Pragmatic Humanism

On the Nature and Value of Sociological Knowledge

Marcus Morgan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317612346
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

Is sociology best understood as simply chipping away at our ignorance about society, or does it have broader roles and responsibilities? If so, to what—or perhaps to whom —are these responsibilities? Installing humanity as its epistemological and normative start and endpoint, this book shows how humanism recasts sociology as an activity that does not merely do things, or effect things, but is also self-consciously for something.

Rather than resurrecting problematic classical conceptions of humanism, the book instead constructs its arguments on pragmatic grounds, showing how a pragmatic humanism presents an improved picture of both the nature and value of the discipline. This picture is based less around the claim that sociology is capable of providing authoritative revelations about society, and more upon its capacity to offer representations of the social in epistemologically open, transformative, ethical, and hopeful ways.

Ultimately, it argues that sociology's real value can only be disclosed by replacing its image as a discipline aimed towards disinterested social enlightenment with one of itself as a practice both dependent upon, and at its best self-consciously aimed towards, human ends and imperatives. It will appeal to scholars and students across the social sciences, and to those working in social theory, sociology, and philosophy of the social sciences in particular.

1 Exhuming humanism

Responding constructively to the critique of the subject

Since at least the 1970s, there has been a great deal of discussion within the humanities and social sciences over the ‘death’, ‘dissolution’, ‘deconstruction’, or ‘decentring’ of the subject. Within such discussions, the ‘subject’ is typically taken to refer to the figure of the self-governing human being, understood as the undivided source of authorship, identity, and experience. This figure has traditionally served as the grounded centre for a range of political, ethical, philosophical, legal, and cultural systems associated with what is often called ‘humanism’, and so the critique of the subject can therefore be understood as a recent instance in the history of what is usually termed ‘antihumanism’.

Where the humanist tradition had typically understood experience as happening to a self-identical subject, or action as stemming from this figure, in this new way of thinking, experiences have instead been cast as constitutive of the subject, and action has instead been seen as the effect of broader forces, to the point at which the traditional subject – the reasoning, willing, experiencing, and determining agent of his or her own fate – has faded into the background, if not disappeared altogether. The assumption of the human subject has, in other words, been understood as conferring ‘an illusionary unity on what is really just a bundle of drives, or a “site” for the interplay of forces generated by social or psychological or linguistic structures’ (Norman, 2004: 75).

This ‘death of the subject’ theme has also played itself out within sociology, where humanism had already been treated with suspicion by those concerned with distancing themselves from the humanities in order to secure sociology’s social scientific credentials. Within this disciplinary location, three main types of reaction to this apparent loss of foundations might be discerned.

The first has been a kind of denial; an attempt to ignore the arguments put forward by antihumanism and carry on as though the previously undetected foundations propping up the subject of modernity had not been fundamentally disturbed. This reaction has arguably been the response of those concerned with protecting an epistemologically realist and disciplinary positivist conception of sociology, which, though rarely defended in explicit theoretical terms, is still implicit in many common methodological prescriptions. It has also been the predominant response of those apparently self-sufficient strands of social theory dominant in neighbouring disciplines, such as rational choice approaches, that have too often trivialised rather than engaged the challenging insights of recent continental philosophy and social thought. A second reaction to the critique has been an abandonment to the apparent loss of the subject, a preoccupation with the abyss it has left behind, and a tendency to either luxuriate or despair over its disappearance. This has arguably been the position of certain strains of poststructuralist theory, which were themselves influential in declaring the ‘death of the subject’ but complacent in their failure to drive beyond the inherent fixes in which such critiques leave us. This response has cast those concerned with recuperating the subject in one form or another as anachronistic, theoretically naïve, and occasionally even dangerous. A third reaction to the assault upon the traditional notion of the ‘subject’, a reaction which retains ample space to accommodate a variety of different perspectives, has involved a clear-sighted acknowledgement of the fact that as the old foundations of modernity erode, ‘new political and epistemological possibilities emerge’ (Brown, 2001: 5). On this more hopeful account, the creative task has been ‘to learn to live with an irreducible contingency and ambiguity – not to ignore it and not to wallow in it’ (Bernstein, 1992: 838). It is within this constructive space that this book suggests that a new form of sociological humanism can and should be strategically revived.

This third response acknowledges the harmful consequences and implicit exclusions that so frequently accompanied those historical high-points of humanism, but balances this conception with recognition that some of the most radical advances in criticism, science, politics, philosophy, and the arts were also won during these moments. Of all these, the centrality of criticism has perhaps been the most frequently overlooked by antihumanists, even though, as Said points out, ‘humanism and criticism’ have been ‘invariably associated – in as many cultures and periods as you can assess’ (2004: 23). Insofar as humanism can be understood as encompassing and encouraging this enterprise of critique, this book therefore joins a discernible backlash, shared across otherwise very different expressions of social thought (e.g. Habermas, 1981; Hind, 2007; Plummer, 2013; Todorov, 2009; Žižek, 2008a) against the attempt at offering what Habermas (1981) calls a ‘total critique of modernity’. Whilst rejecting Habermas’s (1987) own particular model for reviving what he considers to be those undervalued communicative aspects of modernity, this book does agree with the notion that antihumanist social theorists such as Foucault, in spite of all their brilliance, have failed in offering what Fraser describes as ‘a satisfactory non-humanist political rhetoric, one which does indeed do, and do better, the critical work that humanist rhetoric sought to do’ (1985: 173). Rather than alternatives, what has too often been left behind by the successive attacks upon the human is an empty void, which in a climate of cynicism towards the adoption of substantive positions, theorists have failed to fill with normatively affirmative and ethically robust content. As Seidler writes, ‘in looking towards post-modernity we have been too ready to dispense with a language of values and ethics, leaving the traditions of modernity behind before we have learnt how to fully evaluate them’ (1994: xvi).

Although, therefore, the image of the universal sovereign subject may now no longer be sustainable in the various self-confident forms in which it first appeared, this book nevertheless argues for the revival of a humanism understood as a contingent resource, rather than some ultimate foundation. Moreover, it hopes to show how a pragmatically conceived humanism of this kind still offers much of importance to sociology at the present moment in its development. For this reason it turns to the philosophical tradition of American pragmatism in helping guide what it sees as humanism’s necessary and timely revival.

Pragmatism as the exhumer’s spade

if, as some of us think, the word ‘humanist’ is now a term in search of a meaning, perhaps it is time for it to meet up again with the philosophy of William James

(Jonathan Rée, 2010)

Baert and da Silva have expressed surprise that the links between humanism and pragmatism are rarely commented upon ‘given how pervasive humanism is amongst classical and contemporary pragmatists and how essential it is to their intellectual project’ (2010: 294). This book intends to contribute towards correcting this oversight, in particular by emphasising pragmatism’s ability to provide a de-Cartesianised, anti-metaphysical humanism that responds well to many of the most common critiques put forward by antihumanists in recent years. The pragmatic character of this book’s arguments means that it very consciously ignores what is sees as misguided philosophical debates over humanism’s essential validity. Humanism is vital to sociology not because we might some day prove its ultimate reality or discover its ultimate foundation, but because of its demonstrable uses to the concerns that we sociologists, and in fact we human beings more generally, face in the concrete world in which we live. Whilst European thinkers were the first to successfully deconstruct and bring to America’s attention the unstable presumptions written into the humanistic foundations of Western thought, American philosophy, this book suggests, is now best equipped to repay the favour by showing how such presumptions can be profitably worked with rather than despaired at or denied in traversing the apparent impasses of antihumanism.

However, the book does not intend to simply retread the well-worn path, first beaten at the University of Chicago, from pragmatic philosophy through to the various forms of symbolic interactionist micro-sociology. Instead, it will try to show other ways in which pragmatic philosophy is of use in constructing a re-humanised sociology. It also endeavours to avoid using the insights of pragmatic philosophy in a dogmatic fashion, and in this respect finds sympathy with Bernstein’s comments that we cannot ‘simply return to the pragmatists to solve our theoretical and practical problems’, and that to do so would in fact be deeply ‘unpragmatic’ (1992: 840). Rather, it sets out to employ the tradition itself pragmatically, as a source of inspiration that can be interpreted and developed along creative and perhaps unpredictable lines. In this manner, alongside pragmatism as a named and clearly circumscribed philosophy, this book also asserts the importance of authors from altogether different traditions whose ideas resonate with those of the pragmatists without necessarily associating themselves with this camp of thought. Many of these thinkers have been influenced by the antihumanistic thrust of poststructuralism, but in recognition of its related limitations have made their way back towards more fragile, self-critical, and strategic figures of the human, in the process transforming the insights of antihumanistic thought from hindrances to the project of reviving humanism into essential ingredients necessary for its elaboration.

An example of such a thinker was Edward Said, whose classic work Orientalism (1978) was critiqued by Clifford (1980) for its inconsistency in using a broadly Foucauldian theoretical framework, yet presenting an unmistakably humanistic argument throughout. This is because Said adopted Foucault’s notion of ‘discourse’ as a central analytical category in his study, yet rejected the displacement of the subject that such an adoption typically implies. For Clifford, Said’s position was incoherent: one could not adopt Foucault’s insights without ridding one’s intervention entirely of all remnants of humanistic credulity. Said’s defence was that Clifford, like many others, identified humanism with too constricted a realm of enquiry and practice, pointing out that humanism in fact encompasses a far greater range of ideas than its critics maintain. As he wrote,

I did not (and still do not) see in humanism only the kind of totalising and essentialising trends that Clifford identified … I believe then, and still believe, that it is possible to be critical of humanism in the name of humanism and that, schooled in the abuses of the experience of Eurocentrism and empire, one could fashion a different kind of humanism.

(2004: 10–11)

When the ostensibly universal figure of the human was successively invoked by the Greek, Renaissance, and Enlightenment philosophers, it of course arrived in a certain assumed form: almost always able-bodied, no doubt male, certainly un-enslaved and white, and likely bourgeois, European, and heterosexual.¹ The implicit exclusions within such imaginings have not disappeared, and Phillips, for instance, points out how although women ‘are not, on the whole, now regarded as less than or other than human … it remains almost impossible for them to function as the generic human … it is usually the male body that fills this space’ (2015: 26–7; also MacKinnon, 2007). This book argues, however, that it is precisely because, as Butler puts it, some humans are able to ‘take their humanness for granted’, whereas ‘others struggle to gain access to the term’ (2007: 954), that humanism – a more adequate, less static, less brittle, and less abstract humanism – is itself so sorely needed. Ironically perhaps, there would in other words be no necessity for humanism, at least insofar as it functions as a normative resource in challenging our all-too-frequent descent into the inhumane, if equal treatment and respect were automatically accorded on the basis of one’s biological membership of the species.

Said shows how asserting the value of humanism need not mean defending it uncritically, but can instead mean elaborating and extending those aspects that still prove useful to our collective needs, whilst correcting those elements that time has shown to be pernicious, exclusionary, or simply mistaken. In this manner, humanism is not seen as a static fossil, trapped within some particular historical expression, but as an open and evolving narrative, which is ultimately a matter of what we featherless bipeds choose to make of it.

However, if this project of reviving a new humanism is so sincere about incorporating the critiques launched against it, and learning the lessons that history has taught to earlier forms of hubristic universalism, why is it so obstinate about retaining the term? As Karavanta and Morgan put it (whilst rehearsing many of the project’s now familiar complaints): ‘Why humanism now? Why invoke a term, which, since its conception, has always been in crisis, complicit, as it has been, with the project of modernity, the expansion of colonialism, the growth of imperialism and now the domination of global capital?’ (2008: 1).

Why humanism now?

Simpson (2001) stresses four main reasons for pursuing what he dubs a ‘rescue attempt’ of humanism at the beginning of the twenty-first century, most of which are based around acknowledgment of the valuable roles that humanism has traditionally served in guiding human affairs. First, he argues that reinvoking a notion of humanism allows us to talk coherently about human progress (and therefore also regress) through offering a standard of assessment, which whilst not needing to claim a metaphysically sanctioned position outside the history of its own construction, nevertheless allows some form of contingent, disputable, and therefore revisable judgement to be advanced. Second, he shows how it enables social, ethical, and political criticism by again appealing to a notion of common humanity, which likewise need not (as it has in the past) be grounded in abstract and ahistorical foundations but could instead find its meaning in ongoing human debate about the human. Third, and relatedly, he demonstrates how humanism allows for the presumption of the dignity of humanity and therefore a justification for stances we might wish to take against social formations that act to debase such dignity. Simpson’s first three reasons are united therefore in their foregrounding the normative dimension of humanism, which he argues ought to be conceived as a perpetually ‘unfinished project’; operative, but always only ever provisionally so.

The final justification he offers is that humanism has traditionally provided, and should continue to provide, a basis for the pursuit of humanistic learning: a justification for the humanities. Whilst there are of course well-known problems with defending this disciplinary dimension of humanism insofar as the humanities are conceived as a frozen, authoritative canon of writing, dominated by an immovable, ordained elite, this dimension nevertheless holds important implications for sociology’s own academic model, which will be explored here in Chapter 4.

This book’s aims are in spirit congruent with Simpson’s arguments, and in particular with his characteristically pragmatic conception of humanism’s contingent cultural role, and hence the justifications he offers for a ‘rescue attempt’ are, with certain qualifications, equally applicable here. However, given this book’s broader concerns, five related reasons for resurrecting a sociological neo-humanism might be used to supplement Simpson’s more focussed justifications.

The first additional reason is that humanism paves the way for a reintroduction of what this book will argue is the indispensable concept of the subject back into sociology. However, since this defence of the subject draws upon the intellectual resources of pragmatism, it is a defence conscious of the critique of Cartesianism, and therefore not a defence that appeals to some metaphysical notion of an abstract and entirely autonomous agency animating the objective world. Nevertheless, it understands that as long as we guard against its reification, the analytical abstraction of subject from object can itself be pragmatically useful. One reason why, is that the return to the subject has consequences for any sociological understanding of the processes of social change, offering a picture in which humans are seen as producers, as well as merely products of such things as structure or discourse, and in which subjects possess an ever-present – albeit frequently latent or thwarted – possibility of taking hold of history’s development, rather than acting merely as passive dupes of forces above and beyond them. The book contends that it is simply empirically inaccurate to argue that the human subject is always, everywhere, and entirely constituted, something Berger dubs ‘sociologism’, ‘that is, a system that interprets all of human reality consistently and exclusively in sociological terms, recognising no other causal factors within its preserve and allowing for no loopholes whatever in its causal construction’ (1963: 190). The subject – as attentive social research has recurrently demonstrated – is never entirely an effect of something else, and so always to some degree exceeds, escapes, evades, confounds, and humbles the social theoretical schema contrived to trap it. Paying attention to this excess is not only important ethically, but also holds political consequences. This is because social representations are never purely descriptive, but also always, albeit often surreptitiously, prescriptive too. Adopting a humanistic stance allows us to see sociology as an immanent social practice, which can become internalised, and often in altered form realised, by society’s participants themselves (e.g. Hacking, 1999; Mol, 1999).

The second supplementary reason is that humanism appears to some extent unavoidable. With the exception of certain episodic interruptions, human beings are trapped inside a continuity of consciousness, and so the continual return to ourselves as a source of meaning in the construction of knowledge is an almost impossible route to bypass, as we are simply unable to stand outside ourselves in our pursuit of understanding. Human experience is obligatorily mediated through our subjective point of view and however much it may wish to, ‘human consciousness … cannot entirely extricate itself from itself’ (Janicaud, 2005: 29). Something similar appears to hold true for our values: humanistic language is frequently the only morally legitimatising vocabulary available in normatively objectionable situations, and if the antihumanist project is misunderstood as a destructive exercise in nihilism (Rose, 1984), then it is incumbent upon such critiques to answer the difficult question as to what is to act as the guide for the constructive element within their sensationalistic claims of the ‘death of Man’ (as noted, the male so often stands in for the universal). Posing this question often uncovers the fact that much self-declared ‘antihumanism’ is frequently not antihumanism through and through, but rather a reckoning with a particular facet of the humanist tradition that the critique has found wanting, whilst simultaneously retaining many of what it deem...