 Adapting one of Brewer’s illustrations, two friends may be on a motorcycle on their way to Vegas, for blackjack and wild times; when we check back, a few years later, we find them in the gardening aisle at Home Depot; a few years after that, doing something very different from either of those things.  There’s an observation we can extract, about the relation between activities and actions as other views we have surveyed conceive them: on the one hand, the activity of friendship produces an endless stream of subsidiary goals and actions (those roadtrips, gardening projects and so on); on the other, because the participants’ conception of the friendship will continue to deepen and shift, the actions in that stream cannot be concretely characterized up front.  The versions of high-grade and low-grade action being contrasted with each other here are interdependent. Dialectical activity normally emits merely end-directed action on an ongoing basis.  (And the intelligibility of those ends normally depends on their embedding within dialectical activity, if only the activity of living one’s life; it makes sense that they’d be biking to Vegas, given how, at that stage of the friendship, they understand what their friendship is about, and without that context, it wouldn’t make much sense.)  Conversely, the improving grasp of what one is doing, central to the activity, depends on the friction with the surrounding circumstances produced by the end-directed actions; it was, perhaps, the way the Vegas trip didn’t work out, and the subsequent quarrel, that made the two of them rethink what they were doing with each other, and start in on the gardening.