Husserl’s account of action: naturalistic or anti-naturalistic? A journey through the Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins

My goal in this paper is to present and assess Husserl’s account of action in the Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins. I argue that Husserl’s phenomeno- logical description strikes a unique balance between an anti-naturalistic construal of action as non-reducible to natural causality, and a broadly naturalistic refusal to assign to actions a non-natural cause like ‘the will.’ After discussing Husserl’s definition of actions, I present Husserl’s anatomy of an action, which can be sim- ple or composite and, accordingly, break down into a primary and a secondary component. In the third part I turn to considering the living body as the source of actions, and I offer a description of the subtle interplay of passivity and activity for the constitution of deliberate, goal-oriented actions. I conclude with some remarks about the philosophical lesson that we can learn about the problem of free will from these analyses.