Science For Humanism

The Recovery of Human Agency

Charles R. Varela

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415481823
• eBook ISBN: 9781134017393
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

In the 18th century, the pre-modern Judeo-Greco-Christian problem of freedom and determinism is transformed by Kant into the modern problem of the freedom of human agency in the natural and cultural worlds of deterministic structures; it is this version of the freedom and determinism issue which centres the Science and Humanism debates, and thus marks the history of the social sciences.

Anthony Giddens is credited with providing the new vocabulary of 'structure' and 'agency' in order to formulate the problem of freedom and determinism in those terms, thus making this formulation fruitful. In this book, Charles R. Varela proposes that Kant originally formulated this problem, and makes a series of wide-ranging and groundbreaking observations based on Kant's metaphysics of realism which enables Varela to propose a solution to the structure/agency problem.

Subjects revisited in this book include:

· "Giddens' Call"

· The stalemate of the social and psychological sciences

· The determinist tradition of modern science

· Postmodernism

This breadth of themes, drawn together by Varela with his work on Kant, fully realizes Giddens' principle that human agency is a real causal force. It is Kant's conception of causal power that is the causal force Giddens' has called for.

Science For Humanism: The Recovery of Human Agency will be of particular interest to students of humanism and therefore realism, Kant and Giddens.

Part I
Science for Humanism

1 Historical context

Humanism and Giddens’s Call

Introduction

During the last 40 years of the twentieth century the decline of various positivist philosophies of science was accompanied by a rise in a variety of realist philosophies of science (contrary to Skinner 1990: 5–6, 1–20). This realist turn is evidenced in the works of Jerrold L. Aronson (1984, 1995), Roy Bhaskar (1975 [1998]), Mario Bunge (1979 [1959], 1996), Rom Harré (1970, 1975, 1986, 1993), Stephen Mumford (1998), and William A. Wallace (1974, 1996). At the margins of the social sciences with the 1970s and since, this new development worked its way into the philosophy of social science and thus promoted a quiet and modest pursuit of the possibility of naturalism in the social sciences. This was initially reflected in the work of Margaret Archer (1995, 1996 [1988], 2000), Roy Bhaskar (1979,1991), Rom Harré (1979, 1984, 1991), Russell Keat and John Urry (1975), Peter T. Manicas (1987, 2006), and John Shotter (1993). There are three major results of the realist turn that I will be briefly dealing with here in order to bring out both the historical context that justifies Science for Humanism: the Recovery of Human Agency, and the theoretical framework that promotes it.

In my judgment, there has been a particular result of the shift to scientific realism in the social sciences that is of cardinal importance: the reopening of the Science and Humanism debate on the ontology of human being, especially with respect to its key problem of freedom and determinism. In the second half of twentieth-century social science that problem has gone through two critical formulations: while Parsons’s vocabulary of “(social) system and (individual) voluntarism” dominated the three decades from the 1950s to the 1970s, the last 25 years of the twentieth century witnessed its transformation into Giddens’s new vocabulary of “(social) structure and agency.” As we will now see, the realist turn in the philosophy of science is presupposed by the sociological problem of social structure and human agency, and that very fact encourages the move to generalize it to be the problem of deterministic structures and human agency.

In each of the social sciences their respective theoretical interests have given us the traditional structures of the psychological, the social, and the cultural. I now want to propose that the theoretical thread that connects these three structures into a fundamental metaphysical problem is based on the non-traditional structures of biology and language. Biology can then be understood as resolving into two internally related concepts: the organism and the body; and language can also be understood as resolving into two internally related concepts: practices and discourse. The second somatic revolution in the social scientific theorizing of embodiment that stems from the combined work of Drid Williams, Brenda Farnell, and Charles Varela leads to the proposal that biology and language can be assimilated under the key concept of dynamically embodied discursive practices (Farnell and Varela 2008 in press; Williams 1982: 161–82). Hence, I can now assert that the general problem of structure(s) and agency can be given an enriched formulation: the problem of deterministic structures and dynamically embodied discursive agency.

In this book, my interest is restricted to the fundamental problem of deterministic structure and human agency. For the sake of convenience, although he never presented it, as far as I know, with this generalization and enrichment in mind, I will refer to this new formulation simply as Giddens’s problem of structure and agency.

The realist turn and the problem of structure and agency, furthermore, are connected in what I will refer to as Giddens’s Call. The “Call” is articulated in the New Rules of Sociological Method (1976: 91): a viable theory of structuration is in need of a suitable realist philosophy of science in order to ground its concept of human agency in a concept of “agent causality.” Particularly important for this book’s interest is the understanding that there is a specific implication in Giddens’s theory of structuration: any prospect of a solution to the structure and agency problem will take the form of an answer to that “Call.”

The second result of the realist turn is an examination of the phenomenological theory of freedom that threads together the philosophical work of Wilhelm Dilthey, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty from the perspective of Giddens’s Call. This theory of freedom in all of its varieties has been of great importance, for it has informed and fueled the Humanist revolt against Science in the social sciences in the three decades that spanned the 1950s to the 1970s. The use of Giddens’s perspective allows us to discover that the theory of phenomenological freedom turns out to be, itself, the crucial reason for the demise of the Science and Humanism debate as we entered the 1980s. In other words, the death of traditional Humanism in the social sciences must be laid at the doorstep of the phenomenological tradition. To see this clearly, the key theorist here is Merleau-Ponty: his representative theory of freedom openly addresses the structure and agency problem, and in doing so, human freedom is, technically speaking, actually being cast as the “power of agency.” However, in Merleau-Ponty’s traditional phenomenological denial of science that was his signature to the very end, it will be shown that this concept of freedom as a power of agency is thus deprived of any possibility of being correctly grounded in a concept of “agent causality.” Thus, this particular effort to rescue freedom from determinism is fatally limited to being a defiance of determinism by the theoretically ineffective act of merely affirming freedom. Here, precisely, is the very reason why the phenomenological theory of freedom leads to the death of traditional Humanism. And yet, Merleau-Ponty’s theory of agency as a “power” can be given a new lease of life if it is simply addressed in terms of the entire metaphysical context of Giddens’s problem of structure and agency. Indeed, I now want to propose that this entire context of the problem of structure and agency, the call to ground agency in “agent causality,” and the turn to scientific realism that the call implies, is indeed the emergence of a New Humanism in the social sciences.

The third major result will be an examination of both the Postmodernism of Knowledge and its complementary, the Postmodern Philosophy of Science (Best and Kellner 2003: 285–88; Giddens 1979; Harré 1998: 353–77; Newton 1997: 8–44). The two Postmodernisms together make up a serious challenge to the view taken here, that structure and agency is a genuine problem, and thus is open to possible solutions under the auspices of a suitable realist philosophy of science. The challenge to this view from the Postmodernism of Knowledge is found in Jacques Derrida’s theory of language and in Jean Baudrillard’s theory of hyper-reality. Specifically, it is an implication of Derrida’s theory that human freedom is to be identified with the spontaneous structural activity of human language that constitutes a reality wholly unto itself. Thus, the world of natural causation is not a problem for human freedom because the latter is imprisoned in the solipsism of the lived life of human language. The other challenge from the Postmodernism of Knowledge in the case of Jean Baudrillard goes one step further. His outright banishment of “reality” and the “social” seems to eliminate both “structure” and “agency” as possible problems. For, the implication is that there is no natural reality for there to be any problem of deterministic structures, and there is no social reality for there to be any issue of human agency. But there is another similar but deeper challenge to taking seriously Giddens’s problem and its possible solution that issues from the Postmodernism of the philosophy of science.

Harré’s analysis of the idea of science in the works of Nelson Goodman, Richard Rorty, Bruno Latour, and Ian Hacking, indicates that they converge, however unwittingly, on a common outcome: the delegitimation of the rational and empirical authority of natural science. The concept of nature, the sovereign pillar of Western theological, philosophical, and scientific realism, is exclusively reduced to being the social construction of the scientific cultural community. And as a direct consequence, science itself thus is taken to be just another community that of course arbitrarily privileges its ontological beliefs. From such a standpoint, the problem of deterministic structures and the freedom of human agency is an artifact of a radical social constructionism. In short, there can be no such problem.

The three major results of the realist turn in the social sciences are here intimately connected: the reopening of the Science and Humanism debate promotes the question as to the possible relevance of the phenomenological tradition and the two Postmodernisms to the advancement of social scientific theory, specifically with respect to the prospect of a solution to Giddens’s problem of structure and agency. The answer that I will present is that a fatal inadequacy in the theory of phenomenological freedom and in the two Postmodernisms of Knowledge justifies the conclusion that they are irrelevant to the new Science and Humanism debate concerning the problem of structure and agency. Thus, in consequence, I am afforded the opportunity to take the Science and Humanism debate seriously, and, under the auspices of Giddens’s New Humanism, to present an answer to his Call: the recovery of human agency.

Humanism in defiance of science: Kant, Dilthey, and Heidegger

Throughout the modern history of the encounter of Science and Humanism the debate on the problem of freedom and determinism has been based on this theme: in its idea that determinism is the reality behind the appearance of freedom Science is against Humanism; in its affirmation of freedom in defiance of that determinism Humanism is against Science. The theme is under-written by the following principle: since the natural and human worlds are constituted by a metaphysic (ontology) of deterministic structures, there can be no metaphysical space for the grounding of natural agency in the physical world nor human agency in the cultural world. In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and in the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), Kant proposed a two-world (or two-story) solution as a way out of this predicament with respect to human freedom: within the metaphysical framework of scientific naturalism, freedom is to be located in the noumenal realm and determinism is to be located in the phenomenal realm (Allison 1990, 1995). The metaphysical character of Kant’s two-world solution, however, poses a serious problem, to which Pistorius, Dilthey, and Heidegger have given us three complementary interpretations. In 1794 Herman Andreas Pistorius famously articulated this problem, which, today, Henry E. Allison informs us is still accepted in modern philosophy as the essence of the difficulty of Kant’s theory of freedom (Allison Ibid: 29).

I readily confess that this double character of man, these two I’s in the single subject, are for me, in spite of all the explanations which Kant and his students have given it, particularly with respect to the resolution of the well known antinomy of freedom, the most obscure and incomprehensible in the entire critical philosophy

(Allison 1990: 29, emphasis provided)

Pistorius’s specific reference to the resolution of the antinomy of freedom is the actual site of the problem, to be sure. However, he is, nevertheless, crucially vague concerning the specific issue of the perplexity of the two “I’s” in the third antinomy. For now, this perplexity can be quickly indicated in a single statement when Kant says that, “Reason in its causality is not subject to any conditions of appearance or time” (Kant1985a: A 556 B 584). It must be precisely noted that in this statement Kant does not actually say that freedom as reason is a causal act that is “not in time,” but that it is “not subject to any conditions of … time.” For now, this difference, and it will be shown to be a significant difference, will be set to one side; I will, then, treat this issue according to the received or traditional view in the history of philosophy. In that history, Kant’s theory of freedom is a revolutionary response to the Judeo-Greco-Christian traditional theory of Transcendent freedom: a spiritual power that is a reality neither in time nor in space. This, technically, is the root of the commonsense version of this theory referred to as freedom of the will; in short, free will. Thus, in the case of Kantian theory the issue of freedom can be stated as follows. When human subjects are considered to be in the phenomenal realm (the first “I”) and therefore are in space and in time, they are thus under the conditions of determinism: hence freedom is impossible; nevertheless, when those same subjects are considered to be in the noumenal realm (the second “I”) and are not in time, they are in consequence under the conditions of freedom: hence freedom is possible. Concerning the distinction between phenomenal determinism and noumenal freedom, it is important to observe, as the quote clearly reveals, that Kant actually took the distinction to be a reference to two types of causality: for the former, the “causality of nature,” for the latter, the “causality of (or through) freedom.” Kant thus provided us with a two-world theory of the problem of freedom and determinism, which has been interpreted as giving us a special and specific solution to that problem: the possibility of freedom is a matter of rescuing freedom from the phenomenal world by locating it not in the spiritual but in the noumenal world.

It is in this strict sense of the location of freedom in reference to space and time that Kantian freedom and religious freedom can be precisely differentiated: the former is transcendental but not transcendent, whereas the latter is transcendent but not transcendental. Furthermore, ontologically speaking, transcendental freedom is thus situated in the metaphysical space of naturalism, and so, of course, transcendent freedom is situated in the metaphysical space of supernaturalism. Ultimately, therefore, the Kantian theory of freedom is integral to his Copernican Revolution in philosophy, as the latter is located within the context of the Scientific Revolution.

Dilthey: noumenal to phenomenological

In the late nineteenth century Dilthey’s revolt against Kant’s theory of freedom, I contend, was precisely a revolt against (let us now say) the Pistorius issue of the atemporality of freedom (as clarified above); and this can be seen in the following three quotes from Dilthey’s Introduction to the Human Sciences (1989). The important point to pick out here is that Dilthey gives us a three-part conception of human agency, or what he in fact calls an “efficacy of the will”–“power,” “temporality,” and “dynamic embodiment” (Farnell and Varela 2008).

Power

Here we only want to emphasize what we find in our own lived experience, namely, that the will can direct our representations and set our limbs in motion, and that it has this capacity even when it is not exercising it. Indeed, in the event of an external restraint, this capacity can be immobilized by a similar or greater force, but is nevertheless felt as present. Thus we grasp the representation of an effectuating capacity (or a power) which precedes the particular effective act; particular voluntary acts and deeds flow from a sort of reservoir of effective force [thus a power]. … [a] productive force.

(Dilthey Ibid: 20–21, my emphasis)

Temporality

It is much more difficult to conceive the ideality of time than that of space, since time is just as much the form of inner lived experience [of the efficacy of the will] as of outer processes [constituted by the efficacies of other wills and physical and biological entities]. The increase in the intensity of attention or the feeling of pain is given as reflexive awareness. It is contained in every reflexive awareness of our vitality, and, since consciousness of the state and experienced vitality exist undifferentiated here, it is nonsense to place an appearance between consciousness and vitality, which are, after all, totally un...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Science for Humanism
• PART II Returning to Kant and the stalemate of sociology
• PART III Returning to Kant and to Giddens’s Call
• References