Home Issues V-1 Symposia. The characteristic form of human action is an extemporaneous performance or improvisational exertion. An ordinary conversation what C. But since our inquiry into this range of considerations turns on appealing to our experience as improvisational actors in the overlapping situations of everyday life, this appeal itself needs to be considered.
Accordingly, the appeal to experience is here interrogated with the aid of what pragmatists but also perfectionists such as Stanley Cavell say about it. In doing so, he hopes to illuminate the inherently creative dimension of human action, wherever it unfolds. The actions, gestures, and utterances of human beings in everyday life are far from mindless routines. To some extent, they are almost always creative responses to dramatic situations cf. Joas , Ch. They are, at the very least, unrehearsed responses, that is, improvised or extemporaneous ones.
The phrasing of such a person can arguably be as deft as that of Frank Sinatra when shaping a musical phrase Iseminger Without question, deeply sedimented habits make possible extemporaneous creativity, so much so that it is easy to allow the operation of such habits to eclipse our appreciation or even awareness of the creativity inherent in our unrehearsed exertions. The innate intelligence of the human animal, precisely as a meshwork of dispositions, is, however, an organ of novelty, all the more so human intelligence in its more mature form.
Present action is, to repeat, not simply the mechanical re-enactment of established dispositions; rather it tends to be an innovative manner of responding to the immanent demands of an unfolding drama. The roots of it in the past should not obscure from us the fruits just now forming themselves in the ever present spring of the living present CP 5.
The spontaneity and plasticity of the child can be preserved by or, to some extent, recovered by, the adult. As much as action reveals the presence of habits, it can also alter the form of those habits, if only in subtle and virtually imperceptible ways.
