Beyond Separateness: The Social Nature Of Human Beings--their Autonomy, Knowledge, And Power 0813312507, 9780813312507

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Beyond Separateness

BEYOND SEPARATENESS The Social Nature of Human Beings— Their Autonomy, Knowledge, and Power RICHARD SCHMITT

Routledge

Taylor & Francis Group New York London

Excerpts from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, copyright 1927 by Harcourt Brace & C o m p a n y and renewed 1954 by Leonard Woolf, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace & Company. Acknowledgment is also gratefully made to the estate of Virginia W o o l f and T h e Hogarth Press, publisher of To the Lighthouse in the United Kingdom.

First published 1995 by Westview Press Published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © 1995 Taylor & Francis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schmitt, Richard, 1927Beyond separateness : the social nature of human beings—their autonomy, knowledge, and power / Richard Schmitt. p.

cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8133-1224-8.—ISBN 0-8133-1250-7 (pbk.) 1. Individualism. (Social sciences) HM136.S393

2. Autonomy.

3. Social choice.

4. Power

I. Title. 1995

302.5'4—dc20

95-8126 CIP

ISBN 13: 978-0-8133-1250-7 (pbk)

She told them that the only grace they could have is the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it. —Tout Morrison, Beloved

Contents ix

Preface 1

Autonomy

1

Distinct Bodies and Separate Persons The Autonomy of the Philosophers Autonomy as Self-Ownership, Self-Realization, or Self-Creation Is Autonomy Possible? The Problem of Socialization

2 4 7 10

2

17

Separateness

What Is Separateness? Groups and the Debate over Individualism The Defense of Separateness Joint Actions 3

The Critique of Separateness

A Case History The Troubles with Separate Autonomy Is Separateness Chosen? Being-in-Relation: Minimal, Covert, or Open Is This One More Attack on Individualism? 4

Being-in-Relation

Caring Reciprocity Reciprocity and Being-in-Relation Caring for Children Being-in-Relation and Teaching Separateness, Covert Being-in-Relation,~and Openly Chosen Being-in-Relation

17 20 23 26 34 35 38 51 53 55 58 60 63 66 71 73 77

vii

Contents

viii 5

Examples of Being-in-Relation

Being-in-Relation and Empathy Autonomy and Conformity Autonomy in-Relation Doubts Separateness, Language, and Philosophy 6

Love and Anger

Current Views of Love Love in-Relation But What About Unrequited Love? Love and Anger as Forms of Being-in-Relation Love and Anger as Openly Chosen Forms of Being-in-Relation Eros and Agape 7

Knowledge: Separate or in-Relation?

The Problems of Separate Knowing Social Knowledge Knowing in-Relation Different Kinds of Knowledge 8

Power and Empowerment

80 80 88 90 97 101 105 105 111 114 117 120 123 124 125 138 142 146 149

Traditional Conceptions of Power Power and Separateness Problems with the Prevailing Conception of Power An Alternative Theory of Power Power Is Not a Communicative Medium How Power Came to Be Anonymous Covertly in-Relation Power Is Oppressive Covertly in-Relation Power Alienates Empowerment Choosing Empowerment Some Final Thoughts

151 151 152 154 156 158 160 162 165 172 176

Notes References About the Book and Author Index

179 188 198 199

Preface

LOOKING BACK OVER the twentieth century, we see an uninterrupted string of crises: wars, mass murders, famines, systemwide collapses. That perhaps does not distinguish our era from earlier times: Throughout history human beings have suffered many calamities. But in our century the experience of these crises has become very self-conscious. Crises have become occasions for serious theoretical efforts at understanding and diagnosing our ills and prescribing remedies. These efforts have not had an overwhelming success, but neither have they been shown to be useless. This book makes a contribution to this continuing reflection about ways of improving the human lot by ameliorating our ways of living in society. The task of social amelioration has been approached in three different ways. Most familiar are the thinkers who point with justified pride at the accomplishments of capitalism and liberal democracy and urge us to improve on the details of that economic and political system to usher in a less tortured era of human history. In economics they defend laissez-faire capitalism; in the political arena they recommend subtle improvements of the electoral system in Western democracies. Their social theories interpret a wide range of phenomena as quasi-market exchange relations. This project comes under attack from two sides. Both sides deplore the rootlessness and fragmentation of life in modern capitalist society. Both sides echo Marx's words that capitalism, "wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has ... left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash-payment'" (Marx and Engels, 1978:475). Capitalism, whatever its accomplishments, has been spectacularly destructive of the social fabric. It has depersonalized relationships and thereby allowed free rein to the worst human impulses of selfishness, cruelty, and disregard for the needs of the poor and the weak. The central principles of social organization of the capitalist democracy need to be replaced. But these sorts of criticisms take two diametrically opposed forms. First, there are the backward-looking critics: They find models of future, more humane social institutions in past societies that capitalism and liberal democracy have destroyed. Such are "communitarian" theorists. These critics of capitalist democracy point to the ways in which capitalism has robbed the world of its magic and has replaced it with a world animated by individual interest and structured by contractual relations. They want to renew our world by re-creating some earlier ix

X

Preface

social structures in which community came before individual interest and tradition was stronger than (quasi-)scientific rationality. Attacks from the opposite direction come from thinkers who identify with Marxism or have, in one way or another, been moved by Marxism to believe that there is no reason to glorify the past. The knowledge that life in feudal society was oppressive as well as the bitter memories of large-scale communitarian experiments of the fascist and communist variety support them in that stance. Critical theorists use vocabularies that range from an orthodox Marxian one to the vocabulary of communicative ethics, or of feminism, to look into the future for some hope for amelioration and possible paths toward fulfilling those hopes. They are united by the commitment to an emancipatory project. In each case the replacement of the "idyllic" relations of an earlier era by the "cash-nexus" of capitalism is the target. But different theorists take different aspects of that transformation to be the most fundamental. Orthodox Marxists have drawn attention to the exploitative nature of capitalism. When the cash-nexus becomes the tie between employer and worker, the worker is exploited. The system that promised to increase the well-being of all, if only each would pursue his or her self-interest rationally, instead is bringing misery to the many and excessive wealth to the few. Accordingly Marxists offer as their remedy class struggle and socialist revolution designed to end exploitation: The means to a better world is to be found in class-based political action aiming at the transformation of the political landscape and bringing economic transformation in its wake. Habermas and the Frankfurt School turned their attention to the conception of rationality that predominates in capitalist democratic societies. Replacing the older idyllic relations with the cash-nexus of capitalist contracts has replaced a more generous form of rationality with strictly "instrumental" rationality—the exclusive use of reason for calculating appropriate means to each individuals ends. The "lifeworld" of traditional ways of understanding and tackling social problems is "colonized" by the rational practices of experts and bureaucrats. Such a diagnosis of our problems leads to proposals to reform our practices as rational (political) agents by reconsidering the nature and uses of rationality. Another focus of attacks has been the conception of persons as separate individual actors. Marx often talked as if it were simply false that human beings are as separate from one another as, implicitly or explicitly, the defenders of capitalist democracy describe them. But elsewhere, for instance, in his discussion of alienation, he suggests a more complex and interesting view: We who live under a capitalist democracy are, indeed, separate individuals, but that is determined by social institutions, not human nature, and is therefore alterable. If we are separate individuals today, we need to not be quite as separate tomorrow. The replacement of traditional, complex relationships that were constitutive of persons by the purely external relationships measurable by their economic value came about through human choices and can be undone by making other, better choices.

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This last claim has gained further interest and complexity in recent feminist theory that has pointed out that men in our society are considerably more likely to conform to the image of the separate economic or political actor whom we encounter in the theory of capitalist democracy than women. Their role has traditionally been to build bridges and to establish bonds between these separate actors. Male separateness has not been open to women because they were not supposed to be separate but to supply the social and affective connections destroyed in the public sphere by capitalist democracy. The relationships of women were not uniformly replaced by the cash-nexus of the capitalist marketplace because women did work they did not get paid for, regardless of whether they also hired themselves out for wages. Work in the home was not contracted for. The older "idyllic" relations were said to have found a refuge there, even if only in the practices of women. That suggests that separateness is not natural and inescapable but is a way of being that has been chosen, mostly by men. This attack on separateness is new. At the same time it is continuous with prominent themes in earlier views. The attack on separateness continues a longstanding tradition of being critical of the individualism that underlies the theory and practice of liberal democracy. The Marxian complaint about the destruction of social bonds became a staple of nineteenth- and twentieth-century social thought. Sir Henry Maine argued that the history of law manifests a transition from "status" to "contract." Ferdinand Tbnnies distinguished the "society" in which we live from an earlier "community," and Max Weber deplored the "disenchantment" of our world by the new capitalist rationality. Fascism in the 1920s and 1930s gave a thoroughly conservative interpretation to these complaints, as do the advocates of traditional religion and morality today. Individual license is to be restrained by giving new force to traditional communal values. Individualism is overcome by subordinating individuals to communal regimes. At the other end of the political spectrum, protests against capitalist rationality point to its oppressiveness and look toward greater equality and more genuine democracy as cures. Capitalist individualism is said to have fragmented social structures and left the weak helpless against the depredations of the powerful. Collective decisionmaking at work and elsewhere is expected to cure the destructiveness of an atomized society. Both the backward-looking and the liberationist critics of capitalist democracy agree that individualism is seriously in error. But a good deal of the debate over individualism suffers from vagueness. The reflections that follow about separateness and being-in-relation will help to clarify some issues in the debate over individualism. Most of this book concerns itself with the argument about separateness and its opposite, "being-in-relation." In the first two chapters, the issue of general social amelioration may seem quite far removed. These chapters provide the necessary conceptual toolkit for the argument that follows. But then we come back, in Chapter 3, to the oppressive effects of separate autonomy on women and in Chap-

Preface

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ters 7 and 8 to the destructive effects of separateness on those without officially accredited expertise. From then on, the project of social amelioration is never too far in the background. More promising relationships to others, being-in-relation, occupy Chapters 4 and 5. Chapter 6 compares the kinds of intimacy available to the separate individual with the love that being-in-relation can bring. Also in the final chapter, I will approach that central issue of social and political reform very directly by examing the concept of power. The conception of power that goes with the prevailing doctrine of human (read "male") separateness is inevitably power that dominates. If we are to envisage a society where solidarity carries more weight than domination, we need either a society where power is evenly distributed—a completely Utopian conception—or one where power differentials do not inevitably end in domination. That is possible only if being-in-relation is chosen more often than we choose it today. Much of the current discussion of separateness, and of the relations that women sometimes have to one another, is too general. I will try to examine the opposition between separateness and being-in-relation in more concrete terms, to see whether the central opposition is still discernible and reasonably clear when we look at it in some detail. Hence I begin in Chapter 1 to talk about autonomy, a concept of considerable importance in contemporary philosophy in the Englishspeaking world. I will raise certain difficulties about prevailing concepts of autonomy that arise because autonomy is explicated against the background of the assumption that human beings are irremediably separate from one another. In the first three chapters, I argue that that assumption is an error. It is moreover a complex error. Human beings are not as separate from one another as many mainstream philosophers assume. In addition, whether we are separate is not a question of fact but a matter of how we choose to be. (So is the precise way in which we choose to be separate.) Insofar as human beings are separate from one another they are so by choice. We could choose to be different, namely, in-relation. The two chapters that follow, Chapters 4 and 5, develop being-in-relation in some detail and begin to present some reasons for preferring being-in-relation over separateness. The final three chapters will try to strengthen those arguments against choosing separateness by discussing different forms of being-in-relation: in empathy, love, knowledge, and, finally, power. If many of us chose to be in-relation more of the time than we do now, would emancipation be closer to our reach? Would our social life be humanized? This book lays some of the foundations to an affirmative answer to those questions. *

*

*

Many persons have listened to me talk about these issues and have read what I have written. They have patiently waited for the issues to clarify themselves while insistently pointing to the difficulties in earlier formulations. I am very grateful to Linda Alcoff, Doug Allen and his colleagues and students at Orono, Maine, anonymous reviewers for Westview Press and Hypatia, Stuart Barnum, Steve Beck,

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xiii

Lorraine Code, Murray Code, Steve De Witt, Lisa Feldman, Connie M u i , Kai Nielsen, Amelie Rorty, Justin Schwartz, the members of SOFPHIA who commented helpfully on the very early and the very last pieces of this book, Bob Ware, and, particularly, Tom Wartenberg for many important comments. A review of an earlier book of mine by Iris Young gave me the initial impetus to take up this entire train of thought. Spencer Carr has consistently been both sharp-eyed critic and supportive friend. Lucy Candib has worked at her computer six feet away from mine on problems very much like these. We have talked about them over quiet lunches when our children were in school and daycare or over their noisy interruptions when they were at home. I would not have been able to write this book without the joy and turmoil of life with Lucy, Addie, and Eli. May it be of use to them. Richard Schmitt