The will is not an experience: the philosophy of action in Ludwig Wittgenstein's later works

In this paper, I review and discuss the philosophy of action in Wittgenstein's later works. In the first part, I discuss Wittgenstein's criticism of the variety of contemporary theories in the philosophy of action: the theory of innervation, the ideomotor theory of action of William James, the "trying" theory of action. Key intuitions in Wittgenstein's criticism can be summarized in three points: 1) Action has an active as opposed to passive quality as it is given in our experience; 2) action is not produced by some kind of means, action has no prior phenomenal causes; 3) we know what movements are our actions. The first group denotes the property of "activeness", the second one denotes "non-causal" property of actions, and the third one denotes the property of "authorship". In the second part, I develop these intuitions. The problem goes as follows: how can we explain the property of "activeness" and the property of "authorship" of action without introducing in our account the phenomenally given antecedents of action? I propose to divide two types of action. Those actions that are done without much thought in everyday life (automatic), and those actions that occur with a high concentration of attention and deliberation (problematic). Further, I propose to consider the theory of action that is based on the following assumptions: real causes of action can not be given in experience. We should analyze the action as having two components: 1) a phenomenal and 2) non-phenomenal. The phenomenal component of action is what we can observe as the action like the bodily movements or the mental actions. Non-phenomenal includes the causes of this phenomenal part. There are two possible meanings of "non-phenomenal" causes of action. The first approach is naturalistic: the actions have unconscious physiological processes in our body (more precisely - in our brains) as their causes. These processes produce the relevant experience of authorship and activity. The alternative approach is the "transcendentalist's" agent-cause: the cause of action is the transcendental will, which cause the phenomenal "action". The agent is the will and exists as the agent only when he wills, i.e. when he is doing something.

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