The Subject of Human Being

Christopher W. Haley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317283171
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The Subject of Human Being presents a sweeping account of the nature of human existence. As a work of philosophical anthropology, the analysis ranges from the basic powers emerging from the mind, to our extraordinary psychological capacities, to the shared sociocultural worlds we inhabit. The book integrates different perspectives on social ontology from a selection of philosophers and theorists, whose advances toward understanding the relationship between individuals and society ought to revolutionize social theory as understood and practiced in the social sciences and humanities. Although grounded in critical realist philosophy of Roy Bhaskar and the social theory of Margaret Archer, the book also draws from philosophy of mind, phenomenology of consciousness, psychoanalytic theory, virtue ethics, and personalism to support and extend its arguments. Four elements of human existence are examined: the nature of consciousness, agency, subjectivity, and the social world. Thus, it addresses related issues of power, the agent-structure problem, the formation of beliefs and desires, human universals, and human rights. Portraying a unified social theory that is materialist, realist, dialectical, and centered on emergence, and offering a comprehensive and progressive theory of human being, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of critical realism, philosophy, and the social sciences.

1Introduction

Human being

What is a human being? There is no more immediate and consequential philosophical problem than human self-definition. Answers to the question inevitably if not axiomatically shape human institutional reality, governing family, polity, economy, and the infinite permutations of the social world. It might be considerate to provide a comparative study of the many different answers to the question, drawing on Western philosophical, theological, and secular sources with a frank appreciation of cross-cultural alternatives from India, China, and sub-Saharan Africa to celebrate and relativize all conceptions of how a human being can be defined. The supra-universalism of such an inclusive party, however, is nothing more than a tautology. Human being is thusly defined as “what you see is what you get,” or perhaps more accurately, “what you know is what you get.” In any case, tautological expressions of human “being” in its specific practice and institutional life are taken as “at one” or identical with its self-nature. On the surface the implication is that human nature is plastic and endlessly malleable to the hand of cultural determinants. This is a consequence, however, of a more fundamental unease, a relativistic tendency generated by an underlying skepticism toward “objective” knowledge and the real problem of categorical imperialism, whether by “presentism” or “ethnocentrism.” Because it is true: in the totality of human habitation on earth, the diversity, alterity, and seeming incommensurability of cultural and historical differences, of thousands of different languages and religions and profoundly different familial, political, and economic systems, yields a sense that any attempt to provide a universal philosophical anthropology could only really be a “local prejudice.”

The Subject of Human Being proposes that human being cannot be defined in exclusive (or reductionist) terms of being “as is,” whether historical, cultural, or social on the one hand, and certainly not biological, universal, or transcendental on the other. Instead, an objective definition of the nature of human being must account for individual, sociocultural, and universal facets of each human being, and provide a theory of how the universal intersects with the concrete, local, idiosyncratic features of all peoples in all places in all times. Accordingly, the central premise upon which this book succeeds or fails is that social theory has advanced to a point where it is now possible to provide an interdisciplinary account of the universal features, powers, capacities of being human on the one hand, and the concrete and geohistorically specific features, structures, forms, institutions of social being on the other, wedded together as a unified social theory.

The nature of human being, therefore, is both given and not given. It is given because there are universal features of humankind, granted by the shared features of biology, consciousness, agency, subjectivity, language, and intersubjectivity. It is not given because for every “self” in the world, each person has only actualized through language, culture, identity(s), and social interactions. What is universal in each person is only manifested in particular social contexts that precede them in time.¹ The great theoretical challenge is to model the fact that social prerequisites for human existence are simultaneously dependent on human beings for their existence. Humankind produces its social conditions of existence. Individual selves are subjected to these conditions, fundamentally in reference to a set of beliefs and desires concerning their world. Thus the “self” becomes a “subject” through the combination of ontological features of human being that are universal to its kind and ontological features of the social world that condition the self in concrete geohistorical and sociocultural milieus.

At the heart of human being is a gap created by belief and desire, detaching human existence from the surrounding conditions of existence. Human belief has a truth condition to be true that often succeeds but also routinely and systematically fails. Human desire has a fulfillment condition to be fulfilled that separates the world as it is from the world desired to be. For both beliefs and desires, the psychoanalytic, anthropological, and philosophical question revolves around their formation. What a person believes and desires is informed by their social milieu but not determined by their milieu. At the same, beliefs and desires, especially those revolving around conceptions of what it means to be human by definition, become “reasons for action.” They become the impetus for the development and (re)production of social institutions, social structures, and the rights, duties, and liabilities of deontological powers associated with institutions and structures of social relationships.

The fundamental feature of human being is the nature of its consciousness, which is the ground-zero point for the properties and capacities of human being that distinguish it from other forms of life on earth. Human consciousness has four key emergent properties that are established by retroduction and phenomenological analysis. Human awareness of being aware is predicated on the temporality of consciousness to anticipate the future and remember the past in relation to an ongoing present. Temporal awareness establishes an enduring point of reference: the self, who remembers and makes plans in the moment. Likewise for the capacity to direct one’s conscious attention to any point of stimulus through the five senses. Some “thing” is directing one’s attention and has reasons for the action (even if the reason can only be given after the fact). The “self” is thus the “thing” that directs its attention to all things “on the mind.” This capacity is the ontological basis for human agency as a real, emergent causal power and grounds the mechanism of reflexivity.

Moreover, the meta-awareness of a self conscious of itself entails an existential gap of indeterminacy, which precludes, in principle, the potential for biological, sociological, and psychological determinations bearing on the subject. It precludes what subjects have believed and have desired by interrupting their automatic transference to the next moment as what the subject will believe and will desire. At the same time, the gap draws the subject into the existential predicament of deciding, however obscured, “what comes next in time.” The gap thus compels the subject forward to do something, make something, or say something (or just give up and go back to bed); it is the moment all beliefs have to be reconfirmed and the original ground of human desire.

The two “gaps” of belief and desire inaugurate an intertwined philosophical task—the discovery of “correct beliefs” and formation of “ethical desires.” The deep fallibility of human understanding leads to misidentification and mystification of what is universal and unconditional, and what is cultural and contingent. Human institutions reflect deep-held values and beliefs. Human institutions are also, at their core, created to enhance human power through configurations of social relations. Taken together, when beliefs are wrong, institutional reality becomes distorted and oppressive. Faulty beliefs beget destructive social institutions that normalize, naturalize, or enforce relations of power in three general domains: relations of domination between people; exploitation of nature/biosphere/other species by humankind; and privileging of the present at the expense of people and the planet in the future. It is simplistic to assume “true beliefs” will “save the day” by fostering a progressive institutional reality that no longer supports exploitation and domination. At the same time, it is apparent both within the Western world and around the world that humanity and its many societies are divided by secular and religious ideologies—divided by ontological claims for human being. This work defends a philosophical anthropology that transcends relativism and sectarian fundamentalisms. In the long haul of their development, social-theoretical and philosophical understandings of the “subject and society” have reached their apogee. An expressly ontological and unified social theory has the power to effect a radical immanent critique of all existing definitions of human being, whether theories of the “folk,” religious mystics and theologians, or philosophers of the spirit. The immanent critique acts as an agent of change, dissolving the rationalizations for and legitimacy of institutional structures that fail to provide conditions for human flourishing.

The purpose of exploring The Subject of Human Being, consequently, is to understand the relations between what is objective and universal to human being and what is subjective and particular to human beings. The basic phenomenal experience of the self unifies four key facets of human being: a bio-state of conscious awareness, a self-directed power of agency, a symbolically mediated social existence, and a geohistorical location with specific structures of social positions and powers. In the course of being alive all facets meld together, giving the “mouthfeel” of each person’s unique stance in the world—in other words, human subjectivity emerges. The analytical separation of universal and particular aspects of human being facilitates the task to theorize the relatively independent powers and capacities of human consciousness, agency, and social forms in their contribution to the larger structure of subjectivity.² Only by separating what is “real” for all human beings from the “reality” of being alive in a particular time and place can human “thoughts and theories” about humankind be rectified.

Dialectical critical realism

The methodology I employ takes an overtly multidisciplinary approach to discover overlapping and converging points of agreement from philosophical, psychoanalytic, and social-theoretical treatments of the self in relation to the social. As a project of theory-building, I take pertinent texts and undertake close readings to integrate their strengths and supplement their weaknesses and lacunas. My philosophical orientation is grounded, foremost, in Margaret Archer’s realist sociological theory and the dialectical critical realist (DCR) movement inaugurated by Roy Bhaskar. Archer’s and Bhaskar’s works, while independently developed, are philosophically compatible and mutually enriching. DCR (I will use this acronym to reference the commonality of Archer, Bhaskar, and other “family members”) reinvigorates ontological speculation, countering the epistemological turn in modern philosophy (and its positivist offshoots) and the linguistic turn in postmodern thought. DCR provides a realist, emergentist, materialist, processual, and dialectical framework to understand the world. It is upon these touchstones that I evaluate the explanatory power of various concepts and theories to uncover and explain the “nature” and powers of human being in relation to the necessary social predicates for meaningful, efficacious practices, in the doing, saying, and making of human life.

The philosophy of “critical realism” takes its name from the conflation of Kantian “critical philosophy” and Humean “empirical realism,” while jettisoning both Kant’s and Hume’s common error, what Bhaskar identifies as the epistemic fallacy. The fallacy has entailed two general trajectories in Western thought: the rationalism of the “transcendental ego” for Kant, versus the empiricism of “sensory impressions” for Hume. In both cases, and despite their epic struggle for ascendancy in philosophy around the world, being (ontology) is marginalized as effectively unknowable when it is assumed that true and justified knowledge can only be of human thoughts and perceptions—what is “on the mind.”

The critique of the epistemic fallacy is the starting point for an ontological realism that overturns all philosophical systems that discount the reality of “Being” as a legitimate object of knowledge by prioritizing epistemological considerations. DCR puts all its cards on the table. Ontological realism defends the claim that there is a real and ineluctable objective world and that all forms of “Being”—things, processes, structures, and mechanisms—with sufficient endurance in time and space have an intrinsic capacity to act as “truth makers” of human understanding and scientific explanation.

Philosophy in tune with the world requires both ontology and epistemology that are conceived as irreducible to one another. DCR posits the distinction between the domains of the intransitive (world of being) and transitive (world of knowledge). The intransitive dimension includes all relatively independent objects and processes in the world, objects such as volcanoes, the sun, cellular mitosis, evolution, mountains, and trees. Transitive objects of knowledge are the antecedent collection of theories, facts, beliefs, symbolic frameworks, models, paradigms, methods, etc. that form the material base for further knowledge production. In the social world, emergent social forms are dependent on the activities and concepts of human agents in their “doing, saying, and making.” Social forms are “existentially intransitive” because of their “relative endurance,” becoming legitimate objects of social science. DCR is sensitive to the fact the production of knowledge is inscribed by its sociohistorical context because transitive objects are included in the world of being, viz., knowledge of being is constellationally embedded in being. This fact has special bearing on transitive knowledge of the social world. Unlike knowledge of the natural world, knowledge of the social world interpenetrates with its intransitive objects, often conditioning by normative force or critique the social institutions and forms in question.

Central to DCR is the theory of emergent powers materialism (as opposed to the ubiquitous “eliminative materialism”), which postulates reality as stratified with levels holding irreducible, sui generis causal powers, from which follows a causal criterion of ontological reality, which demarcates what is “real” in terms of an intrinsic causal power. Emergence is the key DCR philosophical claim, from which all else follows: can higher-level emergents (their nature, powers, etc.) be completely explained in reference to the emergence basis, or are emergents actually qualitatively novel? Moreover, can parts form wholes with irreducible powers, generated out of the interactions among their parts? If all of reality can be reduced to a reduction base of particle physics, or whatever is the reduction point du jour, and fully explained in terms of their mechanistic determinations, human-centered reality collapses into an uninteresting and meaningless preordination of particle effects. On the contrary, the “gift” of emergence is a real world with ontological depth and all the multifaceted consequences of emergent powers, not least the causal powers associated with human agency and social forms. This entails that the objects (units of analysis) of social-scientific research are people and the mechanisms, processes, and structures that constitute social phenomena.³ A theory of emergence also informs the dialectical aspect of DCR, whereby the emergence of being always has a temporal dimension, marked by the causal powers of absence and negation, change and transformation, such that being is always a becoming.

The causal criterion can also enframe recent trends in social theory and philosophy that are usually not considered “realist” but still, nonetheless, locate a force or power operating through and animating the social world. For example, on the one hand, out of the Anglo-American empiricist tradition, contemporary neoclassical economists (neoliberals) and many political scientists and sociologists are realists about “rational individuals” and base all explanations of “social” phenomena as only statistical regularities of the actions of individuals guided by conscious self-interest and desire fulfillment. A radically divergent view, out of the continental European (suspicious) tradition, holds that what is “real” exists underneath or outside the conscious individual subject. The chieftains of continental thought follow this course: Nietzsche is a “realist” concerning the “will”; Heidegger a realist concerning the pre-ontological formations of “Dasein”; Merleau-Ponty the effects of “embodiment”; Foucault “discourse”; Derrida “text”; Lacan the “big Other-subconscious”; and Judith Butler gendered “language.”⁴ For all of these conceptions answering “what is going on in the world and why,” the ontological question seeks the prime mover of social reality, asking: what mechanisms and powers are in play in the production of the social world?

Social ontology

Human beings are, of course, at bottom biological animals, emerging out of some primordial soup on the back of chemistry and physics, and eating, mating, and dying in the due course of life. But unlike other creatures on earth, human beings have a unique capacity. Human speech acts, practices, and productions tend to agglutinate and endure through codification and concretion in time and space. People create social institutions; transform nature into a built environment (Machu Picchu, the Great Wall of China, the US interstate system, etc.); develop technologies; form polities; and create ideational monuments of religion, philosophy, and law. It seems apparent, at the same time, human day-to-day practices and productions are not fully original instances of conduct, but come through subjects as learned, emulated, or dictated, or, in other words, as necessary predicates for coherent, meaningful, and efficacious behavior within a particular social and cultural milieu.

Social ontology is concerned with social universals that are transhistorical and transcultural features of human societies, which underlie the multiplicity of cultural and historical variations expressed in human institutions and practices. The central issue of social ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Philosophical materialism
• 3 The ontology of consciousness
• 4 The ontology of subjectivity
• 5 The subject of psychoanalysis
• 6 The subject of structure
• 7 Social ontology
• 8 Conclusion
• Index