To Flourish or Destruct

A Personalist Theory of Human Goods, Motivations, Failure, and Evil

Christian Smith

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780226232003
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In his 2010 book What Is a Person?, Christian Smith argued that sociology had for too long neglected this fundamental question. Prevailing social theories, he wrote, do not adequately "capture our deep subjective experience as persons, crucial dimensions of the richness of our own lived lives, what thinkers in previous ages might have called our 'souls' or 'hearts.'" Building on Smith's previous work, To Flourish or Destruct examines the motivations intrinsic to this subjective experience: Why do people do what they do? How can we explain the activity that gives rise to all human social life and social structures?Smith argues that our actions stem from a motivation to realize what he calls natural human goods: ends that are, by nature, constitutionally good for all human beings. He goes on to explore the ways we can and do fail to realize these ends—a failure that can result in varying gradations of evil. Rooted in critical realism and informed by work in philosophy, psychology, and other fields, Smith's ambitious book situates the idea of personhood at the center of our attempts to understand how we might shape good human lives and societies.

1

Critical Realist Personalism—Some Basics

Critical realist personalism grounds and centers its theoretical reflections in the nature, capacities, limitations, and implications of real human personhood. Humanity’s personal being is the starting point, substantive focus, and explanatory reference for understanding the constitution and operation of human personal and social life. To describe, understand, and explain features of human life well—from the simplest actions to the most complex global institutions—one must begin by thinking about what persons are, can do, are motivated to accomplish, are not able to do, and what their actions and interactions produce through emergence as social facts. I have written in depth about the nature of persons elsewhere, but readers of this book may benefit from a restatement of some of the basics of personalist theory.1

The center and touchstone of personalist social theory is the human person. Every social theory and philosophy has some structuring framework, guiding metaphor, or thematic reference that organizes how it describes and explains reality. Thomas Hobbes, for example, focused on the problem of creating order in a chaotic and conflicted world. John Locke wrote of the problem of cultivating a free citizenship in the face of overbearing states. Jeremy Bentham emphasized the maximizing of human pleasure and minimizing of pain. Karl Marx made the means and relations of material production his interpretive key. Émile Durkheim framed his thinking around the problem of social solidarity. Talcott Parsons’s theoretical touchstone was the functional survival and well-being of social systems. Pierre Bourdieu was centrally concerned with the dynamics of the social reproduction of inequality.2 By comparison, the central organizing theoretical principle and reference of personalist theory is the human person.

The Reality of the Person

The most basic belief underlying personalist theory is that human persons are real entities with ontological being that exist in nature. Persons and personhood are not mere names we give to gesture toward something that seems real but in fact is a mere appearance or fabrication. By calling ourselves “persons” we are not simply evoking a fiction of folk psychology that has no substantial referent. The word “persons” refers to real entities, that which we humans ontologically are. Personhood is a real thing, what philosophers call a “natural kind.” Persons have being naturally, as a particular kind of entity with characteristic capacities, features, and tendencies that are distinct from nonpersonal entities. Persons are one particular part of the larger order of reality in the nature of things. They are not human cultural constructions (although our theories about them, which is different from the “them” about which we have theories, are human constructions). Furthermore, the personhood of persons cannot be disaggregated in a reductionistic operation to some lesser or simpler collection of parts, without a loss of ontological essentials. The personhood of persons is irreducible.3 So when we ponder what related to human social life might be real, what actually exists, what belongs to a human social ontology, human persons are among them as primary facts. Human life never could be constructed and lived in some places or times in a way in which personhood was absent. Where there are living humans we find persons.4 That is because personhood is a particular, natural, and central aspect of human being.5

By “humans” I mean living members of the human species—Homo sapiens—at whatever stage of development in the life course. By “reality” I mean all that belongs to that which has being, the sum total of what exists. By “real” I mean possessing ontological being and thus occupying a part of the totality of all that exists in reality. Included in the real are both material things and nonmaterial entities that possess causal powers.6 Thus no material object is not real, and nothing that can exert causal force on other objects is not real. Nonmaterial entities—such as gravity, radio waves, force fields, beliefs, and desires—may therefore be real if they possess causal powers.

What would an argument against the reality of human personhood sound like? One version might be that “persons” are mere epiphenomenal imaginings or cognitive illusions wafting off of the brains of the material bodies of Homo sapiens about themselves or other humans. Such a materialist account might say humans are bodies and nothing but bodies, mere matter and electrical signals and the stream of conscious perceptions and cognitions that arise from them—but nothing existing above and beyond those material elements, despite our imaginings of them.7 Another personhood-denying view, compatible with the materialist account above, would argue a social-constructionist line, that personhood is merely a cultural invention of some people in some times and places, not real or universal. The constructed idea of personhood is simply a cultural imposition on human bodies, merely one way to look at what human beings are. In which case, we might want to call some people “persons” in social contexts that recognize the term, but have no good reason to claim that all humans are persons or that personhood itself is a real, natural entity.

Personalism denies both of those positions. For one reason, personalism rejects classical materialism (the doctrine that nothing exists except matter) as a general metaphysical presupposition and exclusive criterion defining the contents of reality. The causal criterion of reality recognizes nonmaterial entities possessing causal powers as belonging to the real. Many things that are not material do possess capacities to exert causal forces to make things happen in the world. And, by a causal criterion of reality, that makes them real. Personhood endows humans with causal powers that are not reducible to the material bodily elements from which personhood emerges, and so causally equipped and cause-exerting persons are real. Accounts that seek to expunge such nonmaterial entities from reality yet explain without them how reality (supposedly) works end up having to engage in more intellectual reductionism and contortions than justifies the initial presupposition of metaphysical materialism. Materialism is a mere presupposed doctrine—the kind that constrictively functions to define the basic rules of the scientific game in ways that determine in the first place what could count as a fact and so what could possibly ever be discovered and recognized. So it seems best to many of us simply not to presuppose it, since other good reasons and evidence argue against it. Personalism thus contends that nonmaterial entities can exist and do exist, and very important among them are human persons.8

The Centrality of Persons

In personalism, social structures and societies are not prioritized analytically or morally over persons. Particular features of human relationships or institutions are not privileged in explaining humans and social life. Specific analytical questions about social order or change are not the starting point. Rather, personalism is driven by a realist account of what persons are ontologically, what persons are capable of causally, how finite persons are limited in their causal capacities, and what personhood entails as genuine goods for persons to pursue teleologically. The rest flows from there. In personalism, the real, natural character, capacities, tendencies, interests, and ends of human persons, and the constructed cultural and institutional outcomes to which those naturally give rise, are what organize and shape how personalism describes and explains human social life. The cultures and the social, economic, and political institutions, structures, processes that people develop and pass on are first and ultimately made sense of by the nature, capacities, goods, and limits of human persons.

From a personalist perspective, a crucial test of any theory about human social life is whether it in principle, at least, comports with what we know about and experience as persons. Not every theory needs to discuss persons explicitly. But every theory needs in principle to be able to explain, if asked, how its account fits with what we best understand about personhood. The question is one of compatibility and coherence, not completeness. Not all theories need to spell out their positions on personhood. But they should be able, in principle, to unpack their respective assumptions and theories in ways that are compatible with the central role of human persons as described by personalism in social life. Theories may operate at a very abstract or macro level. That is fine. The question is whether they are capable of providing an account of how and why they work at that level in light of the reality of human persons. Theories that can are worth further consideration. But theories that try to explain important features of social life while blackboxing the nature, interests, capacities, tendencies, goods, and ends of human persons are problematic, perhaps worth learning from selectively but not deserving full acceptance.

The principal reason behind this position is the personalist belief that human persons are the primary actors in and agents of human social life. The actions of persons are what animate, energize, and drive social life. Of course, social structures and institutions also emerge into real being at an ontologically higher level than that of persons as a result of emergent human activity. The social does exist at a higher level than the personal in the “strata” of reality, just as both of these exist at a higher level than the cardiovascular or neurological. And those social structures and institutions by virtue of their sui generis emergent properties and capacities possess specific downward causal powers that persons do not possess. But all social structures and institutions are emergently dependent upon the ongoing activity of human persons, whereas human persons are only contextually and developmentally dependent upon the social structures and institutions that nurture and sustain (or perhaps exclude, exploit, and destroy) them.9 This is a crucial distinction. By emergently dependent I mean having no source of being other than that given through upward emergence. By contextually and developmentally dependent I mean actually having a different source of being—different from upward emergence working from a lower level—but still needing the higher level as a context necessary for the nurturance and sustenance of that being. Thus personal being emerges up from human bodies, not downwardly from social structures. Yet persons depend upon social structures and institutions to survive and realize the fullness of their personhood, so they are contextually and developmentally dependent but not emergently dependent upon them. In this sense, while both personal and social realities possess and exercise different real causal powers to influence the world, human persons are ontologically more basic and original sources of life and energy in the social world than are social structures and institutions.10 Therefore, any good social theory should in principle be able to explain why and how it works analytically and explanatorily in relation to the principle source of social life and activity, human persons. Otherwise it is a theory floating inexplicably above the level of reality from which its components draw their being.

This account proceeds within a different framework from the individualism/social holism debate of a generation ago.11 Personalism rejects social holism as an account of human social life. No social being exists apart from the activities of persons, which emergently give rise to the social. Holism itself was an equally troubled pendulum swing away from problematic atomistic individualism. But the real problems of a rival do not make its counterpart valid or sensible. Framed in terms of that debate, personalism also rejects individualism. Society, social institutions, and social structures are not simply nominal labels attached for convenience purposes to what is really nothing more ontologically than individuals behaving and interacting. Social institutions and structures are real in their own right; they exist in reality, sui generis, possessing real ontological being through emergence, which endows them with their own causal features and capacities.12 The social exists at a next-higher “level” of reality above the personal. So despite its emphasis on the centrality of persons, personalism cannot accept an individualistic social theory. Since that older holism/individualism debate, more recent social theorists have proposed other ways to address similar issues. For some time, the matter was framed as a “micro/macro problem.” Anthony Giddens tried to dissolve the holism/individualism, micro/macro problem with his theory of structuration. James Coleman took a rational choice approach in linking individual agents to macro social processes.13 All of these offered advances in understanding, in their own ways. But none are ultimately satisfactory from a personalist perspective, for reasons that will become clear as this book unfolds. Suffice it for now to say that personalism derives its understanding and explanation of social life from the nature of human persons, yet without discounting the reality and power of social structures and institutions.

A Realist View of Reality

Critical realist personalism provides us with certain conceptual distinctions that are essential for making sense of reality, on which the argument of this book relies. One set of distinctions is among the real, the actual, and the empirical. The real, as noted above, is what exists—material, nonmaterial, and social entities that have structures and capacities. The real exists whether we know or understand it. It possesses objective being apart from human awareness of it, even when parts of it are not expressed in existential actuality. The actual, by contrast, is what happens as events in the world, when entities that belong to the real activate their powers and capacities. The actual happens in time and space, whether any person experiences it or not. The empirical, by contrast again, consists of what we humans experience or observe, either directly or indirectly. By definition, empirical matters are actualities that are observed or felt. Thus what we observe (the empirical) is not identical to all that happens (the actual). The actual comprises much more than the empirical. And neither the actual nor the empirical are identical to all that has existence (the real). There is also more to what is real than what happens, and to think otherwise is to engage in the fallacy critical realists dub “actualism.” The empirical is always a subset of the actual, and the actual is the outcome of operations of entities that belong to the real. The three must not be conflated or else we fall into problems.

Maintaining these distinctions enables us to understand that certain objects and entities can and do exist even if they are empirically not observable at particular times and places (for example, beliefs, values, and desires). It is only when they activate their causal powers in ways producing events in time and space that they become actual, and thus potentially observable. (Of course, the causal powers of other real entities may counteract or neutralize their causal powers, in which case their effects may not become actual, even though their real causal capacities are operating.) Just because we do not see or cannot experience or measure something at some place and time in the actual, that does not mean it is not real and potentially or actually exercising causal powers. To think otherwise is to conflate the real with the empirical.

Personalism begins with a set of assumptions about reality that is both commonsensical and intellectually defensible. Most generally, it assumes that independently of human consciousness, a reality exists that is differentiated, ordered, complex, and stratified. Reality is all of that which exists or has being. The existence of much, though not all, of reality—including things like galaxies, oceans, maple trees, frogs, and nitrogen—is not dependent upon human consciousness. These parts of reality would exist whether or not humans recognized, thought about, or understood them. So only some of reality is dependent for its existence on human consciousness, things like people’s beliefs, for example. What is this larger reality like? Reality is, first of all, differentiated. It does not consist of one indivisible monad, but of different parts, including planets and toads (among those that are not mind-dependent) and families and armies (among those at least partly dependent upon human consciousness for their existence as institutional facts). Those parts that altogether comprise reality are also ordered. They stand in relationship to and interaction with many other parts in ways that are normally stable across space and time. That is in part what makes it scientifically understandable. Reality is also complex, not simple. Its many parts are normally related in intricate, interdependent ways, so that a change in any one part usually has consequences for other parts, making most parts causally subject to potential influences by many other parts.

Reality is also stratified. Subsystems of reality cluster together as if in “layers” operating “above” and “below” other subsections. By subsystems of reality I mean particula...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Critical Realist Personalism—Some Basics
• 2 Rethinking Motivations for Action
• 3 Against Social Situationism
• 4 Human Nature and Motivation in Classical Theory
• 5 On Basic Human Goods, Interests, and Motivations
• 6 Toward a Theory of Flourishing
• 7 Understanding Failure, Destruction, and Evil
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index