Action modifies the being of things, not just their appearance

Evidence

Under the term action, besides motion, a tendency, though so it be without actual motion, seems to be included. Held back by strings, a magnet and a bar of iron, suspended at a certain distance from each other, remain both of them without motion: cut the strings of either of them, it moves till it comes in contact with the other; but for the state of mutual action which preceded the cutting of the strings no such motion would have taken place. — Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, 510 (#expands, via linked claim)

This contradiction can explain many things: for example, the difference between real action on the one hand, which modifies in an essential way both man and external reality (in other words, real culture) and which is Americanism, and on the other hand the gladiatorial futility which is self-declared action but modifies only the word, not things, the external gesture and not the man inside. … The second only creates a superior kind of puppet, modelled on a basis of rhetorical predicates, which will collapse into nothingness the moment the strings are cut which give from outside the appearance of motion and of life. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1132 (#expands, via linked claim)

These have a particular Being which Heidegger calls Zuhandenheit: ‘readiness-to-hand’ or ‘handiness’. While I am hammering, the hammer has that kind of Being for me. If, for some reason, I lay down the hammer and gawp at it as a Hammerding, then it has a different kind: Vorhandenheit or ‘presence-at-hand’. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 215 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Motion alters a quality’s mode of being rather than its essence; Tools and surroundings are grasped through the ends they serve, not in themselves; The body’s action on matter reveals qualities that already dwell latent within it — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1361 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Action includes tendency to motion, not just actual motion #expands (0.85) — Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, 510
• Real action modifies man and reality while verbal action only creates puppets #expands (0.85) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1132
• An object’s being shifts between use and detached observation. #exemplifies (0.82) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 215
• Identity is transformed by political action, not a precondition of it #exemplifies (0.80)