If the intellectualist is right that understanding saturates the space of agency, the anti-intellectualist is right that there is also understanding beyond the limits of our agency. Stanley (2011, cited in Noë this collection) relied on the opposition between the personal and the subpersonal; he supposed that what makes a mere reflex, which is subpersonal, an action, which is personal, is that it is guided by knowledge or reason. But the opposition between reflex and action is not exhaustive, and the crucial dimension is not that of the contrast between the personal and the subpersonal. Consider conversation, as an example. We can characterize conversation as a personal-level action. But there is a way of describing the phenomenon that defies such characterization. When two people talk they adopt similar postures, they pause at coordinated intervals, they adjust their volumes to match each other, they move their eyes and modify their dialects, all in ways that are governed by their interaction (see Shockley et al. 2009 for a review of this literature). Talking is what I elsewhere call an “organized activity” (Noë in press). One remarkable feature of organized activities, in this sense, is that they are not guided by the participants or authored by them. Another is that they are carried on spontaneously and without deliberate control. And yet another is that they are clearly domains in which highly sophisticated cognitive capacities—looking, listening, paying attention, moving, undergoing—are put to work.
Notice: I said above that talking, in the sense I have in mind, is not a personal-level activity. What I mean by this is that the sort of tight coupling and temporal dynamics, the sort of organization we see at work when people talk, is not best characterized at the level of minutes, hours, choices, etc. that normally characterize the personal level. But nor is this a phenomenon of the subpersonal level. For one thing, we aren’t interested in something happening in the nervous system of one individual. We are interested in something encompassing two (or more) people. For another, we aren’t interested in processes unfolding at time-scales of milliseconds. No. We are interested in what people do, but in a manner that is truly beyond agency. We are interested, here, in a phenomenon of the embodiment level (as distinct from the subpersonal or the personal level).
And yet we remain, when thinking about conversation—or any other organized activity—very much in a domain where we can and must speak of cognitive achievement, understanding, skill, and so on.
One upshot of these considerations, then, is that while understanding, as I argued above, is a necessary condition of agency, it is also present beyond its limits. Another is that understanding beyond the limits of agency cannot be understood individualistically. This is obvious in the case of intrinsically social activities, like conversation, but it is also true for organized activities that can be carried out by solitary individuals (such as seeing, for example).
The thing that anti-intellectualism gets right, as I see it, is the appreciation that a great deal of what we do, isn’t really done by us: activity happens to us; we find ourselves organized. We are made what we are in the setting of organized activities.
From the standpoint of the theory of organized activities—presented in more detail in Noë (in press)—we are creatures who are from the very beginning caught up in world and other-involving organized activities; these activities form the lived substrate of our biographical lives as persons. Actionism, in these ways, is committed to a radical form of anti-individualism.