Human Landscapes

Contributions to a Pragmatist Anthropology

Roberta Dreon

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781438488233
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Pragmatismus in der Philosophie

Human Landscapes works out a pragmatist anthropology which the Classical Pragmatists never put together in a comprehensive form—despite the many insights on the topic to be found in Dewey's, James's, and Mead's texts. Roberta Dreon retrieves and develops this material in its astonishing modernity concerning current debates on the mind as embodied and enacted, philosophy of the emotions, social theory, and studies about the origins of human language. By assuming a basic continuity between natural developments and human culture, this text highlights the qualitative, pre-personal, habitual features of human experience constituting the background to rational decision-making, normativity, and reflection. The book rests on three pillars: a reconceptualization of sensibility as a function of life, rather than as a primarily cognitive faculty; a focus on habits, understood as pervasive features of human behaviors acquired by attuning to the social environment; and an interpretation of human experience as "enlanguaged, " namely as contingently yet irreversibly embedded in a linguistic environment that has important loop effects on human sensibility and habitual conduct.

Chapter 1

Introduction

A Pragmatist Approach to Human Nature

1. Looking for a Pragmatist Anthropology: Issues and Methods at Stake

Pragmatism is philosophy with the people in.¹ I would sum up this philosophical posture through the words used by Tim Ingold to distinguish anthropology from ethnography and ethnology, regarded as merely descriptive and strictly comparative enterprises (2008). Hence, Pragmatism is (one of) the best candidate(s) to develop a philosophical anthropology, although only a few scholars have attempted to take some steps along this path and none of the Classical Pragmatists fashioned an organic anthropological theory out of their rich yet scattered insights.

My aim in this book is to contribute to the development of a philosophical picture of human nature as a form of life that is contingent, yet also relatively stable and marked by some basic common features that are still open to change and reshaping because of their constitutive dependence on a natural and naturally sociocultural environment. In other words, I will develop a philosophical anthropology within a cultural naturalistic framework, by relying on a series of contributions mainly taken from John Dewey, but also from George Herbert Mead and William James.² Methodologically, I will recover the most significant contributions from their legacy in order to develop an organic—yet not exhaustive—view of humans as naturally cultural organisms embedded in an environment they contribute to changing from the inside. By making deliberate use of these sources to create a new philosophical anthropology, I will bring the Pragmatists’ arguments into relation to one another within a more coherent framework, radicalize them when needed, and compare them with other interesting positions in the current debate on the specificity of human sensibility, habitual behavior and the intertwining of experience and language. From the point of view of content, my main interest is to investigate some relatively stable features of human organic-cultural behaviors on which both rationality and normativity are based—a qualitative background that is dynamically reshaped by appropriating the results of more reflective practices. Of course, personhood (Margolis 2017), as well as autonomy and responsibility, is a crucial factor to define the characteristically human way of being and deserves to be considered an essential step for developing a “pragmatistic anthropology” (Quante 2018). Nonetheless, the distinctive contribution of the present book lies in the fact that it looks at human practices primarily as hinging on a shared human sensibility, as scaffolded by habits of conduct, thought, feeling, and belief, and as shaped through the thick and mongrel (in Margolis’s sense) fabric of enlanguaged human experience. Certainly, human practices also involve giving and asking for reasons (Brandom 1994), but I am interested in inquiring into the background from which explicit reasons and established norms emerge and to which they return—describing a mixed, nonfoundational dynamic. Both James and Dewey—but probably even Peirce—were interested in bringing into focus the qualitative background of life in which both logic and norms are rooted (Dewey 2004; Dewey 1985a), because “Existentially speaking, a human individual is distinctive opacity of bias and preference conjoined with plasticity and permeability of needs and likings” (Dewey 1981, 186).

Consequently, I will focus on three main issues, with no pretense to exhaustiveness. The first issue—to be worked out in chapters 2 and 3—is a conception of sensibility broader than sensory perception that I propose we ground in organic life exposure to the environment and define as the affective capacity to discriminate between living conditions as favorable or adverse, in contrast to the standard ascription of feeling and qualitative experience to a merely subjective realm. In the chapter 2, my central aim will be to consider how this capacity to perceive the environment as dangerous or welcoming, which is already widespread within animal life as reconfigured by the highly social environment peculiar to humans, as well as by the cultural-linguistic characterization of the human niche. In the chapter 3, I will integrate this topic through a pragmatist approach to the emotions, by setting them within the broader framework of human sensibility, rather than considering them as specific entities (mental representations? psychic states? neuro-programs?). By bringing together and radicalizing James’s, Dewey’s, and Mead’s contributions to the topic through a comprehensive outline, I will be able to suggest an account of emotions as modes of behavior, including affective, evaluative, and practical aspects, because of their contextualization within human beings’ structural exposure to a natural and naturally social environment.

The second issue will be habits, assumed to be pervasive and structural features of human behavior characterizing human acting, thinking, and feeling. I will argue that habits are already pervasive in human life at a prepersonal level: individuals acquire most of their habits from an already habitualized social environment, by being entrained and attuning their acts, feelings, and thoughts to already existent ways of doing things and interacting with one another. In chapter 4, I claim that habits are a relatively flexible channeling of both organic and environmental resources, deriving from the strong social interdependence of human beings that is rooted in their natural fragility from birth. Through a comparison with Bourdieu’s account of habitus, I will suggest a view of habits as contingent features of human conduct that are plural and exposed to change, rather than a hidden matrix of behavior.

In chapters 5 and 6, I will develop a conception of human experience as enlanguaged—a conception that goes beyond the artificial opposition between experience and language, and assumes that language is irreversibly part of each human’s experience, but also that human experience is always embedded in linguistic contexts and practices, although this circumstance has come about contingently, because of the natural circumstances of human development. Consequently, I propose that we approach language not only from the perspective of each individual’s utterances but also as a characteristic of the human environment, configured by the broadly linguistic practices of our ancestors and continuously reshaped by our own. Hence, language is pictured not as a separate domain but as an integral part of the human form of life. In light of this, I consider language to be a complex of various sorts of utterances, embedded in—and scaffolding—different practices: not just making reference to absent things and working virtually, but also establishing and maintaining social bonds, both with intimates and strangers; making things in common; and influencing other people’s conduct.³ I will also emphasize that language is fully embodied in gestures, sounds, prosody, and rhythm—all of them aspects of the material structure of language. In the last chapter, I will further focus on the various facets of my thesis of a strong continuity between sensibility and language. Within a naturalistic framework, and by contrast to quasi-transcendentalist approaches, I will suggest that we regard linguistic utterances as deriving from previously existing organic and environmental resources. I will also consider the profound reorganization of animal sensibility, action, and cognition caused by the advent of linguistic practices, as well as the deep intertwining of both qualitative-holistic and analytic features in linguistic habits and practices.

Certainly, such a proposal is limited and could be integrated by further research in other fields—from the point of view of contents, the issue of humans as tool makers and of the disrupting and reshaping effect of media and artifacts on human lives would be important; from the point of view of the sources, a pragmatist anthropology could be significantly enriched by reconsidering Peirce’s semiotic investigations with a more specific focus on human nature and behaviors.

The method I follow in this volume is an updated version of the mixed method—partly theoretical and partly historical—I have derived from my “continental” philosophical education in Venice, where I have learned to make use of conceptual and argumentative resources inherited from the past in order to engage with current problems. This means considering historical reconstruction not as an end in itself but as a strategy to engage with the topics at stake, by exposing those resources to any criticism and integration provided by more recent theoretical debates. This sort of engagement can involve the adoption of a different vocabulary as well as a different set of references that could help consider old issues through alternative points of view. Such an approach might sound strange in most of the current English-speaking philosophical world, with its usual sharp division between, on the one hand, theoreticians engaging with philosophical problems that are dealt with independently of the discussions they have engendered in the past and, on the other hand, historians of philosophy reconstructing past ideas and philosophies with textual and historical accuracy, but with no pretense to solve any issue at stake or formulate it in an alternative way.

My preference for the mixed method also reflects a conscious choice to reject methodological individualism as the default approach in philosophy: I share the Pragmatists’ assumption that a social group, an institution, a mother tongue, or a cultural tradition is already there when we are born, and that our self-identity gradually emerges out of the shared form of life we are embedded in from birth—namely, out of “the human family,” in James’s words (1975, 92). The old Cartesian assumption that one should start thinking exclusively by oneself and must do so in order to give up false prejudices seems artificial in light of the socially and culturally shared constraints of our individual experience (Ruggenini 2006). By contrast, I think that a person’s own contribution and originality consists in the ways he or she filters, criticizes, integrates, reorganizes, or even distances him- or herself from the cultural heritage he or she comes from when exposed to different existential conditions and different sets of categories, including discourses. We cannot ignore the consequences—in terms of the way we do philosophy—of the assumption that knowledge has a social character, which is to say: the view that a new particular thought becomes true insofar as it corresponds to the complex web of previous beliefs, already stocked opinions, and rules of action each person has inherited from the previous generations (James 1975, 34 and ff.). This approach to the philosophical task can sometimes make it difficult to distinguish between an individual contribution and the inherited culture from which it takes shape, disappointing both philologists and analytical philosophers. However, I think it is worthwhile to run this risk, because discrimination is possible. In this specific case, I will draw most of my arguments from the Classical Pragmatists, as readers who are familiar with this field of research will easily see. However, the peculiar focus on sensibility and the proposal to identify the latter with the already meaningful perception of living conditions as favorable or harmful are mine alone, and cannot be found in any of the authors whose writings I make use of. I will also stress Dewey’s investigations on habits in order to offer a provisional, working definition of habits as the relatively flexible channeling of resources coming from both the environment and the organism, against the background of a conception of behavior as the integral output of organic-environmental interactions. I will develop a theory of habit acquisition from the social, prepersonal level to the individual one, beyond the Pragmatists’ explicit arguments. Finally, I will use arguments and ideas derived from Dewey, Mead, Frank Lorimer, and even James to support the thesis that language has become an integral part of the human niche. I will focus, in particular, on the disrupting feedback effects it has had—and still has—on humans’ ways of interacting with their world, far beyond their explicit and sometimes ambivalent statements.

Of course, the point of departure for any specifically individual contribution is not bound to be other philosophies, as in my case: it might be biology, physics, or even a picture of the complex variety of everyday life, as is the case for phenomenologists as well as anthropologists dealing with the interpretation of ethnographic material. I tend to adopt a pluralistic attitude with reference to the body of knowledge one decides or happens to start from, but I think that there is no a priori best term of comparison—as, for example, physical reductionists believe.

In this regard, a philosophical anthropology should still look like an armchair enterprise to most current people involved in ethnographic work. However, my point is that not even armchair philosophers are closed within their own minds and shut off from the rest of the world. Rather, for the most part they engage with a restricted yet significant portion of the shared world, namely, the cultural heritage of concepts and arguments derived from a specific past and tradition. Certainly, that part of the world philosophers engage with is limited and different from everyday life in the traditional or contemporary societies studied by anthropologists, but I see no reason to disregard the portion represented by intellectual history and assume it did not contribute to the shaping of human forms of life.

Through the Pragmatists, I contend, we can identify some features in human behaviors that seem to be shared and relatively stable, given the natural history of humanity up to the present. These common features, as will become evident, clear the field and set the ground for the great variety and variability of human behaviors, rather than for a narrowing down of human conducts to some main possibilities, assumed to be instantiable in different ways. Philosophical anthropology has usually been identified with the German intellectual tradition developed by Arnold Gehlen and Helmuth Plessner, and generally based on a phenomenological background (Max Scheler and also Martin Heidegger), with further insights provided by theoretical biology (Jacob von Uexküll and Adolf Portmann). While sharing some important elements of this intellectual tradition (Fischer 2009), my proposal of a philosophical anthropology developed from pragmatist arguments and insights adopts a more coherent cultural naturalistic stance, with no emphasis on an allegedly radical break in organism-environment relations between man and other animals. World precariousness and stability are not seen as an exclusively human experience, as was the case in existentialism and in German philosophical anthropology, but rather as a basic fact of life in general. By contrast, I wish to emphasize the ways in which new organic and environmental conditions—including sociocultural aspects—have exercised feedback actions and contributed to reorganizing already existing animal interactions by reshaping previous forms of animal sensibility, habitual behavior, and modes of gestural communication.

An important part of the method adopted here is the constant exposition of the Pragmatists’ arguments to different approaches and vocabularies from other naturalistic, but nonreductive, fields. The book makes broad references to the work of contemporary scholarship on the mind’s radically embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended condition (Gallagher, Di Paolo, Colombetti, Nöe, and Hutto, among others), as well as to works on other topics that are crucial for both progressive trends in current cognitivism and for pragmatist anthropology. My contention is that a treatment of subjects such as perception and emotions, habits versus representations, and linguistic bodies could be provided more coherently by shifting the field of research from the philosophy of mind and cognition to an anthropological view of the above features as something characterizing the specific form of human life within a naturally sociocultural environment. Seen from a pragmatist perspective, cognition appears to be rooted in the phenomenon of living and limited to specific phases of experience, which leaves us enough room to draw distinctions between human forms of intelligence and other organic modes of intelligence. Likewise, the mind is approached as an emergent quality of specific human forms of interaction with the environment, but it is not assumed to be the only decisive feature shaping human behavior.

Furthermore, a pragmatist approach to human nature and its contingent history can represent a significant contribution to paleoanthropological research on human phylogenesis. In what follows, I will make some important references to the claims supported by Tattersall and Tomasello. A pragmatist anthropology shares their hypothesis of language as an exaptive phenomenon having disruptive effects on human development, as well as the idea of a mutual interdependence of the cultural and biological aspects of the environment and the assumption that human sociability is qualitatively different from other animal modes of being social. I will argue that pragmatist anthropology could provide a significant theoretical input for investigations of this kind, pushing them, on the one hand, to definitely abandon the residual computational framework (partly) characterizing their idea of language and, on the other hand, to definitely emancipate themselves from a mentalistic conception of intersubjectivity.

Pierre Bourdieu is also regarded as an important point of reference in the third chapter, where similarities as well as divergences with respect to Dewey’s theory of habits prove crucial for highlighting the peculiarity of a pragmatist approach to the topic.

Furthermore, I will be making some references to developmental psychology, and particularly to Trevarthen’s work on very early forms of multimodal communication between new and old members of the human species. This perspective is significant because of its consequences for the issue of human ontogenesis, but also because it carries on the Classical Pragmatists’ early interest in this field of inquiry.

2. The State of the Art

As I hinted above, only a few scholars have sought to outline a philosophical anthropology through a pragmatist lens. Arguably, the most remarkable attempt has been made by Joseph Margolis, whose philosophical anthropology seems to be the ultimate outcome of his previous investigations into the philosophy of the arts, the avenue for a form of naturalism without reduction, and an opportunity for radical historicity (2016). In Margolis’s first Venetian Lecture (2017),⁴ it becomes clear that the central issue he is addressing is the problem of the human “gap” in animal continuity: this is the basic paradox characterizing human beings and Margolis’s challenge is to interpret the distinctiveness of humans—including intentional, cultural, and self-reflective features—without resorting to extra-naturalistic causes or sources, as well as by avoiding any form of eliminativism or reduction of the personal and the cultural to physical entities. By acknowledging the complexity of the animal world—both in its social aspects and in its nondiscursive forms of intelligence—Margolis considers sociality to be an extremely important feature of being human, but believes that it is not enough to understand the emergence of human persons. Adopting such an approach would mean overlooking the highly refined forms of societal life characterizing many animal species—where nonetheless we cannot appreciate the level of self-reflectivity that is distinctive of human beings. On the contrary, the acquisition of a natural language remains a distinctively human characteristic: although it is grounded in the completely natural favorable changes in the human vocal apparatus and brain, it contributes to producing the processual construction of selves out of human animals. Mar...