Action does not merely realize intentions. Action helps constitute intentions.
Joas’s central move is to reject the picture in which a fully formed actor first chooses an end, then selects means, then commands the body to execute the plan. Human action is often more recursive: goals become definite only as the actor engages a situation.
Joas: Situated embodied activity ↔ emergent ends ↔ revised activity
Two dominant models both treat action as implementation.
Preferences + beliefs → choice
The actor supposedly knows what is wanted and computes a suitable means.
Useful locally; misleading when promoted into a general anthropology.
Norm + role + situation → appropriate conduct
The actor follows a socially available orientation rather than maximizing utility.
Joas’s objection is parallel: the governing orientation still appears too fully constituted before action begins.
Four inheritances, one Joasian construction.
Joas does not merely add these thinkers together. Each repairs a different defect in classical action theory. The final synthesis is his.
Social act
The primitive unit is not an isolated mind but coordinated conduct among organisms.
Use in Joas: sociality enters the constitution of agency itself.
Role-taking
I can become an object to myself by taking the attitude of the other toward me.
Use in Joas: reflexivity is socially generated, not presocial.
I / Me
The Me carries organized expectations; the I is the response not fully knowable beforehand.
Use in Joas: ordinary action contains structured indeterminacy.
Practical intersubjectivity
Joas’s reconstruction of Mead: practical coordination precedes fully constituted reflective subjects.
Lived body
The body is not merely an object possessed by consciousness. It is the actor’s practical standpoint on the world.
Prereflective intentionality
Directedness need not begin as an explicit proposition or fully formed goal.
Body schema
Acquired bodily capacities organize a field of possible action before deliberation.
Schilder is important to the immediate genealogy of the body-schema discussion; Merleau-Ponty supplies the anti-dualist phenomenology.
Action schemes
Cognitive structures develop through organized activity rather than merely preceding it.
Assimilation / accommodation
Existing schemes organize experience; resistant situations force the scheme itself to change.
Decentration
Objectivity increases through coordination of perspectives rather than escape from perspective as such.
Habit
Most conduct proceeds through acquired organizations of action rather than continuous calculation.
Problematic situation
Reflection becomes salient when the ongoing organization of action no longer suffices.
Reconstruction
Inquiry does not merely discover a pre-given answer; it reorganizes the situation and the actor’s ends-in-view.
Endogenesis of goals
Joas’s distinctive synthesis: intentions, ends, and self-understandings can become specified and revised within the course of situated, embodied, socially mediated action.
→ Creative action
Joas replaces three hidden assumptions.
| Classical assumption | Joas’s replacement | Principal conceptual ancestry |
|---|---|---|
| Ends precede conduct | Situated intentionality | Dewey + pragmatism; strengthened by Merleau-Ponty |
| Mind commands body | Corporeal agency | Merleau-Ponty + Schilder |
| Individuals precede social relations | Primary sociality | Mead |
| Mature cognition is simply present | Developmental construction | Piaget |
+ fixed end
+ instrumental body
+ corporeality
+ sociality
+ development
Creativity appears when an existing organization does not fully determine what comes next.
The novelty is neither arbitrary nor fully predetermined. It is conditioned by acquired capacities, material constraints, social relations, and the emerging structure of the situation.
Creative action is ordinary before it is heroic.
Conversation
You enter intending to state disagreement. The other person’s response changes what you take the disagreement to be. The goal shifts from rebuttal to clarification or synthesis.
Mead: role-taking. Merleau-Ponty: tone and gesture. Piaget: decentration. Joas: goal revision in action.
Writing
You begin to explain X. During composition, a distinction appears that reveals Y as the actual problem. The writing process changes the object of the writing.
Joasian point: means can specify or transform ends.
Skilled performance
A musician improvises because habits are deeply sedimented, not absent. Expertise creates a larger structured repertoire for responsive departure.
Corporeality: creativity presupposes bodily habit.
Mini switchboard: remove a building block
Agency is not sovereignty.
Joas’s actor is neither determined by structure nor mysteriously exempt from causality. Freedom is better understood as a capacity for reconstructing conduct when established organizations fail.
The more useful question is not “How free is the actor from the situation?” but “What capacities does the situation make available for creative reconstruction?”
Collective action can also discover its ends.
Joas scales the theory upward. Institutions are not merely constraints imposed on actors, nor are they simply optimal solutions designed in advance. They can be sedimented results of collective attempts to reconstruct problematic situations.
This gives democracy an experimental dimension. A polity need not merely aggregate fixed preferences. Under suitable conditions, public interaction can alter what participants understand their interests and ends to be.
One anti-Cartesian convergence, four distinct problems.
| Thinker | Primary problem | Contribution to Joas |
|---|---|---|
| Mead | How do mind, meaning, self, and society emerge from social action? | Social constitution, role-taking, reflexivity, structured novelty |
| Merleau-Ponty | How can perception and intentionality be understood without Cartesian dualism? | Lived body, prereflective directedness, bodily availability |
| Piaget | How do cognitive structures and objectivity develop? | Construction through action, accommodation, decentration |
| Dewey | How does intelligent action reconstruct indeterminate situations? | Habit, problem, inquiry, ends-in-view, reconstruction |
| Joas | What model of human action follows if these anti-Cartesian lessons are taken seriously? | Creative action: goals and selves can emerge and change within conduct |
Orientation
This page is an interpretive synthesis rather than a substitute for Joas’s texts. The main structural claims follow the published organization and descriptions of The Creativity of Action and Joas’s reconstruction of Mead.
- Hans Joas, The Creativity of Action, University of Chicago Press / Bibliovault: book record and contents.
- Hans Joas, G. H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-examination of His Thought, Suhrkamp rights page: publisher description.
- George Herbert Mead, “The Definition of the Psychical”: Mead Project text.