My Dinner with Torn
In which I try to come to terms with continental philosophy and practical politics
Thanks for the direct statement, John. What is interesting is how you set things up really nicely, like loading the dice. You take the social as a given, in this case a welfare programme. Then you ask us to consider the different ways individuals can respond to it (and of course there is always more than one way of reacting to things more culturally mediated than spiders and snakes). Different individuals respond in different ways, and the differences are put down to a biological predisposition. The fairness preference is explained by reference to a fairness-preference biological predisposition. My intention is not to load the dice or to take the social as a given. I’m trying to identify a practical political situation and how it can be approached. I’m not sure how best to express “the social.” In my model (the generic model I’ve borrowed from others, to be clear) , the social would be included as an external factor. Certainly it interacts with and comes to bear on what’s happening inside the individual, and the behavior that results. Is anything thereby explained? Is there any hope of isolating the biology in cases like this, and establishing beyond any reasonable Continental doubt that it is the cause? I’m not arguing for biology as “the cause.” I’m arguing that it’s part of the cause. Theoretically, if we had access to the right technology and subjects, we could isolate exactly how much of “the cause” is accounted for by the biological predisposition. From a practical perspective knowing it’s part of the cause is important, even if we haven’t quantified it absolutely. The recalcitrant Continental is more likely to insist that the initial focus be elsewhere. The social welfare programme belongs to a state - a distinctively political entity. How did such a thing come into being?
In a broader sense this is certainly the more important question, and please don’t infer an intention to discount it. I asked the more restricted question because I’m looking for you to identify some basic mechanics.
Every citizen is a flesh and blood organism, just like every lizard or orangutang. How has that flesh and blood given rise to something that the lizard and the orangutang seem incapable of?
I’m not sure that the lizard and orangutan are incapable so much as less capable or differently-capable. I don’t know much about lizards, to be honest, but based on the ones that live in here Florida they don’t appear to be particularly social animals. The only thing I can say about them is that they have exactly the capabilities evolutionary forces selected for them. Same with primates, including humans. What we call “social” refers, ultimately, to a survival mechanism that allowed the species to reproduce. All primates display it in some form. We like to think of our form as “the most advanced,” but this reflects our own arrogance more than objective reality. To make the statement given rise to something that the lizard and the orangutang seem incapable of seems to assume that humans had a choice to have the social faculties we have.
And here the recalcitrant Continental is likely to suggest that the phenomenon of self-consciousness needs to be given more weight, as does the emergent priority of a culture that is internalised by every developing child.
This might be progress. Yes, consciousness or self-awareness has an impact, and yes, culture has an impact on the developing child.
And care needs to be taken to avoid equating self-consciousness with a dubious perusal of an internal objectivity. No, self-consciousness is much more the sort of thing Hegel narrates in the Phenomenology, as a certainty of something that might be described as freedom - the certainty that one is precisely not the sort of object construed by your cognitive psychology. Again, there is no reason to deny that there are biological precedents in the behaviour of simpler organisms. But the consciousness of freedom must change the game sufficiently to explain the emergence of the sort of political entity so far absent in lizard and orangutang communities.
OK. Now maybe we’re getting somewhere. A certainty of freedom. Consciousness of freedom. No way I’m going to challenge you on Hegel, so I will accept this as Hegel gospel. My model does not account for this. In fact, I suppose it rejects it, at least as an independent factor, and not as something that “changes the game sufficiently..” I’m not at all sure this is a real phenomenon in the heads of actual people.
We are even tempted to suggest that it is precisely that self-consciousness that drives evolutionary biology insofar as the latter sets itself against what it sees as mistaken attempts at social engineering. The argument that certain political arrangements are anti-biological (assuming that such arguments are being made) is just a smokescreen for another assertion of the old masterful self-certainty (full of affect, but changed dramatically by the phenomenon of consciousness and the recoil of the subject).
I’m not sure where the assumption comes from that a biological predisposition toward a certain pattern of behavior or thinking supports one political arrangement over another. I’ve had people tell me that somehow a scientific approach to human behavior “supports capitalism,” and that the very concept of “human nature” is anti-communist, and other such nonsense.
My argument is very much the opposite. I don’t need Hegel to tell me that capitalist exploitation is an affront to anyone who values egalitarian fairness and human dignity. But blaming “capitalism” is nonsense. Capital has no agency. People do. Blame them.
And blaming science is worse than nonsense - it’s utterly counterproductive. If we don’t understand the evil men do, we can’t hope to change it. But it’s an unpleasant task. We have to be willing to knock man off any pedestal of idealism and view him as a product of the natural world and nothing more. Consciousness of freedom? Maybe one day, but not yet.