility mentioned
above—the ateleological performance of some of the actions that compose
complex ceremonies—is that other such actions can be performed for a pur-
pose. For instance, after an Iroquois club member, per custom, bows his head
and listens to the minister’s blessing of the hounds, he might hurriedly line up
to receive an individual blessing for the sake of getting the hunt going. This
commingling of actions done for a purpose with actions performed simply
out of adherence to a custom or norm can mask the presence of teleology.
Most importantly, most people who perform a ceremony or ritual report
that they do so for a purpose or end.78 When a ceremony or ritual is carried
out for a purpose or end, the actions that compose it are also performed for
a purpose or end, namely, the purpose(s) or end(s) for which people carry
out the ceremony or ritual concerned. This is true whether or not these ac-
tions are performed according to standing rule or custom (and whether or
not the actors have additional purposes or ends in performing individual ac-
tions). People might, for example, participate in a rain dance for the sake of
bringing about rain, for the sake of doing what is customary, for the sake of
doing what others are doing, or so on. The actions and sequences thereof that
compose the dance might be enacted, moreover, according to custom.79 The
ends for which the people individually participate in the dance—regardless of
what they are—anchor the intelligibilities that govern their performances of
the customarily sequenced actions: the dancers enact the ritual according to
custom and for the sake of this or that end. Similarly, a person might attend
a funeral for the sake of supporting a grieving family but then carry out the
ceremonial actions disinterestedly, inattentively, and mechanically. He per-
forms these actions for the sake of standing by the family, even though this
end makes no contribution to what he specifically does, and he might even
appear not to be acting purposively at all.
As indicated, one way of teleologically carrying out a ceremony or ritual is
to perform it for the sake of doing either what others do or what one is sup-
posed to do. One can shake hands for the sake of decorum, attend a funeral
to do what one is supposed to do, stand and sing “My Ol’ Kentucky Home”
to join in with others, and participate in the Blessing of the Hounds for the
sake of acting like other Iroquois Club members, just as one can light the
menorah at Hanukkah, help burn someone in effigy, and even, as a Shaker,
stand and begin to dance in order to do what one is supposed to or to act
like others. Conformity, in other words, need not be purposeless adherence
to custom or norm; it can also be powerful teleological impetus. It is worth

adding that the above possibilities were all open to “premodern” and “tra-
ditional” peoples. In carrying out ceremonies and rites, they could pursue
personal, common, or collective ends, seek to act like others or to do what
they were supposed to do, and/or simply conform to norms and customs.
Some glimpse into the complex nexus among teleology, normativity, and
custom in premodern (and some contemporary) practices is provided by
Rodney Needham’s observations about the variety of answers ritual actors
proffer to the question of why they perform a given ritual: (1) sometimes
people say the ritual is their custom or that their ancestors require it of
them, (2) sometimes people defer to a local authority who gives a traditional
reason that is really just a feature of the ritual, (3) on other occasions differ-
ent people give conflicting reasons, and (4) in some cases the reasons they
give are contradicted by their actions. Needham concludes, quoting Arthur
Waley on Confucian practices, that “The truth . . . is that there is no ‘real
reason’ for ritual acts.”80 This truth leaves people free to perform these acts
for diverse ends.
The upshot of this discussion of ceremony and ritual is that the perva-
siveness of these phenomena in both modern and nonmodern worlds does
not imply that human action is fundamentally ateleological. Actions can be
simultaneously ceremonial-ritual and teleological. Indeed, ceremony and
teleology are complementary dimensions of human activity. Occasionally
people simply conform to custom and norms, and teleology is neutralized.
Sometimes, conversely, people flexibly and even inventively pursue their
ends, and ceremony is set aside. Most activities, however, mix teleology and
ceremony. This holds just as much in the “practical,” “prosaic,” “technologi-
cal,” “instrumental,” or “reasoned” arenas of social life as it does in the “reli-
gious,” “artistic,” “expressive,” or “spontaneous” domains. Not just teleology
and expression, as Taylor observed, but ceremony, too, is differentially dis-
tributed throughout social life. The familiar description of the transition from
premodernity to modernity as a development embracing increasing teleology
and less and increasingly restricted expression and ceremony is untenable.
4. Sacred Worlds
Animating the idea of a unified activity timespace is the thesis that teleology
underpins the spatiality—the place-path layouts—through which people live.
A place is a place to perform some action, whereas a path is a way between
places. Place-path arrays are a type of space fundamentally tied to—following
from and determining—human activity.
148 Chapter 3
The objects amid, at, and in relation to which people act can have nonin-
strumental significance, i.e., significances other than their places in human
activities, for instance, aesthetic significance, religious significance, and sym-
bolic significance. The layout of the tree-lined driveway connecting a horse
farm entrance to the family mansion can be aesthetically pleasing, a horse
farm cemetery can hold sentimental or historical significance, a field can be
where a religious event of great importance took place, and an object such as
a crystal chalice can symbolize an abstract idea of great value to some group
of people. These aesthetic, sentimental, historical, religious, and symbolic
significances have implications for action: the driveway might be something
to erect or to admire, the cemetery might be a place to reminisce, meditate,
or connect with the past, the religious site might be the destination of a pil-
grimage or a place to defend at all costs, and the chalice might be something
to handle with great care or to produce imitations of profusely. The fact that
significances of these sorts implicate actions, and thus places and paths, raises
the question of whether place-path arrays must be underpinned by teleology.
If they do not, the unity of timespace as portrayed in previous chapters is
merely a contingent, occasional matter, and I cannot claim that it pervades
human life. Can aesthetic, religious, symbolic etc. significance underlie place-
path layouts independently, and even in the absence, of teleology?
I will not confront this issue systematically. I will, instead, focus on one
particularly rich and consequential account of religious significance, Eliade’s
account of sacred worlds. I hope that my comments about this one example
will make plausible the general thesis formulated at the end of this section
about the contribution that noninstrumental significance makes to spatiality
(place-path arrays).
Eliade’s views commend themselves, above all, for their grandeur. They
raise profound questions, for instance, about how to distinguish traditional
worlds from modern ones. More germane to the present context, Eliade claims
that the significance of the world for the category of human he calls “religious
man” diverges profoundly from the significance of the world for the category
he counterposes to religious man, “profane man”: the world of religious man
is through and through a cosmogony-based sacred world. It does not seem, at
first glance, that the place-path layouts of sacred worlds depend on teleology.
As a result, Eliade’s account of the world of religious man appears to endanger
the scope of my account of unified timespace. Another reason Eliade’s views
recommend themselves in the present context is their Heideggarian character.
Eliade conceived of the sacred and the profane as two modes of being-in-the-
world. His descriptions of sacred worlds are descriptions of the worlds in which
certain people experientially act. His account of sacred space is, accordingly, an
account of the spatiality—the aroundness—of sacred worlds.
Religious man lives in a sacred space, a sacred cosmos, in whose sacred-

ness everything—humans, artifacts, other living creatures, and inanimate
objects—participates. A sacred space is centered around a hierophany, which
is a manifestation of the sacred. This hierophany is an absolutely fixed point
that provides orientation for human activities. Because religious man cannot
live without orientation, the occurrence of an hierophany, the existence of a
fixed point, is tantamount to the creation of a world in which he can live. The
sacred space, or cosmos, instituted about an hierophany is at once a centered
space of inhabitation. The opposite of sacred space, profane space, is a form-
less expanse, homogeneous and neutral. Such an expanse lacks absolute fixed
points; the closest thing it possesses are privileged places which change in
accordance with the needs of the day. Profane space thus provides no orienta-
tion. It is uninhabitable and terrifying: chaos.
The absolute fixed point of an hierophany can be “discovered or pro-
jected.”81 It can also take the form of a “sacred precinct, a ceremonial house,
a city, a world,”82 a rock, or a mountain. This entity is the center of the world.
It is also a break in homogenous space: an opening through which passage
from one cosmic region to another occurs. This communication with heaven
is expressed in images of an axis mundi: a pillar, ladder, mountain, tree, or
vine. Around this axis mundi lies the world, i.e., the world of the people
whose sacred space it is.
The center of the cosmos is consecrated, usually through ritual.
This is the reason for the elaboration of techniques of orientation which, prop-
erly speaking, are techniques for the [ritual] construction of sacred space. But
we must not suppose that human work is in question here, that it is through his
own efforts that man can consecrate a space. In reality the ritual by which he
constructs a sacred space is efficacious in the measure in which it reproduces the
work of the gods.83
Religious man seeks to live near the center of the cosmos. As a result, whenever
he intends to settle a territory or to inhabit a structure, he performs a ritual of
consecration that creates a centered, inhabitable world. This consecration ritual
is effective because it repeats “the pre-eminent cosmogonic act, the Creation of
the world.”84 To ensure the endurance of the created world, a sacrificial ritual
that repeats the divine sacrifice at the Creation is also performed.85 Transformed
into the center of a cosmos, the territory or structure is then occupied. These
rituals are performed multiply, at the founding of dwellings, cities, and lands.
As a result, a people’s world always contains multiple centers; an example is
Palestine, Jerusalem, and the Temple, each the site of an hierophany.
In a sacred world, the center is the preeminent place, the place of the hiero-
phany, in relation to which the world is ordered and delimited. In this regard,
150 Chapter 3
the center—be it a house, a temple, or a city—is no mere instrument for liv-

ing, something more or less exchangeable for other such instruments. As the
center of the world, it orders life and is not easily abandoned. Other objects in
this cosmos such as artifacts, cities, cultivated fields, and things of nature have
significance by virtue of participating “in a reality that transcends them,”86
more specifically—like the consecration of the cosmic center—by virtue of
repeating an extraterrestrial archetype. Only those objects that repeat such
archetypes are meaningful; everything else is only of fleeting and fluctuating
import. The same hold of human acts. Actions are significant only insofar as
they repeat a primordial act or mythic example. The life of religious man, as
a result, is “the ceaseless repetition of gestures initiated by others”87 who were
not men. All human activity is encompassed in this system:
the archaic world knows nothing of “profane” activities: every act which has a
definite meaning—hunting, fishing, agriculture; games, conflicts, sexuality,—in
some way participates in the sacred . . . every responsible activity in pursuit of a
definite end is, for the archaic world, a ritual.88
In sum, for Eliade the sacred space of religious man is an inhabitable world
that revolves about and is ordered by reference to a sacralized center, and in
which anything that is real is either an instantiation of an extraterrestrial ar-
chetype or a repetition of an archetypical act.89 Everything outside this space
is disordered and meaningless, chaotic and terrifying. A sacred space, or cos-
mos, is populated, consequently, by objects and events whose meaningfulness
is tied to another reality.
The most general claim I make about spatiality, the place-path layout of the
world, is that it is relative to practices: which place-path arrays are anchored
at a particular arrangement of objects depends on the practices carried on at
or in relation to it, on the organized doings and sayings that compose these
practices. In previous chapters I argued, more specifically, that these arrays
are underpinned by the teleology of activity: (1) by the ends and purposes
people pursue when carrying on practices amid or in relation to particular
arrangements of objects and, behind this, (2) by the teleoaffective structures
of the practices involved—the ends, tasks, actions and combinations thereof
that are acceptable or enjoined in these practices. What Eliade’s analysis illu-
minates is that general understandings also underlie place-path arrays.
In sacred space, something’s meaning derives from its relation to an extra-
terrestrial reality; formulated in my language, its meaning reflects a general
understanding that something is real only if it instantiates or repeats an
extraterrestrial archetype. Everything that exists, consequently, is such an
instantiation or repetition. Similarly, something’s status as center of the cos-
mos reflects general understandings of hierophany and cosmology that are
articulated in the consecration and sacrificial rites through which a center is

established. These general understandings establish basic features of religious
man’s being-in-the-world: they inform how religious man experientially acts
in and encounters the world around. On their basis, everything in the world
possesses sacred meaning. According to Eliade, moreover, these understand-
ings diffuse throughout the practices of religious man.
Recent anthropology (among other disciplines) has challenged the sup-
position that everyone who carries on a particular practice shares specific
general understandings. Practitioners in a given practice interpret what they
are doing differently, and their interpretations can also diverge from the of-
ficial ones enunciated by authorities. In response to this challenge, one might
wonder whether generally shared understandings of the sorts Eliade invoked
were more common in the past. A more decisive response, however, is to
point out that the general understandings involved are common, not shared.
Indeed, almost all general understandings that organize practices, including
contemporary practices, are common. Contemporary scholars are right that
participants in the practices of religious man do not share understandings of
reality, hierophany, and cosmology. What is true, however, is that some par-
ticipants in these practices sport these understandings and that the latter are
available to and encountered by all participants. For they are articulated and
prescribed in these practices. General understandings of cosmos, life, hiero-
phany, and sacred meaningfulness as repetition may not be universally shared
by religious man, but they are afoot in his practices.
The important point presently is that this complex of general understand-
ings informs the teleological organization of religious man’s life, his pursuit
of particular combinations of ends, projects, and actions. Sacralization and
sacrificial rites are carried out, for instance, for the sake of sanctifying territory
or structures and insuring that the sanctification holds. Cosmogonic under-
standings, moreover, inform myriad projects and actions by setting standards
for people to meet and patterns for them to emulate, regardless of the ends for
which they act. Once a centered space for inhabitation is established, religious
man always seeks to ensure that important activities are properly carried out,
i.e., that these activities adhere to their archetypes. In this regard, consider
Eliade’s comments on dance:
All dances were originally sacred; in other words, they had an extrahuman
model. The model may in some cases have been a totemic or emblematic animal,
whose motions were reproduced to conjure up its concrete presence through
magic, to increase its numbers, to obtain incorporation into the animal on the
part of man. In other cases the model may have been revealed by a divinity . . .
or by a hero. The dance may be executed to acquire food, to honor the dead,
or to assure good order in the cosmos. . . . What is of interest to us is . . . [that]
152 Chapter 3
[c]horeographic rhythms have their model outside of the profane life of man;
whether they reproduce the movements of the totemic or emblematic animal, or
the motions of the stars; whether they themselves constitute rituals (labyrinthine
steps, leaps, gestures performed with ceremonial instruments)—a dance always
imitates an archetypal gesture or commemorates a mythical moment. In a word,
it is a repetition . . . 90
Cosmogonic understandings establish patterns of action and movement that

dance is supposed to instantiate.
The instrumental significance of magico-religious entities likewise reflects
general understandings. Something’s instrumental significance is its place in
human activity. Instrumental significances, accordingly, are tied to people’s
purposes and ends. Something’s instrumental value as a cloak, for instance,
reflects the fact that people act for the sake of protection from cold and
for modesty. Eliade repeatedly documents that the instrumental values of
magico-religious entities are informed by general understandings of magical
and religious matters.91 Consider, for example, this passage:
Just as the infant is placed on the ground immediately after birth so that its
true Mother shall legitimize it and confer her divine protection on it, so, too,
infants, children, and grown men are placed on the ground—or sometimes
buried in it—in case of sickness. Symbolic burial, partial or complete, has the
same magico-religious value as immersion in water, baptism. The sick person is
regenerate; he is born anew. The operation has the same efficacy in wiping out a
sin or in curing a mental malady . . . The sinner is placed in a cask or in a trench
dug in the ground, and when he emerges he is said to “be born a second time,
from his mother’s womb” . . .
Initiation includes a ritual death and resurrection. This is why, among numer-
ous primitive peoples, the novice is symbolically “killed,” laid in a trench, and
covered with leaves. When he rises from the grave he is looked upon as a new
man, for he has been brought to birth once more, this time directly by the cosmic
Mother.92
A hole or trench in the ground is regarded as a place at which to cure a sick-

ness or to become a new person. This understanding presupposes the ends of
curing sickness or becoming a new person. It also reflects general cosmogonic
understandings.
General understandings combine with teleology in the determination of
human activity. They specify ends and purposes, stipulate forms of activity,
and inform how objects and events can be used in the pursuit of particular
ends and purposes. By virtue of these effects, general understandings also
underpin spatiality.93 Interestingly enough, Eliade hypothesized that religious
man seeks to live in a sacred world in order to ensure his participation in

being, for the sake of avoiding the chaos that is tantamount to nothingness.
He thereby suggested that the sacralized life and world of religious man sub-
serves a primordial teleology, even, possibly, that teleology is rock bottom
in human life. However that may be, teleology and general understandings
deeply entwine in the life of religious man: both the ends religious man pur-
sues and how he pursues them reflect his general understandings, his general
understandings sometimes respond to his deepest ends and needs, and the
spatiality of sacred worlds is shaped by this complex of teleology and general
understanding. It is a fair bet that this entwinement characterizes human life
in general.94
General understandings shape spatialities, i.e., place-path arrays only in
conjunction with teleology. Even such all-encompassing general understand-
ings as those cosmogonic ones that underlie the sacred worlds of religious
man establish at best minimal place-path arrays. The more elaborate arrays
through which religious man proceeds reflect his ends and purposes (some of
which might rest on these general understandings). Similarly, noninstrumen-
tal significances such as aesthetic, religious, and symbolic significance do not,
by themselves, set up place-path arrays. Only in conjunction with teleology do
they do so. A religious site, for instance, is a place to mount a defense only for
people who act for the sake of protecting the centers of their worlds, just as a
crystal chalice anchors places to move about and handle things gingerly only
for those who act in order to safeguard it. Similarly, the prospect of a pleasing
tree-lined driveway makes a strip of land a place to build the driveway only
in conjunction with the desire to live amid beauty, just like the driveway’s
pleasing quality institutes a place to admire it only for those who want to
look at beautiful things. Noninstrumental significances, like sacred worlds,
determine spatiality only in conjunction with teleology. They do not, conse-
quently, challenge the basic unity of timespace. Teleology is indispensible to
the spatiality of the world.
In this chapter, I have tried to show that neither the emotional side of human
life, the widespread existence of ceremony and ritual, nor the sacredness of
the world of religious man à la Eliade undermines the teleological character of
activity. These phenomena reveal, instead, that infrequent actions, particular
aspects of action, and particular features of the world around are rooted in
something other than teleology. These nonteleological actions, aspects, and
features, however, either are relatively rare or peacefully coexist and even join
with teleology in shaping human activity. I conclude that human activity is fun-
damentally teleological. I also reaffirm that activity evinces a unified timespace
and that interwoven timespaces are pervasive in social life.
154 Chapter 3
Notes
1. This claim must be tempered. In highly traditional contexts, for instance, the
rational thing to do might be whatever tradition counsels, and any departure from
tradition might be irrational. To label an action “rational” is to imply that it is intel-
ligent, sensible, and appropriate; see below.
2. An earlier version is found in Theodore R. Schatzki, Social Practices: A Wittgen-
steinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1996), chapter 2.
3. For an argument that they should not, see Brian O’Shaunnessy, Consciousness
and the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
4. A third reason for treating worldly and mental actions as a class is that actions
of either type consist in bodily actions that are performed, and states of conscious-
ness (e.g., sensations, images) that occur, in particular contexts. A particular occur-
rence of, say, removing a diseased gall bladder consists in a series of bodily actions
performed by a surgeon at and around the operation table (in conjunction with the
bodily actions of residents and nurses), as well as in many (though probably not all
the) thoughts, feelings, and images the surgeon had while performing these actions.
Similarly, working out a math problem in one’s head on a particular occasion consists
not just in a series of images and thoughts (or simply the onslaught of the answer), but
also in whatever facial or hand gestures and absent-minded actions such as doodling
the cognizer makes. Of course, interventions in the world primarily consist in bodily
actions in particular circumstances, whereas mental actions primarily consist in the
occurrence of images and words in particular circumstances (consider what happens
when you obey an injunction to imagine looking over a landscape from the top of a
mountain). Fully considered, however, actions of both sorts consist in contextualized
bodily actions and states of consciousness. For further discussion, see Schatzki, Social
Practices, chapter 2.
5. See, for example, Alfred Schutz, “Choosing Among Projects of Action,” in Alfred
Schutz, The Problem of Social Reality. Collected Papers I, ed. Maurice Natanson (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 67–96, here 70.
6. I here side with Austin and oppose the widespread conception of intentional
actions as actions done for a reason. (See J.L. Austin, “Three Ways of Spilling Ink,”
in Philosophical Papers, second edition, ed. J.O. Urmson and G.J. Warnock (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1970 [1961]), 272–88.) In its contemporary form, the latter
conception dates at least to G.E.M. Anscombe’s Intention (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1957). Austin’s essay offers an insightful and, as far as I can tell, accurate ac-
count of the common concept of intentional action. I have no present interest, more-
over, in using a regimented or theoretical version of this concept. It would take the
present discussion too far afield to address the significant methodological issues that
attend this decision.
7. See Arthur Danto’s notion of basic actions; Arthur Danto, “Basic Actions,”
American Philosophical Quarterly 2, no. 2 (1965): 141–8.
8. For an account of action different from mine that acknowledges abilities to carry
out bodily actions, as well as what I am calling “practical understanding,” see Jennifer
Hornsby, “Agency and Actions,” in Agency and Action, ed. John Hyman and Helen
Steward (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1–23. For an account of
the role of bodily capacities in activity that parallels the role that I attribute to bodily
repertoires, see Vincent Descombes, The Mind’s Provisions: A Critique of Cognitivism,
trans. Stephen Adam Schwartz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001 [1995]).
For the initiate I might add that Descombes, drawing an analogy between bodily
capacities and what Marcel Mauss called “techniques of the body,” ties the bodily
capacities involved to the practical syllogism, not to practical intelligibility.
9. For further discussion, see Theodore R. Schatzki, The Site of the Social: A Philo-
sophical Exploration of the Constitution of Social Life and Change (University Park, Pa.:
The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 77–9.
10. Donald Davidson, “Actions, Reasons, Causes,” in Donald Davidson Essays on
Actions and Events (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 3–20.
11. Some readers will recognize this and the previous paragraph as an explication
and expansion of Heidegger’s notion of signifying (Bedeuten). On my interpretation,
Heidegger’s description of signifying is an account of the determination of activity.
See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), section 18.
12. Signifying bears an especially strong surface resemblance to a family of accounts
that distinguish between prior intentions and intentions-in-action, prospective and
immediate intentions, or intentions and executive representations. See, respectively
John Searle, Intentionality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), Myles
Brand, Intending and Acting (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984), and Kent Bach,
“A Representational Theory of Action,” Philosophical Studies 34 (1978): 361–79. One
major difference between my account of action and these is that its making sense to
someone to perform an action does not causally govern what the actor does. It instead
picks out something that the actor, because of his practical understanding, therewith
executes (“therewith” because signification is signification to an embodied agent: the
person to whom it now makes sense to X is a person who has the bodily ability to X).
Like most accounts of practical reason, moreover, the three aforementioned accounts
of intention are not interested in phenomenological saliency. They provide rational
reconstructions that use partially regimented mental condition terms familiar from
and still tied to their common use. This ad hominum characterization raises far too
many substantive and methodological issues to address here. For a taste of these is-
sues, see John Searle, “The Limits of Phenomenology,” in Heidegger, Coping, and
Cognitive Science: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, Volume 2, ed. Mark Wrathall
and Jeff Malpas (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 71–92 and Dreyfus’s response
in ibid., 323–37.
13. The idea of accessing the structure of human activity through an experience
that is a feature of that activity goes back to Wilhelm Dilthey’s notion of Innewerden.
See Wilhelm Dilthey, Grundlegung der Wissenschaft vom Menschen, der Gesellschaft
und der Geschichte. Ausarbeitungen und Entwürfe zum Zweiten Band der Einleitung
in die Geisteswissenschaften (ca. 1870–1895), Gesammelte Schriften 19, 2nd, revised
edition (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997), 62–63, 203–4, 207–8. With an
eye to my discussion of Bergson in chapter 4, I might add that this idea should be
156 Chapter 3
contrasted with Bergson’s claim that a recollection of perception/action is produced

simultaneously with every perception/action. Such recollections, Bergson claimed,
can become conscious, thereby providing ex post access to the contents of percep-
tion/action. They do not, however, provide access to the structure of consciousness
or experience. See Henri Bergson, “Memory of the Present and Future Recognition,”
in Mind-Energy, trans. H. Wildon Carr (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1920
[1908]), 134–85, here 157–8.
14. For discussions of the best available philosophical account of this complex-
ity, that of Wittgenstein, see Malcolm Budd, Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Psychology
(New York: Routledge, 1989) and Paul Johnston, Wittgenstein: Rethinking the Inner
(London: Routledge, 1993); see also my book, Social Practices: A Wittgensteinian Ap-
proach to Human Activity and the Social, chapter 2. A recent account in psychology
that largely supports Wittgenstein’s observations is Bertram F. Malle, How the Mind
Explains Behavior: Folk Explanations, Meaning, and Social Interaction (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 2004).
15. He might also have declined to use some version of “believe” and simply re-
plied that it would chase away the gloom. This points to the idea mentioned below (in
the text) that reasons for actions are, not mental conditions such as beliefs and desires,
but believed states of affairs and desired ways of being, i.e., the contents of beliefs and
desires. For versions of the idea that what motivates actions are not mental conditions,
see Rudiger Bitner, Doing Things for Reasons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001),
Jonathan Dancy, Practical Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), and Fred-
erick Stoutland, “The Real Reasons,” in Human Action, Deliberation and Causation,
ed. J. Bransen and S.E. Cuypers (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998), 43–66.
16. This claim implies that explanations of actions by reasons articulate the teleolo-
gies as well as the motivations that govern behavior. It implies, in other words, that
such explanations are teleological-motivational in character. Depending on context,
actual reason explanations can cite ways of being, states of affairs, or both (and maybe
also emotions—see section 2). In analyzing reason explanations as encompassing
both teleology and motivation, I avoid the either-or of forward-looking teleological
explanations versus backward-looking normative explanations that is posed by a re-
cent analyst of teleological explanations. See Scott Sehon, Teleological Realism: Mind,
Agency, and Explanation (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), 176–7.
17. For additional discussion of the issues touched on in this and the previous
paragraph, see Theodore R. Schatzki, “Coping with Others with Folk Psychology,” in
Heidegger, Coping, and Cognitive Science: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, Volume
2, ed. Wrathall and Malpas, 29–52.
18. Heidegger, by the way, believed that all actions are determined by emotions
or moods, if only by a “pallid, evenly balanced lack of mood, which . . . is far from
nothing at all” (SZ 134).
19. Shaker Sunday services were locally famous events which interested outsiders
could witness. After initial words and a sermon from a village elder, Shakers rose and
carried out set dances. After a while these dances broke down and individual Shakers
began whirling about and crying out on their own. The ensuing pandemonium could
continue for hours and be heard miles away. The Shakers understood all this whirling
about, writhing on the floor, and crying out as a form of worship to which supernatu-
ral powers had led them. The ability so to dance was understood as a gift from God,
a sign of divine anointment.
20. This last example, repeatedly analyzed in the literature, was introduced by Ro-
salind Hursthouse in “Arational Actions,” The Journal of Philosophy 88, no. 2 (1991):
57–68.
21. As I will explain in chapter 4, this formulation is misleading. For the sake of clarity,
however, I will suppress the accurate, but more complicated formulation until then.
22. See Davidson, “Actions, Reasons, and Causes” and Donald Davidson, “Hume’s
Cognitive Theory of Pride,” in Donald Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 277–90.
23. Hursthouse, “Arational Actions,” 59.
24. David Charles, “Emotion, Cognition, Action,” in Agency and Action, ed. John
Hyman and Helen Steward (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 105–36,
here footnote 34, 132–3.
25. Peter Goldie, “Explaining Expressions of Emotion,” Mind 109, no. 433 (2000):
25–38 and, more expansively, his The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000), chapter 5.
26. Desireless cases such as these are emphasized in Monika Betzler, “Expressive
Actions,” Inquiry 52, no. 3 (2009): 272–92. According to Betzler, emotions rationalize
actions in the absence of desire by reference both to engagements with people and
things to which actors are committed and to the sense of identity that these com-
mitted engagements provide. She believes that emotions rationalize a large portion
of emotional actions in this way. I will not pursue the point further, but each of the
cases she describes fall into one or another of the three ways mentioned in this sec-
tion in which emotions determine actions. The idea that emotions relate to actions
through values and valuation is also found in Elisa A. Hurley, “Working Passions:
Emotions and Creative Engagement with Value,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 44
(2007): 79–104.
27. On this point I agree with Sabine A. Döring, “Explaining Action by Emotion,”
The Philosophical Quarterly 53, no. 211 (2003): 214–30. One must also distinguish
cases sans desire where perception and emotion determine what makes sense to
someone to do from cases sans desire where perception and emotion jointly cause an
emotional reaction (see below).
28. See Martin Hollis, “Reason and Ritual,” in Rationality, ed. Bryan Wilson (Ox-
ford: Blackwell, 1970), 221–39.
29. The following example is inspired by a real incident I witnessed and by a poem
by Charles Bukowski titled “hot,” in Burning in Water Drowning in Flames. Selected
Poems 1955–1973 (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 161–2.
30. John McDowell, “Reason and Action,” Philosophical Investigations V, no. 4
(1982): 301–5.
31. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard
McKeon, trans. W.D. Ross (New York: Random House, 1941), 1139 a31.
32. Kovach and de Lancey argue that, for a large central class of emotions, the
emotional determination of action works via “affect programs” that are evolutionarily
158 Chapter 3
wired into the brain and operate largely independently of cognitive capabilities. Adam
Kovach and Craig de Lancey, “On Emotions and the Explanation of Behavior,” Nous
39, no. 1 (2005): 106–22.
33. Döring, “Explaining Action by Emotion,” 223–5.
34. Hursthouse, “Arational Actions,” 58, 62.
35. I might mention that Goldie defends his version of the standard account by
radically restricting what I label the third category of emotional performance. All
emotional actions, he claims, are explained by desires and beliefs; involuntary doings
alone can be caused by emotions. The third category of emotional performance thus
comprises only such involuntary bodily doings as Duchenne smiles when happy, facial
contortions when fearful, and cascades of tears when grieving. (These involuntary do-
ings are to be distinguished from “bodily changes that are part of the emotion” such
as responses of the autonomic nervous system, hormonal changes, and muscular reac-
tions such as trembling and flinching.) Goldie thus defends the standard account by
reclassifying most emotional actions of the third type as cases of the first. This is not
the place to consider Goldie’s creative interpretation of the beliefs and desires needed
to explain the reclassified actions.
36. Another example is Élisabeth Pacherie’s description of emotional actions of
the third sort as “impulsive”: spontaneous, unratiocinated. Pacherie explains their
impulsive character as follows. Emotions are defined by action tendencies; fleeing,
for instance, defines fear. The action-tendency essence of emotion implies that an
(emotional) perception of an object or event as, say, dangerous is equivalent to en-
countering this object or event as something from which to flee. Because of this, an
emotional perception immediately gives rise to a motor representation that causes
action; perceiving the bear as dangerous, thus as something to flee, immediately
leads to fleeing. See Élisabeth Pacherie, “The Role of Emotions in the Explanation of
Action,” in European Review of Philosophy, 5: Emotion and Action (Stanford: CSLA
Publications, 2002), 53–91, here section 4.2. On attributing action tendencies to emo-
tions, also see also Craig DeLancey, “Real Emotions,” Philosophical Psychology 11, no.
4 (1998): 467–87.
37. Could emotional actions of the third type have been more prevalent in earlier
historical eras? Readers of, for example, Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process: So-
ciogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (revised edition, trans. Edmund Jephcott,
ed. Eric Dunning, Johan Goudsblom and Stephen Mennell [Oxford: Blackwell, 1994
(1939)]) might think that direct emotional expression was more prevalent in the un-
civilized body. I do not know the answer to this question. Even if it is Yes, limits exist
as to how much atemporal activity of this sort social life can tolerate.
38. On the history of the expression “ritual,” see Talal Asad “Toward a Genealogy
of the Concept of Ritual,” in Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in
Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 55–79.
39. These analyses employ notions of expression that are related to but to different
degrees narrower than prominent philosophical notions of expression. Examples of
the latter are Wilhelm Dilthey’s idea that acts, texts, and built structures (objective
spirit) express purposes, values, and ideas, Wittgenstein’s idea that doings and say-
ings express states of consciousness, emotions, and cognitive conditions, and Taylor’s
broad conception of the expressive nature of language and meaning. See Wilhelm
Dilthey, Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften, Gesam-
melte Schriften VII (Tübingen: B.G. Teubner, 1927), Joachim Schulte, Experience and
Expression: Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1993), and Charles Taylor, “Language and Human Nature,” in his Mind and Language:
Philosophical Papers 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 215–47.
40. Further complicating the situation was the fact that some philosophers equated
teleology with rationality. See, for example, I.C. Jarvie and Joseph Agassi, “The Prob-
lem with the Rationality of Magic,” in Rationality, ed. Bryan R. Wilson, 172–93, here
173.
41. See, for example, Donald Davidson, “Radical Interpretation,” in Donald Da-
vidson, Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 125–39 and
the collection Rationality and Relativism, ed. Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982).
42. Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough,” in Ludwig Witt-
genstein, Philosophical Occasions 1912–1951, ed. James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 118–55. Clause (3) combines several of Wittgenstein’s
remarks.
43. See, for instance, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthet-
ics, Psychology & Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978).
44. See, above all, Peter Winch, “Understanding a Primitive Society,” American
Philosophical Quarterly 1 (1964): 307–24.
45. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 1937).
46. See, for example, John Cook, “Magic, Witchcraft and Science,” Philosophical
Investigations 6, no. 1 (1983): 2–36, H. Mounce, “Understanding a Primitive Society,”
Philosophy 48, no. 186 (1983): 347–62, Alfred Ayer, Wittgenstein (London: Weidenfeld
and Nicolson, 1980), and Berel Dov Lerner, Rules, Magic, and Instrumental Reason
(London: Routledge, 2002).
47. Brian R. Clack, Wittgenstein, Frazer and Religion (New York: Palgrave, 1999) and
Frank Cioffi, “Wittgenstein on Making Homeopathic Magic Clear,” in his Wittgenstein
on Freud and Frazer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 155–82.
48. Alice Ambrose, Wittgenstein’s Lectures 1932–5 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1979), 33.
49. Charles Taylor, “Rationality,” in Rationality and Relativism, ed. Martin Hollis
and Steven Lukes, 87–105.
50. For a useful compact summary of this development, see Max Horkheimer, The
Eclipse of Reason (New York: Continuum, 1974 [1947]).
51. On this, see also David Hoy, “Ethnocentrism and Objectivity,” in Objectivity
and Its Other, ed. Wolfgang Natter, Theodore R. Schatzki, and John Paul Jones III
(New York: Guilford, 1995), 113–36.
52. On this, see Lerner, Rules, Magic, and Instrumental Reason, chapter 10.
53. Pascal Boyer maintains, for instance, that people insist on the exact repetition
of rituals because they seek certain results and fear that even slight deviations will
cause rituals not to achieve these results. See Pascal Boyer, Tradition as Truth and
160 Chapter 3
Communication: A Cognitive Description of Traditional Discourse (Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press, 1990), 17.
54. Edmund Leach, “Ritual,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences
(New York: The Free Press, 1968), 523–4.
55. John Beattie, “Understanding Ritual,” in Rationality, ed. Bryan R. Wilson,
240–68, here 246. Compare Beattie’s assertion to Malinowski’s characterization of
religion, magic, and practical behavior as, respectively, purely expressive, a mix of
expression and teleology, and purely teleological; Bronislav Malinowski, “Magic, Sci-
ence, and Religion,” in Science, Religion, and Reality, ed. Rodney Needham (London:
Sheldon Press, 1926), 19–84.
56. See John Beattie, “Ritual and Social Change,” Man (N.S.) 1 (1966): 60–74; also
Beattie, “Understanding Ritual.”
57. Beattie, “Ritual and Social Change,” 72.
58. Ibid., 78.
59. In this context, it is worth mentioning Rom Harré’s idea that social formations
are jointly constituted by “practical” and “expressive” orders. The practical order is
made up of those aspects of social activity that are oriented toward the fulfillment of
biological and material ends, whereas the expressive order is made up of those aspects
that are oriented toward “such ends as the presentation of the self as valuable and
worth of respect” (25; cf. Erving Goffman’s notion of the presentation of self). The
distinction between the two orders is thus rooted in a distinction between types of
ends people pursue. See Rom Harré, Social Being, second edition, (Oxford: Blackwell,
1993 [1979]), chapters 1 and 7.
60. The Blessing of the Hounds is a traditional blessing spoken by a priest or
minister at the beginning of the hunting season. Its practice follows the tradition of
honoring Saint Hubert, the patron saint of hunters. This blessing typically occurs in
front of a hunting lodge before the assembled and festively clad members of the lodge
together with their horses and dogs. At the Iroquois Hunt Club in Lexington, the
Episcopal Bishop of the Diocese of Lexington stands on a circular stone tablet before
old Grimes Mill (the lodge), semi-circularly surrounded by approximately one hun-
dred officers and members of the lodge who are dressed, respectively, in red or black
formal hunting attire. The hounds are brought into the circle, and the Bishop gives
the fifteen minute Blessing. After a short prayer and sermon, the horses and hounds
are blessed. The riders then come forward individually, kneel on a cushion in front of
the Bishop, and receive their blessings, along with a St. Hubert medal that the Bishop
places around their neck. The first hunt then commences. The event is accompanied
by music provided by local musicians.
61. This is an increasingly popular ritual today that dates back centuries. People
commit their fears, hopes, regrets, and the like to pieces of paper that are burned to
symbolize spiritual cleansing. The ritual is not restricted to New Year’s Eve, but can
also accompany life-passage ceremonies such as weddings. It can also be carried out in
more or less complicated forms, from individuals doing it alone to church ceremonies
where people take turns going to the altar to light their papers with the support of all
in attendance. These activities can be supplemented by related activities such as com-
mitting goals to, and discussing personal flaws on, additional pieces of paper.
62. Steven Lukes, “Political Ritual and Social Integration,” Sociology 9 (1975):
289–308, here 291.
63. Gilbert Lewis, Day of Shining Red: An Essay in Understanding Ritual (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), chapter 1.
64. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989), 44–5.
65. Wendy James, The Ceremonial Animal: A New Portrait of Anthropology (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 7. If this is true, why did I begin the current
subsection with a list of ceremonies? The plausibility of any definition of ceremony
rests partly on its fitting paradigmatic examples—hence the list. Nothing, however,
precludes a plausible definition from attributing ceremony broadly to social life.
66. Ibid., 92.
67. Ibid., 243.
68. David Parkin, “Ritual as Spatial Direction and Bodily Division,” in Under-
standing Rituals, ed. Daniel de Coppet (London: Routledge, 1992), 11–25. Arguing
that the spatial and directional qualities of movement are the basis of proper and
effective ritual, Parkin defines ritual as “formulaic spatiality carried out by groups
conscious of its imperative or compulsory nature” (18).
69. James, The Ceremonial Animal, 78.
70. Ibid.
71. Ibid., 243.
72. Ibid., 107.
73. Marc Augé has attributed to social life generally a concept of ritual that paral-
lels James’s. (Marc Augé, An Anthropology for Contemporaneous Worlds, trans. Amy
Jacobs [Stanford: Stanford Press, 1999 (1994)].) Claiming that ritual is essentially
concerned with the constitution of relative identities and othernesses, Augé writes that
rituals comprise material spaces, measurable durations, symbolic and specific ends,
varied effects (intended and unintended), formal constraints, and temporal phases.
He also holds that the ritual relation to the world is “consubstantial with the social”
(84). What he means is that the social is the realm of the demarcation and recognition
of otherness and identity. This definition of the social is too narrow for the purposes
of this book. I agree with Augé, however, that the construction of identity and other-
ness is pervasive in social life. Indeed, all practices and practice-arrangement bundles
institute identities and othernesses, for instance, participant/member and nonpartici-
pant/nonmember, not to speak of the roles that practices and bundles encompass. (I
disagree with Augé, however, that the symbolic end of all practices and bundles is this
construction.) It is useful to add the construction of identity and otherness to James’s
list of the features of ritual.
74. James does not say what rules are. It might be that, like Humphrey and Laid-
law, she conceptualizes them à la Parsons, Giddens, and Searle as implicit constitutive
directives and formulae and not à la Wittgenstein as formulated regulative prescrip-
tions and instructions as in my text. This is not the place to contest the former no-
tion of rules. See, however, Barry Barnes, The Elements of Social Theory (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1995), chapter 3 and the brief remarks in Schatzki, Social
Practices, 50–1.
162 Chapter 3
75. For a detailed and insightful discussion of the teleological dimension of ritual,
see Caroline Humphrey and James Laidlaw, The Archetypal Actions of Ritual. A Theory
of Ritual Illustrated by the Jain Rite of Worship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994),
chapter 7. Humphrey and Laidlaw claim that people almost always carry out ritual ac-
tions for the sake of something. The purposes involved can be personal or those that
are formulated in texts or by authority figures (as the purposes of the ritual). Hum-
phrey and Laidlaw also intriguingly argue (in chapter 4) that rituals comprise actions
whose identities derive, not from the intentions of participants, but from constitutive
rules that determine what actions it is that people perform when they carry out ritu-
als. Rules accomplish this, moreover, independently of the intentions and purposes
of the participants. Humphrey and Laidlaw hold that it is this “objective” quality of
ritual actions, the fact that rules and not people’s purposes and intentions define what
people do, that enables practitioners to adopt varied purposes in performing, and to
entertain varying interpretations of the meaning of, these actions.
76. Max Weber, Soziologische Grundbegriffe (Tübingen: J.C. B. Mohr, 1960), 44.
77. See Weber’s characterization of a traditional action as “very often simply a dull
[dumpfe] reacting to familiar stimuli that proceeds according to an already lived-into
disposition [Einstellung].” Ibid.
78. At least in contemporary societies, in fact, the more complex a ceremony or
ritual is the less possible it is that a person can participate in it a-purposefully. An
inverse relationship exists between, on the one hand, how much knowledge people
possess of their practices, how much they think about which practices to carry on, and
the range of alternatives available to them and, on the other, how likely they carry out
ceremonies or rituals purposelessly.
79. James suggests that one feature of ceremony and ritual is that they are pat-
terned activities into which people try to fit themselves, as opposed to organized
activities that arise from people’s purposive attempt to bring them about (James, The
Ceremonial Animal, p. 258). This is an important contrast famously dating back at
least to Ferdinand Tonnies’s distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (Com-
munity and Association, trans. Charles P. Loomis (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1955 [1887]). Humphrey and Laidlaw also base their account of ritual on it. This
feature of ceremonies and rituals is preserved in my account of how the organizations
of ceremonial and ritual practices shape activity.
80. Rodney Needham, “Wittgenstein and Ritual,” in Exemplars (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1985), 149–87, here 160. The quote is from Arthur Waley,
Analects of Confucius (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1938), 57.
81. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Wil-
lard R. Trask (New York: Harcourt, 1987 [1957]), 22.
82. Ibid., 37.
83. Ibid., 29.
84. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard R. Trask (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 1971 [1949]), 18.
85. For detailed discussion of these sacrificial rites, see Mircea Eliade, Commen-
taires sur la Légende de maître Manole, trans. Alain Paruit (Paris: L’Herne, 1994).
86. Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, 4.
87. Ibid., 5.
88. Ibid., 21–2.
89. For a discussion of exemplary ritual repetition, see Connerton, How Societies
Remember, chapter 2, section 5.
90. Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, 28–9.
91. In this regard, consider the chapter Eliade devotes to sacred stones in Patterns
of Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: Meridian Books, 1958),
chapter 6.
92. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 143–4. Italics in original.
93. The category of general understanding includes symbolic understandings.
Symbolic understandings specify what is a symbol of what, for instance, the moon as
a symbol of becoming, vegetation as a symbol of renewal, and openings at the tops of
house as symbols of a communicative opening to a different reality. An account such
as Eliade’s that claims that “theories,” i.e., general understandings underlie the signifi-
cance of the world must be distinguished from an account such as one of Lefebvre’s
that treats the social world as a text composed of signals, signs, and symbols that actors
must read: “In the village everything is symbolic, and reveals the truth of symbolism:
ancient and powerful, strongly attached to things, and also to rhythms. Houses, fields,
trees, sky, mountains or the sea are not simply or solely themselves. Cosmic and vital
rhythms surround them; they contain subtle resonances; every ‘thing’ is part of a cho-
rus. Space and soil symbolize the community; the church sets the time and symbol-
izes, in the cemetery, the world, life and death. In this poignantly archaic world, daily
life presents itself in all simplicity, both utterly quotidian and inseparable from its
resonances.” (Henri Lefebvre, “The Social Text,” in Henri Lefebvre: Selected Writings,
ed. Stuart Elden [London: Continuum, 2003], 88–92, here 89.)
94. If so, then it follows, stated grossly and in terms parallel to the above discussion
of teleology and expression, that the transition from premodernity to modernity—in
Eliade’s terms, from religious man to profane man—is not an ascension of the prior-
ity of teleology over general understandings but a switch in dominant general under-
standings.

The Timespace of Human Activity On Performance, Society, and History As Indeterminate Teleological Events

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T HE ACCOUNT OF ACTIVITY TIMESPACE DEVELOPED in the previous two chapters

logical aspects, it remains centrally and pervasively teleological.

The present chapter examines the bearing of emotions on human activity,

situation. Nothing like this follows from identifying an activity as teleological.

1. Outline of a Theory of Human Activity

Discussing the extra-teleological dimensions of human activity and their rela-

one to perform—regardless of whether it is worldly or mental—depends on

By an “emotional activity” I mean an activity among whose determinants is one

Some of these actions are patently emotional given my descriptions of them

example, the scholar’s pride might cause a colleague’s mention of an accom-

that the emotional determination of activity is socially circumscribed does

3. Ceremony and Ritual

ceremony and ritual constitute “teleology-free zones of sociality” (apologies

Instrumental Versus Expressive Religious and Magical Activities

activities. In his so-called Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, he wrote, inter

ing to label the practices of past or pre-westernized peoples “magic,” “ritual,”

Indeed, John Beattie forcefully claimed that no “present-day” anthropolo-

anthropologists such as Leach to cite expression or something similar as what

center of gravity of rituals is expression and symbolism conceded that people

The sociologist Steven Lukes defines ritual as “rule-governed activity of

consignment of ritual to religion and magic, buoyed by the modern western

formance. Over time, however, myriad anthropologists have described how

of the performances of ceremonies and rituals, achievements ipso facto real-

to custom or norm; it can also be powerful teleological impetus. It is worth

Religious man lives in a sacred space, a sacred cosmos, in whose sacred-

the center—be it a house, a temple, or a city—is no mere instrument for liv-

articulated in the consecration and sacrificial rites through which a center is

Cosmogonic understandings establish patterns of action and movement that

A hole or trench in the ground is regarded as a place at which to cure a sick-

man seeks to live in a sacred world in order to ensure his participation in

contrasted with Bergson’s claim that a recollection of perception/action is produced

Communication: A Cognitive Description of Traditional Discourse (Cambridge: Cam-

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