THE DEFINITION OF EFFICACY

The Experience of Efficacy and the Differentiation of the Experiences of Acting and Happening

A distinction may be drawn between human act and act of man. In this way action is distinguished from all the other actualizations taking place in man (act of man) by means of the attributive human. It seems, however, that this distinction has a merely verbal significance and serves to accentuate rather than to explain the difference. For human act, or, equivalently, "human acting," is also an act of man.

Hence, it is first necessary to demonstrate why and when the act of man is not human acting; for only then will it be possible to understand why human acting alone is the acting proper to man, that it alone corresponds to what actually is contained in the structure of "man-acts." We shall now endeavor to find such an explanation while adhering to our initial position as defined above.

Thus, the starting point in our argument will be the experiential difference that is discernible in the totality of man's dynamism between man's acting and what happens in man. An examination of the facts discloses that it is the moment of efficacy that determines this fundamental difference. In this case the moment of efficacy is to be understood as the having of the experience of "being the actor." This experience discriminates man's acting from everything that merely happens in him.

It also explains the dynamic contraposition of facts and structures, in which activeness and passiveness are distinctly manifest. When acting I have the experience of myself as the agent responsible for this particular form of the

dynamization of myself as the subject. When there is something happening in me, then the dynamism is imparted without the efficacious participation of my ego. This is precisely the reason why we speak of the facts of the latter kind as of something that happens in man, indicating thereby that then the dynamism is not accompanied by efficacy, by the efficacious participation of man. It is thus that in the dynanlism of man there appears the essential difference arising from having the experience of efficacy. On the one hand, there is that form of the human dynamism in which man himself is the agent, that is to say, he is the conscious cause of his own causation;

this form we grasp by the expression, "man acts." On the other hand, there is that form of human dynamism in which man is not aware of his efficacy and does not experience it; this we express by "something happens in man."

The contraposition of acting and happening, of activeness and passiveness, brings forth still another contraposition that arises from having, or not having, the

experience of efficacy. Objective efficacy is the correlate of the experience of efficacy, for having this experience opens to our insight the structure of the efficacious ego. But not having the experience of efficacy - when the ego does not efficaciously participate in all that only happens in man - is by no means equivalent to the absence of objective causation. When something happens, when an inner change takes place in man, it must have a cause. Experience, in particular the inner experience, only supplies the evidence that the ego is not the cause in the manner that it is in an action, in acting.

The Experience of Efficacy and the Causal Relation of Person and Action We now see that the moment of efficacy, which is present in acting and absent in happening, does not at once explain what efficacy is, but only points to the

specifically dynamic structure of human acting as well as of the one who acts. Having the experience of himself as the agent the actor discovers himself to be at the origin of his acting. It is upon him that the existence of acting as such depends: in him it has its origin, and he sustains its existence. To be the cause means to produce an effect and to sustain its existence, its becoming and its being. Man is thus in a wholly experiential way the cause of his acting. There is between person and action a

sensibly experiential, causal relation, which brings the person, that is to say, every concrete human ego, to recognize his action to be the result of his efficacy; in this sense he must accept his actions as his own property and also, primarily because of their moral nature, as the domain of his responsibility. Both the responsibility and the sense of property invest with a special quality the causation itself and the

efficacy itself of the acting person. The students of the problems of causality, on the one hand, and psychologists, on the other, often note that human acting is in fact the only complete experience of what has been called by Aristotle "efficient causation." Without going into the details of this thesis, we have at any rate to accept that part of it which asserts the special self-evidence of man's efficient causation in acting, the efficient causation of the acting person.

The Experience of Efficacy and Man's Transcendence of His Acting

Efficacy itself as the relation of cause and effect leads us to the objective order of being and existence and is thus of an existential nature. In this case efficacy is simultaneously an experience. There lies the source of the specific empirical significance of human efficacy related with acting. For, as already mentioned, the efficacy of man draws him, on the one hand, into that form of his dynamism which consists in acting and, on the other, it allows him to remain above this dynamism and this acting. In the structure of "man-acts" we also have what may be defined as the immanence of man in his own acting and at the same time what has to be regarded as his transcendence relatively to this acting. The moment of efficacy, the experience of efficacy, brings forth first of all the transcendence of man relatively to his own acting. But then the transcendence proper to the experience had in being the agent of acting passes into the immanence of the experience of acting itself:

when I act, I am wholly engaged in my acting, in that dynamization of the ego to which my own efficacy has contributed. The one could not be accomplished without the other. The "efficacious ego" and the "acting ego" each time form a dynamic synthesis and a dynamic unity in any particular action. It is the synthesis and unity of person and action.

This unity, however, neither obscures nor abolishes the differences. It is here that we come to the distinguishing trait in the structure of "man-acts," the trait that sets it off essentially from the structure of "some thing-happens-in-man." Being the agent, man is definitely the subject in his acting. When something happens, it is not man but the "something" that stands out as the agent while man remains as the passive subject. He experiences passively his own dynamism. What takes place in him cannot be, on the evidence of experience, defined as acting, even though it is still some sort of actualization of his own potentiality. The term "act" is not as strictly exfoliated phenomenologically as is acting or even action. Its reference is not to any actualization, to any dynamization of the subject that is man, but only to that

actualization or dynamism in which man is active as the ego: the man who is the ego has the experience of himself, as the agent. According to the evidence of the integral experience it is then, and only then, that man performs an action.

The Experience of Efficacy and the Differentiation of Action out of Various Activations

Every dynamization of man in which he is not active as the concrete ego - that is to say, he as the ego, does not have the experience of his efficacy - we shall call activation. There is activation whenever something happens only in man and the something that happens is derived from the inner dynamism of man himself. But now the mode of the inner derivation is different from that which man does, in what is his action. The term activation seems to combine most adequately the moment of certain passiveness with the moment of activity, of certain activeness or, at any rate, actualization. The word is much used in natural science, but does not seem to have been applied in the study of the human being, in spite of its apparent adequacy for defining, and in a way even for explaining, the difference existing between the fact that man acts and the fact that something happens in him. Moreover, being rooted in everyday speech it expresses well the semantic difference and even contraposition between it and action.

By now the dynamism proper to man seems to have been sufficiently explained in the first approach. This first approach has dealt with the experiential differentiation of the human dynamism by the facts of acting and the facts of happening, which take place in the human being. In addition, in the first experiential approach we have already been able to discern within the structure of "man-acts" all the specificity of the conjugate of person and action. It has been brought into view by the moment of efficacy, which is simultaneously the moment of the transcendence of the person with regard to his acting. As the person-action conjugate occurs owing to this moment of transcendence we shall now consider it separately for a thorough analysis.

Man "Creates" Himself in Action: the Roots of Human Ethos

Efficacy and transcendence bring with them a special dependence of acting upon the person. Man is not only the agent of his acting, he is also the creator of it. It lies in the essence of efficacy that it produces and maintains the existence of an effect. On the other hand, the essence of creativeness is to shape the created work. In a sense, acting is also a work created by man. This characteristic trait of acting is specifically evidenced by morality as one of its properties (and which we have frequently

referred to in this study). Morality and acting differ essentially, but at the same time they are so strictly united with each other that morality has no real existence apart

from human acting, apart from actions. Their essential separateness does not

obscure their existential relationship. The one and the other are most strictly related with the efficacy of the person, indeed, with the phenomenon of the experience had of efficacy. (At this point phenomenology seems to infringe boldly upon metaphysics, and it is here that its reliance upon metaphysics is most needed; for phenomena themselves can visualize a thing clearly enough, but they are incapable of a sufficient explanation of themselves.)

If it is in acting that man forms his own moral value - wherein is contained an element of the specifically human creativity - then this additionally confirms that man, the actor, himself shapes his acting and his actions.~ The old Aristotelian problem, whether actions are the products of the acting man or the product is solely the outward effect of his acting - for instance, whether the product is the sheet of paper covered with writing or the strategic plan worked out by the mind - supplies sufficient evidence that human efficacy is also creative. Its creativeness uses man himself as its raw material. In the first plan, the human being forms himself by his acting. In the contraposition of man as "creator" and man as the "raw material" we again discover a form, or rather an aspect, of the contrast between activeness and passiveness, which we have been tracing here from the start. Indeed, it is a new aspect rather than a new form; for we cannot simply and definitely identify man as the "creator" with human acting, and man as the "raw material" with what happens in the human subject. On the other hand, there can be no doubt that action always consists in overcoming human passiveness in one way or another.

The moment of creativeness, which closely accompanies the moment of efficacy, the experience of efficacy that sets up the objective structure of "man-acts," brings out even more vividly the dominant role of efficacy in the integral dynamism of the human being. Efficacy itself is dynamic: indeed it constitutes, as it were, the

culmination of the dynamism of the human being. But, at the same time, it distinctly differs from this dynamism as a whole. The difference between them has to be adequately emphasized by their interpretation.

3. THE SYNTHESIS OF EFFICACY AND SUBJECTIVENESS. THE