The Difference between "acting" and just "executing" 🤗🤌
"Judgment is not only decisive for interpreting a situation appropriately and determining what matters. It is just as decisive for the action that follows. Because whenever and wherever human action is reduced to the mere application of rules, principles, or instructions, it loses its creative, productive, and ultimately its human dimension. Applying and subsuming rules is something computers and robots can do far better, faster, and more precisely. What is fundamentally different is opening situations toward action. That creates a completely different relationship between subject and world. Following Lambert Wiesing, one could say that constellative execution produces a closed, linear form of opposition, between acting subjects, but also between subject and situation itself. A burger is paid for, a burger is delivered. A motorcycle is four kilometers per hour too fast, that results in a fine. Two points too few, assistance is denied. Human action, by contrast, dissolves this rigid opposition. It draws the subject into the situation itself and opens new, creative spaces of interpretation and possibility. This is why Wiesing speaks of a “painterly” mode of existence, which he contrasts with a constellative-linear one. Hermann Schmitz similarly speaks of “poetic” rather than “prosaic” explication. These terms already imply imprecision, ambiguity, and subjectivity. It is therefore no surprise that a culture obsessed with availability, control, and calculability attempts to overcome or minimize such a relationship to the world. In doing so, however, it dramatically loses the capacity to creatively shape a shared world and to remain open to the dynamic particularities of subjective experience and intersubjective encounter. Or, as Andrea Esser puts it succinctly: "We move within the realm of practice, a realm in which we try, through speaking and acting, to make sense of our human existence and our relationships. Such sense-making remains abstract if action is understood only through its general, determining features and subsumed under higher-level concepts."