Finite but Unbounded: New Approaches in Philosophical Anthropology 9783110523812, 9783110523324

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Finite but Unbounded: New Approaches in Philosophical Anthropology Kevin M. Cahill, Martin Gustafsson, Thomas Schwarz Wentzer (Eds.)

Berlin Studies in Knowledge Research

Edited by Günter Abel and James Conant

Volume 12

Finite but Unbounded: New Approaches in Philosophical Anthropology Edited by Kevin M. Cahill, Martin Gustafsson and Thomas Schwarz Wentzer

Series Editors Prof. Dr. Günter Abel Technische Universität Berlin Institut für Philosophie Straße des 17. Juni 135 10623 Berlin Germany e-mail: [email protected] Prof. Dr. James Conant The University of Chicago Dept. of Philosophy 1115 E. 58th Street Chicago IL 60637 USA e-mail: [email protected]

ISBN 978-3-11-052332-4 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-052381-2 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-052343-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printing on acid free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Table of Contents Martin Gustafsson Introduction 1 Tim Ingold To Human Is a Verb

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Thomas Schwarz Wentzer Approaching Philosophical Anthropology: Human, the Responsive Being Mark Bevir Situated Agency: A Postfoundational Alternative to Autonomy Martin Gustafsson Notes on Life and Human Nature

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Emily Martin Ethnography, History and Philosophy of Experimental Psychology Kevin Cahill A Degenerate Case of Action

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119

Margaret Lock The Alzheimer Enigma in an Ageing World

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Margrit Shildrick Individuality, Identity and Supplementarity in Transcorporeal Embodiment Lars Fr. H. Svendsen The Loneliness of the Liberal Individual Vincent Descombes The Dual Nature of the Modern Individual Index of Names Index of Subjects

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Introduction

What does it mean to think of ourselves as human? In his contribution to this volume, Tim Ingold remarks that this is “surely the oldest and most fundamental problem of anthropology” (p. 9). It is striking, however, that the problem is also characteristically and equally fundamentally philosophical. The question does not seek to remedy a mere lack of factual information, but a lack of clarity in thought: What does it mean to think of ourselves as human? Our humanity – something that ought to be (and in some sense must be) utterly familiar to us – is at the same time deeply and perplexingly elusive. And what is really perplexing is that the elusiveness itself seems somehow to be constitutive of the very phenomenon that we here seek to understand. The contributions to this volume may be viewed as variations on the following thought: To be human is to be subject to an open-ended task rather than an object with a set of determinate properties – a task whose nature can only be fully settled in relation to the particular circumstances under which each human being leads her life. More specifically, the essays may be read as attempts to understand and exhibit the epistemological and methodological consequences of this thought. An appreciation of how anthropology and philosophy come together in such a moment of perplexity over what it is to be human may allow us to conceive the very idea of philosophical anthropology afresh. Rather than being an intellectually obsolete and philosophically naive form of a priori armchair inquiry into a purportedly stable and universal human essence, philosophical anthropology can now come into view as a joint venture devoted to understanding why, and in what sense, the attempt to pin down once and for all what it is to be human is necessarily futile. As Thomas Schwarz Wentzer notes in his contribution, this is not to propose some new-fangled definition of the term, but rather simply to rearticulate the guiding thought of Helmuth Plessner’s path-breaking work from the first half of the previous century – one of the crucial sources of the very idea of philosophical anthropology. Tim Ingold spells out the indeterminacy of the human by saying that being human is something one does rather than something one is. In the words of the thirteenth century thinker Ramon Llull, homo est animal homificans – man is the ‘humanifying’ animal. Starting with Llull, Ingold traces a tradition of thought in which being human is conceived in terms of embarking on an open and unpredictable venture. Schwarz Wentzer explores a similar conception, also starting from Llull, and drawing on the hermeneutic tradition, in particular the work of Bernhard Waldenfels. While Ingold characterizes the human venture primarily DOI 10.1515/9783110523812-001

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as a process of education, Schwarz Wentzer emphasizes the role within this venture of the burden of responding to others – to the particularities of their demands and of the circumstances in which they arise. Both authors stress the importance of conceiving of this process as open. Its pursuit must be undertaken in the absence of exact knowledge of the demands it will place upon us, or of what the consequences of our responses to them will be. Ingold and Schwarz Wentzer also both stress the apparent epistemological paradox that underlies the very idea of philosophical anthropology, in as much as any specification of the discipline must proceed from an appreciation of the indefinability of its subject. A sense of the apparent intolerability of this paradox is traced by both of them to an overly narrow conception of what a meaningful disciplinary inquiry must involve. It is this conception – rather than the very idea of philosophical anthropology – that is the source of the appearance of some inconsistency or muddle inherent in the enterprise itself. As Schwarz Wentzer notes, one upshot of this is that the question of what it means to think of ourselves as human may never lose its urgency. Rather than being silenced once and for all by arriving at a universally valid answer, the worry expressed by this question may be dealt with only in a piecemeal fashion. Thus, the aim of the volume is to clarify the methodological and epistemological distinctiveness of the project of philosophical anthropology, thereby liberating it from its various mystifications. The resulting form of inquiry into the human, while remaining recognizably philosophical in character, must at the same time draw upon the intricate detail of human life revealed through anthropological fieldwork. The philosophical task of understanding what it means to conceive of ourselves as human and the anthropological task of revealing the diversity of forms of human life may now come into view as two sides of a single coin. The volume is composed with this two-sidedness in mind: as we move from one paper to the next, the coin is repeatedly turned over as each face of the discipline is constantly revealed to be the flipside of the other. Thus, the vital internal connection between these twin aspects of the philosophical anthropological enterprise is disclosed. The contributions of Mark Bevir and Martin Gustafsson, taken together, jointly explore the extent to which an acknowledgement of the openness and indeterminacy of our conception of the human may or may not mark a distance from the Western metaphysical tradition. Bevir, in his criticism of what he calls “the poststructuralist hostility to the subject” (p. 47), warns against the danger of throwing out the philosophical baby with the bathwater of the tradition. He argues that once we get clear about how individuals are influenced but not logically determined by local contexts and traditions, we can better appreciate how the tradition’s defining ideas of human agency, intentionality and rationality may be

Introduction

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reclaimed without invoking any essentialist forms of determinacy which poststructuralist critics rightly reject. However, according to him, these very poststructuralist critics share with their traditionalist foes much more than they realize – in particular, the following dubious claim: If there are such things as human subjects at all, then their humanity is to be accounted for in terms of universal and unalterable standards of rationality. Once this conditional is rejected, we realize that rejecting the idea of such universal standards does not oblige us to write an obituary of the subject of philosophical anthropology, but rather allows us to resurrect it in accordance with a more finely tuned understanding of wherein its life – the real thinking and acting life of human beings – consists. One traditional way of capturing the essence of the human is to draw a contrast between human beings and other creatures, defining the human being as the rational or the language-using animal. Drawing on the works of Elizabeth Anscombe and Michael Thompson, Gustafsson warns against simply throwing the guiding idea of such attempts overboard. His argument is similar in structure to the one ascribed to Bevir above. We need carefully to distinguish the following two assumptions: (1) that the difference between human and non-human animals may be usefully marked through an appeal to rationality or language, and (2) that what we thus appeal to can be defined once and for all in terms of some fixed universal, context-free characteristics. If we take the first assumption to immediately entail the second, then we will of course be inclined to think that any rejection of the second requires the rejection of the first. In the context of developing this point, Gustafsson discusses different notions of essentialism in contemporary philosophy of biology. He argues that many contemporary critics of essentialism take an overly simplified and implausible notion of what any form of essentialism must entail for granted. Medical anthropology is one of the areas in contemporary anthropological research in which issues about the limits and the openness of our concept of the human are most conspicuously at stake. Emily Martin’s, Kevin Cahill’s, Margaret Lock’s and Margrit Shildrick’s contributions all deal with questions that arise in connection with medical-anthropological matters. Martin brings up how human subjectivity has been effectively banished from experimental psychology during the last 100 years or so, contrasting this anti-subjectivist approach with the introspective methods developed by Wilhelm Wundt at the end of the nineteenth century. She looks closely at how Wundt’s methods were related to those contemporarily used in an anthropological setting by the Cambridge expeditions to the Torres Straits Islands. In particular, she provides a detailed discussion of the Cambridge anthropologist C. S. Myers’ developments of such methods. She argues that Myers’ emphasis on subjectivity and social context in his attempt to understand the meaning of foreign practices is some-

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thing from which there is still much to learn. She develops this point by relating Myers’ approach to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s and Elizabeth Anscombe’s investigations of psychological concepts and their criticisms of experimental psychology – a connection which is natural, since Wittgenstein worked for a while as a student with Myers, and Anscombe in turn was Wittgenstein’s student. Martin argues that the trio of Myers, Wittgenstein and Anscombe provides us with the resources needed to appreciate the dangers and limits of conceiving the psychological subject as a “stripped down entity, a data-emitting being whose subjective experience is outside the frame of the experiment” (p. 111). In the second part of her paper, she presents an extended criticism of the attempts of contemporary so-called ‘affect theorists’ to safeguard emotional phenomena by situating them in a sphere which the theorists themselves characterize as ‘inhuman’ and ‘pre-subjective’ and thus as essentially insulated from anything normative or social in character. In her discussion of affect theorists, Martin mentions the 1985 experiment by Benjamin Libet, in which experimental subjects were asked to decide to flex a finger at will and to note the exact time they made the decision. It was discovered that there was a slight delay between the spike in the brain’s activity and the subject’s consciousness of having decided to do the flexing. Martin argues that affect theorists misinterpret these data, seeing them as evidence that conscious thought and intention are much less significant than we ordinarily take them to be. Kevin Cahill’s contribution delves deeper into the ways in which Libet’s experiment has been interpreted by scientists of various stripes, as well as by science journalists. In line with Martin’s approach, Cahill draws on the case of Libet and his interpreters to illustrate how treating human actions and their intentionality on the model of mechanical processes, isolating them from their ordinary meaningful contexts, necessarily engenders a distorted representation of these phenomena. According to Cahill, the conclusions thus drawn concerning the insignificance of human subjectivity and the absence of free will, rather than being the empirical discoveries of experimental science, are the artificial products of the experimental design – products that are induced by first framing decontextualized scenarios of action and then treating these as if they were paradigms of action überhaupt. Cahill argues that these artificial experimental scenarios should be regarded as ‘degenerate’ limiting cases, standing to typical actions in something like the relation of an extensionless point to a circle. Margaret Lock’s contribution investigates the situation in current research on Alzheimer’s disease, and in particular the central role played there by the so-called ‘amyloid cascade hypothesis’ – viz., the hypothesis according to which the causative agent of Alzheimer’s disease is deposition of amyloid β protein in the brain. This hypothesis was proposed in 1992, and has since become

Introduction

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the dominant view of how Alzheimer’s is caused. It also shapes many of the ideas regarding which preventative measures, including testing for biomarkers, ought to be employed to forestall a future pandemic of the disease. The amyloid cascade hypothesis has not gone unquestioned, however. Drawing on various contemporary sources, Lock complicates our picture of the medical landscape by bringing out two major unresolved problems for the dominant view. First, the amyloid cascade hypothesis treats early onset Alzheimer’s and late onset Alzheimer’s as basically one and the same medical condition, despite the fact that there are good reasons to believe they are not. Second, there are many people whose brains are full of amyloid plaque, and who yet do not suffer from Alzheimer’s. According to Lock, this makes it urgent that we undertake to explore alternative routes of explanation. In particular, she points out that there might be factors involved that cannot be straightforwardly managed within a narrowly medical perspective, since they have more to do with issues of public health, such as poverty, smoking, access to sound nutrition, sanitation, education, and so forth. Echoing themes that we have already noted above in the contributions of Martin and Cahill, Lock raises concerns about the methodological tendency to entirely abstract away from the wider complexities of the human context in order to gain a well-defined mode of treatment of a narrow range of issues. Of course, in medical research – as in science generally – such a regimentation of method and narrowing of focus can often prove to be extremely productive. However, Lock argues, there is no a priori reason to think that the explanations we seek must always be as simple and straightforward as such an approach requires, especially not when the phenomenon we are trying to understand is as intricately entangled with our conception of what it is to be human as is the case when it comes to Alzheimer’s. Margrit Shildrick’s contribution is a discussion of what happens to our sense of the human in an age of bewilderingly rapid bio-technical developments, including advanced organ transplants and sophisticated prostheses. How do these technologies affect the very notion of human individuality, if that notion is tied to a sense of bodily integrity that can no longer be taken for granted? Drawing on phenomenological work which contests the idea of prostheses and transplanted organs as merely external technological aids and instead takes seriously an often experienced sense of radical incorporation and dissolution of autonomy, Shildrick suggests that we are entering an era in which the human body can no longer be regarded as a self-contained unit but is better theorized in terms of a Deleuzian notion of biological and technological assemblage. According to Shildrick, such assemblages are best seen as floating arrays of connections between biological, technological and social circumstances – a concep-

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tion she takes to be in fundamental tension with inherited conceptions of stable human individuality. Lars Fr. H. Svendsen’s and Vincent Descombes’ contributions also deal with the notion of human individuality, focusing on questions having to do with what it means to say that the human individual is a product of modernity. In this connection, Svendsen exploits the concept of the liberal individual, and develops his discussion in connection with the much debated issue of contemporary loneliness. To what extent does liberalism’s emphasis on autonomy sever the individual’s ties to his or her fellow beings, and to what extent does the severing of such ties shape the individual, engendering a kind of person who suffers from deep and troubling existential loneliness? Svendsen brings out the contradictions involved in the liberal conception of individuality, acknowledging the fact that “[t]he liberal individual is caught in a paradox where she wants both unlimited freedom and real belonging” (p. 180). At the same time, he argues that alarmist claims about a pandemic of loneliness in modern Western societies lack solid empirical foundation, and that most people seem able to handle the paradox without turning their lives into total disarray. Drawing on the works of the French anthropologist Louis Dumont, Vincent Descombes discusses a related ‘duality’ that plagues the modern individual. This duality is a matter of both being in the world and standing apart from it: “everybody is now supposed to be as indifferent to merely worldly values as a monk, and at the same time to raise a family, to have a job, to be a good citizen, etc.” (p. 202). Descombes emphasizes the care with which Dumont deals with the epistemological and conceptual issues that need to be addressed in order to approach this topic in an illuminating fashion. The concept of individuality needs to be made genuinely comparative, so that we can make sure that we are making a genuine contrast when we distinguish the modern individual from pre-modern forms of human existence. Descombes points out that Dumont opposes a overly particularized sort of contextualization: we need to relate the phenomenon we are studying not just to some delimited subsystem or aspect of a society, but to the whole pattern of political, economic, religious, and other circumstances under which human beings lead their lives. According to Dumont, what makes such a whole hang together is the intellectual cohesion of its social ideas, its own collective self-representations; and the job of the social anthropologist is, then, to find ways of describing other forms of social life using our own preconceptions and categories. Descombes works out in detail how Dumont approaches the issue of modern individuality within this sort of epistemological framework, emphasizing Dumont’s idea that the breakthrough of modernity required not just one but two breaks with tradition. The first step was religious, connected with the Calvinist reformation; the second was secular and political, due to the scien-

Introduction

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tific and political revolutions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Descombes spells out how these two breaks created that complex (and, by anthropological lights, special and even ‘eccentric’) phenomenon we know as the modern individual. What does it mean to think of ourselves as human? Rather than offering one definitive answer to this question, this collection seeks to bring out why providing one single such answer itself would be a wrongheaded aim. The point here is neither to intimate that the question itself is misguided, nor that the enterprise of philosophical anthropology should be dismissed as resting on a conceptual and epistemological muddle. Quite the contrary: the aim is to show that philosophical anthropology can achieve a clear awareness of its own significance and distinctive epistemic character only through an appreciation of why that question needs to be asked and answered over and over again – from a variety of viewpoints, none of which takes itself to provide advantage from which one can furnish a definitive and conclusive answer to the problem which animates such an inquiry.

Tim Ingold

To Human Is a Verb Abstract: What does it mean to think of ourselves that we are human? Drawing on the writings of the mystic Ramon Llull, the cosmology of the Kelabit of Borneo, and the philosophy of José Ortega y Gasset, I argue that a human life is one that is led, and that to lead life means to undergo an education. I take from the theology of Henry Nelson Wieman the idea of undergoing as an exercise of creative imagination, and from the philosophy of Jan Masschelein the idea that this involves an education in the sense of ‘leading out’ or exposure. In this leading out, the imagination feels its way forward, trailed by a perception already accustomed to the ways of the world. Here, submission leads and mastery follows, and not vice versa. Our humanity, then, is not given from the start, but is continually fashioned in the course of what we do, in a never-ending process of attention and response, of lives lived in relation with others.

1. The time is July 1885, the place Mount McGregor, to which the eighteenth president of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant, has retired to write his memoirs. On his deathbed, unable to speak because of the throat cancer that was killing him, Grant pencilled the following note to his doctor, John H. Douglas. “The fact is I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb is anything that signifies to be; to do; or to suffer. I signify all three”.¹ There is no knowing what exactly was going through Grant’s mind as he wrote these gnomic lines, for he died a few days later. My purpose in this essay, however, is to offer some reflections on what he might have meant, for I believe that his words encapsulate a profound solution to what is surely the oldest and most fundamental problem of anthropology: what, exactly, does it mean to think of ourselves that we are human? More than five hundred years earlier, on the island of Majorca, the same problem was exercising the mind of the writer, philosopher and mystic Ramon Llull.² Born in 1232 to an aristocratic family, and by his own account, Llull  The semiotician Thomas A. Sebeok gives an account of this episode in the introduction to his collection of essays, I Think I Am a Verb (Sebeok 1986, pp. 1– 2).  For details of Llull’s life and work, I have drawn on the authoritative works of Anthony Bonner (1985) and Charles Lohr (1992). DOI 10.1515/9783110523812-002

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lived the dissolute life of the troubadour until one day, while composing a love song to his latest paramour, a vision came to him of Christ suspended on the cross. Over subsequent days the vision kept recurring, causing him such alarm that he eventually resolved to abandon his licentious ways and to devote the rest of his life to Christian teaching and scholarship. At that time, Majorca was a centre of commerce in the Mediterranean world and a melting pot of ideas from Islam, Judaism and Christianity. Realising that to convince Moslems and Jews of the truth of Christianity meant approaching the subject in an ecumenical spirit, Llull embarked on nine years of intense study, including learning Arabic from a Moslem slave he had purchased, but with whom he subsequently fell out (imprisoned for blasphemy, the Saracen eventually hanged himself in gaol, saving Llull from the awful responsibility of having to decide on his fate). This study laid the foundations for an extraordinarily long and prolific life, during which he wrote some 280 books, composed in Latin and Arabic as well as in his native Catalan. One of the last of these was the Logica Nova, written in Genoa in 1303, in his seventy-first year. Much inspired by his engagements with Islamic culture and science, Llull presents us in this work with a dynamic cosmos in which everything there is – every entity or substance – is what it is thanks to the activity proper to it. Things, for Llull, are what they do. For example it is of the essence of fire that it burns. Precisely what fuels the fire, or what is heated by means of it, is an accidental or contingent matter. Perhaps you burn wood to heat water, but neither wood nor water is necessary for there to be fire. What is necessary is that burning should be going on. Likewise, whiteness may whiten this or that body, but there is only whiteness when whitening is going on (Lohr 1992, pp. 29 – 30). That the existence of a thing or substance is indistinguishable from its activity is not however easily expressed in Latin, and in order to achieve this Llull had to devise new words, modelled on the forms of the Arabic verbs with which he was familiar. One of these neologisms appears when he turns to the problem of defining the human. If what goes for everything else goes for human beings too, then they must likewise be defined by the activity proper to them. Where there are humans, something must be going on. But what? Once again, Llull had to invent a new verb: homificare, ‘to humanify’. The human, according to Llull’s enigmatic definition, is a humanifying animal: Homo est animal homificans. ³ Precisely what human beings do, or how they go about it, is by the way. However wherever and whenever they exist, humanifying is going on. Humans humanify themselves, one another, the animal and vegetable kingdoms, and indeed the entire

 Here I follow Bonner’s translation: ‘man is a manifying animal’ (in Llull 1985, p. 609).

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universe (Lohr 1992, p. 34).⁴ Thus for Ramon Llull, nearing the end of his long life, as indeed for Ulysses Grant over five centuries later, it seemed that the grammatical form of the human is not that of the subject, whether nominal or pronominal, but that of the verb. Hard as this may have been to express in a language that normally enlists the verb into the predicate, and which thus categorically separates persons and things, as causal agents, from the effects they set in train, it would have come easily to those peoples who are credited, in current anthropological parlance, with ontologies of animism – that is, ontologies in which to exist means to participate from within in the continual unfolding of a lifeworld. Precisely such an understanding of existence is current among the people of the Kelabit Highlands of central Borneo, as described by anthropologist Monica Janowski (2012). For the Kelabit, the cosmos and everything included in it is infused with a vital energy known as lalud. As it flows and percolates through the entire landscape, so lalud brings everything to life. The cosmos, as Janowski puts it, “is dynamically animated” (2012, p. 148). But if lalud is everywhere, it nevertheless varies in its concentration. As it concentrates, it coalesces into entities and substances of manifold kinds, including humans and animals, rocks and trees. The older things are, the more lalud is concentrated in them and the harder or more solid they become. At the same time, however, they become more powerful, and this power is manifested in their capacity to interrupt or channel the current of lalud itself. In this regard, human beings are particularly powerful. Kelabit distinguish between the bare fact of living, mulun, and the way of life – known as ulun – peculiar to the human (Janowski 2012, p. 156). In the practice of ulun, humans do not merely ‘go with the flow’, as other creatures do. They rather intervene in directing it, bending or diverting it in ways that answer to their purposes, above all to the imperative to provision themselves. Principally this is done through the construction of earthworks including digging irrigation and drainage ditches, and even cutting through river meanders to encourage the formation of oxbow lakes, all with the aim of creating wet fields for rice cultivation. Really powerful people are distinguished from lesser folk, and human beings more generally from animals, by the enduring marks, or etuu, that their lalud-directing accomplishments have left in the landscape.

 Lohr renders the verb homificare as ‘hominize’ rather than ‘humanify’. I explain my preference for the latter below.

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2. As world-shapers whose very existence and capacities are congealed within currents of life-activity that they themselves aspire to direct, human beings are, for the Kelabit, precisely what Llull also took them to be, namely humanifying animals. They do not set out, as an ontology more conventional to the Western tradition would have it, to humanise the world: that is, to superimpose a preconceived order of their own upon a given substrate of nature. For humans to humanify, in the sense that Llull intended and that corresponds with the Kelabit idea of ulun, is to forge their own existence within the crucible of a common lifeworld. Their humanness is not given from the start, as an a priori condition, but emerges as a productive achievement – one moreover that they have continually to work at for as long as life goes on, without ever reaching a final conclusion. Or in the words of the twentieth century Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset: “the only thing that is given to us and that is when there is human life is the having to make it, each one for himself… Life is a task” (Ortega y Gasset 1961, p. 200). This passage comes from a celebrated essay entitled ‘History as a System’, which Ortega composed in 1935, just prior to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, while living in exile in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Echoing Llull, Ortega argues that the grammatical form of life is that of the gerund: it is always in the making, “a faciendum not a factum” (1961, p. 200). For that reason, he thinks, appeals to human nature or, alternatively, to the human spirit are misconceived. To speak of the human body or the soul, or of the psyche or spirit, is to suppose that such a thing has already crystallised out, in a fixed and final form, from the processes that gave rise to it. It is to place, at the origin, a conclusion that is never actually reached. For in truth, where there is human life there is never anything but happening. Life is not; it goes on. Indeed, as Ortega observes (1961, p. 213), there is a certain absurdity in our customary way of referring to ourselves, as human beings. For how can one go on being? It is like asking us to move along and stand in one place at the same time. Perhaps, then, we should substitute the word ‘becoming’ for ‘being’. As instantiations of life-in-the-making, should we not rather call ourselves human becomings? In an intriguing aside, Ortega (1961, p. 200, fn. 9) rules out such an alternative, with critical reference to an earlier philosophical writer with whom he is otherwise very much in sympathy. That writer was Henri Bergson. For Bergson, too, it was all happening. Everything was movement, growth, becoming: the apparently fixed forms of things but the envelopes of vital processes. Being, said Bergson, lies in self-making: l’être en se faisant. Yet in Bergson’s vocabulary, self-making was just another word for becoming (from devenir, ‘to become’). Or-

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tega insists, to the contrary, that there is more to the human task of self-making than mere becoming; more to life-making than mere living; more – as the Kelabit would say – to ulun than mulun. Humans are quite literally the fabricators of themselves; they are auto-fabricators (Ortega y Gasset 1961, p. 115). Indeed in an argument strikingly redolent of Kelabit reflections on the same theme, Ortega claims that unlike other animals which merely become whatever it is in their nature to be, humans must perforce determine what they are going to be. The fulfilment of human being is always deferred, always not yet: “man”, says Ortega, is a “not-yet being” or, in a word, an “aspiration” (1961, pp. 112– 113). And precisely because they aspire to things, humans also face difficulties in their achievement (1961, p. 201). Life is not difficult for the animal, since it does not reach out for what is not immediately attainable. Nor, for that matter, is it easy. The difference between ease and difficulty is of no concern to the animal. But for humans, caught as they are between the reach of aspiration and the grasp of prehension, it is a never-ending preoccupation. To put it another way, by comparison to the animal in whose horizon there is no past or future, only an ever-evolving now, the movement of human life is temporally stretched. Out in front is the ‘not yet’ of aspiration, bringing up the rear the ‘already there’ of prehension. At once not yet and already, humans – we might say – are constitutionally ahead of themselves. Whereas other creatures must be what they are in order to do what they do, for humans it is the other way around. They must do what they do to be what they are. You must be a bird to fly, but to be human, you must speak. Flying does not make a bird, but speaking makes us human. It is not that humans are becoming rather than being; rather their becoming is continually overtaking their being. This, I suggest, is also what the Kelabit have in mind when they distinguish the ulun of human endeavour from the mulun or bare life of other creatures. And it is what Llull had in mind when he spoke of man as a humanifying animal. Moreover I think it is probably at the back of the minds of most of us when we say of our human selves that we do not just live our lives but lead them. What Llull’s humanifying, Kelabit ulun and Ortegan auto-fabrication have in common, then, is that they are all about leading life. As an answer, however, this merely kicks the question down the road. The question was: what does it mean to think of ourselves that we are human? All we have managed to do so far is to replace this with another question, namely, what does it mean to say of lives that they are led? The answer I propose, in what follows, is that to lead life is to undergo an education.

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3. Both terms need to be unpacked, and I shall start with the verb ‘to undergo’ before turning to the significance of ‘education’. In a work entitled Intellectual Foundations of Faith, dating from 1961, the American theologian Henry Nelson Wieman set out to show in what ways a life that is led – that is to say, a human life – can be creative. It is necessary, he argued, to distinguish between two kinds, or meanings, of creativity (Wieman 1961, pp. 63 – 66). There is, on the one hand, the creativity that is expressed in what people do. A person is creative in this sense when he or she “constructs something according to a new design that has already come within reach of his [or her] imagination”. This is the sense most commonly invoked when creativity is identified with innovation. It is found by looking back from a final product – what Wieman calls a ‘created good’ – to an unprecedented idea in the mind of an agent, in whose doing or making it was actualised. On the other hand, however, is the creativity that “progressively creates personality in community”.⁵ Wieman’s point is to argue that behind the contingencies of what people do, and the miscellany of products or created goods to which these doings give rise, is the ‘creative good’ that is intrinsic to human life itself, in its capacity to generate persons in relationships. This kind of creativity, he says, is “what personality undergoes but cannot do” (Wieman 1961, pp. 65 – 66). It does not begin here, with an idea in mind, and end there, with a completed object. Rather, it carries on through, without beginning or end. Such is the creativity of social life. For social life is not something that the person does but what the person undergoes: a process in which human beings do not create societies but, living socially, create themselves and one another. That is to say, they both grow and are grown, undergoing histories of development and maturation – from birth through infancy and childhood into adulthood and old age – within fields of relationships established through the presence and activities of others. And critically, this growth is not just in strength and stature but also in knowledge, in the work of the imagination and the formation of ideas. As a young man, Wieman had been a keen reader of the philosophical writings of Henri Bergson, and he would later go on to study and publish on the work of Bergson’s British contemporary, Alfred North Whitehead. It was Whitehead who had coined the term ‘concrescence’ to describe the capacity of living things continually to surpass themselves (Whitehead 1929, p. 410). In a world  For further discussion of this distinction, see Ingold (1986, pp. 202 ff.) and Ingold and Hallam (2007, p. 8).

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of life, Whitehead argued, there are not only concrete, created things but also concrescent, crescent things. Or rather, one could look at this same world in two ways, either from the outside, considering every organism as the living embodiment of an evolved design, or from the inside, by joining with the generative movement of its growth and formation – that is, of its coming into being or ontogenesis. Wieman’s distinction between the creativities, respectively, of doing and undergoing, or between created goods and the creative good, is clearly a version of the same thing. Moreover there are echoes of Bergson in the idea of a creativity that is to be found not in the characteristic doings of the person but in the creation of personality in community. “It is … right to say that what we do depends on who we are”, wrote Bergson in his Creative Evolution of 1911, “but it is necessary to add also that we are, to a certain extent, what we do, and that we are creating ourselves endlessly” (Bergson 1911, p. 7). This endless creation of ourselves corresponds precisely to Wieman’s idea of a creativity undergone rather than done. Furthermore, as Bergson was keen to stress, the process is irreversible. Thus to understand creativity in this sense is to read it forwards, in the unfolding of the relations and processes that actually give rise to worldly beings, rather than back, in the retrospective attribution of final products to initial designs. It is to recognise, with Bergson, that ontogenesis takes time. This is time as duration: not a succession of instants but the prolonging of the past into the actual. “Duration”, Bergson wrote (1911, pp. 4– 5), “is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances”. But is this idea of gnawing and swelling sufficient to grasp the essence of lives that are not just lived but led? The past might gnaw into the future, but the future has a habit of slipping away beyond our reach. We have to track it down. For Ortega y Gasset, as you will recall, what is distinctive about human life is that it is not just impelled from behind but summoned from in front. Humans, he argued, are the script-writers or novelists of their own lives, creating themselves as they go along. As every novelist knows, characters have a way of outrunning their author’s capacity to write them down. It is vital not to lose them. So too, in the creation of our own lives, we are fated to give chase to hopes and dreams that are forever on the point of vanishing (Ingold 2013, pp. 71– 72). And since all human life is happening, so all creation is occasional: a moment-to-moment improvisation. Whereas God created the world in a single act, and finished the job, “man”, wrote Ortega, “makes himself in the light of circumstance, … he is a God as occasion offers, a ‘secondhand God’” (Ortega y Gasset 1961, p. 206). And it is precisely in this task of secondhand creation that imagination comes into play. God needs no imagination, since His creation is already all in place before the act begins. But worldly, mortal humans can only recreate piecemeal, a bit at a time. Recall that in Wieman’s definition, ‘to do’ is to act

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upon an idea that is already settled within the imagination. The intention or design is there before the act. ‘To undergo’, by contrast, is to move upstream, to where ideas have yet to crystallise out from the flow of action. As a creative good, the power of the imagination is not one of mental representation, nor is it a capacity to construct images in advance of their material enactment. It is rather the generative impulse of a life that continually runs ahead of itself. Following Ortega, we could say that imagination is another word for the aspiration of not-yet-being. As such, it leads from the front rather than pressing from behind. But where it leads is not yet plotted out before the act begins. As we say colloquially, the propensity of the imagination is to ‘roam’, to cast about for a way ahead or to improvise a passage; it is not to map final outcomes and all the steps to reach them. And for Ortega, without imagination – without this capacity to run ahead of ourselves – human life would be impossible.

4. This leads me to my second term, namely ‘education’. Like the concept of creativity, the word education carries a double connotation. The first is familiar enough to all of us who have sat in a school classroom, as pupils, or who have stood up before the class to teach. This is the sense of the Latin verb educare, meaning to rear or bring up, to instil a pattern of approved conduct and the knowledge that supports it. The efficacy of education, here, lies in the intergenerational transmission of an order that already exists. It is, according to the normative canon of Western pedagogy, the provision of cultural content to young minds equipped by nature with the capacities to receive it. As such, it is a process of humanisation. A variant etymology, however, traces the word to educere, from ex (out) plus ducere (to lead). In this sense, education is a matter of leading novices out into the world rather than – as it is more conventionally understood – of instilling knowledge in to their minds. To be thus led out is to be both impelled and drawn into the unknown. Education, in this second sense, is not what a person receives in order that they may then go on to do this or that in accordance with existing social or moral precepts. It is rather what the person undergoes: a process not of humanisation but of humanifying. It might perhaps be compared to going out for a walk. In a brilliant meditation on the subject of walking and education, the philosopher Jan Masschelein (2010a, b) argues that walking is not about taking up a standpoint on things. It does not place us in a position, or afford us a perspective, on the basis of which we can then proceed to act. On the contrary, walking continually pulls us away from any standpoint – from any position or perspective we might adopt. “Walking”, as

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Masschelein explains, “is about putting this position at stake; it is about ex-position, about being out-of-position” (2010a, p. 276). Or in a word, it is a practice of exposure. And this is precisely what is achieved by education in the sense of exduction. Crucially, the movement of ex-duction, of a life that leads out into a world-information, is not intentional but attentional. When we say of a deed that it is done with intention, we mean that the outward cast of action follows an inward cast of thought. The mind intends and the body extends. This is what Wieman implied in his definition of ‘doing’ as action predicated upon a design already lodged within the mind of the agent. Yet to the extent that the doer is wrapped up in the seclusion of his own deliberations, he is perforce absent from the world itself. On exposure, however, this protective wrapping unravels. The walker on the move, lest he lose the way, must be ever vigilant to the path as it unfolds before him. He must watch his step, and listen and feel as well. He must, in a word, pay attention to things, and adjust his gait accordingly. Thus in the very act of walking, he is thrust into the presence of the real. As intention is to attention, therefore, so absence is to presence. A person might intend to go for a walk; she might reflect upon it, consider the route, prepare for the weather and pack her provisions. In that sense walking is something she sets out to do. She is the subject, and her walking the predicate. But once on the trail, she and her walking become one and the same. And while there is of course a mind at work in the attentionality of undergoing, just as there is in the intentionality of doing, this is a mind immanent in the movement itself rather than an originating source to which such movement may be attributed as an effect. Or in short, if the walker’s intention converges upon an origin, her attention comes from being pulled away from it – from displacement. At first glance this conclusion seems remarkably close to that reached by the ecological psychologist James Gibson (1979). Pioneering his ecological approach to visual perception, Gibson had proposed that we do not perceive our surroundings from a series of fixed points; nor, he argued, is it the task of the mind to assemble, in memory, the partial perspectives obtained from each point into a comprehensive picture of the whole. Rather, perception proceeds along a path of observation. As the observer goes on his way, the pattern in the light reaching the eyes from reflecting surfaces in the environment (that is, the ‘optic array’) is subject to continual modulation, and from the underlying invariants of this modulation, things disclose themselves for what they are. Or more precisely they disclose what they afford, in so far as they help or hinder the observer to keep on going, or to carry on along a certain line of activity. The more practised we become in walking these paths of observation, according to Gibson, the better able we are to notice and to respond fluently to salient aspects of our environ-

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ment. That is to say, we undergo what Gibson called an ‘education of attention’ (Gibson 1979, p. 254). Many scholars, myself included (Ingold 2000, pp. 166 – 168), have followed this approach in describing the process of enskilment by which the novice is gradually transformed into a ‘master’ of what he or she does. Walkers become skilled in detecting and responding to irregularities of the ground surface, enabling them to keep their balance in tricky terrain. Musicians become skilled in the manipulation of their instruments, enabling them to find their way through the most complex of passages. Weavers become skilled in working with fibrous materials, enabling them to generate a regular pattern from the rhythmic repetition of basic movements. Yet with mastery comes its opposite: submission. To embark on any venture – whether it be to set out for a walk, to play a piece of music, or to weave a textile – is to push one’s boat out into the stream of a world in becoming, with no knowing what will transpire. It is a risky business. Thus when Masschelein describes walking as a practice of exposure, both the education to which the walker lays himself open and the attention demanded of him are quite the reverse of what Gibson had in mind in his theory of perceptual attunement. It is not a matter of picking up, and turning to one’s advantage, the affordances of a world that is already laid out. Recall that the verb attendre, in French, means ‘to wait’, and that even in English, to attend to things or persons carries connotations of looking after them, doing their bidding, and following what they do. In this regard, attention abides with a world that is not ready made but always incipient, on the cusp of continual emergence. In short, whereas in one sense, in the acquisition and exercise of skilled mastery, the world waits for the practitioner, in another sense, in the educational practice of exposure, the practitioner waits upon the world. Here, to wait – to attend – is to be commanded not by the given but by what is on the way to being given (Masschelein 2010b, p. 46). Thus the walker, a master of the terrain, must wait for signs that reveal the path ahead, with no surety of where it will lead; the hunter, a master of the chase, must wait for the animal to appear, only to put himself at risk in its pursuit; the mariner, a master of his ship, must wait for a fair wind, only to submit to the elements. The walker, as indeed the hunter and the mariner, once embarked upon a course, is at the mercy of the befalling of things. In these as in countless other examples, mastery and vulnerability, practical enskilment and existential risk, are two sides of the same coin. That coin is attention.

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5. What, then, is the relation between the two sides: between our waiting for the world and the world’s waiting for us, and between the modes of education that lie, respectively, in exposure and in attunement? Earlier, I suggested that unlike other creatures that live their lives but do not lead them, the lives of humans are temporally stretched, between the already and the not yet. It seems that in every venture and at every moment, we are both fully prepared and yet utterly unprepared for things to come. What then leads, and what follows? The usual answer is to claim that as intentional beings – that is as agents – humans deliberate before they act, in Wieman’s sense of doing what has already come within reach of the imagination. Thus the mind commands and the body submits more or less mechanically to its directions. Mastery, in this account, is cognitive: if humans lead their lives it is entirely thanks to their capacity to conceive of designs in advance of their execution, something of which animals – at least for a science of mind constructed on Cartesian principles – are deemed incapable. The chess-master, for example, plans his moves in his head, by means of mental computations of wondrous complexity, whereas their subsequent enactment, entailing the grasping and lifting of a piece from one square and its transport to another, could hardly be simpler. It requires no great skill; indeed any machine could do it. I would like to propose, however, that in undergoing, the relation of temporal priority between mastery and submission is the reverse of that which is assumed in the cognitive or intentionalist account of doing. Here, submission leads and mastery follows: education as exposure precedes education as attunement. Rather than a commanding mind that already knows its will trailing a subservient body in its wake, out in front is an aspirant imagination that feels its way forward, improvising a passage through an as yet unformed world, while bringing up the rear is a prehensive perception already accustomed to the ways of the world and skilled in observing and responding to its affordances. A life that is led, then, or one that undergoes an education, is held in the tension between submission and mastery, between imagination and perception, between aspiration and prehension, and between exposure and attunement. In every one of these pairings, the first leads and the second follows. But the former’s lead is not commanding but tentative. It requires of its following not passive obedience but active delivery. Pushing the boat out, I call upon my powers of perception to respond. Yet in that very response I discover that unbeknownst to me, I have been there before, as have my predecessors since time immemorial. Without even thinking about it, I seem to know the ropes. Heading out along the trail, into the ‘not yet’, I already know how it goes. Thus all undergoing is remem-

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bering. As the phenomenologist Bernhard Waldenfels (2004, p. 242) has put it, “we are older than ourselves”: behind the selves we are on the point of becoming, but are not yet, are the selves that we already are without our knowing. In this ongoing, iterative process of becoming who we were, and of having been whom we become, there is no bottom line, no point at which we can uncover some basic human nature that was there before it all began. In their animic cosmology, the Kelabit remind us that humanness is not given a priori but is a productive achievement that leaves its marks in the landscapes of habitation (Janowski 2012, pp. 154– 156). Or as anthropologist Istvan Praet has recently written, with regard not specifically to the Kelabit but to ontologies of animism from around the world, “what always recurs … is a Humanity envisaged as an ongoing fabrication rather than a guaranteed status, … a sustained pattern of activity or particular way of living rather than … an absolute class or category” (Praet 2013, p. 203). Remember what Ortega said: we are secondhand gods, not created once and for all but creating and recreating ourselves as the occasion demands. Thus as an animal homificans, in Llull’s phrase, I am my walking, and my walking walks me. So here’s a riddle: I carry on, and am in turn carried. I live and am lived. I am both younger and older than myself. What am I? President Ulysses Grant was right. I think I am a verb. I would like to conclude with a poem. It is by the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, and its title is The Instructions. The poem was prominently displayed on a large glass panel as part of the ‘Do It’ exhibition, held at the Manchester Art Gallery from July to September 2013. The exhibition provided its public with dozens of instructions, ranging from the active to the absurd, which visitors could try out for themselves, either in the gallery or at home. Judged as a poem, The Instructions is perhaps proof that poetry is better left to poets than to philosophers. However it happens to encapsulate almost everything I have argued that doing is not. Indeed, in the poem Nancy is inviting us to think of doing in a way to which we are quite unaccustomed. And that way corresponds almost exactly to what I, following Wieman, have called undergoing. Do it! ‘it’: What you have to do, What is up to you to do, What falls to you ‘it’: Undetermined, undeterminable, Which will only exist when you have done it Do it, do that, That thing no-one expects,

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Not even you, That improbable thing Do what stems from your doing, And yet is not done by you Nor produced But stems from well before your doing From well before you Do what escapes you What is not yours And that you owe.⁶

First of all, says Nancy, the ‘it’ that you ‘do’ is not already within reach, ideally if not materially, before you start. Doing, in other words, does not translate from an image in the mind to an object in the world. Rather, both the thing and the idea of it emerge together from the doing itself. This doing, moreover, is an act to which you submit: you do not initiate it; rather it falls to you. It was the last thing you expected to happen, and in undertaking the task, you were perhaps surprised to discover capacities of perception and action you never knew you had. But where has it come from, this thing you did? For Nancy it has no point of origin; it cannot be traced to an intention. What we do is not done by an authorial agent with a design in mind. It is rather part of a never-ending process of attention and response in which, as we have seen, all human life is caught. Just as the ‘already’ is always behind us, as far back as we care to go, so the ‘not yet’ will always escape ahead of us, beyond the horizon of our expectations. And as we owe our very existence to what has gone before, and as what comes after owes its existence, at least in part, to us, so our deeds belong to no-one: not to ourselves, not to others, but to history – or better, to life. The doing of which Nancy speaks – the doing that is not done by you – is a kind of action without agency, an undergoing, an auto-fabrication. It is not mulun but ulun, as the Kelabit would say: a life not just lived but led. It is a humanifying. But let us drop such obfuscating words and simply end where we began: for us, to human is a verb.

Acknowledgements This essay owes its conception to a memorable conversation which took place during the 17th World Congress of the International Union of Anthropological  Reproduced by permission of the author.

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and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) at the University of Manchester, in August 2013, with Thomas Schwarz Wentzer and the members of his Philosophical Anthropology Group (Line Ryberg, Kasper Lysemose, Ramus Dyring) from the University of Aarhus, Denmark. I particularly want to thank Thomas Schwarz Wentzer for drawing my attention to the works of Ramon Llull. At an International Human Research Conference, which took place at Aalborg University a couple of weeks later and at which I had spoken on the topic of human creativity, a questioner asked me to clarify the relation between doing, undergoing and agency. This essay is my provisional answer. I first presented it to the conference on ‘Human Nature’ at the University of Notre Dame in April 2014, and I am grateful to Agustin Fuentes and the University of Notre Dame Press for allowing it to be reproduced here. I have since expanded the essay into the several chapters making up Part 3 (‘Humaning’) of my book The Life of Lines, published by Routledge in April 2015.

References Bergson, Henri (1911): Creative Evolution, Arthur Mitchell (Trans.). London: Macmillan. Bonner, Anthony (1985): “Historical Background and Life of Ramon Llull”. In: Anthony Bonner (Ed. and Trans.): Selected Works of Ramon Llull (1232 – 1316), Volume I. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 5 – 52. Gibson, James J. (1979): The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Ingold, Tim (1986): Evolution and Social Life. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. Ingold, Tim (2000): The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. Ingold, Tim (2013): Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Abingdon: Routledge. Ingold, Tim and Hallam, Elizabeth (2007): “Creativity and Cultural Improvisation: An Introduction”. In: Elizabeth Hallam/Tim Ingold (Eds.): Creativity and Cultural Improvisation. Oxford: Berg, pp. 1 – 24. Janowski, Monica (2012): “Imagining the Forces of Life and the Cosmos in the Kelabit Highlands, Sarawak”. In: Monica Janowski/Tim Ingold (Eds.): Imagining Landscapes: Past, Present and Future. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 143 – 163. Llull, R. (1985): Selected Works of Ramon Llull (1232 – 1316), Volume I, Anthony Bonner (Ed. and Trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lohr, Charles (1992): “The New Logic of Ramon Llull”. In: Enrahonar 18, pp. 23 – 35. Masschelein, Jan (2010a): “The Idea of Critical E-ducational Research – E-ducating the Gaze and Inviting to Go Walking”. In: Ilan Gur-Ze’ev (Ed.): The Possibility/Impossibility of a New Critical Language of Education. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, pp. 275 – 291. Masschelein, Jan (2010b): “E-ducating the Gaze: The Idea of a Poor Pedagogy”. In: Ethics and Education 5, pp. 43 – 53.

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Ortega y Gasset, José (1961): History as a System and Other Essays Toward a Philosophy of History. New York: W. W. Norton. Praet, Istvan (2013): “Humanity and Life as the Perpetual Maintenance of Specific Efforts: A Reappraisal of Animism”. In: Tim Ingold/Gisli Palsson (Eds.): Biosocial Becomings: Integrating Social and Biological Anthropology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 191 – 210. Sebeok, Thomas A. (1986): I Think I Am a Verb: More Contributions to the Doctrine of Signs. New York: Plenum Press. Waldenfels, Bernhard (2004): “Bodily Experience Between Selfhood and Otherness”. In: Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 3, pp. 235 – 248. Whitehead, Alfred North (1929): Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Wieman, Henry Nelson N. (1961): Intellectual Foundations of Faith. London: Vision Press.

Thomas Schwarz Wentzer

Approaching Philosophical Anthropology: Human, the Responsive Being Abstract: The paper defends the view that ’philosophical anthropology’ denotes a discourse in philosophy that deals with a subject matter – the human being and the question of its ‘nature’ – that is different in kind from all other subjects. Reminding Raimundus Lullus, F.J.W. Schelling and Helmuth Plessner, this claim and its ontological as well as epistemological implications are outlined, arguing that we are in need of an existential approach in order to live up to the philosophical task implied. Bernhard Waldenfels’ recent phenomenology of otherness and alterity, centered on the concept of responsiveness, is brought into play, defending the claim that humans are responsive beings. This approach delivers a new paradigm to deal with the human in philosophical anthropology, qualifying hermeneutic as well as pragmatist approaches in philosophy as well as in recent ethnography towards a responsivist model of human existence and agency. Not man but men inhabit this planet. Plurality is the law of the earth. – Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind –

1. The human in the anthropocene How are we to address ‘the human being’? In this paper, I want to suggest a hermeneutic approach to philosophical anthropology and the question concerning the human being. However, this suggestion does not refer to a maneuver of an apt application of a certain method or theory (‘hermeneutics’) to a discipline (‘philosophical anthropology’) and its subject (‘the human being’). In fact, philosophical hermeneutics provides neither methods nor theories that could be applied; philosophical anthropology does not refer to an established discipline in either philosophy or anthropology; and – most importantly – the expression ‘the human being’ is suspected to reify the manifold of human biological as well as socio-cultural realities, stuck to an essentialism that has been defeated by the 20th century’s transdisciplinary insights concerning the scientific and ethical impossibility to address ‘human nature’ or some unwarranted equivalent. Recent posthumanism, antihumanism or transhumanism indicate powerful tendencies that – notwithstanding the internal and mutual differences – reflect these inDOI 10.1515/9783110523812-003

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sights, holding that any attempt to question the human is not only doomed to fail, but moreover is likely to reanimate a stance we should not revert to; as this stance – traditional Western humanism – is said to be based upon a whole package of dubious ethical and political presuppositions we ought to get rid of in light of the Anthropocene and in the name of our responsibilities towards other human as well as non-human or even transhuman cultures.¹ In this perspective, philosophical anthropology and its concern about the human might seem outdated and its motive ethically problematic. So in light of these remarks, my second sentence above seems to be a nonstarter, as one cannot pursue a hermeneutic approach to philosophical anthropology in order to deal with the question concerning the human being. Maybe it would be more correct to outline the scope of this paper by saying that it qualifies the impossibility of its endeavor. But then again, I suspect that such impossibility somehow relies on the peculiar character of its subject. It is due to the way humans are like that we are reluctant to render universal descriptions of the human, not knowing what kind of scientific approach – if any – might be capable to address, let alone to answer, a corresponding question in the first place. And yet a sentence like this implies claims about human nature, even if this concept undergoes its own deconstruction that prevents any scientific elaboration. Accepting the rejection of essentialism – as universal ontology or ‘just’ with regard to humans – does not prohibit asking for conditions all humans share qua being human. On the contrary; the question concerning the human being gains even more philosophical urgency, as it becomes a case of wondering. What is so special about the human that makes it so difficult even to articulate a suitable question to its general features? I take the question concerning the human being to be of utmost importance precisely because of the aforementioned tendencies and our global situation. Paradoxically as it seems, posthumanism is implying claims about the human, as it is part of the human condition that it can or has to be articulated in terms of a posthuman condition. It might be true that the non-existing discipline referred to by the term philosophical anthropology only can be realized appropriately in a kind of ethical turn leading to posthumanist ethics. But if so, it would be the thing itself, the subject at issue, i. e. the human condition that would urge the approach into such a direction. We are in trouble to administer our Socratic ignorance towards ourselves  Apart from Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism and The Question concerning Technology (both in Heidegger 2008) one has to refer to Foucault’s influential lectures on the Technology of the Self (Foucault 1988). Concerning posthumanism and the human-animal divide in Western metaphysics see Agamben 2004; in its ethical and political consequences see Haraway (in Kirkup et al. 2000) and Braidotti 2013. For a helpful overview see Ferrando 2013.

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and our proper emplacement in this world. But we cannot but respond to the challenge of this ignorance anyway. The following remark announces the paradox entailed in this opening, claiming it nonetheless to be the central topic of philosophical anthropology. According to this remark, the problem and only concern of philosophical anthropology would consist in its theoretical impossibility, which again is due to its subject, the human: “We are still in need of a conception about the human being that due to conceptual analysis is able to demonstrate the impossibility of any concept of the human being. […] This exactly would be the content of the anthropological difference” (Kamper 1973, p. 7; my translation). In this remark Kamper echoes Heidegger’s famous ontological difference, the difference of Being and beings or entities, respectively (coined in Heidegger 1982, pp. 319 f.). Following this idea, one is invited to conceive of the Human in a similar vein as one is exposed to think of Being in Heidegger’s writings. The anthropological difference then would refer to the peculiar fact that the human never could be thought of as something reifiable or objectifiable, but that it nonetheless provides particular human beings to be what they are. It is not just an universal of a particular or the type of a token, but a guise of being that is distributed individually in a way that every member of its class – every individual human being as well as every group, society or culture – has to explore its meaning anew. As such, the human withdraws itself from being a subject of scientific scrutiny. It nonetheless is present in its absence, neither subject nor object, rather a non-ject that remains the unfathomable horizon of human existence. How are we to deal with it, and in what sense could it ever be a theme for philosophy or/and anthropology? In this context the label ‘philosophical anthropology’ would then mean to reflect the indeterminacy of any discourse that tries to deal with the human, being aware of the ontological peculiarity of its subject. ‘Philosophical anthropology’ then would function as a formal indication of a certain way of questioning, not as a label referring to a well-established discipline or tradition. At the face of it, it seems to have a well-defined, separable subject – the human being – that is one, albeit peculiar, topic open for scientific or philosophical scrutiny. But then again, human beings seem to burst any effort to limit the domain of the human. Echoing Aristotle’s anthropology in De Anima and his twofold claim that “in a manner the soul is all existent things” (431 b 21) and that hence acquaintance with it “contributes greatly to the whole domain of truth” (402 a 5), we cannot think of the human otherwise than in its ontological ubiquity and its epistemic priority. As the Anthropocene discloses, we have difficulties to think of some worldly entity that is not affected by humanity. We are about to face the fact that humans have become global actors in a way that is able to

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frighten those of us who have learned to understand this phrase – humans are global actors – in its most literal meaning. We are in charge – and it is by no means clear what this ‘we’ is referring to and what ‘in charge’ might mean apart from a vague intuition of an absolute responsibility that exceeds anything what we usually take to be among our responsibilities.² ‘Philosophical anthropology’ then would be a name for a discourse that points to the urge of an ontology of the human that is able to match what science is about to call the Anthropocene. A hermeneutic approach to philosophical anthropology would be one way to enter into such a discourse. I will come back to this in more detail further below, suggesting the hermeneutics of human responsiveness as a possible account. Before that some historical background is needed. Although it is true that the term ‘Anthropocene’ is new, it might be helpful to recall that awareness concerning the extraordinary epistemological and ontological requirements concerning a discourse that would be able to capture ‘the human’ is not. Apart from Aristotle I want to draw on three rather different representatives who each have articulated the urgent need for a new discourse that is capable to address its subject, the human, in a way that defers from rationalist traditions and its humanism. All of them were aware of the groundbreaking implications for what used to be the predominant paradigm in philosophy.

2. In search of a new paradigm: logic, positive philosophy, philosophical anthropology 2.1. Human logic In the Logica Nova, published in 1306 by Ramon Llull, Latin Raimundus Lullus, we find a remarkable definition of the human. Homo est animal homificans. ³ The human being is, Lullus holds, the humanizing animal, the creature that makes or produces its humanness. Lullus herby rejects the predominant Aristotelian definition that takes the human being to be the rational mortal animal, explaining

 Concerning the notion of absolute responsibility see Nancy 2003.  Homo est animal homificans. Et ista definitio est magis specifica, et magis convertitur cum definitio, quam ista: Homo est animal rationale et mortale; quia de genere rationalitatis est angelus, et de genere mortalitatis est leo et equus etc. Hoc quidem de Deo dici potest, et de ceteris entibus. Sicut Deus est ens deitans, et sua aeternitas aeternitans, […], faber homo fabricans. Et ideo definitio ista magis propria est, cum sit maioris proprietatis immediate subiecti. Lullus 1985, p. 22.

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the benefits of this entelechial theory and its superiority to the orthodox views. Traditionally highlighted properties that usually are taken to depict humanity – rationality, mortality – are shared by other entities (angels, lions, horses); they are hence not specifically human. What is more, they cannot exhaust the concept of the human. For this reason, traditional Scholastic classifications render the human being insufficiently. Lullus’ alternative definition is rather peculiar; its definiens renders neither a property humans have nor a faculty they may activate. ‘Homificans’ does not refer to a differentia specifica or a genus; it is the present participle of a verb that did not exist up to Lullus and expresses a mode of being or an entelechy. The ‘what is ‘x’’-question, the question of the first category in Aristotle, is answered verbally as ‘the being x-ing’. Answers of this type can of course be given with regard to any substance to be defined; it is according to Lullus especially useful to understand the unity of its most honorable subject, namely God. But the human being is Lullus’ favorite subject as its ontological entelechy exemplifies the reflexivity of the logical expression. Hence Lullus’ new logic suggests thinking of the human as the execution of its being while being this execution. So the human being is the humanizing being.⁴ Lullus proves his sensibility for the reflexivity involved when he applies his theory on the very definition of the definition itself in the last sentence of the passage in note 3. A definition of his kind, he says, is more appropriate than the old Scholastic ones as it more appropriately and immediately captures its subject. It’s a definitio definians, so to speak. No doubt; this is a strange thought. The formula concerning homo homificans is all the more interesting as it is placed in a context of logic, not of anthropology. There is no praise of individual freedom, no appeal to self-realization comparable to what one can find in Pico della Mirandola’s famous Oration towards the Dignity of Man two centuries later. Lullus stays within the constraints of medieval thinking; he wants to improve Scholastic epistemology attacking its petrified ontology with his anti-essentialism, ultimately in order to promote what one could call medieval cross-cultural understanding. Provided mutual understanding, the Jews and the Muslims would see the truth of Christian faith according to Lullus’ reasoning. But one has to have one’s conceptual framework in order first; against the stiff classificatory scholastic system – notably Albertus Magnus – Lullus therefore presents the idea of an auto-poietic and dynamic animated ontology, an idea that Cusanus, Giordano Bruno and especially Leibniz will come back to in the following centuries.

 See also Tim Ingold’s contribution to this volume, ‘To Human is a Verb’. Parts of the present paper have profited immensely from a conversation with Ingold in Manchester, August 2013.

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Hence Lullus notices the ineffability and incomprehensibility of the human when analyzed merely in orthodox Scholastic theories. He reacts to this discomfort by promoting a new way of conceptual analysis that is able to articulate the preservative force of its conceptual content. According to this logic one has to express the way humans actualize their being. This capacity is what distinguishes humans from other entities; but it has to be taken in its formal indicative meaning only. What kind of action, praxis or life form exactly would meet the standards of the homificare is not and cannot be specified. This means that everything humans undertake is a way of humanizing their animality. And it also means that they adapt to their environment by way of integrating the environment into the project of their humanizing. To live is to digest in the metabolism of humanizing. Homo est animal homificans. Der Mensch menscht. It does not matter for the sake of my argument whether humans provide the only species that perfectly exhibits the logic of Lullus’ dynamic realism and its corresponding theory of definition. Any organism, one could hold, organizes itself and its environment according to its entelechial history. The point is that Lullus is driven to develop this logic because of the insufficiency of the traditional paradigm with regard to the human. It might be disputable whether or not there is a universal ontology implied. But the human being gains a sort of epistemic or phenomenological priority, as it is the human that experiences in first person what it means to be a creature that is executing its existence and thereby actualizing what it is supposed to be.

2.2. Positive philosophy In 1841 mature Schelling confesses in his lecture course on the philosophy of revelation, Philosophie der Offenbarung (translated under the title of The Grounding of Positive Philosophy): Thus far from man and his endeavors making the world comprehensible, it is man himself that is the most incomprehensible and who inexorably drives me to the belief in the wretchedness of all being, a belief that makes itself known in so many bitter pronouncements from both ancient and recent times. It is precisely man that drives me to the final desperate question: Why is there anything at all? Why is there not nothing? (Schelling 2007, p. 94)

According to Schelling the promise of modern thinking, powerfully announced since Descartes and Kant, according to which we understand the world via the cognizing moral subject, has proven to be nothing but a dream. Its assurance was to have intimate access to a reality that we ourselves are, a subjectivity that should serve as the grounding fundament of all our knowledge claims con-

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cerning nature and history. But its very first premise proves to be illusionary, as the human subject, instead of being this familiar, pure and transparent entity intimately at hand, stubbornly remains alien, opaque and obscure. In fact, the human is the most incomprehensible being; the modern project that linked the hope of an encompassing systematical understanding of the universe to the capacities of the human subject and its reflexive self-determination is doomed to fail due to the unfathomable nature of the human. Schelling precedes the nihilism of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, experiencing the abysmal truth of the subjective turn of modernity. This experience gains metaphysical significance as it resets the transcendental discourse. Transcendental philosophy from Kant to Hegel, including its objective version in Schelling’s early Philosophy of Nature, is decomposed together with its ultimate principle, the principle of transcendental subjectivity. The result is despair that falls back to the discourse of theodicy, a discourse that asks for the ultimate metaphysical reason for anything to be at all, with Schelling rather shouting out than asking: Why is there anything at all, rather than nothing? Hence to answer the question ‘what is the human being?’ urges Schelling to revisit the fundamental question of metaphysics.⁵ It presses Schelling to invent a new kind or discourse of metaphysical thinking, a discourse called ‘positive philosophy’ dealing with ‘the empirical a priori’ (Schelling 2007, p. 181) that according to Schelling ultimately can be experienced as a historical epiphany of the divine spirit and its incarnation in Christ. I do not want to evaluate Schelling’s philosophy of revelation here. Let me simply register the fact that Schelling – beginning in 1807 with his influential, although not very lucid essay on Human freedom (Schelling 2006) – is concerned with the question ‘what is the human being?’, and that his strategy to deal with the incommensurability of this question is its expansion into a another kind of metaphysics called positive philosophy. To ask this question means to transcend anything that could be asked; it means to suspend and reevaluate the available discourses that the philosophical traditions used to provide. The human proves to be a subject that calls for extraordinary means if philosophy ever would be able to answer its request. Following Schelling, its questioning inaugurates a philosophical experience that alters our view of philosophy as it used to be. Traditional thinking – labelled ‘negative philosophy’ by Schelling – remains stuck in a rationalist discourse that is unable to reach the experiential ground of the human. Hence questioning the human philosophically requires rethinking the very capacity of philosophy from the

 Formulated originally by Leibniz in his treatise On the principles of nature and grace from 1714.

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very start. According to Schelling, addressing the human requires beginning all over again. It takes nothing less.

2.3. Philosophical anthropology Helmuth Plessner was the first to put the term ‘philosophical anthropology’ on a book cover in the subtitle of his principal work Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch. Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie from 1928.⁶ He later coined the word of the human being as the homo absconditus, the unfathomable human, the being whose essence remains concealed and inscrutable to itself (Plessner 1983, pp. 353 ff.). This expression – as it was the case with both Lullus’ logical project and Schelling’s philosophy of revelation – is not free of theological references, as it refers to the topos of the deus absconditus, the unfathomable or hidden God. In Isaiah 45, 15 the prophet foresees former enemies to recognize the God of the Jews, notably his hidden, invisible existence and to abandon any cult of idols and their fabrics. They will worship the peculiar and rather strange way of being a divine being, its unperceivable remoteness, much against what one was used to expect of gods and positive divine existence hitherto. Plessner praises rather than regrets the ineffability of the human and demands of philosophy a sort of discreetness that tactfully responds to, i. e., acknowledges its subject in its principal concealment.⁷ What has caused metaphysical despair in Schelling has in Plessner been recognized as the conditio humana; humans are beings that do not know what or who they are. This ignorance must not be misunderstood as a kind of romantic naivety. We do not rest right in the middle within the circle of our intentions and

 The book is not translated into English yet. There may be many reasons for this, among them Plessner’s timing. The book came out shortly after Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), where Heidegger dismissed philosophical anthropology to be inherently insufficient to deal with the real problem that only a ‘fundamental ontology of Dasein’ could address. At that time, ‘philosophical anthropology’ was connected to the name of Max Scheler, who in many lectures had announced a book. He died before he could finish it; a short essay came out posthumously, also in 1928. As it turned out, Scheler’s essay gained some public attention; but obviously the audience was not prepared to read a major and demanding monograph like Plessner’s, especially because Heidegger’s existential ontology seemed to have outpaced the option of philosophical anthropology even before it really got started. See Plessner’s preface to the second volume (Plessner 2003, pp. 13 ff.); see Fischer 2007 as a comprehending monograph to the idea of philosophical anthropology in Germany after World War 1.  One might add that this thought has found its ontological explication in Derrida’s concept of ’ghost’ or ’specter’ and has as such found entrance in recent ethnography.

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activities, absorbed by our worldly engagements in a kind of childish innocence (a stance that Nietzsche sometimes seems to have advocated). Our position is ‘eccentric’, outside the circle, in a possible distance to the world and ourselves (Plessner 2003, pp. 360 ff.). Plessner persuasively unfolds this thought in his analysis of the human body as both lived body (Leib) and physical body (Körper), giving this distinction a twist that remarkably differs from Merleau-Ponty’s (Merleau-Ponty 1962). We do not just embody our flesh; we experience our body in both its intimate givenness and its sometimes stubborn recalcitrance. We are and have our bodies at the very same time. We are our bodies; but we also experience our embodiment in a way that distances us from this our body. Humans can be slaves of their bodies (Plessner analyses this beautifully in Laughing and Crying, (Plessner 1970)) and masters of their embodiment in a way that non-human animals without human interfering never will be. One might just think of a line-dancer; only a creature that can objectify its bodily being is able to push its bodily achievements towards the most astonishing acrobatic performances that come along smoothly and naturally without any physical or biological need (regarding what might be called ’anthropotechnique’ see Sloterdijk 2013). Human beings are unbound, and although there are certain requirements to temperature, pressure and oxygen, they are not limited to a specific environment on Earth. Their world is the world. Their being underdetermined implies their openness towards the world, not resting in themselves but performing their own limitlessness. Human dwelling responds to what has been called transcendental homelessness (Lukács 1994/1920), as humans occupy and cultivate a space as their own; but this dwelling is not principally bound to exactly this peculiar spot as their habitat. Hence Plessner draws a link between the global presence and mundane existence of humanity on the one hand and the indeterminacy and unfathomability of the human on the other. However, what Schelling had experienced as a reason for metaphysical despair, becomes in Plessner a reason for human dignity. This dignity is rooted anthropologically, not ethically. It comes along with social techniques of tact and discretion, of pretense and even hypocrisy, attitudes that respect the freedom of distance and remoteness – even within a person’s intranet, i. e. especially for me towards myself (Plessner 1999). The inscrutability of our nature rather than our ability to act morally transcends any objectifying approach with regard to the human being. The human being is the non objectifiable being, a creature that remains unfathomable – for itself and for its other. Plessner’s contributions to sociology are hence built around the idea of freedom as a freedom to keep oneself behind – as persona, lat. for mask – conceiving of society in the Limits of Community (Plessner 1999). Hence in Plessner we meet a different take on not knowing who we are. The insight into the incomprehensibility of human nature

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does not give rise to a new logic or a new metaphysic. In Plessner too this insight displays the abyss of our freedom (Plessner 1983, p. 134), but this exactly is the reason why freedom is an anthropological, and not a metaphysical problem. Philosophical anthropology stands its ground as a research program sui generis. Ernst Tugendhat (2007), Heidegger’s maybe most faithful critic, follows this train of thought when announcing philosophical anthropology to be a prote philosophia, the first philosophy. Plessner and Tugendhat hence claim philosophical anthropology to be the solicitor of the project of universal philosophy in the postmetaphysical age. Philosophical anthropology responds to the challenge of posthumanism by exploring the ways humans perform their existence, rather than by defending a terrain of qualities or properties that they are claimed exclusively to possess. Lullus, Schelling and Plessner give us three snapshots of the difficulties connected to a philosophical analysis of the human. They one way or the other provide a conception of the human that articulates with conceptual means the impossibility of any plausible conception of the human. Lullus launches a new logic, Schelling invents positive philosophy, Plessner asserts philosophical anthropology. They all avoid what one might call traditional scientific or metaphysical thinking due to their reluctance to subject the human to an ontology of specifiable objects; in the case of Lullus more than 600 years before Heidegger’s phenomenology of Dasein and the Letter on Humanism. They all explain or address human incommensurability as something to be dealt with primarily in philosophical discourse, provided this is about to deal with the human. Now this is the entry of this paper. What is it like to be that being that remains remote, uncanny, ineffable and indescribable in-and-for-itself? Given that there are prominent voices, authorities maybe, who try to argue for human incomprehensibility, how are we to approach this fact from the first person perspective, as first-hand-witnesses or even victims, who have to execute this ontological peculiarity in everyday life? What kind of evidence is there for the claim of human indeterminacy? And how does it feel to be a being that escapes its philosophical determination? – It is in line with this questioning that I want to explore an existential perspective, centered on the idea of human responsiveness. Following Schelling and Plessner, it may very well be that I am concealed to myself. It is quite certainly so that the being that I am remains opaque in its familiarity and intimate in its secrecy. Analogous to what Plessner shows with regard to human embodiment, I might consider that my very existence too is characterized in the double mode of immediate familiarity and restive strangeness. However, I experience this recondite being as something I have to deal with, as a condition I respond to, even when I tactfully look aside. Philosophy’s

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incapability sufficiently to approach the human being finds its existential equivalent in the burden to lead a life, i. e. to respond to the demand of existence without being able to provide sufficient answers. It would be absurd to wait until we know who we are, before we start living. We consider it pathological to expect of ethics to deliver a manual of life, as if there was a device like a moral GPS that could guide us towards our true selves. We are always already on our way, finding ourselves urged to respond to the demands of life. Hence I believe that we have to conceive of philosophical anthropology in terms of a responsive anthropology. The human being exists as responsive being. Lullus’ phrase Homo est ens homificans might be specified anyway: We are responsive beings, and an analysis that follows up on this trait may rightly be considered as hermeneutics of responsiveness.

3. Anthropology, Waldenfels and human responsiveness With this move, the approach towards philosophical anthropology ultimately gains an existential perspective. For the claim concerning the human as the unfathomable being is now interpreted from within, from the perspective of the being that has to cope with its existence. It is at this point that the approach presented here joins forces with some tendencies in recent anthropology. In the work of among others Arthur Kleinman (2006), James Laidlaw (2013), Cheryl Mattingly (2010, 2012, 2014) and notably Michael Jackson (1995, 2005, 2011, 2013a, 2013b), one finds attempts to locate the universal in the particular and to display what roughly might be called ethical and existential dimensions of the human conditions in the ordinary, in real life. In different ways these approaches liberate anthropology from predominant social theories that have all too hastily sustained the dimension of lived experience in favor of cultural patterns or social powers. They do not display the ethical as a field of examples apt to philosophical theories of, say, utilitarian, virtue ethical or deontological provenience. They rather show the emergence of ethical deliberation and agency on the level of the experiencing and acting persons themselves, as responses to personal crisis, physical violence, social injustice, family catastrophes or just as matters of daily concern for those one cares about. What is more, their ethnographic material supports the assumption that particular persons undergo experiences that make them reflect on their own condition as the human condition. The material testifies that we think about our lot or about what might be right or wrong in a way that often formulates needs or dilemmas that are taken to be of

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universal value. I take this ethnographic evidence to be of utmost interest for philosophical anthropology. Philosophical anthropology should consider itself to be a trans- or crossdisciplinary project sui generis; the approach presented here, despite of its philosophical origin, is meant to support such a project in the interface between anthropology and philosophy. Hence I take recent anthropology as bearing witness to the claim that the reflexivity of philosophical anthropology, which was already inherent in Lullus’ attempt towards a definition of the human, has to be taken in its existential depth. For it is not first on the level of a philosophical analysis that the indeterminacy and the unfathomability of human life is noticed or discovered. It does not make sense to claim that it was only with Schelling, Plessner or some other modern Western philosopher that the inscrutable openness of the human being – that Nietzsche had coined as ‘the still undetermined animal’ (Nietzsche 2002, p. 56) – has become an issue, as if their discovery remain restricted to the academic discourse. Rather, the reflexivity of the question concerning the human originates in the very subject matter that is at issue. We hence have to think the human life form in its various uncountable guises as ways to exhibit and to actualize this indeterminable existence, as humans in each and every act respond to the demand of their living. The vocabulary that I want to introduce in order to describe the human way of coping with existence is borrowed partly from philosophical hermeneutics in the tradition of Heidegger and Gadamer, but especially from Waldenfels’ recent phenomenology of otherness (Waldenfels 2011). In line with my considerations so far one finds for instance the following nonchalant remark of Waldenfels’: In the end, the ancient definition ‘The human being is an animal which has speech or reason’ can be reformulated as follows: ‘The human being is an animal which responds.’ Consequently, the difference between human and animal, as well as that between human and machine, must be reconsidered (Waldenfels 2011, p. 38).

Waldenfels follows – notwithstanding certain cautious reservations – up on the traditional philosophical discourse that ‘defines’ the human being due to its rational or linguistic capacity. The human being is the being that gives answers in return. Hence the central trait of this approach is to recognize the phenomenon and to launch the concept of responsiveness, in the German Romanic version phrased as Responsivität. In many books since his principal work Antwortregister (1994) Waldenfels has developed a comprehensive phenomenology of otherness and alterity that is neither limited to the Other as the other person, nor has the Other as its prototype or ultimate subject for alterity. In that perspective Waldenfels suffices to establish some distance to the thinking of Lévinas, notwithstand-

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ing the fact that his whole approach remains deeply ethical. Waldenfels does not explicitly enter the anthropological discourse, although it does not seem to be that difficult to imagine that anthropology could profit enormously from his phenomenology of otherness. The point of departure for the conception of responsiveness is the irreducible distinction between demand and response, Anspruch und Antwort (1994, pp. 193 ff). We experience this distinction as the difference between the whereupon (the event of us being called to respond) and the what of our responding (the content of our answer).⁸ Referring to Heidegger, Waldenfels interprets the hiatus between demand and response as the responsive difference. Hence the relation between demand and response is not equivalent to the logic of question and answer, where the answer fills in the piece of information that was lacking according to the question. If one is asked to give a reason for one’s beliefs or one’s actions this very act of being asked remains outside the discourse, even when one succeeds in giving a comprehending and by all means sufficient answer. The demand entails an illocutionary force of otherness that escapes from its fulfillment; one might keep asking oneself ‘why is she asking me that? What is she up to?’, and there is no answer to these questions that redirects the reflexivity back to the level of discourse, where one started. Hence the demand remains alien or remote to the propositional or dialogical content that it facilitates. An indication of this hiatus can be found in the difference between answer and reply, the two types of the response in our linguistic practices. I might reply to a tourist that I don’t know the way to the station, but in doing so I do not answer her question. I nevertheless acknowledge her demand in replying, even if I am not able to fulfill the intention of her question. In these situations we can easily distinguish between the speech act of replying and the propositional content that would satisfy the requirements of being a both correct and truthful answer to the question. And we grant that the demand deserves to be heard and responded to, even if we cannot fulfill what we take to be the questioner’s intention. But also if we refuse to reply we still respond. If I ignore her request – I might be busy, offended, shy, or ignorant of her language – my silence is a response too and runs the risk of being understood as misplaced and socially intolerable. As the use of the term ‘illutionary force’ above indicates, Waldenfels’ phenomenology and his account on responsiveness draws to some extent on Searle’s theory of speech acts and especially on Austin’s philosophy of ordinary language

 See also Waldenfels 2002, p. 188. Similarly, with a strong emphasis of the religious implication of this line of thinking, Chrétien 2004.

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(see Waldenfels’ discussion of both in 1994, p. 49 ff.). However, both accounts are developed from the perspective of a speaker, intending to do something, not of a listener or respondent, being exposed to an alien demand. They hence presuppose a set of rules or a system of norms that already are in play, before the speech act analysis can start. In that perspective, the ordinariness of linguistic practices comes along with a system of rules and normative commitments that are set, providing the frame for human praxis and its philosophical analysis. But Waldenfels does not just aim at a phenomenological (instead of pragmatist) reconstruction of those rules and norms. The phenomenon at stake – indeterminable otherness that requests my response – displays a pre-normative obligation that opens the space of normative behavior in the first place. It displays an existential commitment that precedes intentionality and its accounts on intentional subjects as well as (neo‐)pragmatism and its approaches on competent speakers.⁹ In contrast to these, Waldenfels aims at saving the unruly and unintentionable otherness that we meet as a potentially infinite demand. We give something in return, hence we re-act, but we always remain in jeopardy, as there is no norm that could regulate our prenormative handover to the otherness of real life. Looking back to Raimundus Lullus, a superficial parallel to the Doctor Illuminatus can be found in the fact that Waldenfels conceives responsiveness as ‘responsive rationality’ that requires a different kind of logic, a new, responsive logic, a ‘Antwortlogik.’ This logic revisits the relation between questions and answers or call and response from within, taking its point of departure not in the question, but in the response. This move blocks traditional ways of thinking about the human as initiative intentional subject that enters into the dialogue of its social and practical existence via a first beginning. To render a dialogue as a sequence that had its origin in a question posed by a that was answered by b is surely possible, but remains within an observational distance from the third person perspective. However, a person who asks is typically responding to a certain situation that demands of her to ask. And in that sense the question is not a first beginning, but always already an act of responding, following up on something that precedes a questioner’s initiative. The term responsiveness qualifies the facticity of human life, the fact that we always already find ourselves in particular situations that we did not initiate or design, without ever being capable to reach the origin of these demands. To think of human existence in terms of  The term ‘existential commitment’ is borrowed from John Haugeland (1998, p. 2). To Haugeland, this term marks a claim against ‘traditional’ theories of intentionality, similar to ours put forward here against pragmatism and its followers. To show this, a more detailed discussion of Brandom (1994) and McDowell (1994) as well as Husserl (1910), Searle (1983) and – representing others as well – for instance Crane (2001) would be necessary.

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responsiveness means to acknowledge its internal remoteness and intrinsic alterity. Hence a phenomenology based on responsiveness reinterprets human living in light of the perspective of a person that experiences her existence as a demand she responds to in every sequence of her course of life. One might add that responsiveness is in a certain family resemblance to what early Heidegger had termed facticity (Heidegger 1999). It captures the thrownness of our existence in terms of qualified and yet insufficient and finite behavior. We are responding to the fact of our historically situated existence in being who and what we are. Waldenfels develops four topoi that organize this logic; topoi as typically unnoticed but nevertheless familiar commonplaces derived from a certain view on our communicative praxis. These are singularity – every demand exceeds or precedes the universal-particular distinction, as it is not experienced as a case of something or a token of a type – ; inevitability – every demand urges us to respond, an urge that is not the result of a normative system already in place, but belongs to the ‘essential presuppositions of our social existence’ – ; diastasis – the unreachable deferment characteristically for the temporality of the response that remains delayed to its demand – ; and asymmetry – the inevitable imbalance between demand and response that leads to the repetitive process of new demands and responses, i. e. to the openness and infinity of social interaction (Waldenfels 2011, pp. 39 ff.; 1994, pp. 333 ff.). Notwithstanding the fact that Waldenfels develops these topoi from dialogical interaction, the scope of responsiveness is wider than the limits of our linguistic or communicative performances; broader even than our social practice. Responsive rationality is not limited to communicative rationality; it is at stake already in our bodily existence as Leibwesen and our erotic existence, in aesthetic experiences, in our listening to memories and the voices of our past. It characterizes our experiential existence in every direction: “We conceive of responsiveness as the principal feature of all our discursive activity, practical doings and bodily comportment, which all become accessible from there” (Waldenfels 1994, p. 336; my translation).

4. Hermeneutics and responsiveness So far, I have presented Waldenfels’ phenomenology of otherness centered on the concept of responsiveness as a way to execute an existential analysis of the human condition from within. What we have met in Schelling and Plessner – the unfathomability of the human – has been articulated centered on the experience of a responsive difference in the hiatus between demand and response. We respond to the demands of our existence, but are never able to catch up on or

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to live up to the event of our exposedness to these demands. On this reading, philosophical anthropology would take its point of departure in the claim that humans are responsive beings. In what is left I want to argue that this claim can be specified further, as I hold that we experience this hiatus, the gulf between demand and response and the intrinsic insufficiency of our responding as a hermeneutical challenge or obligation. It is the obligation to meaning, and the challenge to understand. In this reading, philosophical hermeneutics conceived as hermeneutics of responsiveness is a way to explore existential anthropology. To give an outline of this program in line of my considerations so far I draw on the following – rather long – passage from Gadamer: It is part of human Dasein that one enters the world and is called upon without having been asked in advance. One is living in all ‘thrownness’ towards one’s future, upon which one is projecting oneself. Hermeneutics is hence concentrated on something incomprehensible. This is somehow always characteristic to hermeneutics. Hermeneutics is challenged by the uncomprehended or incomprehensible; by the same token it is put on the way of questioning and hence forced to understand. This is definitely not an instance of forestalling dominance over everything meaningful. […] And yet this still belittles the paradox that is entailed in the hermeneutics of facticity. Not just this or that uncomprehended, but the absolute incomprehensible, the fact to be there, and even more the incomprehensibility not to be there, have to be projected towards meaning (Gadamer 1989, p. 63; my translation).

Gadamer retells the origin of philosophical hermeneutics in Heidegger’s early Hermeneutics of Facticity (Heidegger 1999). He acknowledges the incomprehensibility of human existence as the true origin of the hermeneutic experience, taking human thrownness not as something to be overcome but as a constant challenge to understanding. It is true that the hermeneutical process seeks understanding and that it takes its point of departure in something that is unknown or opaque, surprisingly strange or foreign. The hermeneutic activity consists in projecting these issues of incomprehensibility upon a sense or a meaning. But this is not an act of dominance or mastering. It does not subject otherness under the hegemony of meaning. It is, Gadamer claims, an act of responding to a challenge, to something we experience as a demand. Note the existential twist in the quote above, echoing Schelling’s despair. What really matters are not just situations of temporal disorientation or a momentary lack of knowledge. The position termed ‘hermeneutics of facticity’ is paradoxical in principle, as it responds to the demand of the incomprehensible as such, to human finitude, in the passage quoted above rendered in its most existential mode. Hermeneutics in this sense conceives of meaning as the human response to human finitude (Gadamer 1975; similarly Marquard 1981;

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Warnke 1987). In contrast to other traditions or schools in recent philosophy it does not aim to ‘overcome’ those limits by means of scientific progress and its methodologies. Hermeneutics acknowledges the finitude of finitude; i. e., it does not regard ‘finitude’ as an obstacle or limitation that prevents us from pure knowledge, perfect justice or ultimate happiness, as if these were tenable goals. Human finitude is experienced as the principal shortcoming of our responses that remain in diastatic insufficiency to the demands of life. Philosophical hermeneutics of responsiveness explores human finitude as the prime condition for our worldly engagements and entitlements in all its aspects. Gadamer’s take on hermeneutics acknowledges the unreachable origin or prompt of our search for meaning. In this perspective it comes closer to Kierkegaard and Schelling than to Schleiermacher and Dilthey. Hermeneutics is not the recollection of something already known and understood;¹⁰ it is not a process of growing coherence that swallows and dissolves otherness and difference into the unity of a discourse, whether this discourse is thought as dialogue or as Überlieferungsgeschehen. Its existential version is perforated and leaks, rather than it would be a closed totality. It has the urge of understanding in its very center, in the unfathomable existence of the being that cannot but to project this very existence towards meaning. Hermeneutics of responsiveness refers to a way to think of responsiveness from a hermeneutical point of view. In responding we do not just react to certain stimuli, but respond to a demand in the space of meaning. Hence we act as if the urge of a certain situation opened a question that we have to answer. Our strategy to cope with the routines of ordinary life as well as to act in pressing situations is to understand, i. e. to give it a meaning. It might well be that our hermeneutic capacity does not lead to an ultimate understanding (or an ultimate ‘truth’) and hence an altogether appropriate response. But this proves neither our responsive understanding nor hermeneutics to be defective. According to the four topoi of responsive logic according to Waldenfels – i. e. according to the singularity of the demand, the inevitability of our response and the diastasis and asymmetry between demand and response – we experience the inherent difference when we take something as something, i. e. the difference between the demanding subject matter and what we might mean about it when responding to its demand.  Rodi, an editor of Dilthey’s Collected Works and former director of the Dilthey-Archive at Bochum, conceived hermeneutics once with a formula of August Boeckh as ‘Erkenntnis des Erkannten’ (Rodi 1990). This formula meets the criteria that allow hermeneutics to be a legitimate target of its critics along the way mentioned above; its existential version that is carved out here does not.

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It goes without saying that, in doing so, we act as social beings, i. e. in communality with others that share our being-in-the-world. Hence routines of ordinary life as well as pressing situations are not only typically, but in principle socially mediated. When I promote a responsive approach of human existence I do not want to suggest an individualist account of existential anthropology. On the contrary: the term responsiveness is linked etymologically to dialogical practice according to our primordial intersubjective and social existence. Hence, to think of the human in terms of responsiveness does not mean to add the capability of answering to a spontaneous subject. It is the other way around; we might experience ourselves occasionally as spontaneous subjects only on the basis of our social responsive existence. Philosophical hermeneutics reflects our capacities for meaningful understanding, claiming to conceive of understanding like an event we undergo, rather than an achievement we initially or with methodological means enact. Hermeneutics refrains from a poietic, constructivist or instrumentalist account of meaning. We rather find ourselves subjected to the transmission of meaning in the multiplicity of socio-cultural lifeworlds. From a hermeneutical point of view our responsiveness does not install the space of meaning nor originate the dialogue of our existence. We just don’t experience ourselves as initiator or originator, but as respondents that catch up with a discursive process that was there before we entered and which will be there when we have left. The burden of existence, its facticity, is hence the ultimate demand humans have to respond to in being who they are. Hermeneutics in this sense is not the doctrine of a subsequent treatment of a subject matter, which has become necessary insofar as one has lost the possibility of an immediate understanding. Although historically linked to the methodological problem of understanding texts or written documents, hermeneutics is more than the discipline of skillful interpretation of an original document. In real life, there is no text available that our hermeneutic activity would have to decipher; and yet, we have to execute our existence interpreting it in responding to a question we never have been asked explicitly, were it not in the mythic origin of oracles and testimonies. Human behavior as such can be treated as executing hermeneutical capacities as it articulates our responsive having-to-be in concrete situations of daily living. Hence Heidegger’s claim, according to which it belongs to the characteristics of our being, already to be in a certain state of being interpreted (Heidegger 1999, p. 5), articulates what I want to understand as our responsive being. Facticity is experienced as responsiveness, in so far as factical life means being confronted with the demand to exist in a certain peculiar, sometimes ridiculous, pitiful or pathetic, sometimes dignified, proud or humble, but always individual manner. Existing we respond to our factical existence.

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We respond to a demand that we have to be responsible for without ever having subscribed to an assignment or having affirmed our participation. Thrownness does not admit a second pitch. It establishes what Jean-Luc Nancy once called an absolute responsibility: We exist as this responsibility; that is, to use Heidegger’s term, we ek-sist, we are exposed to one another and together to word, to the world that is nothing other than this exposition itself. Existence is responsibility for existence (Nancy 2003, p. 296).

I take Nancy’s work as another contribution to what I understand by the phrase concerning a hermeneutics of responsiveness. This phrase does not denote a position or an –ism. It only articulates what I take to be my most noble possibility, the duty of being responsible to the answers that I am.

References Agamben, Giorgio (2004): The Open: Man and Animal. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Braidotti, Rosi (2013): The Posthuman. Cambridge, UK/Malden: Polity Press. Brandom, Robert (1994): Making it Explicit. Reasoning, Representing and Discursive Commitment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chrétien, Jean-Luc (2004): The Call and the Response. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Crane, Tim (2001): Elements of Mind. An introduction to the Philosophy of Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ferrando, Francesca (2013): “Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Antihumanism, Metahumanism, and New Materialisms. Differences and Relations”. In: Existenz. An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics and Arts, 8 (2), pp. 26 – 32. Fischer, Joachim (2007): Philosophische Anthropologie: eine Denkrichtung des 20. Jahrhunderts. Freiburg/Munich: Alber. Foucault, Michel. (1988): Technologies of the Self : A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1975): Truth and Method. Transl. J. Weinsheimer, D. G. Marshall, London/New York: Continuum. Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1989): “Hermeneutik und ontologische Differenz”. In: Gesammelte Werke 10,. Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, pp. 55 – 72. Haugeland, John (1998): Having Thought. Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Heidegger, Martin (1962): Being and Time. Transl. J. MacQuarrie, E. Robinson, San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row. Heidegger, Martin (1982): The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Transl. Albert Hofstadter. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

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Heidegger, Martin (1999): Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity. Transl. John van Buren. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, Martin (2008): Basic Writings: From Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964). Ed. By David Farell Krell. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Thought. Jackson, Michael (1995): At Home in the World. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jackson, Michael (2005): Existential Anthropology. Events, Exigencies and Effects. New York, NY: Berghahn Books. Jackson, Michael (2011): Life Within Limits. Well-Being in a World of Want. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jackson, Michael (2013a): The Wherewithal of Life. Ethics, Migration, and the Question of Well-being. Berkeley, CA/Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Jackson, Michael (2013b): Lifeworlds. Essays in Existential Anthropology. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Kamper, Dietmar (1973): Geschichte und menschliche Natur. Die Tragweite gegenwärtiger Anthropologie-Kritik. Munich: Hanser. Kirkup, Gill (2000): The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader. London/New York, NY: Routledge. Kleinman, Arthur (2006): What Really Matters. Living a Moral Life amidst Uncertainty and Danger. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Laidlaw, James (2013): The Subject of Virtue. An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lukács, Georg (1994): Die Theorie des Romans. Ein geschichtsphilosophischer Versuch über die Formen der grossen Epik. Frankfurt am Main: Luchterhand. Lullus, Raimundus (1985): Die neue Logik, trans. W. Büchel, Vittorio Hösle. Hamburg: Meiner. Marquard, Odo (1981): Abschied vom Prinzipiellen. Stuttgart: Reclam. Mattingly, Cheryl (2010): The Paradox of Hope : Journeys through a Clinical Borderland. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Mattingly, Cheryl (2012): “Two Virtue Ethics and the Anthropology of Morality”, Anthropological Theory, 12 (2), pp. 161 – 84. Mattingly, Cheryl (2014): Moral Laboratories : Family Peril and the Struggle for a Good Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. McDowell, John Henry (1994): Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1962): Phenomenology of Perception. Transl. Colin Smith. London/New York: Routledge. Nancy, Jean-Luc (2003): A Finite Thinking, ed. Simon Sparks. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm (2002): Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Judith Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Plessner, Helmuth (1970): Laughing and Crying: A Study of the Limits of Human Behavior. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Plessner, Helmuth (1983): Conditio Humana. In Gesammelte Schriften, 8, eds. Günter Dux, Odo Marquard, and Elisbeth Ströker. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Plessner, Helmuth (1999): The Limits of Community: A Critique of Social Radicalism, trans. Andrew Wallace, New York: Humanity Books. Plessner, Helmuth (2003): Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch. Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie. In Gesammelte Schriften, 4, eds Günther Dux, Odo Marquard and Elisabeth Ströker. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag.

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Rodi, Frithjof (1990): Erkenntnis des Erkannten. Zur Hermeneutik des 19. u. 20 Jahrhunderts. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von (2006): Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von (2007): The Grounding of Positive Philosophy: The Berlin Lectures, trans. Bruce Matthews. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Searle, John R. (1969): Speech Acts. An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Searle, John R. (1983): Intentionality. An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sloterdijk, Peter (2013): You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics, trans. Wieland Hoban, Cambridge, GB/Malden: Polity Press. Tugendhat, Ernst (2007): Anthropologie statt Metaphysik, Munch: Beck. Waldenfels, Bernhard (1994): Antwortregister. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Waldenfels, Bernhard (2011): Phenomenology of the Alien: Basic Concepts. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Pres. Warnke, Georgia (1987): Gadamer. Hermeneutics, Tradition and Reason. Oxford: Polity Press/Blackwell.

Mark Bevir

Situated Agency: A Postfoundational Alternative to Autonomy Abstract: This paper begins by restating a postfoundational critique of the autonomous individual, that is, the idea that the individual is capable of forming beliefs or making choices outside of all social influences. This critique is conceptual, ruling out the intelligibility of many appeals to, for example, a state of nature or a veil of ignorance. Yet, as some people will think this concept of autonomy is a strawman, so the main point of this paper is to show how much of a loosely humanist concept of the subject remains in tact after this critique. This paper builds up an account of the individual as a situated agent, defending in succession the individual’s capacities for creativity, reasoning, and coherence.

Some postfoundationalists challenge modern analyses of subjectivity as well as knowledge. Poststructuralists in particular trumpet the death of Man, the author, and the subject. As they reject modern ideas of an autonomous self, they explain utterances, meanings, and actions by reference to the logic of an episteme, myth, or language itself, thereby avoiding any appeal to the intentionality and reasoning of individuals. Roland Barthes wrote of how theorists had recently discovered that “it is language which speaks not the author” so they can now “substitute language itself for the person who until then had been supposed to be its owner” (Bart 1977, p. 145). According to Michel Foucault, the concepts of the subject and author are historical aberrations that are already on their deathbed. According to Jacques Derrida, these concepts presuppose a myth of presence; they appeal to intentionality to create the illusion that consciousness and texts consist of stable meanings. A lingering structuralism inspires much of this poststructuralist hostility to the subject. The structuralists characteristically tried to banish agency from explanations in the human sciences. The point of Ferdinand de Saussure’s methodological gesture was to craft a science of linguistics that did not appeal to parole. Later structuralists also sought to approach the human sciences in ways that did not entail appeals to agency. One example is Louis Althusser’s attempt to assert the scientific nature of Marxism by presenting individuals as passive supports of social structures. Another is Foucault’s archaeologies in which an episteme defines the thought of each era.

DOI 10.1515/9783110523812-004

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Even when Foucault wrote a foreword to the English edition of The Order of Things opposing those who called him a structuralist and arguably moderating his claims, he still dismissed agency. He contemplated writing a history of science “without reference to the scientist himself”, that is, without writing “not merely of the concrete individual represented by a proper name, but of his work and the particular form of his thought” (Foucault 1970, p. xiii). “I should like to know,” Foucault continued, “whether the subjects responsible for scientific discourse are not determined in their situation, their function, their perceptive capacity, and their practical possibilities by conditions that dominate and even overwhelm them” (Foucault, 1970, p. xiv). Let me try to answer him. Do structures and social conditions determine conduct? Alternatively, does an acceptable account of conduct need an idea of agency, including creativity, intentionality, and reason?

1. Reclaiming agency My full answer to Foucault consists of a series of arguments showing that people are situated agents who can act innovatively in accord with intentions they adopt for reasons of their own. However, this series of arguments will take time to unfold, moving from a defense of situated agency to arguments tying situated agency to intentionality and local reasoning. To begin, therefore, I focus solely on whether or not structures or context determine conduct. Given this focus, I can define agency in contrast to determinism. People are agents if contexts alone cannot fully explain their conduct. The case for agency begins to appear in the difficulties of imagining accounts of conduct that refer solely to structures and other contexts. Consider three ways of unpacking the seemingly innocuous claim that context affects consciousness and so conduct. First, contexts might influence conduct but not establish limits to the forms conduct takes. This relationship between context and conduct cannot support rejection of agency. If contexts only influence conduct, contexts cannot fully explain the content of actions and speech. Individuals and their agency remain crucial to accounts of conduct. Second, context might restrict conduct by creating identifiable limits to the forms conduct can take without fixing the form it takes within those limits. This relationship between context and conduct can support a partial downplaying of agency but not stronger claims about the death of the subject. If contexts restrict performances, they can explain why actions and speech remain in certain limits, but individual subjects and their agency would continue to explain the particular character of action and speech within those limits. Third, context might decide

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conduct. Every detail of an action or utterance might derive solely from the context. Only this relationship between context and conduct could support a rejection of agency and so claims about the death of the subject. If context decided every feature of conduct, it would provide a full account of actions and utterances, so agency would be irrelevant. But contexts do not determine conduct. On the contrary, people adopt different theories and perform different actions against the background of the same context. Thus, there must be an undecided aspect to any given context. There must be a space in which people can adopt either this belief or that belief and perform either this action or that action. Structures cannot displace agency, context cannot determine conduct, and langue cannot fix parole. It is not enough for poststructuralists to argue that features of conduct are uniform in a given context or that there are commonalities among all those who use a particular discourse. These suggestions imply that other features of speech and action are not uniform, and these features would then be an undecided part of conduct. Further, to accept that contexts do not decide all conduct is to raise the possibility that agency explains what remains undecided by context. Context can only limit or influence conduct, not determine it. Whether context limits or influences conduct varies across features of conduct. Contexts can limit the actions people can perform successfully, although when they do, the relevant context often consists of the agency of others. If we stick to the analysis of subjectivity, then the important point is that contexts cannot limit agents’ beliefs and so the actions they might try to perform. Contexts cannot limit beliefs because it would be impossible to identify such a limit. The easiest way to show the impossibility of identifying such a limit is counterfactually. To identify such a limit, we would have to be able to specify a belief that the person involved could not come to hold. Yet if we could specify such a belief, we could describe it to the person involved. Further, if we could describe it to them, it is possible they could come to understand it. They could grasp what beliefs and ideas the limit precluded. Thus, the alleged limit would not be a limit at all. So, subjects are neither determined nor properly limited by their context. This conclusion is a logical philosophical one. Much confusion arises from failure to distinguish this logical claim from superficially similar empirical ones. It is logically inconceivable that contexts determine or limit people’s beliefs. However, although strictly speaking contexts do not impose limits on beliefs, contexts often influence agents so powerfully that for all practical purposes there are boundaries people are not going to cross. Social influences may effectively preclude people adopting certain beliefs even though it is logically possible that they might adopt them.

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Too many poststructuralists mistake strong patterns of influence for logical limits. They misconstrue methodological gestures and sociological short-hands for logical analyses. Reasonable and even trite sociological claims become indefensible philosophical ones. Consider the relevant example of empty signifiers.¹ Some poststructuralists think of the self as a void filled by subject positions produced by discourses. Their opposition to agency then leaves them few resources to explain change in the relevant subject positions and discourses. Empty signifiers allegedly enable them to explain such change. Poststructuralists define empty signifiers as words or signs that have lost all content so that they are able to articulate diverse elements across multiple discourses. Now, this idea of an empty signifier appears reasonable enough if it is sociological shorthand. Political struggles for change often involve contests over words that have diverse and even incompatible meanings. However, if the idea of an empty signifier is a philosophical one, it is foolish, especially from a postfoundational perspective. Readers might think that empty signifiers are literally empty; their conventional use has neither to include nor exclude any content.² Yet the examples of empty signifiers are not literally empty. The conventional referents of “justice” do not include a chair. The signifier “war on terror” does not cover pen and paper. The signifier “law and order” conventionally excludes a civil war with multiple antagonists. Perhaps, therefore, readers might suppose that empty signifiers are only metaphorically empty. Perhaps empty signifiers have content but not specific content. Although some poststructuralists reject this idea, empty signifiers may just be ambiguous with various people using them to refer to different objects, events, or states of affairs (Laclau 1996, p. 36). However, this metaphorical analysis of empty signifiers implies, given postfoundationalism, that all signifiers are empty. Postfoundationalists deny that any signifier has a one-to-one correspondence with an object, event, or state of affairs. They imply that all signifiers are ambiguous and contestable. Thus, if we unpack the idea of an empty signifier literally, no signifier is empty, but if we unpack it metaphorically, all signifiers are empty. In either case, the idea of an empty signifier does not pick out a particular type of signifier that acts as a source of change. Once postfoundationalists stop mistaking strong patterns of influence for logical limits, they can reclaim agency. Even if contexts influence the content of beliefs and actions, full accounts of beliefs and actions require appeals to agency. Humans have the capacity to devise new beliefs and actions. But,

 For an early discussion of empty signifiers, see Barthes 1977, pp. 109 – 159. For an even earlier discussion of floating signifiers, see Lévi-Strauss 1987.  “An empty signifier is, strictly speaking, a signifier without a signified” (Laclau 1996, p. 36).

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does context necessarily influence agency? Some philosophers have postulated an autonomous subjectivity entirely uninfluenced by context. If the subject were autonomous, claims about the influence of contexts on subjectivity would be empirical sociological ones, not logical philosophical ones. Postfoundationalism provides philosophical grounds for rejecting the possibility of autonomy and insisting that context necessarily influences conduct. Here postfoundationalism echoes meaning holism, according to which the content of a proposition P depends on the other propositions one holds true. Now, if the content of a belief depends on background beliefs, people cannot come to hold any particular belief outside a prior web of beliefs. A person who holds beliefs and acts on them does so only against the background of a web of beliefs that is initially made available to her by a context. Subjectivity cannot be autonomous because people cannot reach beliefs uninfluenced by context. Even as postfoundationalists reclaim agency, therefore, they should allow that agency is inherently situated. When postfoundationalists defend a capacity for agency, they should recognize that agency always occurs in contexts that influence it. Poststructuralists are right to say that postfoundationalism undermines the idea of autonomy. They just go astray when they also reject the idea of situated agency. A rejection of autonomy suffices to support many of the poststructuralists’ criticisms of other analyses of subjectivity. One of Foucault’s main targets was Jean-Paul Sartre and his existentialist account of the integrity of the subject. Sartre seemed to portray the subject as autonomous, suggesting that people have an unlimited freedom apparent in their ability to make spontaneous authentic choices for which there are no existing grounds.³ To deny this unlimited freedom is, Sartre claimed, the archetypal act of bad faith. People accept their existential freedom by taking responsibility for their actions, but such responsibility often causes an anxiety that they flee by pretending their lives and choices are the result of social forces. For Sartre, the human condition is one of existential freedom in which the moment of choice is unencumbered by external influences or pressures. To undercut Sartre’s existentialism requires only rejection of autonomy. If contexts always influence beliefs and actions, individuals cannot be autonomous, so there cannot be a moment of existential freedom when they make choices unaffected by social pressures. Consider the formation of beliefs. A belief  Although I adopt Foucault’s accounts of Sartre, the liberation theorists, and Hegelianism, his accounts can be challenged. I am especially suspicious that the poststructuralists set up Sartre as a straw man. For a sympathetic reading of Sartre that suggests in my terms that he defended agency but not autonomy see Howells 1988.

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in existential freedom implies that signifieds can be fixed independent of theoretical context; people could not reach beliefs uninfluenced by social contexts unless they could know things independent of prior theories. Yet, postfoundationalism implies that language is differential, signifieds are fixed only by theoretical contexts, and so people necessarily reach the beliefs they do against the background of theories they inherit from their contexts. Consider also the performance of actions. A decision to act counts as a choice only when made for conscious or unconscious reasons, and these reasons include beliefs, even if only beliefs about how to realize desires. Thus, if beliefs are necessarily influenced by contexts, so are actions. To identify external influences on oneself and one’s choices is not necessarily bad faith; it can be an attempt at intellectual honesty. Another of Foucault’s targets was the account of the subject associated with liberations theorists such as Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich. Liberation theorists argued that individuals have an inner nature that can be repressed or fulfilled. They then built histories of sexuality around a repressive hypothesis (Foucault 1978, pp. 15 – 50). Their historical narratives suggested that until the seventeenth century people engaged in sex openly and joyfully. Then with the rise of the bourgeoisie, from the seventeenth century through to the dark days of nineteenth century Victorianism, sexuality was silenced, repressed, surrounded by guilt, and restricted to the end of reproduction. For many liberation theorists, sexual and political freedom alike depended on the overthrow of bourgeois society. Foucault opposed liberation theories of the self by suggesting that individuals have no ahistorical nature to be liberated. He did not reject the claim that society can produce sexual misery. What he opposed were implicit appeals to a natural sexuality that society prevents from flourishing. Because Foucault denied the existence of a natural sexuality, he focused on the positive mechanisms by which society produces sexual identities and practices including those that cause misery. A similar challenge to liberation theorists and their repressive hypothesis arises from rejecting autonomy while defending situated agency. A rejection of autonomy implies that people’s beliefs, actions, and identities, including their sexuality, are necessarily influenced by the relevant social context. Thus, it does not make sense to postulate subjectivity or sexuality free from the influence of society. It does not make sense to think of the influence of society as a negative repression to be overcome. On the contrary, a rejection of autonomy suggests that the influence of society is inevitable and so better conceived as a productive source of particular subjectivities.

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Yet another of Foucault’s targets was the Hegelian idea of a universal rationality unfolding through history. Hegel grounded human nature and so the choices people make in an immanent account of objective rationality. For Hegel, the individual is not straightforwardly autonomous since an ulterior principle of objective reason influences beliefs and actions. Yet, the individual still reflects a universal reason since a dialectical logic governs mind’s development through history. Hegel defined the particular subject by reference to an autonomous universal mind that is itself knowable through its appearance in particular subjects. The logical development of the subject embodies the unfolding of objective reason. The universal-I or absolute spirit appears in the activity of the particular-I or individual subject. Foucault opposed the Hegelian notion of spirit by appealing to Nietzsche’s claim that “the forces operating in history are not controlled by destiny or regulative mechanisms, but respond to haphazard conflicts” (Foucault 1977, p. 154). For Foucault as for Nietzsche, history is contingent. History lacks a universal subject that might sustain an objective concept of rationality and serve as an interpretative principle for understanding particular individuals. A rejection of autonomy lends support to Nietzsche and Foucault against Hegel. The idea of situated agency implies that context is a product of conduct, not a structure defined by the relations among its units, but these contexts arise haphazardly from diverse acts of situated agency. There is no need to postulate an absolute spirit guiding conduct. No universal reason guides beliefs and actions to lead history to a given telos. On the contrary, because situated agency is inherently undetermined, it has no universal or logical grounds. Nothing – neither absolute spirit nor anything else – requires individuals to develop in a particular way. To postulate anything such as absolute spirit as the immanent basis for agency is to obscure the contingency of judgment. Postfoundationalism entails a change in Man, not his death. It undermines the concepts of autonomy, liberation, and universal reason that have often characterized modern analyses of subjectivity. But it does not undermine the idea of human agency. People might be situated agents rather than autonomous agents, but they are nonetheless agents. They can innovate, adopt novel beliefs, and perform novel actions against the background of contexts that influence them.

2. Reclaiming intentionality The preceding arguments leave agency rather empty. To argue that contexts do not fix or properly limit agency is not to argue that individuals play an active role in deciding what they will believe and how they will act. Perhaps agency

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is random chance. Perhaps agency merely stands for unexplained variance much as error terms do in statistics. This largely empty idea of agency would not provide much of an alternative to poststructuralism. On the contrary, if agency stood for variance and chance within a structure, language, or system, then far from reclaiming subjectivity, it would echo the poststructuralist critique of structuralism. Derrida in particular criticized structuralism for postulating a false closure and ignoring the instabilities, slippages, and play that he tied to meaning as différance. Clearly Derrida and other poststructuralists often allow for chance and variance. They just analyze chance and variance as inherent within language or other structures, not as products of intentional subjectivity. A proper response to poststructuralism involves a defense not only of chance and variance but also of the intentional quality of agency. Intentional agency consists of a capacity to act for reasons of one’s own. Intentional actions embody the beliefs and desires of the actors. Intentionality does not refer here, as it does colloquially, to a prior purpose to do something. Intentionality refers, as it often does in philosophy, to the capacity of consciousness to be about objects that thus exist in or for the mind. Intentional states can represent things. Beliefs, desires, and motives are intentional states because they can be about objects, properties, states of affairs, and events. Agency is intentional because it embodies intentional states. Most people believe that agency is intentional with actions embodying beliefs and desires. This belief is not just an unjustified prejudice. On the contrary, the belief in intentional states draws support from two related arguments. The first argument comes from phenomenological experience. People experience themselves as having the capacity to direct their actions and reflect on their beliefs and desires. They distinguish actions that embody conscious and unconscious beliefs and desires from involuntary movements. They experience a difference between moving their legs to stand up and the reflex movement of their leg when someone taps their knee with a hammer. The former is the experience of intentional agency. It is difficult to imagine how people would conduct themselves if they did not have this phenomenological experience. The second argument for intentional agency is that in their everyday lives people make sense of people’s actions by interpreting them as intentional. They postulate the conscious and unconscious beliefs and desires that led others to act. It is again difficult to imagine how people would interact socially if they did not treat one another as intentional agents. Most social interactions rely on people ascribing intentional states to one another; think, for example, of persuasion, debate, instruction, and voting. Phenomenological experience and everyday life entail a commitment to intentional agency. Reminiscences and biographies of poststructuralists suggest

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that they too lived as if they and other people were intentional agents. If they did indeed do so, we might wonder what their inability to live in accord with their expressed beliefs about subjectivity tells us about those beliefs. The arguments for intentional agency are compelling. Before deciding the issue, however, I should discuss the opposing case. What arguments led the poststructuralists to reject phenomenological experience and ordinary language? Their main argument is that language is constitutive of the self. Their claim that language constitutes the self assumes that language is a structure. Debates about the relationship of language to the self thus overlap with those about the relationship of structures to agency. Given this overlap, I can extend my earlier arguments about structures to the role of language in making subjects. Claims about the linguistic construction of the self are fashionable, plausible, and yet hopelessly vague. There is a need for clearer analyses of the possible relationships of intentionality to language. Consider various ways of unpacking the vague claim that language is constitutive of the self. A first version of this claim uses the word “language” to refer to consciousness, intentionality, and belief, rather than to the sounds we use to express such things. Claim-1 is thus that people’s actions embody their intentionality. This claim echoes phenomenological experience and ordinary language. It does not help poststructuralists to overturn the commitment to intentionality. A second version of the claim that language constitutes the self casts doubt on intentional agency by raising the possibility that intentionality or at least its content is a product of language. Claim-2 is thus that people’s actions embody their beliefs and these beliefs arise against the background of a language, discourse, or tradition. This claim treats language as directly equivalent to the contexts that I discussed earlier. It is not surprising, therefore, that claim-2 muddles agency with autonomy. Claim-2 opposes an analysis of the subject as autonomous; it presents intentionality as necessarily influenced by its linguistic context, thereby undermining the idea of pure experience and pure reason. However, as I have suggested, to reject autonomy is not necessarily to reject intentional agency. There are, therefore, two different versions of claim-2. Claim-2a, which would undermine intentional agency, is: people’s actions embody beliefs, where these beliefs arise against the background of a social context or language that fixes or limits the beliefs that they might then go on to adopt. Although claim-2a would support the poststructuralist hostility to the subject, it fails along with all appeals to a context that purportedly fixes or limits the beliefs people might adopt and so the actions they might try to perform. Claim-2b, which allows for intentional agency, is: people’s actions embody their beliefs, where their beliefs reflect a social inheritance, but where they can change this inheritance for rea-

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sons of their own. Claim-2b allows that a given inheritance might make it remarkably unlikely that an individual goes on to adopt some beliefs, but it also recognizes that there are no logical grounds for declaring it impossible for her to do so. Far from implying the death of Man, it replaces autonomy with situated agency. A final version of the claim that language constitutes the self focuses less on the influence of inherited contexts upon people’s beliefs than on the linguistic nature of beliefs. Claim-3 is that actions embody beliefs that are influenced by contexts, where beliefs and contexts alike are linguistic entities. The content of claim-3 depends on how one thinks about linguistic entities. One possibility is that an intentional object is a linguistic entity if it consists of words. Claim-3 is thus that intentional objects such as beliefs and desires exist only when expressed in language. Personally I think claim-3 is false. I believe that we ascribe beliefs and desires to people to make sense of their actions, and we sometimes postulate beliefs without implying people held them consciously using a particular linguistic expression. I would even suggest that one person might act in a way that ascribes beliefs to another without either of them having thought about the belief using any linguistic expression. For now, however, the important point is that irrespective of whether claim-3 is true or false, it does not undermine the idea of intentional agency. People could be intentional agents even if intentional objects are necessarily embodied in words. Consider, for example, the conscious belief, “exercise improves one’s health”. Even if people can hold this belief only in a linguistic expression, they still might be agents who can act on it, reflect on it, and change it. Claim-3 becomes relevant to the problem of subjectivity only if we conceive of linguistic entities in a way that precludes their being objects of intentionality. It becomes relevant only if we take it to supplant intentionality with linguistic entities that are not themselves intentional objects. However, if we took claim3 in this way, it would no longer be a claim about the relationship of language to the self. We would have turned our attention from the supposed linguistic construction of the self to the possibility of denying appeals to any self. Let me pause here briefly to distinguish between these two different ways of challenging intentional agency. On the one hand, critics might argue that language constitutes intentionality or the self. I have been considering different versions of that argument, and I have suggested they fail. On the other hand, critics might argue that there is no such thing as intentionality or the self. Although both of these arguments are associated with poststructuralism, they are incompatible. If language constitutes the self, there must be a self that is constituted by language. Alternatively, if there is no self, it is meaningless to say that the self is constituted by language.

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Poststructuralists challenge intentionality mainly by arguing that the self is linguistically constituted, but sometimes by denying the validity of any appeal to intentionality. The latter arguments are not about the role of language in giving us identities. Rather, they try to rule out appeals to intentionality as the source of meanings and so by implication actions. How do poststructuralists argue against appeals to intentional states? Perhaps I should begin by pointing out that the poststructuralist theory of meaning does not provide such an argument. It might seem that if signs (linguistic entities) gained meaning only from relations of difference within a system of signs, then analyses of meaning could not appeal to intentional states. However, even if the poststructuralist theory of meaning is correct, it would not necessarily undermine intentional agency. The relevant system of signs could be the web of beliefs of an intentional agent, and if it were, signs would gain their meaning from the relations of difference among intentional objects. The arguments by which poststructuralists deny intentionality outright are those that imply people cannot escape language. Poststucturalists often suggest that people are trapped in an endless chain of signifiers that takes them from one sign to another without any possibility of bringing the chain to an end through appeals to non-linguistic objects. For Derrida, for example, a text is “a differential network, a fabric of traces referring endlessly to something other than itself, to other differential traces” (Derrida 1979, p. 84). A weak reading of the argument that people cannot escape language is compatible with intentionality. On this reading, the argument that people cannot escape language reiterates the postfoundational rejection of pure experience and pure reason. All experiences are theory-laden, including those of intentional states, even one’s own intentional states. When people interpret actions by ascribing particular intentional states to the actor, they do so in ways that reflect their own prior theories; they do not merely record a meaning or intention that is present in the action itself. All postfoundationalists will agree, therefore, that people cannot get outside language to have direct experiences of intentional states. Yet postfoundationalists can deny the possibility of direct experiences of intentional states without dismissing intentionality. Poststructuralists challenge intentional agency only if they defend a stronger reading of the argument that people cannot escape language. The strong reading suggests that because we do not have direct experience of intentionality, we cannot appeal to someone’s intentional states as constitutive of what texts and actions meant to them. In this view, we are unable to make any link between actions or texts and the intentional states of the agent or author. Poststructuralists sometimes imply here that because we cannot have direct ac-

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cess to intentional states, we cannot possibly appeal to intentional states to fix, clarify, or explain meanings. Derrida writes: All those boundaries that form the running border of what used to be called a text, of what we once thought this word could identify, i. e. the supposed end and beginning of a work, the unity of a corpus, the title, the margins, the signatures, the referential realm outside the frame, and so forth [have been subject to] a sort of overrun that spoils all these boundaries and divisions and forces us to extend the accredited concept, the dominant notion of a ‘text’ (Derrida 1979, p. 83).

Derrida thus suggests that any interpretation that pursues such an object to ground or give meaning to a text is a misconceived and perhaps unethical repression of the slippages, playfulness, and difference inherent in language. The strong version of the claim that people cannot escape language raises the question: how might one justify appealing to intentional states while accepting a postfoundational epistemology? Here postfoundationalists can defend philosophical commitments by reference to lived practice. Whenever people act, they commit themselves at least provisionally to the adequacy of various beliefs about the world. For example, if someone feels hungry, goes to a café, orders a sandwich, pays in cash, and eats it, they commit themselves to beliefs about the existence of certain objects and about the nature of these objects. Philosophy can go to work on the beliefs that people commit to in their actions. Philosophy can analyze the implications of these concepts to provide an account of the classes of objects found in the world and the forms of reasoning fitting those objects. For example, a commitment to bread suggests the world contains physical objects, a commitment to money suggests it contains objects that acquire significance through intersubjective beliefs, and a commitment to people who act for reasons of their own suggests it contains intentional states. Philosophical analysis of the concepts embedded in action provides good reason to believe in intentionality (Derrida 1979, p. 83).

Some poststructuralists might counter that their main objection is not to postulating intentional states in general. Their objection is to attempts to postulate particular intentional states as constitutive of the meaning of particular texts and actions. They might admit that philosophical reflection on the concepts embedded in action provides good reasons for postulating the existence of objects belonging to certain general classes, but then insist that philosophical reflection cannot legitimate postulating particular instances of these classes. Perhaps philosophy supports the claim that people have intentional states, but not ascribing webs of belief to particular individuals. Surely, however, postfoundationalists can defend ascribing particular intentional states to agents on grounds of inference to the best explanation. Because there are good reasons to populate the world with intentional states such as beliefs, we can assume a particular agent held beliefs. Although we do not have direct access to this web of beliefs,

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we can then justify ascribing particular beliefs to her by saying that doing so best explains the evidence. Philosophy provides grounds for assuming Thomas Hobbes had beliefs that he expressed in Leviathan. This assumption raises the question of what those beliefs were. And historians can answer this question by saying that ascribing a certain web of beliefs to Hobbes best makes sense of the evidence. Inference to the best explanation thus provides a justification for postulating particular intentional states as those that explain particular actions. Poststructuralist arguments against postulating intentional states often combine incompatible ideas. They rely on postfoundational rejections of pure experience to deny people have direct experience of intentionality; but they rely on a foundationalist identification of knowledge with direct experience to argue that people cannot have knowledge of other’s intentional states. Surely, however, this foundationalist identification of knowledge with direct experience is an awkward idea for postfoundationalists to defend. Thus I have avoided it. I have argued that postfoundationalism allows people to postulate objects of which they do not have direct experience. Even if people have access only to texts, they legitimately might postulate intentional states as external sources of those texts. So, as phenomenological experience and ordinary language suggest, we should unpack subjectivity as a capacity for intentional agency.

3. Reclaiming rationality To argue that subjects are intentional agents is not to argue that the content of their intentionality is consistent and under their control. Thus the question remains: are intentional agents rational? Poststructuralists imply that subjectivity is inherently fractured and that individuals lack any center to exercise the control needed for self-mastery. In contrast, I believe that we should ascribe conceptual priority to rational consistency, but that doing so neither precludes division nor entails self-mastery. Many of us unreflectively assume that people hold minimally rational beliefs. We do not presume that their beliefs are objectively rational, only that they are broadly consistent. Most people would find it puzzling, for example, if someone believed that a particular room was both square and round. Poststructuralists argue against any such presumption of consistency in part because they downplay agency. Their appeals to structures undermine concern with the consistency of people’s intentionality in that the consistency constraints applying to a language are weaker than those applying to beliefs. Most of us would be puzzled by someone who believed a room is both square and round but we

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do not find it puzzling that language contains the propositions “the room is square” and “the room is round”. One of the main ways in which the poststructuralists undermine the rationality of the subject is thus by promoting strong versions of the claim that language constructs the self. An analysis of the subject as an intentional agent reopens questions about rationality that quasi-structuralism closes. Earlier I argued that language constituted the self only in the sense that people’s actions embody their beliefs where their beliefs are influenced by a social inheritance but where they can change these inherited beliefs for reasons of their own. No doubt structures, contexts, and languages influence intentionality, but they do not determine it. No doubt the words that people use have prior social meanings, but these prior meanings do not fix the ways they use words. The content of actions and beliefs consists in a personal intentionality reached against the background of a social context, not the social context itself. A language gives people words, but they use the words creatively to express themselves. A social context influences the beliefs that people hold, but people reach their beliefs by thinking creatively against the background of that context. Thus, questions about the rationality of the subject depend less on the nature of language than on the nature of beliefs and their ascription to people. Consider the extent to which the nature of beliefs suggests that they actually are rational. Beliefs must show a minimal degree of consistency because we postulate them to make sense of actions. People cannot act in incompatible ways at the same time, so the beliefs we ascribe to people at any moment in time must have a certain consistency. Because people act in the world, they must have a minimally consistent web of beliefs. Successfully to go to a shop and buy food, people have to believe that the shop exists, is open, and sells food, and that they have means of payment the shop accepts. They cannot believe that the shop is open but does not exist or that it sells food but the shopkeeper will not accept any form of payment. The argument for the actual priority of consistent beliefs also applies over time. People’s actions relate to others they have done in the past and plan to do in the future. Many of their actions form chains held together by complex plans. To string together a series of actions in accord with a plan, people must have webs of belief that have some stability. Their beliefs must be stable enough to enable them to commit to future actions. To plan a skiing holiday, I have to believe that I am going somewhere where there is snow and where I will ski, and I have to do so while booking the hotel, buying tickets, and packing clothes and skis. I cannot believe that I need not take my skis as there will be no snow, and I cannot change my mind about where I am going on reaching the airport.

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Clearly the actual priority of consistent beliefs does not take us far. It proves only that subjects are as consistent as they need to be to perform whatever set of actions they happen to perform. Postfoundationalists cannot identify the content of any minimal consistency entailed by people successfully performing actions and sets of actions. The particular web of beliefs and degree of consistency that we ascribe to people will depend on the particular actions each of them performs, and we cannot identify any set of actions that everybody must perform. Thus, the actual priority of consistency allows us to conclude only that each individual performs a set of actions A such that we can ascribe to her beliefs that cohere to a minimal extent C, where C depends on the nature of A. I can extend the place of rationality in my analysis of subjectivity by turning to the process of ascribing beliefs to people. This process gives conceptual priority to consistency. Crucially, language is possible only because saying one thing typically rules out saying some other things. Sentences can have meaning only if to assert something is to deny the contrary. For example, if saying something was somewhere did not rule out saying it was not there, to say something was somewhere would have no meaning. (No doubt objects might have special properties allowing them to be and not be somewhere at the same time, but then to say something without these properties was somewhere would be to rule out saying it was not there). Language thus presupposes a norm of logical consistency governing its use in particular utterances. Further, this norm requires us initially to presume that the beliefs someone holds are consistent. We cannot treat people’s use of language as governed by a norm of consistency unless we postulate their beliefs in accord with a similar norm. For example, if someone says something is somewhere, we cannot rule out their saying it is not there unless we can presume that they do not believe it is both there and not there. We must use a general presumption that people’s beliefs are consistent because if we do not we will be unable to ascribe meanings to utterances. We can ascribe meanings to utterances and beliefs to people only if we do so in accord with a norm of consistency. The conceptual priority of consistent beliefs extends to changes in someone’s beliefs over time. To ascribe one belief to someone, we have to ascribe other beliefs to them, and we decide which other beliefs to ascribe to them in part by presuming that they do not change their beliefs at random. Someone’s beliefs typically remain stable unless she has a reason to change them. Beliefs differ here from desires and actions. We are not puzzled if someone wants to eat chocolate at one time, but not another time; nor are we puzzled if they act on these two desires, eating chocolate one evening but not the next. However, if someone believed that chocolate was fattening at one moment but not at the next, we would wonder what had led them to change their mind. When peo-

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ple hold a belief, we presume they will continue to do so unless new evidence or reasoning provides them with a reason to alter it. Our phenomenological experience reflects this presumption of consistency. It is difficult to imagine how we could avoid interpreting ourselves using a presumption of consistency. If we did not presume that our beliefs were consistent, we could not think of ourselves as having beliefs that give us reasons for action. Given that we thus take ourselves to have broadly consistent beliefs, we can reconcile our idea of ourselves with our treatment of others only by presuming that they too have broadly consistent beliefs. I have argued that subjectivity consists of intentionality, and that the process of interpreting intentionality consists of ascribing beliefs to actors in accord with a norm of rationality. However, the relevant concept of rationality applies only to consistency of belief, not objectively valid beliefs or utility-maximizing actions. These latter concepts of rationality imply that people are autonomous subjects who adopt their beliefs and preferences apart from cultural contexts. In contrast, my concept of rationality as consistency refers to the distinctly local reasoning of situated agents. Reasoning is local in that it occurs within agents’ webs of belief. A web of beliefs is rational simply if it is consistent. Similarly, a change of beliefs is rational simply if it is an intelligible response from within a particular web of beliefs to a new idea or experience. Rationality does not depend (at least in any simple way) on our assessment of the truth or reasonableness of the relevant beliefs or change of beliefs. The adjective “local” refers, in other words, to the way reasoning always takes place against the background of particular webs of belief. Just as agency is always situated rather than autonomous, so reasoning is always local, unable to escape its particular context to reach a view from nowhere. Reasoning is local in the same way as agency is situated; it necessarily takes place against an inherited background that influences it. Local reasoning differs significantly from the seemingly similar concept of local knowledge. Local knowledge refers to people’s specific, concrete, and practical grasp of their experiences and circumstances. The opposite of local knowledge is the general, abstract, and theoretical expertise gained from technical and professional training. Even the strongest advocate of local knowledge would allow that expertise is conceptually possible. In contrast, reasoning is local in its relationship to a web of beliefs. It stands in contrast to the objective rationality of an autonomous self. And one of the main reasons to insist on the local nature of reasoning is to deny the conceptual possibility of an autonomous self. Local reasoning thus describes both expert and local knowledge. Local reasoning can occur against the background of specialized and academic theories. The philosopher tracing the consequences of reason and the neoclassical econ-

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omist grappling with a technical issue to refine a model are engaged in local reasoning against the background of a settled academic practice. Recognition of the local nature of reasoning divorces subjectivity from any implication of self-mastery. Subjectivity is not an illusion, but neither is it something entirely under our control. Individuals are to a large extent what their contexts make them. Their reasoning and intentionality embody the lingering effects of social influences on their webs of belief. Again, as local reasoning is not autonomous, so its operation need not be conscious and reflective. Local reasoning often occurs tacitly, perhaps as an immediate response to an experience of a physical space or material object. A defense of local reasoning as consistency may appear to commit one if not to self-mastery then to the unity of the subject. Yet, the unity of the subject too goes once we recall that consistency is a norm governing the ascription of beliefs with only a minimal and ill-defined level of consistency being actually required. The conceptual priority of consistency does not mean that people cannot hold inconsistent beliefs, nor that we cannot ascribe inconsistent beliefs to people. It means only that a norm of consistency governs the process of interpretation. Poststructuralists often appeal to psychoanalysis to argue that the self is divided. A presumption of consistency helps clarify the role and content of the unconscious. Most obviously, psychoanalytic concepts have a role only when accounts based on local reasoning prove inadequate. People should appeal to the unconscious only when the language of the conscious fails them, that is, when they postulate a conflict between someone’s actions and her self-understanding. The content of psychoanalytic concepts also needs adjusting to allow for the priority of consistency. As Jacques Lacan famously tried to separate psychoanalytic concepts from the more physicalist themes of Freud’s work, so postfoundationalists should separate them from the structuralist themes of Lacan’s work. Lacan argued that the unconscious was like a language, but his idea of a language remained ambiguous. On the one hand, Lacan sometimes used language simply to draw attention to psychological experiences of self, others, and objects. Language stands here as a synonym or expression of intentionality. People use language to express their conscious and unconscious beliefs and desires. Now, if we understand Lacan in this way, his appeal to language simply rejects positivism without asserting an alternative philosophical analysis of intentionality, so we could combine it with an analysis of intentionality that incorporates a presumption of consistency. On the other hand, however, Lacan sometimes implied that language is an abstract system governing its own performances and creating and dispersing the subject. He wrote, “Man speaks, then, but it is because the symbol has made him man” (Lacan 1977, p. 65). Language stands

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here as a quasi-structure that explains particular actions. Now, if we understand Lacan in this way, his appeal to language displaces the explanations based on ascribing beliefs in accord with a presumption of consistency, so it is incompatible with my analysis of subjectivity. Even after we grant that intentionality does not entail self-mastery or unity, we still need to know how we should analyze the content of the conscious, subconscious, and unconscious bits of subjectivity. Poststructuralists such as Lacan are far too prone to appeal here to structures. I have argued instead that peoples’ intentionality consists of the beliefs and desires that we ascribe to them in a process governed by a broad presumption of rationality. My arguments overlap here with humanist theories of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis should concentrate on conscious and unconscious beliefs and desires, not the language in which they are expressed and it should explain these beliefs and desires by reference to situated agency, not a determining structure. In clinical practice, for example, the analyst and patient develop and exchange stories about the patient’s past. They seek a better story that helps the patient because of its aesthetic unity, its pleasing and plausible nature, and the way it opens possibilities for new actions. The psychoanalytic encounter gives the patient new beliefs about her past thereby facilitating her to develop new patterns of activity.

4. Conclusion Many poststructuralists associated their critiques of subjectivity with political opposition to humanism. I just spent a morning in the library looking at dictionary definitions of humanism. Almost all the definitions referred to an emphasis on the capacities, achievements, and worth of human life. They contrasted this emphasis on human life with religious and scholastic concerns with God and metaphysics. These definitions reflect the standard accounts of Renaissance humanists as believing that humans have an active faculty that enables them to influence their own fate within the order of things. These definitions also reflect standard accounts of twentieth century humanism in literary studies and the human sciences as committed not only to the capacity and worth of this world and the individual but also to resistance to scientism and formalism. Twentieth century humanists saw the humanities as a counter-force to the rise of utilitarian rationalism, commerce, and technology. They rejected attempts to deny the meaningful nature of action and reduce human life to a rational calculus or science. Poststructuralists depict humanism in a way that differs from the dictionary definitions, accounts of Renaissance humanism, and the literary and social hu-

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manists of the twentieth century.⁴ The poststructuralists imply that humanists think of the individual as unconditioned, unified, and in complete control of herself. They often suggest, in addition, that this view of the individual is entangled with an imperialist Western ethic. We might be tempted to dismiss this poststructuralist account of humanism as a caricature that does not merit serious discussion. In some ways, we would be right to do so. The poststructuralists offered a caricature of humanism that reflected their debt to the very formalist, structuralist, and avant garde ideas that the twentieth century humanists had denounced for failing to tie society and literature to activity and life. Nonetheless, we also might accept that the humanist emphases on secular reason, human affairs, and individual creativity can get entangled with themes that resemble those highlighted by poststructuralists. Thus, this paper has combined an analysis of the subject as a rational and intentional agent with considerations of the extent to which this analysis entails claims about the independence, self-mastery, and unity of the subject. Many humanists identified subjectivity mainly with capacities for freedom, self-direction, choice, and reason. The poststructuralists challenged humanism for allegedly relying on belief in autonomous freedom and pure reason. Unfortunately, these challenges depended on a shallow misreading of the history of humanism that failed to distinguish among some very different conceptual possibilities. In particular, the poststructuralists’ critique of autonomy slipped into denial of agency, and their critique of pure reason slipped into rejection of local reasoning. Individual autonomy and pure reason are difficult ideas for postfoundationalists to defend. Nonetheless, poststructuralists confront equal difficulties when they try to do without concepts such as situated agency and local reasoning. Ironically, Derrida himself entertained similar possibilities. In a relatively late interview with Jean-Luc Nancy, he suggested that the humanist subject was a “fable” that stood in need of “de-homogenizing”: “there never has been The subject for anyone” (Derrida 1991, p. 102). Given that the humanist subject is a fable, we might ask why even in that interview Derrida still appeared so anxious to define his position in opposition to it. We might also ask whether it was a fable created by the poststructuralists themselves – a fable that provided them with a straw man bearing little resemblance to the actual beliefs or texts of those with whom they associated it. If it was, then I am just the latest of a

 The tendentious association of humanism with these other themes owed much to the debate between Heidegger and Sartre (Gordon 2007, pp. 103 – 30).

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long line of humanists who have believed more or less what Derrida then went on to introduce as if it were a novel possibility: Some might say: but what we call “subject” is not the absolute origin, pure will, identity to self, or presence to self of consciousness but precisely this non-coincidence with self . . . I am thinking of those today who would try to reconstruct a discourse around a subject that would not be predeconstructive, around a subject that would no longer include the figure of mastery of self, of adequation to self, center and origin of the world, etc. . . . but would define the subject rather as the finite experience of non-identity to self, as the underivable interpellation inasmuch as it comes from the other, from the trace of the other, with all the paradoxes or the aporia of being before the law (Derrida 1991, pp. 103 – 104).

References Barthes, Roland (1972): Mythologies. London: Jonathan Cape. Barthes, Roland (1977): Image, Music, Text. London: Fontana. Derrida, Jacques (1979): “Living On: Borderlines”. In: Deconstruction and Criticism. Bloom, Harold; Man, Paul de; Derrida, Jacques; Hartman, Geoffrey H. & Miller, Joseph Hillis (Eds.). New York: Seabury Press. Derrida, Jacques (1991): “‘Eating Well’ or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida”. In: Who Comes After the Subject?. Cadava, Eduardo; Connor, Peter & Nancy, Jean-Luc (Eds.) New York: Routledge. Foucault, Michel (1970): The Order of Things. London: Tavistock Publishers. Foucault, Michel (1977): “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”. In: Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, Bouchard, Donald F. (ed.) Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Foucault, Michel (1978): The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction. New York: Pantheon. Gordon, Peter E. (2007): “Hammer without a Master: French Phenomenology and the Origins of Deconstruction (Or, How Derrida Read Heidegger)”. In: Histories of Postmodernism. Bevir, Mark; Hargis, Jill & Rushing, Sara (Eds.) New York: Routledge, pp. 103 – 30. Howells, Christina (1988): Sartre: The Necessity of Freedom Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lacan, Jacques (1977): Écrits: A Selection. London: Tavistock Publishing. Levi-Strauss, Claude (1987): Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss. London: Routledge. Laclau, Ernesto (1996): Emancipation(s). London: Verso University Press.

Martin Gustafsson

Notes on Life and Human Nature Abstract: According to Elizabeth Anscombe, having a language belongs to the nature of a human being, in a similar sort of way as having sight belongs to the nature of a cat. Plausibly, however, she would be aware that the notion of ‘having a language’ does not have the sort of determinacy that characterizes a notion such as a cat’s being sighted. For a language is embedded in wider and dynamic patterns of human life – habits, institutions, traditions, ways of living together with others – and there isn’t just one such system of patterns, but an astonishing and open-ended variety. This paper explores what sense can be made of the idea that such an indeterminate feature can nonetheless be said to belong to the nature or essence of what it is to be human. Anscombe’s form of essentialism is distinguished from the sort of essentialism that is commonly discussed and rejected in present-day philosophy of biology. Crucially, Anscombe is working with a special notion of generality often not clearly recognized in contemporary debates. This sort of generality marks the peculiar logic of so-called generic statements, and the paper ends by a discussion of recent worries about such statements raised by Sally Haslanger and Sarah-Jane Leslie.

In a lecture titled “Human Essence”, posthumously published in 2005, Elizabeth Anscombe writes: All men not too young and not incapacitated have the blessing of language. They may be incapacitated by brain damage; or again because they are deaf and have not been taught to speak. That a new-born baby is speechless is the same sort of fact as a new-born kitten’s being blind. Earthworms are not blind: it does not belong to their nature to be sighted; they have no organ of sight (Anscombe 2005, p. 27).

As so often in Anscombe’s writings, we have here a passage of enormous density, containing ideas the full spelling out of which would easily fill a book. And, equally characteristically, Anscombe leaves it to the reader to figure out the details of, and her grounds for, those ideas. My aim in what follows is to engage in a series of reflections on what I take to be some of the issues that get raised in this passage. Of central importance is the notion of ‘nature’ or ‘essence’ that Anscombe is working with. This notion has its roots in Aristotle, and has gained renewed attention in recent work by philosophers influenced by Anscombe, notably Philippa Foot and Michael DOI 10.1515/9783110523812-005

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Thompson (Foot 2001, Thompson 2008). At the same time, most contemporary philosophers of biology treat this notion as obsolete and in fundamental conflict with evolutionary theory. However, I shall argue that influential criticisms of biological essentialism – from Ernst Mayr’s renowned attacks on ‘typological thinking’ in the 1950s and 60s (see, e. g., Mayr 1959), to several contemporary discussions of the species concept – fail to get the relevant notion of essence into clear view. Those attacks are directed against a different (and certainly untenable) sort of conception. If I am right, Anscombe is working with a notion of nature or essence that she takes to allow for the dynamics of evolution, and which is not dogmatically and aprioristically imposed on or ignorant towards empirical research and results but sensitive to revision and refinement in the light of further investigations and discoveries. As I will show, it is crucial here that the notion of generality associated with Anscombe’s conception of essence is quite different from the notion of generality that is usually presupposed in contemporary debates. It is true that this sort of generality has received attention in recent discussions about the peculiar logic of so-called “generic” statements – statements in which some sort of exceptiontolerant generalization seems to be made without any explicit use of quantifiers (e. g., Haslanger 2013; Leslie 2008; Sterken 2015). However, many philosophers of biology still seem to take for granted David Hull’s characterization of essentialism, according to which an essentialist is one who believes that “each species is distinguished by one set of essential characteristics. The possession of each essential character is necessary for membership in the species, and the possession of all the essential characters sufficient” (Hull 1994, p. 313). In an influential treatment of the topic, Samir Okasha notes that this characterization of essentialism “would be accepted by nearly all philosophers of biology”, including himself (Okasha 2002, p. 196).¹ I shall argue that the Anscombean form of essentialism does not fit Hull’s definition at all, and that an appreciation of why this is so is necessary if one is to understand what makes her conception intriguing and interesting. Much of what I say will be indebted to Thompson’s work, which I think is in line with Anscombe’s viewpoint, and which seems to me to be the

 As Okasha also notes, virtually all philosophers of biology (including himself) rejects essentialism, thus characterized (Okasha 2002, p. 196). And rightly so: this form of essentialism is in obvious conflict with biological reality. Thus, some contemporary defenders of essentialism such as Michael Devitt have proposed modifications to the effect that essences are associated with “clusters” of characteristics, allowing for individual specimen that do not possess all these characteristics (Devitt 2008). As my discussion in what follows will suggest, such modifications are superficial in comparison with the ones suggested by Anscombe and Thompson, and constitute no fundamental rejection of the notion of generality underlying Hull’s definition of essentialism.

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philosophically deepest elaboration of such a viewpoint within recent philosophy of biology. Let me be clear, though, that I shall not muster a defense of what I take to be Anscombe’s conception. I am not convinced that it works out in the end, and in any case such a defense would require a separate and much longer paper. My aim is just to spell out what I take to be the crucial characteristics of this conception, so that it becomes clearer what issues a proper defense, or a proper rejection, would need to address. In the last third of the paper, I consider the significance of Anscombe’s claim that it belongs to the nature of human beings to have a language. Anscombe says the speechlessness of a newborn baby is the same sort of fact as a newborn kitten’s being blind. But from the broadly Wittgensteinian viewpoint that I (and presumably Anscombe) share, the notion of ‘having a language’ does not have the sort of determinacy that characterizes a notion such as a cat’s being sighted. For a language is embedded in wider and dynamic patterns of human life – habits, institutions, traditions, ways of living together with others – and there isn’t just one such system of patterns, but an astonishing and open-ended variety. So, there seems to be something peculiar about Anscombe’s suggestion that it belongs to human nature to have a language. Not that it is false; rather, her suggestion is peculiar because the notion of ‘having a language’ itself seems to lack the sort of determinacy that would give the suggestion a definite positive content. It is as if Anscombe is suggesting that it is part of the essence of human beings not to have an essence in such a definite sense. And if so, she seems to be arguing that there is an important sense in which a human being’s having a language is not the same sort of fact as a cat being sighted. As a consequence, it becomes an issue to what extent the notion of human flourishing is characterized by a similar sort of open-endedness and variability. In the paper’s final section I explore one aspect of this issue, by addressing a question recently raised by Sally Haslanger and Sarah-Jane Leslie. Haslanger and Leslie both note that the sort of generic generality I find in Anscombean essentialism is a dangerous mode of speech. I argue that nothing prevents a defender of the Anscombean viewpoint from agreeing that generics can be dangerous. However, such a defender would have to resist a conclusion that Haslanger and Leslie both bring up for serious consideration, namely that generic talk should be abandoned altogether. For it is part of the Anscombean view, as I understand it, that the generic mode of speech is necessary if we want to think and talk about living things qua living at all. But there is more to say here, since Haslanger and Leslie are primarily concerned about the use of generics to promulgate stereotypes and prejudices about what certain groups of humans are like, or should be like. Consider some of their

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favorite examples of dangerous generics: ‘A boy doesn’t cry’, ‘A woman is more nurturing than a man’, ‘Muslims are terrorists’. As these examples suggest, the potential harmfulness of generics seems particularly disquieting when it comes to human beings. This has to do with the fact that human beings are linguistic, enculturated beings. A crucial point is that for such beings, the question what they are and the question what they take themselves to be, are not neatly separable. As language-users, we human beings are self-interpreters, and thus we relate to descriptions not merely by passively fitting them or not, but by adjusting to them or by refusing to acknowledge their relevance (cf. Hacking 2002). Generics offer us potential models for what we can be or can become; they tell us what possible modes of existence are available to us. If they express prejudices, those prejudices are dangerous not simply because they are false, but for a more insidious reason: as they yield models to which people might wittingly or unwittingly adopt, they sometimes uncannily achieve the power of self-fulfilling prophecies. Certainly, statements such as ‘A boy doesn’t cry’, ‘A woman is more nurturing than a man’, and ‘Muslims are terrorists’ deserve to be rejected. But what, exactly, does such a rejection amount to? And what, in turn, does that tell us about the role of language and culture in human life? I shall not give final answers to those questions; rather, my aim is merely to show why pursuing them is important and difficult. One more thing before I start my investigation: I repeatedly refer to the sort of view I develop in this paper as ‘Anscombe’s’ and ‘Anscombean’. However, I am aware that the exegetical evidence on which I base my ascription of this view to the actual Anscombe is thin. In fact, I rely more on Thompson’s work than on Anscombe’s, and I often just spell out what I take to be the most interesting and charitable way of understanding her admittedly sparse suggestions. As far as I can see, there is just too little material in Anscombe’s work to make sure that the view described here is really hers. My only defense is that Anscombe is a philosopher to think with, rather than one whose views can be safely identified on ‘purely exegetical’ grounds (if there ever is such a thing as ‘pure exegesis’ in philosophy); and I do take the view I elaborate below to be of considerable interest in itself, regardless of whether it is Anscombe’s own.

1. The irreducibility of organic life “That a new-born baby is speechless is the same sort of fact as a new-born kitten’s being blind.” On a first, cursory reading, this may sound as if Anscombe is proposing some sort of naturalistic reduction of speech and language, perhaps even in that still widespread sense of ‘naturalistic’ according to which nature

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is fully and ultimately described in a completed theory of physics. Such a reading is mistaken, however. Indeed, it is part of Anscombe’s point that not even the cat’s development of sight can be reduced to physics. Taking into consideration the rest of the passage quoted above, it seems that a central element of the similarity that she wants to draw attention to between the cat’s coming to have sight and the human child’s starting to speak is that our conception of both processes involve what might be called ‘normative’ or ‘teleological’ notions that are foreign to physics: If things go well, if things go as they should, the kitten will come to see and the child will start to speak. As she puts it, kittens that remain blind and children that remain speechless are incapacitated, not just deviant or unusual. Before I go on, I should note that I use the terms ‘normative’ and ‘teleological’ provisionally here. Even if I do not think they should be abandoned in this context, there is still a way in which these terms can mislead, and I shall soon explain why. However, I shall continue to use them unhesitatingly for a few pages more, in order to, as it were, prompt the worries one might have about them, and then try to address those worries in the light of what I have said. One might perhaps think that some reduction of the envisaged normativity or teleology in terms of statistical frequency should be possible. After all, most kittens come to see, and most children start to speak. Isn’t the teleology somehow supervenient on that purely statistical fact? Well; but in a caterpillar’s life, if things go as they should, the caterpillar will eventually become a butterfly. Nature is harsh, however, and the vast majority of caterpillars perish long before they undergo such development. Similarly, if we imagine a future in which most kittens remain blind and most children remain speechless – say, due to extensive pollution of the earth and its atmosphere – that would not by itself mean that blind cats and speechless children would then have become the result of things ‘going as they should’. Rather, it would mean that incapacitated cats and children would be more common than they are today (cf. Thompson 2008, p. 68). Another attempt at a reductive account of the normativity or teleology in question would be in terms of dispositions: just as sugar is disposed to dissolve in water, a kitten is disposed to develop sight in certain circumstances, and a child is disposed to start speaking. However, this does not seem to take us anywhere. For the question remains, why is the actualization of precisely those dispositions a matter of things going as they should? After all, the mere fact that an organism is disposed to Φ under certain circumstances does not mean that the organism’s Φ-ing is a matter of things going as they should. Humans are disposed to develop cancer if affected by sufficiently large doses of radioactive radiation, but this does not mean that such a development is a matter of things going as they should. On the contrary, it is a matter of things going seriously wrong: surroundings characterized by high levels of radioactive radiation are

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bad surroundings for human beings to be in. But those very distinctions, between things going as they should and things going awry, and between good and bad circumstances, are not available to us as long as we confine ourselves to purely dispositional talk. Being in water is neither a ‘proper’ nor a ‘bad’ environment for a lump of sugar; it is just one environment among others (cf. Thompson 2008, p. 70). Well – so maybe this sort of teleological talk cannot be given a non-teleological reduction. But isn’t it still obvious that teleological accounts of the living are just remnants of a primitive and obsolete, Aristotelian or religious or romantic world view, and that if we want to do serious science we should simply abandon such talk and describe the facts in some other, non-teleological fashion? But now, let us think about what abandoning all such teleological talk would actually amount to. How deep does such talk go? Is it a merely decorative or dramatic idiom, the abandonment of which would have no deep-going effect on our ability to conceive, identify, describe and investigate the realm of the living? Or is it rather a language of fundamental significance – a way of talking without which the whole category of the living as we know it would disappear out of sight? Even if I do not know of any place where Anscombe explicitly subscribes to the latter view, I think there are reasons to believe that it is her conception.² Consider what she says about kittens and earthworms with respect to sight. Earthworms, she says, are not blind, even if they do not see. Her point is that one among many things that distinguishes earthworms from cats is that earthworms are not assessed along the dimension of sight: an earthworm’s not having sight is not a failure, but ‘the way it is’, qua earthworm. By contrast, a cat that does not have sight is blind; it lacks one of the capacities that cats, qua cats, should have. Anscombe’s saying that earthworms have no organ of sight is a way of making precisely this sort of point. What she is suggesting is that the notion of an organ is irreducibly located within the same teleological framework as that of an organism. An organ of sight is something the function of which is to provide an organism with the faculty of sight; an organ of sight is malfunctioning if it fails to do this. The very unity of an eye is tied to its function; it is by reference to this function within the organism that we identify and re-identify something as an eye, understand what its essential parts are, and distinguish it from other organs. And the functioning or malfunctioning of the organ is the functioning or malfunctioning of the organism of which the organ is a part: if the eye fails, the

 Perhaps the most direct textual evidence is in Anscombe 1981, particularly pp. 85 – 7 (some of the relevant passages are quoted in Thompson 2008, pp. 53 – 4).

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cat fails, in relation to the standards defining what sort of organism it is. By contrast, the earthworm has no organ of sight, nothing that can succeed or fail in providing the organism with the faculty of sight. Hence, the earthworm’s not having the capacity of sight is no failure, no lack. What we have here is a conception according to which living organisms are shot through with this sort of teleology, all the way down: the individual parts of which such an organism is built up constitute identifiable and integrated parts of the organism precisely in virtue of being functionally related to the whole. There is no level at which we can pick out and isolate a non-teleological basis for this organic whole, some non-teleologically individuated unit that constitute the ultimate and securely ‘physical’ essence of what it is to be, say, a cat. Not even the genetic molecules of a cat can play this sort of role. The genes are important, to be sure, but their importance depends on their being properly integrated with an adequate environment in such a way that, by interacting in the proper way with the proper substances and organic material, they contribute to the development, sustainment, and reproduction of – cats. Not just any process in which those genetic molecules can play a part gives rise to a cat. Indeed, we may well imagine various processes in which the very same molecules play a part but where nothing like a cat is in the offing. So, the idea is that to think that the genes constitute the ultimate, non-teleological basis for what makes a cat a cat is to put the cart before the horse; rather, to speak of them as the genes of a cat is already to make reference to that functional whole – the organism, the cat, situated in its proper environment – in which they can play their (no doubt crucial) role (cf. Thompson 2008, pp. 53 – 6).³ More generally, if organisms are in this sense shot through with teleology, it follows that in speaking of what makes a cat a cat, rather than an earthworm or cod, we are not speaking of some purely physical, non-teleological characteristics in virtue of which a cat differs from those other animals. Rather, we are saying which standards of success or failure are applicable to a cat as cat and to its  In his recent defense of biological essentialism, Michael Devitt claims that “[f]or most organisms the essential intrinsic properties are probably largely, although not entirely, genetic” (Devitt 2008, p. 354). Tim Lewens criticizes Devitt’s conception in Lewens 2012, by noting (with the great majority of contemporary philosophers of biology) that “the microstructural properties of species members can be quite different, even when cross-species generalisations hold at the phenotypic level” (p. 753), and then arguing that Devitt cannot take this unruliness in the underlying microstructure into due consideration without turning his notion of essence into “so weak a notion of essence that it barely merits the name” (p. 754). I should note, however, that Devitt’s essentialism and Lewen’s anti-essentialism are both miles away from the sort of Anscombean conception I am discussing in this paper, as they just do not consider the possibility that the realm of the living might form a logical category of its own.

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parts as cat-parts. So, it is not the case that those standards are applied to something that can be relevantly identified without reference to the standards themselves: it is not as if the standards are applied to some already identified, nonteleologically individuated particulars. The idea, then, is this: to describe a particular cat in ‘purely physical’ terms is not to take the first step in a process where the second step consists in the application of teleological concepts or standards to that already identified ‘given’. Rather, if we are not to lose sight of the cat as cat and of its organs as organs, the ‘purely physical’ description that we give of the cat and its organs will have to take place against the background of an already made identification of the cat and its organs in teleological terms. Identifying the entities to which the standards apply – a cat, say, or a cat’s eye – is already to invoke and acknowledge the applicability of those standards. This point can be made in traditional philosophical terms, by saying that the realm of the living constitutes a logical or conceptual category of its own (or, in the jargon of early Wittgenstein, by saying that the concept of life is a formal concept). That something belongs to the realm of the living – that something is subject to standards of the sort I am talking about here – is not a merely accidental or external property of that ‘something’. Picking out, identifying, that something, and deciding whether it belongs to the realm of the living, are one and the same procedure. Living things are not initially given or conceived in terms that are neutral with respect to the issue of they being organisms. Rather, if we want to talk about givenness at all here, we would have to say that they are given as organisms.

2. Normativity and irreducibility Now, as Thompson rightly points out, if the realm of the living forms a conceptual or logical category of its own, then there is in fact a danger involved in using the terms ‘normative’ and ‘teleological’ as unhesitatingly as I have done until now. As far as the term ‘normative’ is concerned, one way of describing the danger is to say that the term ‘normative’ is liable to make us think precisely in terms of externally imposed regulations. That is, we are inclined to think of the envisaged norms in terms of prescriptions that regulate some already individuated units or some already identified activity. The standard example of such prescriptions is traffic rules, which obviously impose standards of behavior on an already existing and separately identifiable activity. Whereas in fact, the picture of its norms as regulative in that sense is precisely the sort of idea that we need to reject if we want to speak of life as a category, rather than as a merely

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accidental feature of some material that can be identified before we take any determinate stance on the question whether it is an organism. The term ‘teleological’ gives rise to a similar worry. It might foster the idea that the sort of purposefulness we are talking about in connection with the living is somehow externally imposed on a material which, if left on its own, would be entirely purposeless. And this mistaken idea gives rise to the question of how that external imposition is supposed to occur. It makes us tempted to ask things like: Does our concept of life involve the idea of some external power that infuses parts of objective nature with purposefulness and hence life – that is, does the concept of life presuppose the idea of a God? Or can Evolution perhaps play this kind of God-like role? Or, is the purposefulness of life something we construct? Is it we who project purposefulness onto certain natural entities and processes, and thereby elevate them to the status of life? Such construals of the notion of ‘teleological’ are bound to make the sort of account offered here seem either superstitious or strangely subjectivist or constructivist. Whereas the point that I am trying to make is that the contrast taken for granted in these sorts of questions, between an inherently purposeless substrate and an imposed purposefulness, is precisely the sort of contrast that the proposed conception of the realm of the living has to reject. Is it better, then, to say that if there is a ‘substrate’ here, it is always already characterized by normativity or purposefulness? Well, presumably. But we still need to ask, what kind of work do such notions of normativity and purposefulness actually perform? It seems we need more precise specifications of these notions if they are going to mean anything determinate at all. The problem is that, if we think through what the irreducibility of notions such as ‘life’ and ‘organism’ entail, then it seems hard to avoid the conclusion that the relevant specifications are going to have to be circular in a way that shows that the relevant ‘norms’ and ‘purposes’ cannot play the sort of explanatory role that my discussion so far may be taken to suggest. Let me explain. As the owner of a circus, I might say of bears that they ought to be middle-sized, castrated, obedient, and have clean and lustrous fur. Given my aims as a circus-owner, what I say is perfectly true. However, it seems preposterous to claim that these ‘oughts’ capture what a bear ought to be like merely qua bear, so to speak. The envisaged norms or standards are imposed from without, relating as they do to the specific aims for which I intend to put bears to use at my circus. Or, consider an elephant with a strange spontaneous inclination to walk upright on two legs for considerable stretches of time. Suppose this elephant would have been killed for its ivory, were it not for this strange talent due to which I bought it to my circus. Suppose also that the creature is well

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taken care of by the circus staff. Then there is a straightforward sense in which the elephant’s ‘unnatural’ behavior is good for it. How, then, are we supposed to single out precisely those standards that are not imposed from without, but which capture the ‘nature’ of a bear, or an elephant? It seems that there is no way to do so that does not already make reference to that nature. In other words, the normativity or purposefulness in question has a clear content only in relation to an established conception of what belongs to the essence of a bear, an elephant, or whatever (which is not to say that this conception of the essence is perfectly sharp and permanently fixed – as we shall see below). Indeed, it seems that making use of some other notion of normativity or purposefulness – a notion which can be defined independently of the identification of the essence in question – will in effect amount to yet another sort of reductionism, according to which talk of natures or essences can be replaced by talk of independently specifiable goals or purposes. This is an important reason why Thompson explains this sort of conception, not primarily in normative or teleological terms, but in terms of what he calls ‘natural-historical judgments’ – the sort of statements one hears and reads in nature documentaries and field guides, such as ‘The domestic cat has four legs’ and ‘The Texas Bluebonnet harbors nitrogen-fixing microbes in certain nodes on its roots’ (cf. Thompson 2008, pp. 64– 5). (The sentences used to make judgments of this sort belong to the class of sentences mentioned at the beginning of this paper, labeled ‘generic sentences’ by linguists and philosophers of language; however, far from all generic sentences are used to make natural-historical judgments. I return to this issue in section 6.) Indeed, as the conclusion of a difficult argument, Thompson even goes as far as suggesting that the “transparently ‘factual’ or ‘positive’ character” of such statements is the basic logical form here (Thompson 2008, p. 73). To the extent that talk of ‘norms’ or ‘standards’ or ‘purposes’ has to do with the essence or nature of creatures, Thompson seems to think it is derivative from this more basic, ‘factual’ form of thought and thus has to be explained in terms of it (cf. also Thompson 2004). This raises worries about Platonism – for if the ‘factual’ character of naturalhistorical judgments is basic, then mustn’t the life-forms in virtue of which those judgments are true also have some sort existence prior to the more or less flourishing individual creatures that inhabit concrete biological reality? This worry may involve a misunderstanding of Thompson’s point – I am not certain that I fully understand his argument at this juncture. Still, I think it is fair to say that his insistence on the ‘factual’ form as basic is unsatisfactory, insofar as it makes him say too little about the complicated relations between natural-historical judgment and concrete biological reality – relations that can only be substantively illuminated by looking in considerable detail at how we actually go

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about when we test and perhaps are led to revise natural-historical judgment in the light of how things in fact happen to be in this concrete biological reality. I shall come back to these worries in section 4. However, let me now end the present section by mentioning and then laying aside another sort of worry which may arise in response to the claim that life is a conceptual or logical category of its own. The worry is that this claim still involves some sort of constructivism or linguistic idealism. After all, we are the users of concepts and of logic – so mustn’t the very idea of life as a conceptual or logical category mean that, in the end, it is our talk of living things that makes such things come into existence? Well; but with this question, we are in fact raising a new and different concern. We are no longer asking specifically about the category of life. Rather, we are asking in general about the relation between conceptual categories and reality. This is certainly a great and deep philosophical issue – arguably the philosophical issue after Kant – but it arises just as much with respect to categories other than life, such as the category of the physical, the category of the mathematical, and so on. Whereas the picture with which I primarily want to take issue here is a picture that has to do specifically with the category of life – a picture according to which the Anscombean account has to entail a distinction between an initially given raw material, presumably describable within physical theory, in which life is somehow infused, either, mysteriously, by a God or by Evolution (now conceived as some sort of independently existing, God-like power), or, subjectively, by us. What I have tried to point out is that the idea of such an “infusion” is precisely the idea that life is not a category, but a merely accidental or external property of certain parts of physical reality. And that’s the idea I think Anscombe (and certainly Thompson) urges us to reject. But I won’t have much to say about the other, general, Kantian worry about the relation between categories as such and reality. Again, this kind of worry is as much a worry about the category of the physical or the mathematical as about the category of life, whereas I want to continue to focus on the category of life in particular.

3. Generality, nature and reality Now, if we think again about the category of life and the way in which norms figure in our talk of living things – and, more particularly, if we think about how these norms figure in our ways of distinguishing between various kinds of living things – we find a feature that is rather intriguing and very important. Consider again how we distinguish between a cat and an earthworm with respect to sight. The cat is measured along the dimension of sight, whereas an earth-

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worm isn’t; being blind is a way of being incapacitated for a cat, whereas it is not a way of being incapacitated for an earthworm. And part of understanding what a cat is, is to understand that, as cat, it is assessable in terms of the capacity of sight (and many other capacities as well, of course); whereas part of understanding what an earthworm is, is to understand that, as earthworm, it is not assessable in terms of that capacity. What does this mean? Well, it does not mean that a blind cat is not a cat. On the contrary, this conception of what it is to be a cat entails that blind cats are possible. So it does not follow from what I have said that it is a necessary condition for being a cat that one in fact is sighted. What is necessary is the possibility of having or being incapacitated with respect to sight. Now consider the following examples, familiar from philosophical textbooks: A brother is a male sibling. A triangle has exactly three sides.

If someone isn’t a sibling then, a fortiori, he isn’t a brother, and if a geometrical figure does not have exactly three sides, it isn’t a triangle. Here, the terms of assessment are such that failure entails exclusion from the relevant extension – a four-sided geometrical figure, say, is excluded from the set of triangles. By contrast, in the case of differentiation between different kinds of living things, it seems that failure does not entail exclusion – a blind cat is still a cat. Or, consider a grown up human being who has no language. This is no contradiction in terms; such a human being is not like a four-sided triangle. On the contrary, the fact that this human being is incapacitated shows that the relevant dimension of assessment is still in place. We can now begin to get into proper view that notion of ‘nature’ that Anscombe is employing when she says that it does not belong to the nature of earthworms to be sighted whereas being sighted does belong to the nature of cats. In saying so, she is not making the absurd claim that a blind cat is not a cat. Rather, what she is saying is that having sight is a standard according to which cats are assessed: it is part of being a cat that one has or is incapacitated with respect to sight, whereas an earthworm’s not having sight is not a matter of incapacity. In general, such claims about the nature of an organism are claims to the effect that living things of a certain kind are assessed along certain dimensions and not along others, rather than claims to the effect that individual exemplars must be successful in those assessments in order to qualify as exemplars of that kind of organism at all. Claims about the nature of an organism are not falsified by individual exemplars who fail to live up to the envisaged standards –

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blind cats, speechless humans, caterpillars that do not turn into butterflies, and so on. It should also be noted that claims about the nature of an organism are not incompatible with there being individual exemplars that live up to standards that are not relevant to their being the kind of creature they are. Thus, consider a circus elephant that is exceptionally talented at walking upright on two feet. After years of training, this creature can walk a considerable distance. We can even imagine that, to our surprise, this elephant develops a taste for upright walking; suppose it is often seen walking on two feet spontaneously, without any prior commandment from its trainer. That such an elephant has this unusual capacity in no way shows that other elephants, which have never been at a circus and cannot walk upright, are therefore incapacitated. Certainly, the circus elephant has an ability that his fellow creatures lack, but this ability is not relevant to the elephant as elephant; it is, one might say, a merely accidental capacity of this particular elephant, as far as its elephanthood is concerned. At this point, it should be clear why the still pervasive conception of essentialism in contemporary debates in the philosophy of biology just does not fit the Anscombean view. Again, according to the standard conception, essentialism amounts to the claim that each species has associated with it a set of essential characteristics, such that having each one of them is necessary for being a member of the species, and having all of them is sufficient. By contrast, the Anscombean position involves no such claim. Indeed, her position is fully compatible with the quite sensible notion that no individual characteristic is in that sense essential to species membership. As Thompson acknowledges, “nobody is perfect”.⁴

 In the contemporary discussion, essentialism is often also associated with the idea that at least some essential characteristics are ‘intrinsic’ to individual organisms (examples of intrinsic characteristics are said to be phenotypic traits and genetic set-up), rather than ‘relational’ characteristics having to do with the organism’s relation to external elements (including features of the environment, the history of the species, and other individual members of the species; a prominent example of such a relational characteristic is the capacity to interbreed with other members of the species). Alternatively, a distinction is made between ‘intrinsic’ and ‘relational’ essentialism, and it is sometimes suggested that only the former is spurious. Thus, Okasha (2002) may be said to defend a form of relational essentialism. For an interesting discussion of these matters, see Ereshefsky (2010). It is worth noting that the point I take Anscombe to be making cuts across this distinction, as it applies to extrinsic characteristics as well. A cat may well lack the capacity to interbreed with other cats and still be a cat – but since cat is a sexual species, and the capacity to interbreed with other cats thus belongs to a cat’s nature, lacking this capacity will mean that the infertile cat is incapacitated. By contrast, a member of some asexual species will also lack the capacity to interbreed with other members of the spe-

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At the same time, this is also a point at which certain questions and worries become pressing – questions and worries that all have to do with the exact relation between talk about natures or essences on the one hand, and concrete, tangible biological reality on the other. If the claim that it belongs to the nature of a cat to be sighted is not falsified by cats that are not sighted, and if the claim that it does not belong to the nature of an elephant to be able to walk upright on two feet is not falsified by a circus elephant which can do this and for which it is good to do so, then it might seem unclear how such claims about the nature of organisms can in any way be answerable to biological reality. The general worry here is that it seems unclear how claims about what belongs and does not belong to the nature of various organisms are in any way vulnerable to falsification – or for that matter, verification – in light of the actual features and abilities of real organisms. How can a natural-historical judgment such as ‘The Texas Bluebonnet harbors nitrogen-fixing microbes in certain nodes on its roots’ have any clear empirical content at all, if it can be retained independently of what we might discover about an individual Texas Bluebonnet, or even of statistical facts about the population of Texas Bluebonnets as a whole? And if such claims aren’t vulnerable to empirical falsification and verification, then all classification made on the basis of such claims seems empty and arbitrary – a dogmatically imposed scheme that allows no genuine friction from reality.

4. Leaving room for evolution At this point, the issue of norm versus description arises again. In fact, it seems mistaken to classify natural-historical judgments as either straightforwardly normative or straightforwardly descriptive; and now I want to return to my claim that it is at least arguable that Thompson’s suggestion that the ‘factual’ or ‘positive’ character of such judgments is the basic logical form serves to hide some of the complexities involved. To get some sense of these complexities, let us compare the logic of naturalhistorical judgments with the logic of anatomical pictures. With regard to ana-

cies, but that is not a matter of its being incapacitated in the relevant sense. At a deeper level, however, there is a sense in which the Anscombean view offers a way of questioning the very distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic characteristics as it is standardly conceived, since the Anscombean view entails that even so-called intrinsic characteristics are identifiable only by situating the individual organism in the wider context of its form of life (as given by stating the relevant natural historical judgments associated with its species). I have no space here to further investigate this intriguing issue.

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tomical pictures it is fairly clear that they have both a normative and a descriptive dimension, even if it is quite difficult to pin down exactly what these dimensions amount to. To see what I mean, let us contrast anatomical pictures with pictures of two other sorts: maps and blueprints. Clearly, the design of a map depends on for what particular aim the map is made: a map made for truck drivers will look quite different from a map made for geologists, and a map designed for tourists looks quite different from a map made for military strategic planning. So, a map is not simply a neutral depiction of a certain geographical area, but will emphasize certain features at the expense of others. And yet, once the particular conventions for the construction of a certain kind of map have been settled, it is the actual terrain that decides whether a proposed map is correct or not. The map is in this sense descriptive: if it does not fit reality, then the map (or, more precisely, the map-maker) is to blame, rather than that piece of the world that it is meant to depict. By contrast, a blueprint – of a machine that we are going to build, say – has the opposite direction of fit. We let it guide us in building the machine, and if it turns out that the result is not in accordance with the blueprint, we normally adjust the machinery rather than redraw the blueprint. In this sense, the blueprint is normative rather than descriptive.⁵ But now, what about anatomical pictures? Pictures in a book on elephant anatomy, say? Clearly, there will be various discrepancies between these pictures and the particular bodies of real elephants. However, in most cases, such discrepancies do not give us reason to revise the pictures. Rather, we simply note that particular bodies fail to live up to the standards specified by the pictures, without blaming the pictures for it. In some cases, we say that those bodies deviate in pathological ways from the pictures. So, the pictures have this normative or ‘ideal’ aspect to them – an aspect that is not present in maps. On the other hand, the pictures are not merely normative, like blueprints are – for they are in some complicated sense still answerable to concrete biological reality. Not in any straightforward statistical sense, however. We may well imagine, say,

 I am simplifying matters here. There are many cases in which we might discover that the blueprint should be changed, for example if it is practically unworkable, or if it contains unnecessarily complicated solutions to simple problems, or if it is based on mistaken calculations regarding, say, the strength of vital parts of the machine. Cases are also imaginable where we would change the terrain rather than a map if we discover a mismatch. Suppose, for example, that we are arranging a big orienteering event, and that we have distributed maps to all the 8,000 participants; and now we discover that on those maps the position of a certain rock is wrongly depicted. Suppose also that the rock can fairly easily be moved from its current position to the position it is given on the maps. In such a case, we may certainly move the block rather than change the maps. (Thanks to Hugo Strandberg for this example.)

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that due to extensive pollution 80 percent of all living elephants suffer from some specific bodily deformation. That would not by itself show that the anatomical pictures need correction – on the contrary, the mere possibility of talking about ‘deformation’ here shows that those pictures still play their normative role. However, evolutionary developments are certainly imaginable such that the pictures do become obsolete. Such evolutionary developments would be developments of a sort of that are not bad for concrete elephants, but instead conducive to their flourishing – developments that involve some further increase in reproductive success, say, and/or developments that involve adaption to new environmental circumstances. It may also happen that we discover that biological reality already involves varieties that cannot plausibly be characterized as ‘deformities’ but which rather constitutes variations that an adequate anatomical depiction would have to take into consideration. Clearly, anatomical pictures can be ‘falsified’ or ‘made obsolete’ by biological reality in various such ways; and so can natural-historical judgments, in a similar fashion. At this point, it may seem as if the sort of conception I am ascribing to Anscombe is threatened by inconsistency. On the one hand, I have ascribed to Anscombe the idea that the realm of the living constitutes a logical or conceptual category of its own, and I have explicated this idea à la Thompson, by arguing that natural-historical judgments play a constitutive (and not merely regulative) role with regard to this category: the standards they define go ‘all the way down’, rather than being applied to some already identified substrate which in itself is teleologically inert. On the other hand, in what I just said about how biological reality can falsify natural-historical judgments or make such judgments obsolete, I invoked notions such as ‘adaption’ and ‘reproductive success’ in order to distinguish between cases of mere ‘deformation’ and cases of genuine evolutionary development which cannot plausibly be said to be biologically ‘bad’ for the organisms. So, it may seem as if I am then introducing some other measures – adaption, reproductive success – that are independent of and more basic than those natural-historical judgments that I earlier seemed to give an irreducibly basic sort of role in biological classification. This is a deep issue, since the sense of conflict here amounts to a worry that there is a fundamental tension between the Anscombean view and evolutionary theory. This worry springs from the idea that if we give natural-historical judgments the sort of constitutive or categorical role that I believe Anscombe gives them, then we are forced to conclude that the biological classifications such judgments provide us with are static, fixed – as if precisely those natural-historical judgments together defined once and for all what flourishing will have to

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amount to for those organisms and all their future offspring.⁶ If this idea were correct, it would mean that Anscombe would treat all deviance from natural-historical judgments as a matter of mere deformation, leaving no room for evolutionary adaption and development. Conversely, it would follow that leaving room for evolutionary development is possible only by invoking independent concepts of adaptation and reproductive success that are fundamentally foreign to the Anscombean view. Let me now explain how Anscombe could resist these conclusions. To begin with, it has to be kept in mind that any attempt to fully specify the nature of, say, a cat, will have to be enormously complicated. Besides a cat’s being sighted, such a specification would mention a host of other characteristics, such as its having a nose, its having night vision, its having four legs, its being furred, its being a predator, and so on and so on and so on. Clearly, it will be possible that some of these proposed characteristics – all these dimensions of assessment, so to speak – turn out not to be characteristic of all cat varieties. Suppose that, on Sicily, we discover a colony of wild cats that are similar in virtually all respects to the cats we know, except for the fact that they do not have night vision. We might imagine that the environment where they live is such that hunting at daytime enables them to find just as much food as any other cat, and, hence, that their capacity for night vision has gradually withered away due to its evolutionary superfluity. This may certainly justify the modification of a claim to the effect that it belongs to cats qua cats to have night vision. Similarly, we might discover that there is a sort of butterfly where only some caterpillars are made to develop into butterflies; the rest of the caterpillars provide the first ones with food for a certain period of time, and then perish. This would certainly justify a qualification of our conception of caterpillars: we would now have to say that in this case caterpillars can have different functions, somewhat like bees can have different functions in a bee society; and that developing into a butterfly is not something that all caterpillars will do, even if everything goes as it should with respect to each one of them. Of course, the development into butterflies will still be central to our understanding of what a caterpillar is, but it will no longer be true that any caterpillar, as caterpillar, is to be assessed along that particular dimension. The nature even of the simplest organism will involve a host of different features and abilities, and a proposed specification of that nature will therefore be  This is indeed the standard objection against essentialism of a broadly Aristotelian kind. As John Dupré puts it, “[i]t is widely recognized that Darwin’s theory of evolution rendered untenable the classical essentialist conception of species. Perfectly sharp discontinuities between unchanging natural kinds could no longer be expected” (Dupré 1999, p. 3).

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revisable as long as there is much enough that remains in place. If very much is different, then it might be better to say instead that we have discovered a new kind of creature. If the life of the animals on Sicily deviated in many respects from cat life as we know it, and if there is yet no clear reason to say that those animals do not flourish in their niche, we may conclude that these creatures are not cats at all and that we have discovered a new kind of animal. Of course, reproductive barriers will be of great importance in such considerations of species proliferation, but other things can matter too. In particular – and this is of crucial importance – it seems arguable that a notion such as reproductive success, even if it surely plays an absolutely central role when we ask ourselves if what we have before us is an instance of mere deformation or of evolutionary adaptation, will still not be independent from other characteristics of the relevant sort of animal – characteristics specified by means of the huge set of natural-historical judgments associated with the relevant species. For in order to conceive something as a process of reproduction at all, we need to be able to identify the offspring as, precisely, a reproduction of its parent; and this requires already having some grasp of what it is for two organisms to be two individual organisms, one of which is the offspring of the other. If the view I am ascribing to Anscombe is correct, it is an illusion to think that we can make sense of the notion of reproduction without already invoking – be it in a revisable and tentative fashion – a host of interconnected natural-historical judgments by reference to which we identify the parent and the offspring as individual living organisms to begin with. Thus, the conception I am ascribing to Anscombe in fact rejects as untenable both (i) the idea that the sort of purposefulness we are talking about in connection with the living is somehow externally imposed on an inherently purposeless material, and (ii) a static essentialism according to which it is fixed once and for all what species there are in nature and how the lines between are to be drawn, so that natural-historical judgments function as non-revisable norms deviance from which will always be a matter of mere deformation or malfunctioning. So, confronted with the objection that we cannot make sense of the evolution of an organ, say, or the evolution of one species into another, if we think of organs and species as rigidly defined in terms of their ‘nature’, I believe Anscombe could reply that such definitions aren’t ‘rigid’ in the suggested sense, but flexible in virtue of their richness, which allows some things to change while other remain stable. The ‘flourishing’ of an organism does not require that the organism lives up to all standards of assessment usually associated with its species, say. Rather, flourishing must be understood holistically: if a sufficient amount of dimensions of assessment remains in place, others can be deemed irrelevant. And some dimensions will be more central than others when it comes

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to evolutionary adaptation, reproductive success being crucial of course. However, the very notion of reproduction cannot be understood without reference to other elements of that web of characteristics that constitutes the nature of an organism, and so cannot function as a separable yardstick that alone determines whether we have a case of malfunctioning or genuine evolutionary development. Rather, the process of evolution calls for the gradual revision of the web, along the lines suggested in connection with the imagined examples of the cats on Sicily: a process where changes and discontinuities are conceivable in terms of a process of development precisely because there is a background of continuity against which it can be seen as taking place.

5. Language and human nature Is this attempt to allow for evolution within an Anscombean framework really successful? In order to settle this issue, one would have to go into more detail about the exact nature of the central concepts of evolutionary theory than I have done. Some philosophers of biology would surely argue that there are ways of explicating theoretically central notions such as reproductive success and fitness that make the Anscombean talk of natures and essences superfluous.⁷ My aim above has only been to clarify the Anscombean position in order to forestall premature rejection, and make it clearer what questions would need to be addressed in order to really assess its viability. In what remains of this paper, I shall discuss something else, namely, the significance of Anscombe’s claim that it belongs to the nature of human beings to have a language. In the introductory section of this paper, I said that from a broadly Wittgensteinian viewpoint that Anscombe can be presumed to share, the notion of ‘having a language’ does not have the sort of determinacy that characterizes notions such as ‘being sighted’, ‘having night vision’, and ‘developing into a butterfly’. For a language is embedded in wider patterns of human interaction – habits, institutions – a cultural context, if you want – and there isn’t just one such context, but a huge and open-ended variety. So, it seems that the notion of a language lacks the sort of determinacy that would give this aspect of human nature a definite positive content.

 One sophisticated recent attempt is Godfrey-Smith 2009, even if his treatment of what he calls “the teleological outlook” (an outlook he explicitly associates with Thompson) is very brief and rather superficial (cf. p. 13).

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Let me put it this way – it’s a rough way, but suggests where I want to go: Anscombe claims that it belongs to the nature of human beings to have a language. It is a corollary of this claim that it belongs to the nature of human beings to inhabit a culture. The ‘natural environment’ of a human being is also a cultural environment. But the general notions of ‘a language’ and ‘a culture’ have no definite positive content. Specific languages can differ enormously, and so can different cultures, and there are no pre-established limits determining exactly what is to be counted as a language, or a culture, and what isn’t. So, what happens when we say that it belongs to the nature of a human being to have a language, is not that we issue a mere restriction on what is to be counted as a human being. Rather, we open up a whole new vista of possibilities and variation: what we say is that to be a human being can mean an enormous amount of different things, and that there is no fixed limit on what particular shapes human life can assume. The notions of ‘having a language’ and ‘living in a culture’ remain to be filled with positive content with respect to concrete individual human beings only by way of specification: to provide such positive content we have to start describing particular practices, habits, institutions, and so on – practices, habits, institutions that are but some of an open-ended plethora of ways in which humans can lead a life with language. To get clearer about the significance of this point, let us consider in some detail the notion of an organism’s ‘proper environment’ – a notion that I have been using on several occasions in this paper. We can think again about the case of the circus elephant which has been trained to walk upright on two feet. In connection with this example I said, on Anscombe’s behalf, that the elephant’s having this unusual capacity in no way shows that other elephants, which have never been at a circus and cannot walk upright, are therefore incapacitated. And I spelled this out by saying that this ability is not relevant to the elephant as elephant. It is a merely accidental capacity of this particular elephant, as far as its elephanthood is concerned. But now, someone might object that for this particular elephant, in its particular circus environment, not being able to walk on two legs would certainly be a matter of being incapacitated; indeed, one might imagine that if the elephant lost this ability, it would no longer be of any use to the circus and be put away, killed. So, having this ability might be a matter of life and death to this particular elephant in this particular environment. And yet, my Anscombe is saying that, as far as its elephanthood is concerned, this is a merely accidental capacity. Here she is obviously working with an idea of the proper or natural environment for an elephant: saying that an elephant which isn’t able to walk upright is not incapacitated makes tacit reference to an environment in which this inability would not matter at all. So, she is presuming a distinction between the

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circus environment as an environment which is not natural for an elephant, and the sort of environment in which wild elephants live as an environment that is natural for an elephant. Generally, in the case of non-human organisms, we can give positive and fairly definite accounts of what their natural environments, their habitats, are like.⁸ And with such accounts come descriptions of what characteristics and abilities are essential to different organisms; and, correspondingly, what the various ways are in which these organisms can be incapacitated, qua the sort of organisms they are, and what it means for them to flourish. In the human case, however, it is harder to see how a similarly circumscribed account of a human’s natural environment could be given – and how to give a definite yet general account of what it means to flourish merely qua human. Certainly, we can to some extent talk about proper and improper environments for human beings as such, as when I said that an environment with high levels of radioactive radiation is not a proper one for humans. However, it is going to be very tricky and risky to make substantive universal claims about when humans flourish and when they do not, about what is ‘natural’ to them merely qua humans, and so on. One just has to remind oneself of the ways in which anatomical pictures have been used to establish allegedly universal ideals defining what a human being is and should be like merely qua human being, but where, in fact, the function of such pictures has been to legitimize violent exercise of power under a disguise of scientific neutrality. Such exercise of power has its special character, precisely due to the fact that humans are linguistic, enculturated creatures. For, as I noted in the introduction to this paper, such creatures will not remain unaffected by the norms one is imposing, but will relate to them, either by rejecting them or by adjusting to them. This sort of point is of course crucial to Foucault’s notion of biopouvoir, as spelled out in Histoire de la sexualité and elsewhere (Foucault 1978). To use Ian Hacking’s term, such ‘looping effects’ show the porousness of the distinction between what humans are and what they take themselves to be, even when it comes to features that appear straightforwardly biological (Hacking 2002).⁹ It is certainly arguable that Anscombe herself was not sufficiently sensitive to this sort of point. For example, her treatment of sex and contraceptives may be (and has been) taken to manifest such insensitivity.¹⁰ Nonetheless, I think a read I disregard complications, such as the peculiar difficulties that arise with regard to species whose members have been domesticized for such a long period of time that their natural environment is an environment where they are being used for human purposes.  A fascinating case study of the power of anatomical and other pictures is found in Kukla 2005.  Cf. Anscombe 1981 and 2008. For an interesting discussion, see Teichman 1979.

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ing of her is possible which acknowledges how deep the non-fixity of human nature goes. For one thing, she clearly wants to reject the idea that human organisms have a nature to which something needs to be, as it were, artificially added in order to get that speaking, enculturated creature that we recognize as human. Speaking, enculturated human beings are not like the circus elephant I described earlier. Again, speaking a language and living in a culture is part of human nature. If we combine this point with the point about the open-ended variability of human languages and cultures, we reach the following conclusion: one thing that is universally human is to live a non-universal sort of life – a life thoroughly embedded in specific practices, habits, institutions and traditions that are only some among an open-ended variety of possibilities. On the other hand, it is indeed important to remember that this open-endedness does not mean that anything goes. To use Wittgenstein’s famous example, the fact that our concept of a game is open-ended does not entail that anything can be adequately counted as a game. If anything could be counted as a game, the concept of a game would be empty. Similarly, the fact that our concepts of a language and a culture, as well as the associated concepts of human good and human flourishing, are open-ended, does not entail that these notions are so malleable that anything could be made to fall under them. Again, think of a human being who gets cancer due to high levels of radioactive radiation – what would a recognizably human way of life be in which this is not counted as an instance of things going awry? The point that there is no such thing as deciding beforehand and at a general level what positive characteristics all recognizable human forms of life must share, does not entail that the very notions of human nature and human flourishing are empty of content.¹¹ For instance, it is no part of the view I am ascribing to Anscombe that there are no biological strictures at all on what is good and bad for humans qua humans. Certainly, according to my Anscombe, the natural environment of humans is also a cultural environment, and the two are not neatly separable in terms of a shared biological basis with a variable cultural varnish – speaking humans are not like circus elephants. And yet, it is clear that any human mode of life will involve interaction with recognizably biological aspects of human existence, and questions can perfectly meaningfully be asked about how sustainable such different modes of interaction are.¹²

 Hacking seems well aware of this point; Foucault perhaps less so.  Anscombe’s sexual ethics clearly presupposes that such questions can meaningfully be raised with regard to contraception, for example. See Anscombe 2008.

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One might still worry that the conception I am ascribing to Anscombe leads to an intolerably relativistic notion of human flourishing. For isn’t this view one according to which each specific culture involves specific determinate criteria of human good, and there is no perspective available from which we can compare and asses the different criteria provided by different cultures? But again: even if having a language and being enculturated belongs to human nature, and even if this belonging is not just a matter of adding a layer of cultural varnish onto a static biological essence, and even if a linguistic enculturated mode of existence can take many shapes, it does not follow that we cannot have serious thoughts and discussions about what it is for a human being to flourish qua human. What is true is that such a discussion will look rather different from a discussion over, say, what it is for a Texas Bluebonnet to flourish. I shall have a bit more to say about this in section 6. Let us also remember that it is no part of the view I am proposing on Anscombe’s behalf that particular cultural and linguistic practices and institutions are closed and fixed. Rather, the relevant notion of open-endedness implies that each such practice and institution is itself open to questioning and renegotiation. Nor is the idea that there are absolute barriers between different cultures, so that their only mode of interaction is that of a power struggle. In fact, one of the most important reasons for questioning and renegotiating one’s own cultural practices might be the encounter with foreign habits. As so many anthropological studies have taught us, no culture is a fixed monolith; rather, it involves various practices and institutions, each of which can be questioned and reshaped in the light of each other, or in the light of changing life conditions due to technological developments, environmental changes, interaction with foreign practices, and so on and so forth.

6. The dangers of generics Sarah-Jane Leslie and Sally Haslanger have recently argued that the use of generic statements is dangerous, since such statements easily serve as pernicious carriers of ideology and constitute powerful tools for inducing and maintaining prejudices and stereotypes. I have already made a similar point about anatomical pictures. Leslie’s and Haslanger’s (already mentioned) examples include ‘A boy doesn’t cry’, ‘Muslims are terrorists’ and ‘A woman is more nurturing than a man’.¹³ These are all generics, and seem to have an exception-tolerating

 Actually, they discuss the plural varieties ‘Boys don’t cry’ and ‘Women are more nurturing

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logic similar to the logic of natural-historical judgments, which makes them resistant towards straightforward refutation by means of particular counter-instances. Thus, consider someone who seriously claims, ‘A boy doesn’t cry’. This claim need not be retracted in face of one or several crying boys. Rather, the utterer might reproach those boys for failing to live up to their boyhood, and perhaps even maintain that most boys today are deformed by an inappropriately soft upbringing. Leslie and Haslanger differ in their views of how generics work. Leslie’s theory is complex. She distinguishes between several different sorts of generic statement, and connects her account of these different sorts of generics to psychological research, arguing that the semantics of generic statements reflect a default mechanism of generalization present already in very young children. Haslanger instead proposes a unified pragmatic account, arguing that the special and puzzling characteristics of generics are due to the ways in which the ‘common ground’ between speaker and hearer involves problematic assumptions about connections between regularities, explanatory essences and normative conclusions. I shall leave discussion of the details of Leslie’s and Haslanger’s theories to another occasion. Instead, I want to consider their ideas about how the dangers involved in the use of generics are to be avoided. According to Leslie, we should avoid using generics to the extent that we can do so, especially when communicating with children. However, she emphasizes that eliminating the use of generics altogether would be “a daunting task”, since the relevant mechanisms of generalization are such a basic feature of our psychological makeup. Indeed, she mentions empirical studies indicating that even if we switched to quantified generalizations, generic thought is so entrenched that those quantified sentences might still be interpreted in generic terms (Leslie 2014, p. 226). However, she does seem to think that the difficulty is not a difficulty of semantic principle, but that it is only our psychological constitution which hinders us from debunking generic language and thought altogether. Haslanger wants us instead to question, not the use of generic sentences per se, but the essentialist and normative assumptions that she thinks are default parts of our common ground. According to Haslanger, these assumptions guide not only our use of generics but our daily lives more generally. The essentialist assumption is that robust regularities are not accidental but due to the nathan men’, but this does not matter to my ensuing discussion. I use the singular since I want to bring out the connection with Thompson’s example of natural-historical judgments that mostly use the singular form. I have retained the plural in ‘Muslims are terrorists’, even if I could well have use the singular form there too.

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tures of things. The normative assumption is that things should express their natures, and will do so under normal circumstances (abnormal circumstances are thus bad) (Haslanger 2014, p. 379). Haslanger argues that criticizing these assumptions is the best way of developing resistance toward the sort of pernicious stereotypes and prejudices that generics often express. With regard to Haslanger’s account, I fail to see how the presence of what she describes as essentialist and normative assumptions can suffice to explain the peculiar characteristics of generics. One problem is that the essentialist assumption’s requirement of “robust regularities” is a statistical matter: this assumption “gives the statistically normal a metaphysical ground” (Haslanger 2014, p. 389). So, as Haslanger describes it, the essentialist assumption allows us to conclude that a thing of the kind A has property P as part of its nature only if a majority of A’s has property P. However, as we have seen, many generics do not require statistical normalcy, but can be true even if only a tiny minority of the relevant things have the property in question. Only a few percent of all caterpillars turn into butterflies, and yet it is true that caterpillars turn into butterflies. It is not clear, then, how Haslanger’s essentialist assumption can explain the extent to which generics resist merely statistical refutation. Even more importantly, the sort of Anscombean viewpoint that I have elaborated in this paper stands in clear conflict with something Haslanger simply takes for granted – namely, that all generics are based on generalization from a sample of things that are identifiable prior to the use of generic descriptions. Anscombean essentialism goes against precisely this presumption when it comes to the class of generics Thompson calls natural-historical judgments. According to this sort of essentialism, our conception of living organisms as living organisms (and of their parts as organs) is generic from the very start, and thus cannot be accounted for in terms of “robust regularities” observed prior to the introduction of any generic essentialization and normativization. A similar point applies to Leslie’s conception of generics as based on a psychological mechanism of generalization, and to her claim that totally abandoning the use of generics is psychologically difficult (or even impossible) but in principle both achievable and desirable. According to the Anscombean viewpoint, this sort of account cannot work in the case of living organisms and the generics that identify their essence. Anscombe’s objection would be that since the organisms are not identifiable as organisms before the introduction of such generics, the envisaged generalization cannot get off the ground. Indeed, if we abandoned the use of generics altogether, we would abandon the very notion of life, our very ability to conceive living organisms as living organisms. If Anscombe is right about this, it is a corollary of Leslie’s theory that our concept of life and of living things is itself a prejudice – perhaps a psychologically un-

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avoidable prejudice, but a prejudice nonetheless. And that does not seem like a very appealing position, to the extent that it makes any sense at all.¹⁴ However, neither Haslanger nor Leslie is primarily worried about naturalhistorical judgments per se. Their suspicions toward generic talk are rather motivated by the frequent use of generics to promote stereotypes and prejudices about human kinds. Now, what should an Anscombean respond to this sort of worry? Well, first of all, she might well agree that generics are often dangerous in the sort of way Haslanger and Leslie have in mind. She might also agree that the specific examples Haslanger and Leslie give of prejudiced generics deserve to be rejected. The interesting question is what such a rejection would involve. As I have already pointed out, the Anscombean would disagree with Leslie’s and Haslanger’s extremely general modes of criticism. If Anscombe is right, what is fundamentally wrong with statements such as ‘A boy doesn’t cry’, ‘Muslims are terrorists’ and ‘A woman is more nurturing than a man’ is not the general semantic or pragmatic features they share qua generics; for the Anscombean thinks other generics that share these general characteristics, including natural-historical judgments, are perfectly okay and need to be retained. But then, what other and more specific modes of rejection are available to her? A satisfactory answer would have to look at a host of various cases and consider their specific features individually. In many cases, it may indeed be so that a generic statement is better replaced by a non-generic, suitably quantified ersatz. Consider ‘A Swede is promiscuous’. Suppose we make a survey where we find that promiscuity is indeed a bit more common among Swedes than among people from other nations (I here disregard the qualms one might have about the very notion of ‘promiscuity’). It still seems reasonable to say that the generic statement should be rejected, since it promotes a stereotyped and prejudiced picture of what Swedes are like merely qua Swedes, so to speak. Of

 The question can be raised if Leslie’s suggested rejection of generics überhaupt would not have even more disastrous consequences. For aren’t generics bound up with the very notions of explanation and law – that is, with the conception that events do not just happen coincidentally? As soon we see things as non-coincidentally interconnected – going beyond an extensionalist and basically Humean world-view according to which nothing more basic can be said about how events are related than that they occur together more or less frequently – we seem to invoke distinctions such as that between a process being interrupted versus it not being interrupted, or between arbitrary and non-arbitrary properties and changes. And distinctions such as these seem enough to undergird generic statements. For the non-arbitrariness is precisely not just a matter of statistical regularity, but of a sort of lawlikeness that can be present even if most processes of the envisaged sort are in fact interrupted, say. I do not have the space here to develop this line of argument in any detail, but hope to return to it elsewhere. For related thoughts, see Rödl 2012.

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course, the idea is not to replace it with its generic negation, ‘A Swede is not promiscuous’. Rather, the point is to skip the generic form itself, replacing it with a non-generic statement of statistical fact (say, ‘The rate of promiscuity in the Swedish population is 5.5 % higher than the world average’). In other cases, however, things are less straightforward. This is especially so when more important matters are at stake than promiscuity among Swedes. Consider ‘Muslims are terrorists’. As replacement we might propose the non-generic, ‘A tiny minority of Muslims are terrorists’, and provide various explanations of why such terrorism arises, explanations that do not traffic in any notion of what is essential to a Muslim. But shouldn’t we also counter the prejudiced generic with its opposite negative generic, ‘Muslims are not terrorists’? Some will feel that little is gained by countering one essentialist statement with another, and suggest that we just stick with the quantified replacement and skip all talk of what is and is not essential to Muslims. However, others might find it profoundly important to stand up for the negative generic, urging that it is of the essence of what it is to be a Muslim not to engage in terrorism. What decides which of these alternatives is preferable? We here catch a glimpse of how generic talk in connection with human kinds is important due to its capacity to express and shape identities. For a Muslim it might be crucial to her identity as a Muslim that she does not engage in terrorism. This is part of being a Muslim as she conceives it, as she wants to conceive it, as she thinks it ought to be conceived. It may seem that, by skipping generic talk and just stick with non-generic specifications of the number of Muslims that are in fact terrorists and with non-essentialist explanations of how such terrorism arises, we approach these issues in a suitably neutral and unprejudiced manner. However, such a stance might disregard how talk of kinds and essences enter into human beings’ self-understanding. Just skipping such talk can mean depriving people of their notions of what they are and what they want to be. This is one important aspect of what it means to say that humans are language-using, enculturated creatures. Unlike Texas Bluebonnets and White Sharks, human beings care about what kinds and categories they belong to and what those kinds and categories involve, and telling them that they should not do so might in itself be a sort of prejudice. ‘A boy doesn’t cry’ is an interesting example for my purposes, since an argument over this statement is likely to soon lead into considerations about what it is to flourish not only as a boy, but as a human being. One might well see it as important to counter this generic with its opposite: A boy does cry, and it is perfectly okay for him to do so. But is this mode of contradiction really intellectually defensible? Given the open-endedness and variability of what human life can be like, and the difficulty of separating what humans are from what they take them-

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selves to be, with what right can we make such an outrageously unrestricted claim about what ‘a boy’ is like? Shouldn’t we confine ourselves to defend a more parochial norm, say, about how the boys within 21st century Western liberal societies are allowed to behave? Or perhaps we should skip all generic talk, and just say that whether one cries or not has nothing to do with what it means to be a boy? I think this would be a misunderstanding of the points made earlier, about the open-ended and self-interpreting character of human life. These points do not exclude a meaningful defense of the unrestricted generic, ‘A boy cries’ (or of other generics about what humans are like qua humans). Rather, what they imply is that such a defense will have to look quite different from the purely biological justification of natural-historical judgments like ‘The domestic cat has four legs’ and ‘The Texas Bluebonnet harbors nitrogen-fixing microbes in certain nodes on its roots’. Remembering and thinking about one’s own childhood, bringing up children of one’s own, engaging concretely and with empathy in the practical and moral aspects of human life with children, reading stories about childhood and upbringing, looking at studies of what happens to children that are banned from crying, investigating what societies are like in which boys are not allowed to cry, and so on and so forth – all this might allow us to conclude that boys who are not allowed to cry will not flourish as the boys and the humans they are. Such considerations characteristically involve question about meaning and morality, in ways that are not present in corresponding discussions of what non-linguistic animals are like. More generally, and by way of concluding, I would say that what follows from this conception of the open-ended and self-interpreting character of human life is not that we cannot meaningfully address questions about what is good for humans qua humans. Rather, what follows is that addressing such questions will itself be a self-interpreting process – a process in which we will have to start from where we are and allow ourselves to make use of our reflective capacities and full moral sensitivities to reach the sort of understanding we are after. There will be no more detached and secure way of checking whether the conclusions we reach are true than by relying on those capacities and sensitivities of ours, exercised in relation to all sorts of material – hands-on life experience, interaction with foreign cultures, literature, empirical psychology, and so forth. We cannot study ourselves from without as we can do with White Sharks and Texas Bluebonnets. Nor does it make much sense to try to occupy an even more detached viewpoint by debunking all generic talk whatsoever. We are stuck with trying to make sense of our lives and ourselves, as Muslims, women, boys, humans – and we must try the best we can to do so.

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References Anscombe, G. Elizabeth M. (1981): The Collected Philosophical Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe, vol. 3: Ethics, Religion and Politics. Oxford: Blackwell. Anscombe, G. Elizabeth M. (2005): “Human Essence”. In: Geach, Mary and Gormally, Luke (eds.): Human Life, Action and Ethics: Essays by G. E. M. Anscombe. Exeter: Imprint Academic, pp. 27 – 38. Anscombe, G. Elizabeth M. (2008): “Contraception and Chastity”. In: Geach, Mary and Gormally, Luke (eds.): Faith in a Hard Ground: Essays on Religion, Philosophy and Ethics by G. E. M. Anscombe. Exeter: Imprint Academic, pp. 170 – 191. Devitt, Michael (2008): “Resurrecting Biological Essentialism”. In: Philosophy of Science 75, pp. 344 – 82. Dupré, John (1999): “On the Impossibility of a Monistic Account of Species”. In: Wilson, Robert A. (ed.): Species: New Interdisciplinary Essays. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 1 – 22. Ereshevsky, M. (2010): “What’s Wrong with the New Biological Essentialism”. In: Philosophy of Science 77, pp. 674 – 85. Foucault, Michel (1976): Histoire de la sexualité, vol 1, La volonté de savoir. Paris: Gallimard. Godfrey-Smith, Peter (2009): Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hacking, Ian (2002): Historical Ontology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Haslanger, Sally (2014): “The Normal, the Natural, and the Good: Generics and Ideology”. In: Politica & Società 3, pp. 365 – 92. Hull, David (1994): “Contemporary Systematic Philosophies”. In: Sober, Elliot (ed.), Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology, 2nd ed, Cambridge. MA: MIT Press, pp. 295 – 330. Kukla, Rebecca (2005): Mass Hysteria. Medicine, Culture, and Mothers’ Bodies. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Leslie, Sarah-Jane (2008): “Generics: Cognition and Acquisition”. In: Philosophical Review 117, pp. 1 – 47. Lewens, Tim (2012): “Human Nature: The Very Idea”. In: Philosophy and Technology 25, pp. 459 – 74. Mayr, Ernst (1959): “Darwin and the Evolutionary Theory in Biology”. In: Meggers, Betty J. (ed.), Evolution and Anthropology: A Centennial Appraisal. Washington, DC: Anthropological Society of Washington, pp. 1 – 10. Okasha, Samir (2002): “Darwinian Metaphysics: Species and the Question of Essentialism”. In: Synthese 131, pp. 191 – 213. Rödl, Sebastian (2012): Categories of the Temporal. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sterken, Rachel Katherine (2015): “Leslie on Generics”. In: Philosophical Studies 172, pp. 2493 – 2512. Teichman, Jenny (1979): “Intention and Sex”. In: Diamond, Cora and Teichman, Jenny (eds.), Intention and Intentionality: Essays in Honour of G. E. M. Anscombe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 147 – 61. Thompson, Michael (2008): Life and Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Emily Martin

Ethnography, History and Philosophy of Experimental Psychology Abstract: Historians of psychology have described how the ‘introspection’ of early Wundtian psychology largely came to be ruled out of experimental psychology settings by the mid 20th century. In this paper I take a fresh look at the years before this process was complete – from the vantage point of early ethnographic and psychological field expeditions. Beginning with the psychological research conducted during and after the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Straits Islands (CAETS) in 1898, I will discuss the importance of the CAETS in the history of anthropology and psychology and explore some possible ways of approaching experimental cognitive psychology ethnographically. I describe the experience of Ludwig Wittgenstein in the Cambridge experimental psychology lab founded after the CAETS by C.S. Myers, focusing on its implications for Wittgenstein’s later thought and for contemporary ‘affect theory’.

In a recent foray into an ethnography of experimental cognitive psychology, I encountered firsthand what the historical banishment of subjectivity from the experimental model means. In the first part of this paper, I will follow this banishment historically by tracing what was involved when human beings came to be treated as experimental psychological subjects in the late 19th-early 20th century expeditions and laboratories organized in Cambridge, England. My goal in this part of the paper is to identify the specifically anthropological approach to the experimental subject used in early psychological experiments. Expedition members – physicians, anthropologists, and psychologists – introduced an arresting way of understanding the meaning of human social practices as inextricable from their social context and from their subjectivity. In the second part of the paper, I turn to contemporary experimental neuropsychology and to the ways a number of humanities and social science disciplines are using its findings in “affect theory” as a way of tapping a particular kind of potentiality: a hidden force emanating from fruitful darkness. This darkness, one we have ignored, is located in primitive parts of the brain where precognitive processes occur. My goal in this part is to ask whether positing that there is a realm in the brain filled with ‘potential’, a unlimited realm that is A version of this paper was published as “The Potentiality of Ethnography and the Limits of Affect Theory” in Current Anthropology, vol. 54, No. S7, October 2013, pp. S149-S158. DOI 10.1515/9783110523812-006

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prior to and unfettered by meaning, threatens loss of the most valuable aspect of the early anthropological conception of human psychic capacities. In the third part, I present some thoughts about how the insights of the early anthropological researchers could be recovered and deployed as an antidote to affect theory.

1. Early history of the experimental human subject in psychology and anthropology Experimental psychology is the discipline that has, perhaps more than any other, exerted experimental controls over human beings. I was led to its history in the process of an ethnographic study of contemporary experimental psychology. Because it was so difficult to gain ethnographic access to any of the many psychology labs I approached, run by colleagues, neighbors and even friends, I resorted to participating as a volunteer subject in various currently ongoing experiments, accessible through the websites of all major psychology departments. I was struck by how irrelevant my experience as a subject was to the experimenters. In one experiment, for example, I was hooked up with electrodes used to measure small facial movements of which I was unaware, which would indicate my emotional responses to photographs presented on the computer screen in front of me. I would press keys on the keyboard to register my conscious responses to these images. A software program tallied the results. My responses were produced, I was told, by specific parts of my brain. What the researchers sought was data about how my brain reacted to the photographs. But there were confounding elements all over the place in this experimental setting. For example, although the monitor I was to attend to and make my responses to was right in front of me, just on my left was another monitor, which would show the varying electrical impulses from my electrodes. I noted to the experimenter that I could easily see the read-out of my own responses and she said “that’s fine, it doesn’t matter.” But it mattered to me. I couldn’t help trying to catch a glance of the varying signal, and wondered how this distraction might affect my responses. Puzzlement over where this current lack of interest in subjectivity came from led me to the work of historians of psychology, who have described how subjective experience, ‘introspection’, which was central to early German laboratory psychology under the tutelage of Wilhelm Wundt, largely came to be ruled out of experimental settings by the mid 20th century (Bayer 1998, pp. 187– 213; Danziger 1990; Morawski 1994). What is important for this paper are the years before the process of ruling out subjective experience was complete – starting from the vantage point of early anthropological and psychological field expeditions. It

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was the psychological research conducted during and after the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Straits Islands (the Cambridge Expedition) in 1898 that had an important impact on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s critique of experimental psychology in the 1950s. This connection has helped me see how to give the ethnographic method a firmer grip in the face of currently fashionable, neurologically oriented accounts of the human mind, in particular affect theory, to which I turn in Part 3.

1.1 Wundt’s introspective methods First, here is some background about the ancestor of the Cambridge researchers, Wundt’s psychological laboratory in Leipzig, and its “introspective” methods. The experiments in Wundt’s laboratory all depended on the precise measurement of time. Historians Ruth Benschop and Deborah Coon have written in detail about the technologies that enabled time to be measured in a standardized way and recorded accurately. As Coon explains, laboratory hardware standardized and regulated the physical stimuli to which the subject would respond and “it also gave quantified, standardized output to the introspective method.” Perhaps even more important, the subject himself had to be standardized. Even though, “In the early stages of psychology’s development, typical experimental subjects were professors and graduate students, not experimentally naive college sophomores and white rats,” there was still “too much individual variation among these flesh-and-bone introspecting instruments. In order to standardize themselves as experimental observers, therefore, psychologists resorted to long and rigorous introspective training periods. […] Only if introspectors themselves were standardized could they become interchangeable parts in the production of scientific psychological knowledge” (Coon 1993, p. 775). Edwin Boring, an historian of psychology, reports that Wundt insisted, “[N]o observer who had performed less than 10,000 of these introspectively controlled reactions was suitable to provide data for published research” (Boring 1953, p. 172). Standardization also extended to “regularity outside the context of experimental practice” (Benschop and Draaisma 2000, p. 19). One of Wundt’s students, the American James Cattell, relates how he followed a strict scheme of physical exercise, and he remarks in a letter to his parents that he and the other experimenters were required to walk 3 – 6 miles a day (Benschop and Draaisma 2000, p. 18 – 19; Cattell and Sokal 1981, p. 89). In sum, as the psychologist Edward Titchener explained in 1912, it was not that “the subject should be hooked up to machines,” it was that the subject had “virtually become the machine, capable of automatic introspection” (Coon 1993, p. 776). In this experimental setup,

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the subject would be presented with a stimulus (a word or a color) and the time would be carefully recorded. With training, the subject could register the exact time at which he had recognized the stimulus (understood the word’s meaning or thought of the color’s name). The difference between the two times was the reaction time: the delay between the appearance of the stimulus and the mind’s psychological, introspective recognition of the stimulus. Wundt and his collaborators aimed at measuring processes in what has been called “the generalized mind,” those parts of mental life shared by all human adults alike. As Benschop explains, “Being practised in appearing in experiments helped to make sure that the results were representative of the ‘universal features of adult human mental life’” (Benschop and Draaisma 2000, pp. 58 – 59). Viewing the subject as having a generalized mind meant that experimenter and observer could switch roles between trials without affecting the format of the experiments. A person could run the experimental apparatus one day and be a subject in the same experiment the next.

1.2 Cattell and the lip key Into this system came an earthquake. The American James Cattell, who was pursuing his PhD in Wundt’s Leipzig lab, realized at a certain point that he was unable to carry out Wundt’s directions. As he explained, “When I was a student in the Leipzig laboratory, attempts were being made to measure the time of perception by letting the subject react as soon as he knew from introspection that an object had been perceived . . . I attempted to continue these experiments, but, feeling no confidence in the validity of my introspection in such a case, took up strictly objective methods in which a movement followed a stimulus without the slightest dependence on introspection” (Cattell and Sokal 1981, p. 335). What did this mean? Wundt’s method was to let the subject react as quickly as possible in trial 1 and then in trial 2 wait until he “distinguished the impression” (like recognizing a color or understanding a word). The difference between the two times gave the “perception-time” (Cattell and Sokal 1981, p. 99). Cattell explains his problem: “I have not been able myself to get results by this method; I apparently either distinguished the impression and made the motion simultaneously, or if I tried to avoid this by waiting until I had formed a distinct impression before I make the motion . . . I added to the simple reaction, not only a perception [i. e. a discrimination], but also a volition [i. e. a choice]” (Cattell and Sokal 1981, p. 65). What was Cattell’s solution to this problem? He added an instrument to the experiment, namely the lip key. This was an electric switch the subject held between his lips. When he was in the act of perceiving a color or a word,

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it was assumed that he would move his lips unconsciously, as if silently naming the object of his perception. Hence the lip key would register the time of the perception without the need for any problematic conscious introspection on the part of the subject. Why does such a minute-seeming change as the lip key loom so large? It was at this moment that Cattell joined the mind to the brain. As soon as he finished his experiments using the lip key, he adopted a relentlessly physicalist perspective, and questioned whether purely mental qualities existed. This was in 1886! As he explained this transition, it takes time for light waves to work on the retina and to generate in cells a nervous impulse corresponding to the light. It takes time for a nervous impulse to be conveyed along the optic nerve to the brain. It takes time for a nervous impulse to be conveyed through the brain to the visual center. It takes time for a nervous impulse to bring about changes in the visual center “corresponding to its own nature, and to the nature of the external stimulus.” When all this has happened, the subject sees a red light. Between these changes and the sensation or perception of red “does not take any time.” “The sensation of a red light is a state of consciousness corresponding to a certain condition of the brain.” This immediacy is parallel to the chemical changes in a galvanic battery: the chemical changes take time, but when they have happened the current does not take any additional time. “The current is the immediate representative of these changes” (Cattell 1886; Cattell and Sokal 1981, pp. 334 – 5). He concluded, “Mental states correspond to physical changes in the brain.” Henceforth his goal was “to inquire into the time needed to bring about changes in the brain, and thus to determine the rapidity of thought” (Cattell 1886, p. 41). The times he recorded were now for cerebral processes without the intrusion of introspection. Cattell’s innovation paved the way for what Danziger was to call the relentless discounting of the subject’s experience in experimental psychology by the 1950s.

1.3 Torres Straits Islands: The “generalized mind” Cattell opened a new road, but others continued to travel old roads. Scientists on the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Straits Islands in 1898 continued understandings and practices sympathetic to Wundt’s introspection. Since the expedition’s scientists assumed that the social and natural environment determined the way the mind perceived the world, they also assumed that after immersion in the daily life of villagers on the islands, they could serve as appropriate experimental subjects comparable to the native inhabitants. This enabled their introspective reports of the time they took to react to a stim-

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ulus to be measured and compared to the reports of native Torres Straits Islanders. The notion of a generalized mind (now extended to these islanders) entailed that the context in which such minds were trained determined their specific characteristics and made them commensurable.¹ For this reason, as in the Wundt lab, experimenters and subjects could trade places. In a photo of W.H.R Rivers with the color wheel, Rivers and his companion (his name is Tom) are on the same side of the table: Rivers is showing him how to use the color wheel so he could operate it and gather information on the expedition scientists (Kuklick 1998; Richards 1998). These practices were especially well-articulated by Rivers, who believed that “a resident of the Torres Straits Islands was no different from any of River’s experimental subjects – including Rivers himself” (Kuklick 1998, p. 174). Rivers explicitly trained himself to participate with the “minds” of Torres Islanders: he imagined he could immerse himself in the lives of Torres Straits Islanders and “faithfully follow their way of life.” “If the anthropologist conducted himself as his subjects did, he would become an embodied instrument, literally thinking and feeling as they did” (Kuklick 2011, p. 21). The Cambridge Expedition scientists realized that this immersion had its limits: they could not embody the past experience of islanders. So, for example, when they saw that hearing was strikingly diminished in some villagers, they attributed this to previous injury from diving for shells among coral reefs (Haddon et al. 1935, Vol. 1 p. 286).² I am suggesting that there is resonance between these practices and the ideas behind Wundt’s laboratory training, aimed to make subjects comparable through experience of the same regimen. In the Cambridge Expedition, the regimen entailed immersion in the environment and social life of the islanders. Perhaps the Expedition scientists were on the cusp of a profound challenge to the assumptions of Wundtian experimental psychology: they pushed the meaning of the “generalized mind” far beyond where the Leipzig experimenters intended, by including children and “primitives.” They also took the idea of being an embodied instrument farther than the Wundtians, by taking the experimental system

 At the time of the Torres Straits expedition, the psychologists on the team (W.H.R. Rivers and C.S. Myers) were haunted by the widely accepted evolutionary theories of Herbert Spencer that “‘primitives’ surpassed ‘civilised’ people in psychophysical performance because more energy remained devoted to this level in the former instead of being diverted to ‘higher functions,’ a central tenet of late Victorian ‘scientific racism’” (Richards 1998, p. 137). Despite this, their experiments did not find significant differences in the predicted direction.  They described this labor as the result of “ruthless exploitation” by traders, until the 1881 Pearl-Shell and Beche-de-Mer Fishery Act was passed “regulating the engagement and employment of natives” (Haddon et al. 1935, vol. 1, p. 14).

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and its training regimen to a different culture altogether. They were stuck on the cusp, however. Their comparative charts between the Torres Straits Islands and British villages did assume that one could set “reaction times” from experiments in these different places alongside one another.

1.4 Bringing back context If shared context was essential to produce minds that could be compared in experiments, shared context was also important to achieve communication with readers back home. The expedition members were extraordinarily devoted to bringing back as detailed a record of the islanders’ way of life as possible, as if to immerse their British audience in the islands’ environment.³ There were published descriptions, 6 volumes worth, but also music recorded on wax cylinders and sound recorded with the rhythmograph. This was necessary, according to Myers, because: “many kinds of barbaric music have rhythms so complicated that the metronome is useless, and must be recorded mechanically” (Freire-Marreco and Myres 1912, p. 217). They made the first ethnographic films, in spite of the limited technology of the time.⁴ In addition they sought to make a complete record of all sensory modalities: smell, hearing, vision, touch, and taste. In the published Report, they cite comparisons (common at the time) asserting similarities between the acute senses of non-human animals and savages—as what their experiments set out to confirm or deny. In all cases they denied or at least complicated such comparisons by gathering evidence that islanders could have less acute hearing or vision than members of the expedition. But besides capturing what people could hear and see, physically, they also tried to capture how the islanders saw things, qualitatively. They collected islanders’ perceptions of natural phenomena, ritual beings, and ordinary objects by asking them to make drawings of how they saw the sun and moon, ritual beings, and canoes. Though the expedition members thought the islanders lacked the components of “high culture,” familiar to them from the cities of Britain and Europe, they insisted that the islanders could meaningfully render the objects that were significant to them: “People of low culture are often admirable  Of course, any expedition worth its salt would bring back ship loads of documents and artifacts (Jardine 2000).  See MacDougall 1978. Haddon took a Lumière camera to the Torres Straits, but despite his high hopes for the medium, it was not taken up seriously again until after the Second World War.

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draughtsmen and every opportunity should be taken to make them draw, to illustrate objects of all kinds” (Freire-Marreco and Myres 1912, p. 110).

1.5 Ethnographic methods Despite their resonances with Wundtian psychology, expedition scientists often departed from expectations appropriate to the laboratory, devising an early (and underappreciated) version of the ethnographic method. I will mention three aspects of their method here. First, the expedition members took comparison two ways. They immersed themselves in the island environment, but they also extended their experimental comparisons back to the British Isles. In their studies of smell, hearing acuity, and visual perception, they gathered data from children and adults living in Cambridge, Aberdeenshire, and in Girton (a village near Cambridge). Immense care was taken to describe the environment in which the experiments were done in both Britain and the Torres Straits islands and to acknowledge when comparisons were not possible. Smell was the most difficult sensory mode because, “In Murray Island [Torres Straits] everything seemed to have a smell” (Haddon et al. 1901, p. 177). Hence no odorless substance was available to serve as a control. Second, despite their desire for careful recording of the experimental setting, they were remarkably able to tolerate lack of accuracy: they frequently acknowledged “rough accuracy,” having “no pretense to extreme accuracy,” willingness to sacrifice greater accuracy, and the impossibility of identifying aberrant reaction times (Haddon et al. 1901, p. 209). But they asserted that even so their results had significance and that their experiments were “very far from being unprofitable” (Haddon et al. 1901, p. 209). Third, and particularly prescient looking back from present day anthropology, was their concern to collect materials in their ordinary, everyday settings. In Notes and Queries of 1912, they summarized a compendium of what was learned in the Cambridge Expedition: A not infrequent feature of anthropological work . . . is very puzzling. It often happens that you ask for information in a way which seems to you to be perfectly simple and straightforward, and your informant may be quite unable to respond, and yet later, sometimes within half an hour, he will give what you want incidentally, perhaps in the course of a tale or other narrative. Probably the formal question, framed on some category of European thought, put the matter in an unaccustomed light. In order to grasp its meaning it would have been necessary for your informant to see the matter in a light different from that nat-

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ural to the people, but when telling the tale the facts are in their natural setting and rise to consciousness spontaneously (Freire-Marreco and Myres 1912, p. 111).

I will return to the importance of finding information in its ordinary, everyday setting in Part 3.

1.6 C.S. Myers⁵ and Ludwig Wittgenstein C.S. Myers took the Cambridge Expedition approach some steps further. His studies in the Torres Straits Islands and later in the Cambridge Laboratory of Experimental Psychology (after 1912) focused on aural perception in music and rhythm (Freire-Marreco and Myres 1912). He founded the psychological laboratory at Cambridge in 1912, taught experimental psychology, and authored a 2-volume textbook on the subject. He was interested not just in recording music, measuring its intervals, and measuring reaction times in various sensory modalities, but specifically in the subjective components of sensory experience. So for example, using a Wundtian apparatus in Cambridge, he could present subjects with sounds separated by various intervals (Myers 1909, p. 96). The subject would try to replicate the pattern and these patterns would be recorded on the smoked surface of a revolving drum. “The subject should carefully record the results of introspective analysis” (Myers 1909, p. 97). Metronomes were also used: “The subject should observe and record the varying affective values (pleasant, wearisome, etc.) of different rhythms and the associated experiences which they may revive” (Myers 1909, p. 99). An “objective” accentuation could be added by enclosing the metronome in a box, which could, unbeknownst to the subject, be opened or closed. The point of the experiments was to identify the conditions under which subjects “heard or read into a sequence of beats a rhythm which was not in fact there” (McGuinness 1988, p. 127). Throughout his career, well into the 1930s, Myers stressed that the aesthetic aspects of music and rhythm had to be understood comparatively in different cultures (Myers 1937, p. 63). In “The ethnological study of music,” he summarizes: Thus it comes about that many examples of primitive music are incomprehensible to us, just because they are not so readily assimilated as those which are more nearly related to our previous experiences. Our attention is continuously distracted, now by the strange

 Myers trained in medicine. He went in this capacity to the Torres Straits Islands and worked there with Rivers, who also trained in medicine.

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features and changes of rhythm, now by the extraordinary colouring of strange instruments, now by the unwonted progression and character of intervals. Consequently much familiarity is needed before we can regard such music from a standpoint that will allow of faithful description. We have first to disregard our well-trained feelings towards consonances and dissonances. We have next to banish to the margins of our field of consciousness certain aspects of music, which, were it our own music, would occupy the very focus of attention. Thus incomprehensibility will gradually give place to meaning, and dislike to some interesting emotion (Myers 1907, p. 249).

The crucial point is that Myers was interested in the physical world (how people perceived sound with their ears) but he held that the social and cultural world would determine how their perceptions were experienced. In his writing on music after the Cambridge Expedition, Myers may have even gone a step beyond the Expedition’s original extension of the Wundtian experimental method. The Expedition extended Wundt’s concepts of the generalized mind and of introspective training: Myers may have been moving toward a method that was not experimental at all. Another significant aspect of Myers’ work was that he worked for a time with Ludwig Wittgenstein in Cambridge. Wittgenstein was a student at the University of Cambridge, reading Moral Science, and at the time Moral Science included philosophy and experimental psychology. In his later writings, turning away from the logical system he laid out in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein frequently referred to “anthropological facts” and “anthropological phenomena.” He articulated some of the central tenets of anthropological analysis: here he restates Notes and Queries on the everyday, natural setting: “What we are supplying are really remarks on the natural history of human beings; we are not contributing curiosities however, but observations which no one has doubted, but which have escaped remark only because they are always before our eyes” (Wittgenstein 1953, p. 415). My argument up to this point is that the members of the Cambridge expedition took the elements of the Wundt laboratory that placed introspection and intentional action at the center and ran with them.⁶ They devised a remarkable way of looking at human psychology as inextricably embedded in its context, right down to the bottom. Even the most raw, “natural” perceptual inputs from eyes, ears, nose, and skin, were only graspable as products of specific human social environments. As we will see in the following section, many other descendants of early experimental psychology have come to see things oth-

 I am deliberately emphasizing those elements of their work that exceeded the experimental model. For another view, see Schaffer 1994.

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erwise. Enamored of what seem to be new reservoirs of potentiality, with creativity and free play unleashed, affect theorists depict the social as stopping well before we get down to the bottom. Language, meaning, and cognition are separated from “the affects” by a “gap.” After describing the landscape of affect theory, I will return for an alternative view to Wittgenstein and the legacy of the Cambridge Expedition.

2. The move away from the social Wittgenstein’s thought looped back to the Cambridge Expedition’s sensibilities after his excursion in the logical fields of the Tractatus. Experimental psychology, meanwhile, trod a single-minded path for the most part into models that stripped the human subject of subjectivity. Perhaps sparked by James Cattell’s innovation of the lip key, there was a progressive elimination of the experience of subjects from psychology. Kurt Danziger has pointed out that where the effort has been made to reintroduce subjectivity the refusal has been absolutely relentless. “It became a key principle of the dominant model of psychological experimentation that the subject’s experience was to be discounted. Attempts to change this state of affairs have always evolved the most determined resistance” (Danziger 1990, p. 183). The story of how this happened is a far longer one than I can tell here, including, in recent years, a growing rapprochement between experimental psychology and neuroscientific imaging technologies. Here, in order to follow the theme of potentiality, I will develop a case study of the ally of neuroscientific thinking I mentioned earlier, affect theory, which is being used in the humanities to explain phenomena on one scale (those embodied for example in social relationships, places, practices and institutions that have a material existence apart from the brain) by means of phenomena on another scale (those embodied in the brain).

2.1 Affect theory Many scholars in the humanities have recently engaged with research in neuroscience to posit a view of a pre-cognitive, pre-individual stage of human perception that promises unrealized dimensions of potentiality. Here are some descriptions of “affect” in the words of theorists from quite different disciplines.

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Nigel Thrift, geographer: In this paper I want to think about affect in cities and about affective cities . . . and, above all, about what the political consequences of thinking more explicitly about these topics might be – once it is accepted that the political decision is itself produced by a series of inhuman or pre-subjective forces and intensities (Thrift 2004, p. 58).

Eric Shouse, cultural critic: An affect is a non-conscious experience of intensity; it is a moment of unformed and unstructured potential. . . affect is always prior to and/or outside of consciousness (Shouse 2005).

There are a number of importantly different varieties of “affect theory”. Some are indebted to Silvan Tomkins’ writing (Tomkins 2008), and others to Francisco Varela’s work on open systems, often in the style of Deleuze and Guattari (Varela 1999; Deleuze and Guattari 1987). But taking into account their differences, historian Ruth Leys summarizes some of the main assumptions they hold in common: “For the theorists in question, affects are ‘inhuman,’ ‘pre-subjective,’ ‘visceral’ forces and intensities that influence our thinking and judgments but are separate from these. Whatever else may be meant by the terms affect and emotion . . . the affects must be non-cognitive, corporeal processes or states” (Leys 2011, p. 437).⁷ For such theorists, affect is, as Brian Massumi asserts, “irreducibly bodily and autonomic” (Massumi 2002, p. 28). Other enthusiastic contributors to affect theory from a wide range of fields include: Eve Sedgwick, Patricia Clough, Lauren Berlant, Elizabeth Grosz, Rosie Braidotti, Kathleen Stewart, Lawrence Grossberg, Elizabeth Wilson, and Antonio Damasio.⁸ This work relates directly to the theme of potentiality. Massumi, one of the most widely read writers on affect theory, stresses its connection with “potential” in a chapter called “Autonomy of Affect” (Massumi 2002, pp. 30 – 31). Something that happens too quickly to have happened, actually, is virtual. The body is as immediately virtual as it is actual. The virtual, the pressing crowd of incipiencies and tendencies, is a realm of potential. In potential is where futurity combines, unmediated, with pastness, where outsides are infolded and sadness is happy (happy because the press to action and expression is life) (Emphasis in original).

 See the astute overview of commonalities and differences among affect theorists in Blackman and Venn 2010.  See for example, the papers in Gregg and Seigworth 2010, or Clough and Helley 2007.

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The definition Massumi gives to the concept of potential here seems to be “unlimited.” In particular, the affective realm is not limited by what he sees as the constraints of sociolinguistic meaning. What motivates these scholars? They do not all agree on every point, and I will be glossing over their differences here, but Leys identifies some common motivations. Centrally, they claim that the role of reason and rationality in politics, ethics, and aesthetics has been overvalued. It is too disembodied and “unlayered” an account of the way people actually form opinions (Leys 2011, p. 436). Given this, they adopt the position that humans are corporeal creatures with important subliminal affective intensities and resonances that are decisive in the way we form opinions and beliefs. They share an insistence that we ignore “affects” at our peril because they can be manipulated deliberately and because they contain the potential for creativity and transformation. In sum, the “affects” are independent of and prior to language. They are prior to “intentions, meanings, reasons, and beliefs;” they are “non-signifying, autonomic processes that take place below the level of conscious awareness and meaning.” They are “‘inhuman,’ ‘pre-subjective,’ ‘visceral’ forces that influence our thinking and judgments” even though they are non-cognitive and corporeal (Leys 2011, pp. 437, 443). Among the affects, at the physiological level, categories that are cognitively separate (such as sad or pleasant) get connected, and this is one way the affects are thought to open up new and creative potential (Massumi 2002, p. 29). Massumi – following Deleuze – considers that the affects are characterized by “intensity” rather than content. Affective states, characterized by intensity, are non-semantic, non-linear, autonomous, vital, singular, indeterminate, and disruptive of fixed (conventional) meanings. Hence the affects provide a rich reservoir of unpredictable potentiality. All this means there is a gap between the signifying order (content, meaning, convention) and the affective order. What exactly is “the gap”? According to Leys, there is “a constitutive disjunction between our emotions on the one hand and our knowledge of what causes and maintains them on the other, because . . . affect and cognition are two separate systems” (Leys 2011, p. 437). These theorists generally argue that affect is independent of meaning and signification: they deny the role of intentionality and meaning at the affective level (Leys 2011, p. 450). There is a gap or “radical dichotomy between the ‘real’ causes of affect and the individual’s own interpretation of these causes” (Tomkins, quoted in Leys, 2011, p. 437). Affects are “phylogenetically old, automatic responses of the organism that have evolved for survival purposes and lack the cognitive characteristics of the higher-order mental processes and are separate from them” (Tomkins 2008; Leys 2011, p. 437). The affects are located subcortically in the brain, in the part of the brain that processes universal, natural kinds (such as

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the so-called basic emotions). The “basic emotions” or “affect programs” are genetically hard-wired responses, products of human evolution, that are expressed in autonomic behavioral patterns (such as characteristic facial expressions for fear or disgust) (Damasio 1994; Sedgwick 2003; Leys 2011, pp. 439, 38). There is one part of affect theory that relates directly to the theme of potentiality. This is the supposition that there is no way to include both mind and body in an account of meaning, making it necessary to posit a level below “the gap” where bodily aspects of affect go on: it is the unformed, pre-cognitive aspects of the lower level of the affects that make them seem filled with potential. This move separates intentionality or meaning from affect and assumes that intentionality and meaning are purely mental or cognitive. There are many points at which this argument can be criticized.⁹ Some critics have shown in detail how the psychological evidence that is the basis for the tenets of affect theory is questionable and out of date (Leys 2010). Others have detailed the ways affect theorists sometimes misread biological and psychological research (Papoulias and Callard 2010). For example, in a 1985 experiment by Benjamin Libet, subjects were asked to decide to flex a finger at will and to note the exact time they made the decision. The experimenters also measured the exact time of any rise in the subject’s brain activity and the exact time of the subject’s finger flexing. The results showed that there was a .2 second delay between the brain’s activity spike and the subject’s decision, then a .3 second delay between the subject’s decision and his finger flexing. In all, there seemed to be a half-second delay between the subject’s brain’s initial activity and the subject’s finger actually flexing (Libet 1985). This half second gap provides Massumi with the evidence of a “gap” between (lower) brain activity and (higher) decision, intentionality and action (Massumi 2002, p. 29). He concludes that material processes of the brain generate our thoughts; conscious thoughts, decisions, and intentions come too late to be very significant. At most they are reflections after the fact. No one would doubt that the brain is necessary for thought and action. But Massumi, and other affect theorists, place too much weight on this experimental evidence. Other studies have been showing that Libet’s evidence is open to contrary interpretations from its publication in 1985 up until the present (Cf. the many contributions to the “Open Peer Review” section in the 1985 Dec issue of “Behavioral and Brain Sciences”; Gilberto 1998; Banks and Isham 2009,

 The point is too tangential to elaborate here, but I would add that the theory involves a troubling alliance with neuroscientific findings rather than a critique of the pervasive cultural effects of neuroscientific findings.

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2010; Kevin Cahill’s contribution to the present volume). At the very least, before drawing such far-reaching conclusions, one would hope scholars of cultural phenomena would consider the experimental structures that generate psychological data. As I noted earlier, the psychological subject becomes a particular kind of stripped down entity, a data-emitting being whose subjective experience is outside the frame of the experiment. Perhaps this is not the most adequate model for understanding human intentionality. The mistakes and confusions in this position are laid bare by the approach pioneered in the Cambridge expedition, and later pursued in Wittgenstein’s account of intention, remembering, and other psychological terms. That account argues that our criteria for whether they have happened are normative and conventional. These criteria are located in use, not in the interior psyche. Saying that criteria for meaning are normative and conventional does not mean that everyone must agree, that there is harmony, or that there isn’t conflict or change! It means that criteria for meaning cannot arise from the mind of a single, isolated individual or from a primitive part of the brain. Drawing on Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Anscombe argued for a social account of intentional actions. Anscombe was arguing against the common sense view of an intention as composed of an action plus an interior mental state. Looking at the ways we speak of an action as done “intentionally”, she concluded that “intention” in everyday language means something done as an action of a whole person, a moral agent, “under a description.” The relevant description would include the past and present social contexts relevant to the person as much as his or her interior states (Anscombe 1957). What is at stake is whether we understand intentional human action as gaining its meaning in an interior, hidden, and thus, socially inaccessible space, instead of in the light of social experience. Anscombe worked in a Wittgensteinian mode to move intentionality away from the private interiority of the mind, into the space of social interaction, where meaning in language is constituted. Wittgenstein conveyed this message through many homely examples: I tell someone: “I’m going to whistle you the theme . . .” It is my intention to whistle it, and I already know what I am going to whistle. It is my intention to whistle this theme: have I then already, in some sense, whistled it in thought?” (Wittgenstein 1967, p. 2e, italics in original) One would like to ask: “Would someone who could look into your mind have been able to see that you meant to say that?” Suppose I had written my intention down on a slip of paper, then someone else could have read it there. And can I imagine that he might in some way have found it out more surely than that? Certainly not (Wittgenstein 1967, p. 8e, italics in original).

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The point is that intentionality emerges from the whole structure of events, from the inception of the notion to the execution of the action. We decide whether someone had a certain intention, not by referring to an event or template in the mind, but by whether his or her gestures, postures, words, and actions fit with a socially defined notion of being about to whistle a tune or meaning to say something. Sometimes a mental event (whistling the tune or saying the words in one’s head) might precede the action, and sometimes not, but in any case, that interior event could not constitute a useable criterion for whether someone was intending to whistle or meaning to speak. Removing any interest in intentionality, conceived as a social process, as affect theory does, removes socially produced contexts of use as a necessary and sufficient basis for what actions and words mean to people. Tackling mathematics, the realm of symbolic life perhaps most difficult to regard as contingent upon social norms, Wittgenstein commented that people found the idea that numbers rested on conventional social understandings “unbearable” (Rhees 1970). Why is there resistance to allowing the meaning of human acts to rest on social understandings all the way down? Why such an idea is unbearable returns us to the Cambridge Expedition. Rivers and the others thought that plunging into a different social and physical environment would make them different people, comparable in many ways to the islanders. In this view there is a vast reservoir of potential for change and creative adaption. But this view also entails that there are limits to human experience, set by whatever social contexts are relevant. It does not compare to Massumi’s virtual realm, the “pressing crowd of incipiencies and tendencies.” Perhaps it is any limitation that seems unbearable in the present era, where the drumbeat of the necessity for constant growth is heard and felt everywhere. Saying that social context limits what is relevant does not close off experiences that are unconscious, inchoate, or unspeakable. Anthropologists and sociolingusts have long found ways to address the entirely social meanings of things that are repressed from speech or action but nonetheless contain powerful kinds of potentiality. Years ago Gayle Rubin analyzed the “sex/gender system” as a “set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity” (Rubin 1975, p. 159). More recently, in Brainstorm, JordanYoung rephrases this: “Gender . . . is a social effect, rather than the result of human biology. Sex in this regard is conceived as the remainder – the material body, and those bodily interactions that are necessary to reproduce it” (JordanYoung 2010, p. 13). Borrowing from this way of putting it, we could say that – like the sex/gender system – the affect/intentionality system is a set of arrangements by which a society transforms neurological processes into products of human ac-

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tivity. Affects are a social effect rather than the result of human biology. Affects in this regard are conceived as the remainder – the material brain, and those neurological interactions that are necessary to reproduce it. Looked at this way, what we see as the affects are the product of a social process that has separated them from larger contexts rather than a new entity we have discovered in nature. The feminist concerns that motivate Gayle Rubin are relevant to analysis in terms of the affects. We need to ask whether one result of seeing the affects as biological phenomena is losing the insights that feminism can provide.¹⁰ Given all the evident flaws in affect theory, one might wonder why it has such wide appeal.¹¹ Many recent scholars attest to the increasing commodification of reproduction (the fetus, the uterus, the neonate), of the body (cells, disease, the genome, organs), and of living beings (the parent, the patient, the subject, the piglet). As such things are commodified, they are given a kind of market value, which entails that they can be placed on a scale and measured on that scale in comparison to other things. They become commensurable with other things of the same kind. In that sense they are removed from their original context. Insofar as their social and cultural meaning depends on their context, it is lost. Part of the appeal of affect theory may lie in the commodification of emotion. Since Arlie Hochschild’s The Managed Heart in 1983 (Hochschild 1983), it has been apparent that the expression of emotion is increasingly subject to pressures of commodification (Hochschild 1983; see also Hardt 1999). I would speculate that the widespread appeal of affect theory is related to the commodification and decontextualization of emotion. Emotions appear tainted by market forces evacuated of human life. In response, seeking untainted territory, theorists are delving “beneath” emotions, to more primitive and presumably unsullied neural processes. The impulse is understandable but the cost is very great.

3. Potentiality It is clear that the trait of potentiality is sometimes thrown up as an object of desire because it seems to imply creativity, openness, and infinite possibility unconstrained by social conventions. I want to suggest that in the ethnographic method lies another kind of potentiality: the potential to examine the ontological position that comparison between two social worlds opens up. One key to what is

 A particularly useful reminder is Lutz 1995.  See these examples from literature and anthropology: Northoff 2010; Zunshine 2010.

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unique about the ethnographic move is that it allows us to see an ordinary, everyday natural setting in its context but from a certain point of view. Wittgenstein muses: Let’s imagine a theatre, the curtain goes up & we see someone alone in his room walking up and down, lighting a cigarette, seating himself etc. so that suddenly we are observing a human being from outside in a way that ordinarily we can never observe ourselves; as if we were watching a chapter from a biography with our own eyes, – surely this would be at once uncanny and wonderful. More wonderful than anything a playwright could cause to be acted or spoken on the stage. We should be seeing life itself. – But then we do see this every day & it makes not the slightest impression on us! True enough, but we do not see it from that point of view . . . (Wittgenstein 1984, p. 4).

It is obvious that the theater creates its own context, but the playwright/artist/ ethnographer allows us to view that context from a certain point of view, namely from the point of view of another embedded context: we can adopt “the way of thought which as it were flies above the world and leaves it the way it is, contemplating it from above in its flight” (p. 5).¹² In Culture and Value, Wittgenstein wrote of the “ethnological point of view” and said this point of view allows us to take up “a standpoint right outside so as to be able to see things more objectively” (Wittgenstein 1984, p. 37e).¹³ What could he possibly have meant by “more objectively,” given his insistence that there is no external point, outside the immersion in everyday forms of life, from which those forms of life can be understood? I think “more objectively” means from a comparative point of view. Comparing two contexts means describing their differences – it does not mean placing them on the same scale. Recall Myers’ remarks on music: the ethnographic goal in understanding unfamiliar music is to “banish to the margins” our habitual focus of attention and make the incomprehensible meaningful through “faithful description”. Editor and biographer Rush Rhees wrote that what Wittgenstein called the “anthropological point of view” had often been misunderstood. He cited a comment of Wittgenstein’s about language games: “the advantage of looking at language games is that they let us look step by step at what we otherwise could only see as a tangled ball of yarn” (Rhees 1970, p. 50).¹⁴ Wittgenstein warned against “the craving for generality as the real source of metaphysics.” He added, “Instead of ‘craving for generality’ I could also have said ‘the contemptuous attitude

 Thanks to Michael Fried for his interesting discussion of this point (Fried 2008).  “Dass wir unsern Standpunkt weit draussen einnehmen, um die Dinge objectiver sehen zu können.”  My translation.

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towards the particular case…’” (Rhees 1970, p. 51). Ethnography could be said to be about particular cases set alongside one another but not balled up into one another. Two tangled balls of yarn can look very much the same: only when we look at them step by step (untangling the ball of yarn) can we gather the details that make a context specific, not general. Perhaps we could say that affect theorists crave generality. Is the widespread contempt for the particular case today part of what drives the search for universal neural processes that generate the affects? Have the affects been discovered? Or are they an effect of social processes that have worked to make them materialize? Is contempt for the particular contempt for anything that limits the kind of commensurability that our markets and systems of governance demand?

4. Conclusion My interest is piqued by the ways Wittgenstein opens up to theorize what kind of knowledge ethnography is. After my early surprise while being a subject in a lab that was studying emotions while disregarding my emotions, I have found a number of labs in which I can observe and participate, labs whose members are interested in the history of introspection in psychology, for example, the work of Robert S. Woodworth, who continued Wundt’s introspective methods and questions (against the grain) into the 1930s. It would be a nice irony if the practices of Rivers and the other Torres Straits researchers, indebted as they were to experimental psychology, could clarify both what is important about ethnographic fieldwork and why some contemporary psychologists are now beginning to return to questions involving intention and introspection. Although Cattell’s lip key opened a path to removing introspection, the historical record of earlier experiments that relied on introspective reports is extremely rich. A shared interest in this history is what opened laboratory doors to me. If some experimental psychologists are becoming interested in the role intentionality plays in their experiments, why are some humanities scholars trying to rule out intentionality from the literature, art, and media they study? Whatever the reasons, it seems clear that to counteract the appeal of affect theory and its notion of potentiality, we will need robust ethnographic accounts that are specific about how humans’ perceptions are social all the way down. Our history in the Torres Straits guides us towards a limited and socially constrained but creative notion of potentiality.

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Acknowledgements Thanks to the spring 2011 seminar in the anthropology of science at NYU for discussions of affect theory and to Max Black, Georg Henrik von Wright, Norman Malcolm, and Bruce Goldstein in the Philosophy Department at Cornell for their lectures and discussions on Wittgenstein when I was in graduate school there. I also appreciate help with the historical sources from John Forrester, Alison Winter, Michael Sokal, David Robinson, and Christopher Green. Profound thanks to all of the members and organizers of the Wenner-Gren symposium on potentiality and to the anonymous reviewers of Current Anthropology. I am grateful to Martin Gustafsson for organizing the present publication.

References Various authors (1985): “Open peer commentary”. In: Behavioral and brain sciences 8 (Dec.), pp. 539 – 66. Anscombe, Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret (1957): Intention. Oxford: Blackwell. Banks, William P., and Eve A. Isham (2009): “We infer rather than perceive the moment we decided to act.” In: Psychological science 20 (1), pp. 17 – 21. Banks, William P., and Eve A. Isham (2010): “Do we really know what we are doing? Implications of reported time of decision for theories of volition”. In: Consious will and responsibility: a tribute to Benjamin Libet, edited by Benjamin Libet, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Lynn Nadel, pp. 47 – 60. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bayer, Betty M (Ed.) (1998): “Between apparatuses and apparitions: Phantoms of the laboratory”. In: Reconstructing the psychological subject, edited by Betty M. Bayer and John Shotter, pp. 187 – 213. London: Sage. Benschop, Ruth, and Douwe Draaisma (2000): “In pursuit of precision: The calibration of minds and machines in late nineteenth-century psychology”. In: Annals of science 57 (1), pp. 1 – 25. Blackman, Lisa, and Couze Venn (2010): “Affect”. In: Body & society 16 (1), pp. 7 – 28. Boring, Edwin Garrigues (1953): “A history of introspection”. In: Psychological bulletin 50 (3), pp. 169 – 186. Cattell, James M.K (1886): “The time taken up by cerebral operations”. In: Mind 11, pp. 220 – 242. Cattell, James M.K., and Michael M. Sokal (1981): An education in psychology: James McKeen Cattell’s journal and letters from Germany and England, 1880 – 1888. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Clough, Patricia (2007): “Introduction”. In: The affective turn: Theorizing the social, edited by Patricia Clough and Jean Halley, pp. 1 – 33. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Coon, Deborah J (1993): “Standardizing the subject: Experimental psychologists, introspection, and the quest for a technoscientific ideal”. In: Technology and culture no. 34 (4), pp. 757 – 783.

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Damasio, Antonio R (1994): Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason and the human brain. New York, NY: Avon. Danziger, Kurt (1990): Constructing the subject : historical origins of psychological research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari (1987): A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Freire-Marreco, Barbara W., and John Linton Myres (1912): Notes and queries on anthropology. London: The Royal Anthropological Institute. Fried, Michael (2008): Why photography matters as art as never before. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gilberto, Gomes (1998): “The timing of conscious experience: A critical review and reinterpretation of Libet’s research”. In: Consciousness and cognition 7 (4), pp. 559 – 595. DOI: 10.1006/ccog.1998.0332. Gregg, Melissa, and Gregory J. Seigworth (2010): The affect theory reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Haddon, Alfred C., Anthony Wilkin, Sidney Herbert Ray, William McDougall, Charles S. Myers, Charles G. Seligman, and Rivers, William H. R. (1901): Reports of the Cambridge anthropological expedition to Torres Straits. Vol. 2: Physiology and psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haddon, Alfred C., Anthony Wilkin, Sidney Herbert Ray, William McDougall, Charles S. Myers, Charles G. Seligman, and William H. R. Rivers. (1935): Reports of the Cambridge anthropological expedition to Torres Straits. Vol. 1 General ethnography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hardt, Michael (1999): “Affective labor”. Boundary 26 (2), pp. 89 – 100. Hochschild, Arlie Russell (1983): The managed heart : commercialization of human feeling. 20th ed. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Jardine, Lisa (2000): Ingenious pursuits: Building the scientific revolution. New York: Anchor Books. Jordan-Young, Rebecca M (2010): Brain storm: the flaws in the science of sex differences. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kuklick, Henrika (Ed.) (1998): “Fieldworkers and physiologists”. In: Cambridge and the Torres Strait: centenary essays on the 1898 anthropological expedition, edited by Anita Herle and Sandra Rouse, pp. 158 – 180. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kuklick, Henrika (2011): “Personal equations: Reflections on the history of fieldwork, with special reference to sociocultural anthropology”. In: Isis 102 (March), pp. 1 – 33. Leys, Ruth (2010): “How did fear become a scientific object and what kind of object is it?”. In: Representations 110, pp. 66 – 104. Leys, Ruth (2011): “The turn to affect: A critique”. In: Critical inquiry 37 (3), pp. 434 – 472. Libet, Benjamin (1985): “Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action”. In: Behavioral and brain sciences 8 (4), pp. 529 – 566. Lutz, Catherine (Ed.) (1995): “The gender of theory”. In: Women writing culture, edited by Ruth Behar and Deborah A. Gordon, pp. 249 – 266. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. MacDougall, David (1978): “Ethnographic film: Failure and promise”. In: Annual review of anthropology 7, pp. 405 – 425.

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Massumi, Brian (2002): Parables for the virtual: movement, affect, sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books. McGuinness, Brian (1988): Wittgenstein: A life: Young Ludwig 1889 – 1921. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Morawski, Jill G (1994): Practicing feminisms, reconstructing psychology: Notes on a liminal science. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Myers, Charles .S (1937): In the realm of mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Myers, Charles Sn (Ed.) (1907): “The ethnological study of music”. In: Anthropological essays presented to Edward Burnett Tylor in honour of his 75th birthday, Oct. 2, 1907, by Henry Balfour, A. E. Crawley, D. J. Cunningham, L. R. Farnell, J. G. Frazer, A. C. Haddon, E. S. Hartland, A. Lang, R. R. Marett, C. S. Myers, J. L. Myres, C. H. Read, Sir J. Rhŷs, W. Ridgeway, W. H. R. Rivers, C. G. Seligmann, T. A. Joyce, N. W. Thomas, A. Thomson, E. Westermarck, pp. 235 – 254. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Myers, Charles S (1909): A text-book of experimental psychology. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Northoff, Georg (2010): “Humans, brains, and their environment: Marriage between neuroscience and anthropology?”. In: Neuron 65 (6), pp. 748 – 751. DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2010.02.024. Papoulias, Constantina, and Felicity Callard (2010): “Biology’s gift: interrogating the turn to affect”. In: Body & society 16 (1), pp. 29 – 56. Rhees, Rush (1970): Discussions of Wittgenstein. New York: Schocken. Richards, Graham (Ed.) (1998): “Getting a result: The Expedition’s psychological research 1898 – 1913”. In: Cambridge and the Torres Strait: centenary essays on the 1898 anthropological expedition, edited by Anita Herle and Sandra Rouse, pp. 136 – 157. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rubin, Gail (Ed.) (1975): “The traffic in women: Notes on the ’political economy’ of sex”. In: Toward an anthropology of women, edited by Rayna R. Reiter. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press. Schaffer, Simon (1994): From physics to anthropology – & back again. Cambridge, MA: Prickly Pear Pamphlets. Shouse, Eric (2005): “Feeling, emotion, affect”. In: M/C journal 8 (6), http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php. Sedgwick, Eve K (2003): Touching feeling: affect, pedagogy, performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Thrift, Nigel (2004): “Intensities of feeling: towards a spatial politics of affect”. In: Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human geography 86 (1), pp. 57 – 78. Tomkins, Silvan S (2008): Affect imagery consciousness: The complete edition. New York: Springer. Varela, Francisco J (1999): Ethical know-how: Action, wisdom, and cognition. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1953): Philosophical investigations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1967): Zettel. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1984): Culture and value. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Zunshine, Lisa (2010): Introduction to cognitive cultural studies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Kevin Cahill

A Degenerate Case of Action Abstract: A short paper from a few years back discussed experiments using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the brain that purport to cast into doubt the reality of free will. In what follows, I first give a quick overview of these experiments and some of the reported claims made on their behalf. Second, I suggest that serious problems with the purported results stem largely from the widely held yet very tendentious assumption that the structure of human action must be directly analogous to the structure of a physical mechanism or process. Finally, I argue that the philosophical significance that these recent studies appear to have is due to their exploiting what I will call a “degenerate case” of action, a case that only seems promising against the background of the tendentious assumption about human action specifically, and of mechanistic explanations more generally.

It seems that rarely a week goes by in which I am not confronted with a news piece reporting scientific findings which purport to falsify this or that aspect of my self-understanding. Not infrequently, these pieces read as if they were written more with the intention of grabbing attention than with the aim of transmitting sober scientific results; they sometimes seem directly intended to provoke the ire of philosophers (or better, what the science reporter imagines a philosopher to be, something like a simple-minded village priest I suppose) with the now usual commonplace suggestions that philosophical questions have been overtaken by natural science. A short article from a few years back that achieved its share of media attention fits this description well. “Neuroscience vs Philosophy: Taking Aim at Free Will” (Smith 2011, pp. 23 – 25), discussed experiments using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the brain that purport to cast into doubt the reality of free will.¹ In what follows, I first give a quick overview of these experiments and some of the reported claims made on their behalf. Second, after making clear that I regard the question of free will suppos-

 I became aware of the Nature article in a short piece by Gary Gutting, “What Makes Free Will Free?” in the New York Times (See http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/19/what-makesfree-will-free/). The Nature article was in turn a kind of popularized summary of the findings first published in Nature Neuroscience (See Chun Siong Soon, Marcel Brass, Hans-Jochen Heinze & John-Dylan Haynes “Unconscious Determinants of Free Decisions in the Human Brain” Nature Neuroscience 11, pp. 543 – 545 (2008)). DOI 10.1515/9783110523812-007

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edly at stake in these experiments to be a bogus one any way, I suggest that the purported bogusness stems largely from the widely held yet very tendentious assumption that the structure of human action must be directly analogous to the structure of a physical mechanism or process. This assumption then seems to get mechanically repeated in the discussions by philosophers, scientists, and not least, science journalists.² Finally, I argue that the philosophical significance that these recent studies appear to have is due to their exploiting what I will call a “degenerate case” of action, a case that only seems promising against the background of the tendentious assumption about human action specifically, and of mechanistic explanations more generally.

1. The background for the recent fMRI studies mentioned above are some now famous experiments carried out in the 1980s by a team of neuroscientists led by Benjamin Libet (Libet 1983, Libet 1985). In these experiments, Libet’s team employed a combination of electroencephalogram (EEG) and electromyograph (EMG) to measure the brain activity (“readiness potential” or “RP”) and muscle activity respectively of subjects who had been instructed to twitch their wrist when they felt the spontaneous urge to do so. Subjects were also provided a method allowing them to note the time at which they became conscious of the urge to twitch their wrist so that the various physical and mental events could be correlated. The reported results suggested that an unconscious RP could be detected by the experimenters slightly before the subject reported having the conscious urge to twitch his wrist. In fact, the detection of the RP afforded the researchers a certain level of predictive ability as to whether the subject would make the movement. There is a large literature in which the various implications these experiments might have for the question of free will have been taken up. The most salient feature of these experiments for this question is the way in which they raise the specter of the irrelevance of consciousness, and so the possibility of responsibility, in an account of human action. If the brain already

 Besides the questions examined in this paper, there are at least three other interesting perspectives to take on this work. First, there are of course technical questions concerning the design of and equipment used in these experiments. Second, there are critical questions that concern how these and other purported scientific findings get reported on in both popular and scientific media channels. Finally, I think an ethnographic perspective could be very useful here for the insight provided from other views on the nature of action and to learn whether the question of “free will” is a universal obsession (something I rather doubt).

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makes the decision to act before the subject is conscious of any intention to do so, then such conscious intention seems to be an irrelevant side-show, a mere epiphenomenon without any robust causal role to play in the process. Since, as a common line goes, the causal efficacy of conscious intention is essential to our conception of free will, Libet’s experiments can be interpreted as posing a direct challenge to that conception. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, who is generally sympathetic to the view that Libet’s work has important philosophical consequences, writes When I decide not to raise my hand to ask a question after a lecture, sometimes I feel the urge and have to stop myself, but often I just decide not to ask my question, and I feel no urge that I need to resist. And when I do raise my hand, it feels as if my conscious proximal will to raise my hand now to attract attention so that I can ask a question is what causes the physical process that includes my hand going up. Thus, the revolutionary interpretations [of Libet’s experiments] suggest that the phenomenology of action is illusory in this respect. (Sinnott-Armstrong 2010, p. 26)³

Lars Hertzberg has put the point this way. [L]ibet and his team might be thought to have given empirical confirmation of Spinoza’s claim that freedom is simply the illusion that we produce our own actions. On this finding, then, the distinction between having initiated an action oneself and having been put up to it by others has no basis in reality: people never really initiate actions. (Hertzberg 2010, p. 141)

The authors of the more recent paper based on fMRI studies acknowledge their conceptual indebtedness to Libet in the first passage of their article. The impression that we are able to freely choose between different possible courses of action is fundamental to our mental life. However, it has been suggested [by the studies of Libet et al] that this subjective experience of freedom is no more than an illusion and that our actions are initiated by unconscious mental processes long before we become aware of our intention to act. (Haynes et al 2008, p. 543)

However, as the authors immediately also go on to state, Libet’s “intriguing experiments have left a number of controversial questions open”.⁴ These questions

 In the context of his paper, Sinnott-Armstrong means something more specific by “revolutionary interpretation” than is evident here. However it is not necessary to my discussion to explain this.  Several of these questions (although perhaps not all the ones Haynes et al have in mind) are discussed Robinson 2012. One of Robinson’s claims (p. 296), which I am not competent to assess yet which seems possibly relevant here, is that fMRI data and evoked potentials of the sort used

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concern, among other things, the causal relevance of the readiness potential measured by Libet’s team. The RP is generated by the supplementary motor area (SMA), part of the cerebral cortex. The concern here is that measuring a signal from this region of the brain provides information only about the later stages of the motor planning process (Haynes et al 2008, p. 543). FMRI technology did not exist when Libet’s team conducted its experiments in the 1980s and the researchers in these more recent studies hope the newer technology will improve on Libet’s experiments by allowing them to directly investigate “which regions of the brain predetermine conscious intentions and the time at which they start shaping a motor decision” (Haynes et al 2008, p. 543). Another aspect of Libet’s team experimental design that has been criticized is the way in which it attempted to determine the onset of the subject’s conscious intention to flick his wrist.⁵ Given the underlying premises of the experiments, this is clearly a crucial point. The time-span between the RP and the intention to move reported by Libet’s team was relatively short. Any serious uncertainty about the onset of the intention could easily be seen to undermine what was supposed to be so earth-shattering about these experiments. Accordingly, the design of the more recent studies tried to refine the method by which the timing of intentions were noted and recorded: The subjects were asked to relax while fixating on the center of the screen where a stream of letters was presented. At some point, when they felt the urge to do so, they were to freely decide between one of two buttons, operated by the left and right index fingers, and press it immediately. In parallel, they should remember the letter presented when their motor decision was consciously made. After subjects pressed their freely chosen response button, a ‘response mapping’ screen with four choices appeared. The subjects indicated when they had made their motor decision by selecting the corresponding letter with a second button press. After delay, the letter stream started again and a new trial began. (Haynes et al 2008, p. 543)⁶

As described by Kerry Smith in “Neuroscience vs Philosophy: Taking Aim at Free Will”, “[t]he experiment helped to change [lead researcher] John-Dylan Haynes’s

by Libet et al are not reliably correlated. I was fortunate to be able to attend a day seminar at the Centre for the Study of the Sciences and the Humanities at the University of Bergen on December 13, 2011. There, Berge Osnes from the Department for Biological and Medicinal Psychology, fMRI Group gave an informative presentation of some important issues pertaining to the design and assumptions behind the use of fMRI techniques.  This concern centered on the possibility that Libet’s subjects might have been distracted by the very apparatus they were to use to note the timing of their intentions.  Note also that subjects were asked to make two choices: a) when to press the button and b) with which finger to do so.

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outlook on life” (Smith 2011, p. 23). As reported, the experiments showed two brain regions encoding information that allowed researchers to predict with “high accuracy” when and with which finger a subject would press the button (Haynes et al 2008, p. 544).⁷ Significantly, the two brain regions were different from the SMA and were reported as containing the information much earlier than did the SMA in Libet’s experiments (Haynes et al 2008, p. 545). Smith writes that, based on these results, Haynes’s team argues “that consciousness of a decision may be a mere biochemical afterthought, with no influence whatsoever on a person’s actions. According to this logic, they say, free will is an illusion” (Smith 2011, p. 24). Haynes himself is quoted as finding the results unsettling

 “High accuracy” here turns out to be 60 %. It is easy to think that the possibility of prediction is the key issue here, but in fact things are more complicated. As Gary Gutting wrote in his short piece in which I originally heard of these fMRI experiments, “[M]y wife might be 100 percent certain that, given a choice between chicken livers and strip steak for dinner, I will choose steak. Does that mean that my choice isn’t free? Couldn’t she be sure that I will freely choose steak?” So the ability to predict behavior per se doesn’t necessarily have the consequences for agency that we might assume. Gutting’s wife can predict his choice for dinner so accurately because she knows that, all things being equal, he’ll choose steak over chicken livers. This kind of personal knowledge is close to the sort of cultural common background knowledge that sociologists use to predict voting behavior and that marketers use to predict purchasing behavior. All of these predictions (or explanations) may involve causality in a certain sense, but there is no contradiction between them and agency. The knowledge that, ceterus paribus, things will go thus and so is very far from prediction under a mechanistic covering law of the sort we associate especially with classical mechanics. This is actually also true in the case of both Libet’s experiments and in the case of the fMRI experiments. The predictions, such as they are, are made possible against a background provided by the agreement of the subjects themselves to participate in the experiments. There is as of yet no question of prediction and retrodiction and thus of bringing these movements under some kind of reversible covering law like we find in classical mechanics. We can perhaps see this better if we try to imagine what would be involved with placing a special brain-scanning apparatus on the heads of subjects in order to try to predict their bodily movements as they go about their business outside the lab setting without controls. This would require being able to “type” or discern the kinds of causal antecedents of movements as well as the kinds of movements themselves, and this prior knowledge and ability would presumably have to be provided by the kind of ceteris paribus conditions that, however, is ex hypothesi only provided by the agreement of the subjects in the lab setting to make only one kind of simple movement. Of course, we might also imagine dispensing with such consent. This could involve handling the subjects much like any other inanimate object of investigation. By isolating the subjects’ bodies and minds from all disturbances, one might try to find the general covering laws for explaining individual movements. Naturally, this is unlikely to provide us with a situation where we find any living bodies, let alone functioning minds. This is, to say the least, a serious difficulty with the project of giving a traditional mechanistic explanation of life and mind.

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and being prompted to ask, “How can I call a will ‘mine’ if I don’t even know when it occurred and what it has decided to do?” (Smith 2011, p. 24).⁸

2. Before turning to my main task of examining a primary assumption at work in this discussion, I will just note that I find the Cartesian picture of what free will must be to be pretty much unintelligible. We are to evaluate the possibility that somehow, some thing, the mind, the self, the soul, whatever, is supposed to stand outside of every contingency, including the body, and effect an action without itself being effected by anything else (except, what, itself?). It’s no wonder that Kant placed the whole magic trick in the domain of transcendental psychology. As far as this picture of free will is concerned, I don’t see that much can be said for keeping it on life support.⁹ At any rate, none of this is to say that philosophers’ voices are absent from Smith’s article. Several are quoted there as expressing both degrees of skepticism regarding some of the assumptions underlying the interpretations offered by Haynes of his work, as well as advising caution regarding the relevance of these findings for the question of free will. But to judge from their remarks, each of the philosophers (and of course the quoted neuroscientists) still accepts at face value some of the basic terms of the question of free will. One sees this in the framing of a common criticism that emerges from the philosophers, viz. that Haynes and other neuroscientists are debunking a dualist view of free will that almost no one holds any longer. We read,

 With respect to the unsettledness expressed in this question, there are a couple of things that might strike one as fishy. First, just because a brain state cum decision state is unconscious doesn’t mean it isn’t mine, any less than my heartbeat’s being unconscious makes it not mine. Second, even if we assume that the decision gets “made” before it becomes conscious, such that once we identified the decision cum unconscious brain state we could predict the movement reasonably well, this does not imply that we could predict the occurrence of the “decision” cum brain state itself. I would like to thank Rebecca Kukla for drawing my attention to the first point mentioned.  To suggest, however, that the very idea of free will as conceived of in Descartes and in much of the tradition after him is confused is not to endorse a “compatibilist” view that free will can be reconciled with its evil twin determinism. Completely apart from issues connected to quantum mechanics, determinism is another metaphysical idea with no clear role to play in any particular empirical description of the world, though it may characterize such a description’s mathematical framework. I realize that this last claim would find fewer supporters than my dismissal of free will and would likely evoke the ire of many philosophers and many scientists.

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Philosophers question the assumptions underlying such interpretations. “Part of what’s driving some of these conclusions is the thought that free will has to be spiritual or involve souls or something,” says Al Mele, a philosopher at Florida State University in Tallahassee. If neuroscientists find unconscious neural activity that drives decision-making, the troublesome concept of mind as separate from body disappears, as does free will. This ‘dualist’ conception of free will is an easy target for neuroscientists to knock down, says [Walter] Glannon. “Neatly dividing mind and brain makes it easier for neuroscientists to drive a wedge between them,” he adds… The trouble is, most current philosophers don’t think about free will like that, says Mele. Many are materialists – believing that everything has a physical basis, and decisions and actions come from brain activity. So scientists are weighing in on a notion that philosophers consider irrelevant. (Smith 2011, pp. 24– 25)¹⁰

Above I dismissed the Cartesian picture of free will as incoherent and this picture at least appears to be fundamentally tied to substance dualism. But I want to suggest that much of the incoherence stems from an assumption shared by Descartes and the many more so-called materialists who take themselves to be his opponents, be they philosophers or not. The assumption takes something like the following form: The structure of human action shares the spatio-temporal structure of a mechanical-physical process. “Structure” of action is thus understood on direct or close analogy with “structure” of a physical event.

Except in the case of eliminativism, the Cartesian role for consciousness keeps its place at the table here with the hypothesis that the instigation of an action involves an occurrent mental state (cum brain state) such as intending, willing, desiring, etc., which is manifest to the mind as the efficient (yet supervenient) cause of the action.¹¹ This is what is taken to be the key idea to be investigated in these experiments. I think the relevance of this assumption is pretty clearly on display in the description above of the experimental setup both in Libet’s earlier experiments and in the more recent fMRI experiments. Sinnott-Armstrong seems equally committed to it as well. He states that “The real question that Libet’s [and presumably Haynes’] experiments raise is whether our conscious wills cause the willed actions” (Sinnott-Armstrong 2010, p. 2). Sinnott-Armstrong believes this question is important because “causation by consciousness or by conscious will is necessary for full moral responsibility” and he cites both popular and legal opinion in support of this assumption (Sinnott-Armstrong 2010,

 The other philosopher quoted is Adina Roskies.  Eliminativists can and do often share the assumption just mentioned concerning spatio-temporal structure, but with no role for consciousness.

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pp. 14– 15, q7).¹² Lars Hertzberg sums up well the significance for these kinds of experiments of the idea that an action begins with an occurrent mental state: [As] far as “self-initiated” action are concerned, there are two alternatives: either the behaviour really is initiated at the time reported by the subject, in which case it is (or at least may possibly be) brought about by his own decision, or else it is initiated at any earlier moment in time, in which case the subject’s “decision” can no longer make a difference. Now, for this line of argument to get off the ground, it must be taken for granted that voluntariness, if there is such a thing at all, is a matter of the agent’s having the experience of deciding to act at a given moment in time. The volition is concentrated in this experience. Unless that assumption is made, the experiment shows nothing surprising: nobody has questioned that there might be distinctive occurrences in the central nervous system just before we perform a movement. (Hertzberg 2010, p. 142)

We started with the assumption that human action must have the same kind of spatio-temporal structure as a physical mechanism or process. Taking an occurrent mental state as the purported beginning of the action then makes it natural to study the inherent causal properties or capacities of the mental state, and this in turn seems to lead inevitably to the requirement that the mental state and its effects be isolated as much possible from external factors. This then largely determines the kind of “action” that is to be studied. It should be something simple like a flick of the wrist or the pressing of a button, preceded by an urge, i. e. a largely isolated movement preceded by a largely isolated mental event: in both cases, the more isolated the better so as to control for extraneous factors. This means that the kinds of contextual features of a situation that one might ordinarily think were the very elements that made an action intelligible, the features, that is, that provide the agent and others with reasons for thinking it makes sense for him to act thus and so, the very stuff of which actions are made so to speak, are here being treated as extraneous factors that need to be controlled for. According to Hertzberg: The need to eliminate anything that could be a reason for performing the movement at any one moment is perhaps thought about along similar lines as the need to remove any external disturbances (such as heat or a draught) that might interfere with the measuring of some subtle physical process. (Hertzberg 2010, p. 142)

 Of course while people may assent to such claims, it’s far from obvious that they would really go along with regimenting it in such a way to give any traction to a theory. It is not given, that is, that they would assent when asked if they always actually made a conscious choice before doing something which they both counted as voluntary and for which they would take responsibility.

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So whereas we might have thought that having reasons in a given context is what provides our actions with their content and distinguishes them from mechanical events, in the kinds of experiments under discussion here the contextual features that might provide an actor with his reasons are being stripped away as carefully as possible. And what remains is supposed to tell us something fundamental about human action and freedom. But surely an account of ourselves as agents must not make unintelligible the very phenomenon of which one is trying to give an account by blocking our view of those contexts in which we act. If, then, the original assumption about the spatio-temporal structure of human action, shared by Cartesians and anti-Cartesians alike, has led us into incoherence, then there must be something wrong with that assumption itself. What I’m driving at of course is the way in which that assumption’s assimilation of action to events erases the future, usually goal-directedness nature of the former. If we look at the various contexts in which we describe ourselves as acting, contexts of descriptions which themselves are directly and indirectly tied to contexts of actions themselves, it emerges that asking and answering questions about an agent’s reasons, broadly construed, provides an important guideline for thinking about these contexts and their descriptions in the first place. In fact, examining such questions reveals that a context of action is about as far away from the motiveless, isolated situations examined in these experiments as one can imagine. Reasons, broadly understood, are not disturbances in an attempt at understanding action but rather are paradigmatic grounds for action. As far as freedom goes, our actions, including, I would add, those we ordinarily take to be constitutive of the scientific enterprise itself, are not a function of somehow magically stepping outside of our environment just long enough to make a decision to have our bodies move one way or another. Instead, our freedom is connected to our active involvement in a world of interrelated historicalcultural factors, affordances, niches, solicitations, etc. that provide us with reasons for pressing into the future in some ways rather than others. I quote Hertzberg once more here: But one would of course be mistaken in concluding from this that a person’s movements are not fully voluntary if there is any answer at all to the question why he did what he did. On the contrary: we should be baffled if we were to ask someone who appeared to be carrying out some activity in a normal fashion why he was doing what he was doing, and it turned out that he did not have a ready answer for us. (Hertzberg 2010, p. 147)

“Free”, one might say, is internal to our notion of human action; and actions (and so freedom) are contextual.

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3. Of course I am not the first reader to notice that the very design of these types of experiments tends to distort the character of what is purportedly being investigated by them. Psychologist and philosopher Daniel N. Robinson points out in this regard that “the demands imposed on subjects in such research situate them in something of an indefinite domain in which actions are very much akin to reactions; contexts in which the ‘voluntary’ and the reflexive are inextricably bound” (Robinson 2012, p. 400).¹³ Even enthusiasts such as Sinnott-Armstrong have pointed to similar potential problems: “We do not normally consciously intend to move a body part for no reason. Hence, it would be way too hasty to generalize from the few actions…tested to all actions in general” (Sinnott-Armstrong 2010, p. 19).¹⁴ But surely, a more sympathetic observer might think, these experiments must have some implications for our understanding of the nature of action and so for the possibility of freedom. After all, they did evidently involve at least two of the central elements of what we ordinarily take to be involved in a voluntary act: consciousness of some sort followed by movement. Thus, despite the reservation we just heard, Sinnott-Armstrong remains generally optimistic: “If we have tested only a sample of a larger class, and if all of that sample shows a certain property, and if there is no reason [sic] to think that the rest of the class differs from the sample, then that finding is at least some reason to expect that the property generalizes to the whole class or most of that class” (Sinnott-Armstrong 2010, pp. 36 – 37).¹⁵ I take this as a fine instance of the sort of reasoning that, while wildly successful for Galileo 400 years ago when he was busy establishing mechanics as the model for natural science, has been pretty disastrous in other areas where philosophers and scientists have insisted on exporting it. It involves the fatal assumption that highly idealized conditions, which in practice are only imperfectly realized in a few simple cases, are in reality perfectly realized in all cases. To make my point against this

 A bit later he adds, “Studies involving very limited reactions to dimensionless stimuli under the necessarily artificial constraints of the laboratory would be ill chosen as a means of addressing the larger issue even if less defective at the level of method, measurement, and interpretation” (Robinson 2012, p. 401). While Robinson is referring to Libet’s work in these passages, the same reasoning applies to that of Dylan-Haynes.  As with the passages from Robinson, Sinnott-Armstrong is referring to Libet’s work, but as with Robinson, the point applies to the fMRI studies as well.  Elsewhere we read, “Another response is that complex actions for reasons and goals are made up of little bits of bodily movement like those that Libet studied.”

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move in the present case I will borrow the term “degenerate case” as it is sometimes used in mathematics. A degenerate case can be defined as A limiting case in which a class of object changes its nature so as to belong to another, usually simpler, class. For example, the point is a degenerate case of the circle as the radius approaches 0, and the circle is a degenerate form of an ellipse as the eccentricity approaches 0. (my italics)¹⁶

My suggestion here is that rather than seeing these fMRI researchers as having arrived at some provisional conclusions pertaining to a paradigmatic case of action, a case which then might be used as a basis for generalizing to actions as a class, we see what the researchers have treated as a paradigm, pressing a button with either one’s right or left hand when one feels the urge to do so, as instead a “degenerate case” of action, as much of an action as a point is a circle, an action where the dimension of reasons has approached zero, that is to say, not really much of an action at all. Against the suspicion that my argument is somewhat aprioristic or that it relies on something unfashionable like “conceptual analysis” of what “we mean” by ‘action’, I would first respond that there is nothing a priori to my claim that an examination of the contexts in which we speak of action suggests that our concept of action is dependent on asking and answering questions about reasons, as when we ask answer the question “Why?”. That question and those answers are very much activities that make sense of language users who are already in the world. They are not part of an a priori analysis of the “meaning” of ‘action’, even if they may not be questions of natural science. Second, none of my argument implies that science can never change our views on matters pertaining to action and responsibility. Nor does my argument imply that there won’t be difficult cases where we aren’t sure how to integrate empirical findings with our sense of what to say in particular cases. But these possibilities do not impugn the significance of our normal sense of action without which there would be no hard cases.¹⁷ Finally, let’s look at the case where someone expressed skepticism concerning whether there are any actions at all. My argument might be taken as only

 http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Degenerate.html. See also Calculus: Early Transcendentals, 8th Edition, Howard Anton, Irl Bivens, Stephen Davis (Hoboken: Wiley, 2005) p. 746 on degenerate conic sections.  Nor is it necessary that all such challenges to our conception of action come from the natural sciences. Certainly ethnography might also be relevant both for providing us with different ways of understanding action and for addressing why the question of free will bothers us so much.

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having conditional force because it depends on something like a conceptual claim that the twitches studied in these fMRI experiments fail to fulfill conditions for what we normally mean by action. But, so this objection might go, maybe nothing fulfills these conditions. Why pay heed to the vague ‘normal case’ concepts like ‘action’ of folk psychology? The short answer is: because science itself is a human action. No action, no science. That science is a “human activity” may strike many now as merely platitudinous.¹⁸ The depressing fact is however that it seems to need pointing out again and again. While I won’t assert that a social world containing agency is a “condition of the possibility” simpliciter for the design and execution of these fMRI experiments, experiments whose significance also relies essentially on the cooperation of participating subjects, it is pretty hard to make any sense of them (or any other experiments for that matter) without first having a background of human agency in place. It’s hard to imagine how natural science is supposed to explain away agency because it seems entirely unclear how it can get itself going without it. We may or may not be able to make our different pictures of nature and our understanding of ourselves as agents actually harmonize with each other; we can at least see to it that they accommodate each other.

References Anscombe, G. Elizabeth M. (2000): Intention. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chun Siong Soon/Brass, Marcel/Heinze, Jochen/Haynes, John-Dylan (2008): “Unconscious Determinants of Free Decisions in the Human Brain”. In: Nature Neuroscience 11, pp. 543 – 545. Gutting, Gary (2011): “What Makes Free Will Free?”. In: New York Times, 10/19/2011, http:// opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/19/what-makes-free-will-free/ Hertzberg, Lars (2010). “The Psychology of Volition: ‘Problem and Method Pass One Another By’”. In: Gálvez, Jesús Padilla (Ed.): Philosophical Anthropology: Wittgenstein’s Perspective. Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, pp. 139 – 152. Libet, Benjamin/Wright, Jr., E.W./Gleason, C.A. (1982): “Readiness-Potentials Preceding Unrestricted ‘Spontaneous’ vs. Pre-Planned Voluntary Acts”. In: Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology 54, pp. 322 – 335. Libet, Benjamin/Gleason, Curtis A./Wright, Elwood W./Pearl, Dennis (1983): “Time of Conscious Intention to Act in Relation to Onset of Cerebral Activity (Readiness-Potential)” In: Brain 106, pp. 623 – 642. McDowell, John (2009): “Are Meaning, Understanding, etc. Definite States?”. In: The Engaged Intellect. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp. 79 – 95.

 Unless it is said as an expression of social constructivism, in which case it will strike many as merely absurd.

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McDowell, John (1994): Mind and World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Nahmias, Eddy (2011): “Is Neuroscience the Death of Free Will?”. In: New York Times, 11/13/2011, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/is-neuroscience-the-deathof-free-will/ Noë, Alva (2009): Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness. New York: Hill and Wang. Robinson, Daniel N. (2012): “Determinism: Did Libet Make the Case?”. In: Philosophy 87, pp. 395 – 401. Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter (2010): “Lessons from Libet”. In: Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter/Nadel, Lynn (Eds.): Conscious Will and Responsibility: A Tribute to Benjamin Libet. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 235 – 246. Smith, Kerri (2011):”Taking Aim at Free Will”. In: Nature 477, pp. 23 – 25.

Margaret Lock

The Alzheimer Enigma in an Ageing World

Abstract: Numerous governments broadcast that we are confronting an “epidemic” of Alzheimer’s disease. It is assumed that health care systems may be bankrupted, and that the global economy will suffer. Despite massive spending on drug development no cure for AD is in sight. A new research strategy is under way designed to prevent AD by detecting deposition of amyloid biomarkers, believed to indicate the first signs of the condition. A brief review of the history of AD follows, including discussion of the amyloid cascade hypothesis. Robust findings are then presented in which CT scans have shown that amyloid plaques are present in the brains of numerous non-demented elderly individuals, calling into question any straightforward relationship between amyloid deposition and AD dementia. Details about two clinical trials under way to detect early biomarkers are presented in conclusion, with emphasis on implicated ethical issues. Life is an adventure in a world where nothing is static … complete and lasting freedom from disease is but a dream. (René Dubos 1959, pp. 1– 2)

The demographic transformation currently taking place virtually worldwide – the “grey tsunami” as it’s fashionably known – will, it is claimed, be a drain on economies and drive up health care expenditures exorbitantly. What is more, this particular tsunami ensures that we must confront a pandemic of Alzheimer’s disease. The latest estimate for demented elderly worldwide in 2050 is somewhere between 135 – 150 million. In short, we are in a moral crisis of global proportions created by the very existence of older people, half of whom among those 85 years and older will, it is claimed, be demented. The palpable fear incited by these predictions is exacerbated by the knowledge that despite ever increasing spending in the order of billions of dollars over the past two decades, no effective treatment has yet been found to halt the neurological changes associated with AD. Certain drugs are effective for months in some individuals, but by no means all, and side-effects are common. Experts agree that, even should efficacious drugs be developed, medicating patients who are already demented can never be more than minimally effective because the neuropathological damage accumulated by then is too great. This menacing situation has stimulated a significant change in approach to confronting AD, one that is beginning to be implemented among research conglomerates DOI 10.1515/9783110523812-008

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around the world. Consensus papers penned by international panels of experts appeared in several medical journals a few years ago in which guidelines were set out as to how AD prevention is to be achieved, first in research settings and then, if these results are positive, in clinical practice (Jack et al. 2011). At the core of these recommendations is a multi-sited research effort designed to assess who among us is at risk for dementia, with a view to interceding with drugs at the so-called ‘prodromal’ or ‘pre-symptomatic’ stage of AD. It is argued that this latent form of Alzheimer’s can be detected by a biomarker that may become manifest as much as 20 years or more before behavioral changes of dementia are apparent, whether to affected individuals themselves, their families, or to clinicians when consulted. In order to achieve this goal, a large investment is currently being made to standardize AD biomarkers¹ and, further, to clarify what exactly they signify in terms of individual prognoses (Lock 2013a). This new orientation has repeatedly been pronounced as a ‘paradigm shift.’ However, without doubt Thomas Kuhn would reject this claim. At most, the move to pre-symptomatic prevention can be described as a “shake-up of normal science,” largely because the hypothesis that has grounded AD research for more than two decades continues to hold sway.

1. The Amyloid cascade hypothesis Arguably, the most influential article to be published in the Alzheimer world appeared in Science in 1992. This article was co-authored by John Hardy, a British neurogeneticist, and Gerald Higgins, formerly chief of molecular neurobiology at the National Institutes of Health in the US, who currently works in pharmacogenomics. Subtitled “The Amyloid Cascade Hypothesis,” the content of this essay quickly became the dominant explanatory paradigm for AD causation at the molecular level. The article opens: “Alzheimer’s is characterized by various pathological markers in the brain – large numbers of plaques surrounded by neurons containing neurofibrillary tangles, vascular damage from extensive plaque deposition, and neuronal cell loss” (p. 184). The second paragraph then sets out the cascade hypothesis. The authors generated this hypothesis on the basis of what were at the time newly discovered findings in connection with the genetics of early onset

 A biomarker is “a characteristic that is objectively measured and evaluated as an indicator of normal biological processes, pathogenic processes, or pharmacologic responses to the therapeutic intervention” (Official definition, National Institutes of Health, United States).

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Alzheimer’s disease, a rare single gene disorder. They also noted that people with Down syndrome, once adults, are highly susceptible to Alzheimer’s disease because the region of chromosome 21 that contains the APP gene that triggers forms of early onset AD is also involved in Down syndrome. Hardy and Higgins argued that the amyloid precursor protein produced by an APP mutation, when “cleaved” by an enzyme, results in an excess of toxic amyloid ß protein, bringing about a cascade of negative effects in the brain, the first indication of which are deposits of sticky clumps of amyloid. Specifically, the claim was that: “deposition of amyloid ß protein (AßP), the main component of the plaques, is the causative agent of Alzheimer’s pathology and … the neurofibrillary tangles, cell loss, vascular damage, and dementia follow as a direct result of this deposition” (p. 184, emphasis added). Hardy and Higgins acknowledged that several upstream pathways no doubt exist that can set off processes resulting in AD, but they argued for a final common pathway that applies equally to both the early onset, single gene determined, rare forms of the disease, and the much more common late onset AD with which virtually everyone has some familiarity. Since the publication of this article, a vast amount of research has been directed towards solving the question of what exactly leads to excess precipitation and/or poor clearance of amyloid-ß protein from the brain. And by far the majority of drug trials in connection with Alzheimer’s, costing billions of dollars, have been designed to eliminate plaques in the brains of experimental mice and humans – with virtually no success. In 2010 two major clinical trials were stopped in the same week. In one, subjects taking the drug exhibited worse cognitive problems than did the control group on placebo, and also appeared to be at increased risk for skin cancer (Langreth, 2010). At this juncture John Hardy began to publically declare doubts about the Cascade hypothesis. The new preventive regime was consolidated in 2011. The key biomarker being tracked is amyloid ß protein in cerebrospinal fluid, and its conversion to insoluble amyloid plaques in the brain and their subsequent build-up. However, it remains unclear as to what exactly is the role or roles of amyloid and what precisely triggers its deposition. A good number of researchers insist that amyloid has a function in defense of the aging brain. ß-amyloid is “highly conserved,” that is, it evolved long ago, and is present in numerous organisms ranging from bacteria to mammals and spans all aspects of cellular life. It has also been shown that amyloid assists in maintaining homeostasis, and/or supports the immune system, among yet other possible functions (Maury 2009). Only under certain conditions that are not thus far explained for does amyloid become a pathology.

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In late 2014 human neurons were grown for the first time in a gel created in a petri dish. The neurons were then genetically induced to exhibit the neuropathology of dominantly inherited, early onset Alzheimers. This culture produced not only beta-amyloid plaques but also tau tangles, in contrast to the mouse models used to date in which amyloid alone is produced. On the basis of these results, the petri-dish method is regarded as an exciting advance. As compared to an animal model, it is not so costly and takes much less time to screen potential drugs. This accomplishment has been heralded as very strong support for the amyloid cascade hypothesis (Kolata 2014). One of the principle investigators, Rudolph Tanzi, a neurogeneticist, is currently starting a project to test 1,200 drugs already on the market and another 5,000 experimental ones that have finished the first phase of clinical testing. Such a project would be impossible using mice as experimental subjects because a year would be required to test each drug. But, as the New York Times noted, a petri dish is not a brain; an in-vitro model does not replicate in vivo complexity. Even so, Sam Gandy a neurologist at Mount Sinai Icahn School of Medicine in New York insisted, this is “a real game changer, a paradigm shifter.” He added that he is “really enthusiastic to take a crack at this in my lab” and, further, his explicit assumption is that, if drugs are developed using this new technique, then both early and late onset AD patients will benefit (Kolata 2014).

2. Seduced by plaques and tangles The innovation that many agree brought about the “discovery” of Alzheimer’s disease was a silver precipitation technique first developed by the Italian scientist Camillo Golgi in 1873, and shortly thereafter modified by the Spanish neurologist and photographer, Santiago Ramon y Cajal. This technique radically transformed the emerging discipline of the neurosciences, and was regarded as such an important breakthrough that these two scientists were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine. Prior to the development of effective staining techniques it had already been postulated that psychiatric disorder must be intimately associated with specific demonstrable changes in the gross anatomy of the brain, but this could not be proven beyond noting anatomical changes detectable by eye, the significance of which were speculative. Nevertheless, efforts were made as early as the 1850s to create subcategories of mental illness based on gross neuroanatomical lesions found at autopsy. Commencing in the 1880s, microscopic examinations were carried out in earnest and, with improved preservation, fixing, and the development of new stains, it was possible to discern in

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closer detail the material changes assumed to be causal of psychiatric disorder and senility (Berrios 1990). As the neurologist Peter Whitehouse noted: The staining process is a centrally important one that, literally, brings the lesion into the medical gaze. As part of a process that made a thing visible, it thereby made it (appear) real (Gaines and Whitehouse 2006).

The silver precipitation technique was refined in 1902 by the German scientist Max Bielschowsky and shortly thereafter was made use of by Alois Alzheimer to stain sections of brain tissue he had procured from several patients who had died at an early age of a dementia-like condition. The histological slides allowed Alzheimer to see with the aid of a microscope what had not before been evident, namely the clumped structures he labeled as neurofibrillary tangles that would thereafter be recognized as one of the key autopsy signifiers of Alzheimer’s disease. Neurofibrils are present in normal cells, and had been observed well before Alzheimer’s time, but the stain clearly showed the extent to which they had accumulated excessively to form abnormally dense twisted fibers inside the nerve cells. A second signifier of what would become known as Alzheimer’s disease, amyloid plaques, found between the nerve cells (neurons), were also visible when he applied a different stain already in use at the end of the 19th century. Alzheimer and his colleagues were convinced that lesions in the autopsied brains of demented patients that they believed they could see without the aid of a microscope were important signifiers of mental illness. What they perceived so clearly when looking down the microscope at the stained preparations of brain tissue was evidence that their beliefs were indeed ‘reality’. When Alzheimer’s original slides, lost and finally rediscovered, were re-examined in 1998, it was apparent that his neuropathological observations had been accurate by today’s standards, and that he had uncovered what we now know is a rare condition driven by specific genes, namely ‘early onset’ AD, in which patients exhibit severe dementia usually in their 40s and early 50s and die shortly thereafter. Medical politics on the part of Alzheimer’s superior, the eminent psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin, determined that the eight autopsied cases Alzheimer had gathered together would be designated as a new disease named ‘pre-senile dementia.’ Historians disagree as to why Kraepelin made this move to have a disease named based on so few cases. Some insist that it was in part to counter the attention being garnered by Sigmund Freud for a psychoanalytic approach to be taken in connection with mental illness. Kraepelin called the new condition that Alzheimer had ‘discovered’, ‘pre-senile dementia,’ a term that he deliberately created as an offshoot of the much larger category known by everyone of the

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day, including the public, as ‘senile dementia,’ a state assumed to be an inevitable part of ‘normal aging.’ For Kraepelin, the early age of onset and, perhaps, the severity of the condition in these cases, were highly significant. But Alzheimer himself vacillated as to whether or not his cases did indeed constitute a new condition, largely because he had autopsied the brains of numerous older people, and frequently found plaques and tangles in their brains. It was this shared neuropathology, common to both early and late onset AD, that caused Alzheimer and certain of his colleagues to have serious doubts, and the staining technology that rendered the lesions in the brain visible under the microscope was conclusive evidence to them of one, and only one condition, regardless of the age of onset of dementia in the patient (Lock 2013b). It is not known if Alzheimer ever fully capitulated to Kraepelin’s insistence that a new disease had been found, but an assumption persists to the present day among perhaps the majority of experts, that the neuropathology tells the whole story, as is made clear by responses to the petri-dish experiment. Not only can the striking difference in age of onset of dementia be safely set to one side, but so too can the totally different contributions made by genetics to early and late onset AD respectively. Autosomal dominant genes are causal of early onset AD, whereas numerous susceptibility genes, almost all of low explanatory power, with the notable exception of APOEe4, are implicated in late onset AD (Lock 2013b). Of course this was unknown in Alois Alzheimer’s day. Despite its baptism by Kraepelin, for approximately four decades, from 1920 to 1970, pre-senile dementia was largely forgotten, although senile dementia remained a common condition associated with aging. No doubt its rarity was largely to blame for this situation. The historian Jesse Ballenger has pointed out several major changes that took place in the 1970s putting what is now known eponymously as Alzheimer’s disease firmly on the map again (Ballenger 2006). Among these changes was the development of the electron microscope permitting refinements in detecting neuropathology. Second, Robert Katzman, an influential neurologist working in the 1970s, argued that the stigmatizing label of senile dementia should be dropped, and pre-senile and senile dementia should be unified as one pathological condition to be called Alzheimer’s disease. Furthermore, concerns about an aging population beginning to fill up hospital beds led in the 1970s to the formation of The National Institute on Aging in the US, and similar moves were made in other countries at the same time. Incipient Alzheimer movements also began to take shape in several countries at this time, effectively helping involved families to bring public attention to the condition. Alzheimer’s disease was first described as a ‘ticking time bomb’ in the 1970s but, even so, despite concerted efforts to raise money, Alzheimer’s has always lagged far behind in funding as compared to that of cancer and heart disease.

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As the Canadian neurogeneticist, Peter Hyslop, put it to me: “Alzheimer’s has never been a sexy disease.” This appears to be in large part because a lingering stigma has remained until recently, and most affected people are regarded as decrepit, and hence it would be inefficient to direct limited funding for health services to such a condition. In the past five years or so this attitude has changed rather dramatically, driven in political circles by the fear that the Alzheimer epidemic will bankrupt economies. One example of this change of heart is that in 2014 a consortium of 350 scientists in 20 teams across Canada was funded to carry out an intensive investigation of many facets of the challenge posed by an increasing number of AD cases. As compared to the US, many European countries, Japan, and elsewhere, the Canadian government has been slow to respond to what is regarded as an Alzheimer epidemic. But when the then Canadian Federal Health Minister, Rona Ambrose, came to Montreal to announce the award she stated firmly, as a couple of years earlier had done President Obama and, more recently, David Cameron in the UK and other heads of state in the EU: “a cure for AD will be had by 2025.” The principle investigator of the Canadian team, Howard Chertkow, a neurologist, effectively deflated the hype by stating in his appreciatory speech: “we [Alzheimer researchers] are in a maze trying to find a way out,” and “we are not sure if we are dealing with one disease or many.”

3. When minds and brains are out of sync In addition to a striking difference in the age of onset of AD profoundly influenced, we now know, by genetics, a second anomaly has been evident since Alzheimer’s day that raises a serious ontological question as to what exactly is the AD phenomenon. It has been shown repeatedly, that the behavioral changes associated with a clinical diagnosis of AD, above all memory loss, do not always correlate neatly at autopsy with the gold standard neuro-pathological signifiers of AD – neuritic plaques, neurofibrillary tangles, and cell loss. A good proportion of non-demented elderly have brains ‘loaded with junk,’ as more than one neurologist puts it, and a recent study indicates that among those over 85 who remain in good cognitive health, almost all have plaques, and some even have tangles in their brains (Bennett 2011). Until recently these anomalies have routinely been brushed to one side by most researchers, on the assumption of a clinical misdiagnosis. But over the past decade, especially since PIB-PET scanning became available in 2004, they demand attention. One illustrative example of this discrepancy is the widely cited Nun Study. In 1986, 678 Catholic Sisters who belong to an order called The School Sisters of

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Notre Dame volunteered to be research subjects for a project that continues until the present day. Autobiographies written in the 1930s and 1940s, when these nuns were in their early 20s, were stored and later matched with neuro-psychiatric assessments administered regularly from age 75 years on. These two sets of data were subsequently linked to autopsy findings after death. When volunteering for the project, every nun had agreed to donate her brain for autopsy. One nun, formerly a biology teacher and still very articulate at 96, explicitly wanted to contribute to science; other nuns stated that one has no need of a brain in heaven. In all, 500 brains have been donated thus far. The advantage to researchers of these particular research subjects is that environmental factors are nicely controlled – throughout their lives, the nuns have eaten virtually the same diet, and they have other life-style behaviors in common too (Tyas et al. 2007). Among the several significant findings of this study it was shown that a good proportion of the nuns who coped very ably with the neuro-psychological battery of tests proved, at autopsy, to have extensive signs of plaques and tangles in their brains, confirming the inconclusive observations made repeatedly since Alzheimer’s day. As the involved neuropathologist put it, “these brains are diseased but there is no sign of dementia.” The study also showed that a high proportion of nuns who had dementia proved to have neurovascular damage at autopsy (Snowdon, 1997). The brain tissue collected as part of the Nun Study has now been made available for research projects around the world and has, therefore, entered the arena of ‘big data,’ global science. Another, more recent, epidemiological study was carried out by Cambridge University researchers in which a carefully delineated sample of 456 individuals were tested regularly while alive for clinical signs of AD. These subjects had all agreed to donate their brains for research after death. This project showed, as expected, that the neuropathological features assumed to be diagnostic of Alzheimer’s disease, including plaques, tangles, and cell loss, are more evident in older than in younger subjects. However, although the correlation between clinically diagnosed AD with postmortem neuropathology was strong in the group aged between 60 and 75, this finding was shown to be less and less strong with increasing age. Among those aged 75 and over, the researchers were surprised to find a remarkable overlap in the neuropathological features found at postmortem, whether or not these individuals had been clinically diagnosed with dementia while alive (Savva et al. 2009). The researchers concluded that AD is best thought of ‘a diffuse clinical syndrome’ and factors other than the simple presence of so-called Alzheimer neuropathology must contribute to the clinical expression of dementia, especially in those over 75 years of age (Richards and Brayne 2010). The senior member of the Cambridge team, the epidemiologist Carol Brayne, has been arguing for

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years that research into dementia should move away from a model that poses as its basic question “has he got it?” to one of “how much of it has he got?” and “why?” A neat correspondence between states of mind and brain does not exist, it seems, an ontological paradox if ever there was one; and the availability of amyloid imaging has brought this to the fore by rendering this anomaly literally visible. Accumulating neuroimaging findings have shown repeatedly that between 20 to 40 % of healthy individuals, often expressed as “up to a third of cognitively normal elderly subjects” carry plaque in their brains (Mintun et al. 2006; Jack et al. 2009). It is evident that these findings are partially dependent upon age and genotype, but this does not fully account for the findings. The assumption of most involved researchers is that these individuals are on their way to dementia if they don’t first die of something else and that this accounts in full for the anomalous autopsy findings that have plagued the field over the past century. But other researchers argue that such an assumption can never be proven, even if people live to be 130, and we should focus on what it is that accounts for “neuro-protection” in these unaffected individuals – something that has consistently taken a back seat. Findings by the Chicago-based neurologist David Bennett and colleagues published in 2013 may become the wedge that forces some dramatic re-conceptualization of the Alzheimer phenomenon. In this study, a total of 467 healthy participants were selected from longitudinal cohort studies. These subjects agreed to numerous annual clinical evaluations designed to assess 5 cognitive domains, and donated their brains for autopsy at death, on average, at 85 years. As have so many other studies, it was found that the brains of most individuals contained recognized AD pathology, including plaques and tangles. The researchers concluded that AD pathology and infarctions (dead tissue) are common in older persons who do not have cognitive impairment, although a decline in episodic and working memory had been demonstrated in many while alive. The researchers concluded that the bulk of variation evident in cognitive decline with ageing remains unexplained. However, so-called “normal” memory loss associated with aging should not be regarded as benign, they insisted, but does indeed indicate the beginnings of a pathological process. Nevertheless, they argue that we must shift the focus of attention to neuro-protection in an effort to detect what it is that enables people to stave off dementia prior to death. As Bennett and his colleagues put it: “Our understanding of the mechanisms that allow some persons to remain dementia-free despite accumulating neuropathology is still in its infancy” (Boyle et al. 2013). Efforts have been made repeatedly to standardize AD clinical diagnoses over the years, on the assumption that this will dispose of persistent disconcerting

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anomalies. The understanding has been that one must strive to detect “pure” cases of AD for research purposes, but in recent years this thinking has changed. David Bennett put it this way when talking with me: …along with the Alzheimer’s pathology comes all kinds of other things. So, for example, infarcts, Lewy bodies, and other things, are contributing to whether someone tips over the edge. We’ve moved beyond AD as a wastebasket category, and we’ve got an Alzheimer’s bucket now, and in that bucket is mostly Alzheimer’s – and we’re pretty good at that – but all kinds of other crap also tags along. And the difficulty is that, even if you can separate these things out, the value of doing this from a research point of view is dubious at best, and probably introduces bias. So…you don’t want to be studying ‘pure’ Alzheimer disease because you’re going to find some really weird things. But people still do this. (April 2010)

Epidemiological studies increasingly make clear that among individuals over 75 who are diagnosed with AD, by far the majority do not exhibit “pure” AD, suggesting that caution is needed in setting up drug trials. Furthermore, several papers have been published arguing that it is time to sub-divide the AD category, not only in terms of age of onset, but also with respect to neuropathology. A recent study suggests that patients with vascular risk factors, cardiovascular disease, and cerebrovascular disease should not be excluded from clinical studies investigating AD because these conditions are present in such a large percentage of demented subjects. And mixed dementia is now regarded as the most common form of dementia (National Institutes of Health, 2014). A further difficulty arises because it is clear that epidemiological assessment of AD cases cannot possibly be accurate; it has been estimated that at least 50 % of potential cases in the US alone never come to medical attention (Alzheimer’s Association Report, 2011). When researchers do surveys using randomly selected samples from populations that are monitored over years, as does the Cambridge group, David Bennett’s group, and certain researchers in northern Europe, then the findings are of worth. However, for the majority of projects, subjects are usually recruited from memory clinics, introducing considerable bias. If we think globally, the task of projecting numbers of Alzheimer cases, and hence the size of the pandemic with which we are confronted, is an absurd exercise because the majority of people with dementia never come to medical attention. In making estimates about AD we are not dealing with hard facts, then, but rather with matters of concern, as Bruno Latour would put it. And amyloid is clearly a coyote-like character, a trickster, as Donna Haraway has characterized certain biological phenomena; an entity that refuses to be pinned down. Amyloid is surely involved in some way in most instances of what is diagnosed as AD and, significantly, in other conditions too, but just how, and what exactly its contributions are has yet to be elucidated.

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4. Biomarkers for AD To date, testing of individuals for AD biomarkers takes place in research settings alone. Once tested, individuals who are “cognitively normal” but biomarker positive for amyloid are classified as “asymptomatic at risk for AD.” In 2011, researchers who contributed to the new guidelines dutifully put in print just how little is as yet known about AD biomarkers: The difficulty … is that we have not yet established a firm link between the appearance of any specific biomarker in asymptomatic individuals and the subsequent emergence of clinical symptomatology. If we can, however, definitively determine the risk of developing AD dementia and the temporal course of clinical progression … we will open a crucial window of opportunity to intervene with disease-modifying therapy. Although we hypothesize that the current earliest detectable pathological change will be in the form of Aß accumulation, it is possible that Aß accumulation is necessary but not sufficient to produce the clinical manifestations of AD (emphasis added, Sperling et al. 2011).

This paper continues: “we acknowledge that the etiology of AD remains uncertain.” It is also noted that many of the studies on which biomarker findings are based are likely to have “cohort biases,” and are probably not representative of the general population. Caution is further noted that because the biomarkers of interest are merely “proxies” for the disease, they do not fully reflect the processes taking place in the living brain, as is the case for the petri dish findings. A longitudinal Australian project involving 87 individuals diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment and who also had positive amyloid on imaging, concluded that virtually all of the research subjects became clinically demented within 3 years following their recruitment into the study (Rowe et al., 2013). This finding supports the amyloid hypothesis, and indicates that some progress has been made towards biomarker standardization and predictions. But numerous publications have shown inconclusive findings. And, most important, the continuing good cognitive health of the 30 % or so of people who have a demonstrated amyloid load in their brains remains unaccounted for.

5. Recruitment for Alzheimer research trials Families where “dominantly inherited Alzheimer’s disease” (also known as “early onset AD”) is present make very attractive subjects for clinical trials today. The approximately 5 % of families distributed worldwide where AD is known to be caused by autosomal dominant genes have recently become targeted for trials in connection with AD prevention: standardization and harmoniza-

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tion of biomarkers, and development of AD drugs. The facts that in these families the onset of the disease is very early, around age 40 to 50 years of age, and progression to death is rapid, are advantageous characteristics for the purposes of researchers because trials can be of shorter duration, thus saving large amounts of money. And one can predict from genetic testing carried out prior to the trial who exactly will succumb to AD, making for a judicious selection of research subjects. Quite dramatically, people from families with early onset AD, who have long felt themselves neglected by researchers, have become a precious resource. In one trial, a multi-sited consortium is carrying out cross-sectional, longitudinal studies with over 260 people in the U.S., Great Britain, and Australia, all of whom carry one of the three genetic mutations associated with familial early onset AD. This study is scheduled to continue until 2016 (Bateman et al. 2012). Preliminary findings from the original exploratory study, limited to the US, suggest that in these families prodromal dementia is detectable up to 20 years before the appearance of clinical symptoms. John Morris, director of the longstanding Alzheimer research group at Washington University, heads up this consortium. Together with his colleague Randall Bateman he recently made the following observation reconfirming the long-standing assumption made by Alois Alzheimer and numerous other experts over the years, that these two conditions are essentially one, a conclusion based on shared late-stage neuropathology: …Because the clinical and pathological phenotypes of dominantly inherited Alzheimer’s disease appear similar to those for the far more common late-onset “sporadic” AD, the nature and sequence of brain changes in early-onset AD are also likely relevant for late-onset AD. Clinical studies in AD caused by gene mutations are likely to pioneer the way to prevention trials for all forms of AD (Bateman and Morris 2012, emphasis added).

A second clinical trial is set in Colombia where a large group of 25 extended families, originally of Basque origin, about 5,000 in all, live in both urban and rural areas scattered mostly around the city, Medellín. These families comprise the most concentrated group of biologically close-knit individuals found anywhere, all of whom carry a specific mutation of the gene presenilin-1 – one of the genes that causes early onset AD. Close to one third of this population – approximately 1,500 people – harbor what is known locally as paisa. Typically, memory loss becomes manifest around 45 years of age and most affected individuals progress to full-blown AD by their early 50s. Francisco Lopera, a neurologist associated with the University in Medellín was the first scientist to pay serious attention to this devastating condition. Once Lopera understood that during the course of three generations, half of the children were affected, he realized that he had stumbled across a form of dementia that must surely be due to a sin-

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gle gene mutation. A decade later, in the 1990s, the gene was isolated, at which time the finding began to attract international attention. Despite the serious risks posed by drug traffickers and Farc rebels, who were very active at the time, Dr. Lopera and his colleagues eventually managed to collect DNA samples and assemble a genetic pedigree extending back nearly 300 years, to around the time that these families first arrived as part of the ongoing colonization of Colombia by Spaniards and Basques in search of gold. One scientist has described these extended families as a “natural laboratory” providing researchers with an “enriched sample” who have “cleaner brains that can give a better picture” than do older subjects, and Joseph Arboleda, a Harvard-based researcher who works with Dr Lopera stated: “the trial puts the amyloid hypothesis to the test…It is possible that drugs will inhibit the brain plaque and yet the family will still get dementia. Such results would prove devastating for current research.” However: “If in the extended family, the onset of Alzheimer’s is delayed, or stopped, then the researchers will have hit the mother lode – a potential cure for sufferers worldwide.” But, he noted, that remains “a big if” (BBC News, 2011). Eric Reiman, the Arizona-based Banner Alzheimer Institute senior PI of the Colombia trial who has been designated as “a rock star of science,” has also been explicit in suggesting that treatments could be generated to protect millions worldwide from common Alzheimer’s. In 2011 he said: … if there is no effect on the biomarkers after 2 years in the right direction [we will] declare futility…If, however, they do budge in the right direction [we will] continue to follow them a little bit longer to see if it slows even subtle memory decline…if it does, I have a feeling that may be enough evidence for regulatory agencies to consider using biomarkers under their accelerated approval mechanism in other [AD] populations (Sullivan 2011).

When I spoke in July 2012 with Pierre Tariot, a geriatric neurologist and an associate Director of the Banner Institute, he told me that discussions have been taking place since 2006 about whether or not this trial was really feasible. Among the many questions posed, he said, were: How can the trial be carried out in a way that would be “respectful and humble”? Should the biological materials obtained from these peoples be regarded as, in effect, a “sacred resource”? An IRB approved registry was set up in Medellín in 2012 enabling potential participants to make a connection with Dr. Lopera, and signatories were asked to attend seminars where the ultimate objectives of the trial, what would be required of research subjects, and the process of randomization were explained at length. Many of the trial subjects have at least 10 years of formal education, but others have only three years or less of schooling. Not everyone proved eager to participate in the trial, but the community as a whole apparently accepted the

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plan favorably. These families are practicing Catholics, and young women are raised to believe that they should have children – that this is part of God’s will. Given this situation, local priests were involved in discussions from the outset. One requirement is that women should not become pregnant during the trial and should, therefore, be using contraceptives. The priests proved to be cooperative, and apparently had no difficulty with contraceptive use for this purpose. After months of silence, the Colombian government finally approved the trial in late 2013. The hope is to produce interim results by 2017. The NIH is providing $16 million, another $15 million comes from private sources, and Genentech, a unit of Roche, is providing the bulk of the money – $65 million. This is a novel approach to testing drugs because subjects have not been diagnosed with AD when they enter the trial. All participants are being administered lumbar punctures, brain scans, and other tests at regular intervals for up to 60 months to track biomarkers and clinical changes unless, of course, the trial is stopped prematurely. Participants know that they will not be told if they have the mutation, even after the trial is completed. And it appears that these Colombians have no wish to learn this information, something that puts the researchers at ease, because Medellín has no genetic counselors. It remains an open question as to what extent the research subjects fully comprehend the uncertainties associated with the trial in both its implementation and outcome, despite the best efforts of the research team. Given the tragedy that stalks the lives of these families surely many are willing to undergo extensive personal discomfort and risk in the hope that a medication will be discovered to avert their fate. A study published in The Lancet Neurology (Acosta-Baena 2011) based on exploratory findings from the Colombia project, even before the trial had been approved, reported that research with a sample of more than 1700 individuals in Medelín, 449 of whom are carriers of the paisa mutation, showed that signs of biomarker changes in cerebrospinal fluid had begun to take place in mutation carriers as young as 18 years of age. This means that the planned trial that will enroll subjects aged 30 and up may not be appropriate. If, as many involved scientists believe, amyloid changes should be medicated from the earliest possible moment of detection by biomarkers, then the trial is likely to fail because the cascade will already be under way. These findings also show that among early onset mutation carriers a build up of amyloid plaque appears to result from excessive production of the Aß peptide whereas, with late onset AD, amyloid deposition results from an inability to clear Aß peptide from the system. These tentative findings suggest that significant differences may well exist between dominantly inherited and late-onset AD, even in their final molecular pathways, and not simply in terms of distal causation – thus throwing into jeopardy the assumption that early and late onset AD

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are essentially the same condition and hence, if and when an effective drug is found for early onset AD it will be equally effective with late onset AD. Equally of interest was the remarkable finding that neurodegeneration involving reduced grey matter and altered synaptic functioning, among yet other changes, appears to take place in advance of amyloid plaque deposition. Should this second finding hold up, and particularly if these changes are also demonstrated in late onset AD cases, then the amyloid cascade hypothesis and the significance of amyloid as the key biomarker for pre-symptomatic AD will have to be modified. However, until such time as an alternative hypothesis is postulated, it is likely that tinkering with the cascade will continue unabated (Fleisher et al. 2012; Reiman et al. 2012). Concerns that will arise in the minds of social scientists and ethicists in connection with the Colombian trial are reminiscent of problems associated with the Human Genome Diversity Project (Lock 1994), and also with the expanding universe of drug trials in which “naïve” subjects (individuals who do not routinely imbibe medication) often living in economically deprived conditions, are systematically recruited as research subjects (London and Kimmelman 2008). Recently, people with Down syndrome have been recruited by researchers at the University of California, San Diego and at University College London as research subjects for AD drug testing – similarly to dominantly inherited AD families, these individuals are particularly good subjects from the scientists point of view – virtually 100 % will get AD. We are told that these individuals volunteered willingly, and one teenager when interviewed said he ‘wanted to help others’ (Hamilton 2014). The petri dish success may well speed up the initial steps of drug testing, but this will not obviate the necessity of phased testing of drugs on humans with all the associated ethical quandaries. It is conceivably possible that drugs will be developed that are effective for one or more subtype of AD that strike at younger ages, that is, with the ‘purer’ forms of AD. But when it comes to people aged 75 and older, those of us who account for by far the majority of cases of AD worldwide, the entanglement of aging and dementia may well present an insurmountable challenge. Aging is unarguably the leading cause of AD, and we cannot “cure” aging, despite the claims of certain mavericks. Nor, for the foreseeable future, globally, will the majority of dementia cases come to medical attention.

6. Alzheimer’s and public health For the time being the two major anomalies evident since Alois Alzheimer’s day remain unsolved – whether or not early onset AD and late onset AD can be best

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understood as effectively one and the same medical condition and, second, the unexplained protection that so many people apparently have even when amyloid plaques and other signs of so-called neuropathology are present in their brains. The question arises as to under what circumstances is neuropathology not pathological? The present search for effective drugs using early onset AD families as subjects for clinical trials is raising some difficult epistemo/ontological questions for reseachers, as is PIB-Pet scan neuroimaging, and visible dissent is beginning to be visible in AD research communities. There is no denying that dementia is on the increase globally, given that the proportion of elderly in populations everywhere is on the increase. But it is equally clear that, even should advances be made in the scientific understanding of dementia, particularly of the vascular/ AD type of mixed dementia, the vast majority of affected people will never come to medical attention. In addition to the search for biomarker diagnosis of prodromal AD and effective medication to block its progress, implementation of a public health approach to AD is, I believe, an urgent matter. This is particularly so because it is clearly highly questionable as to whether elimination of amyloid is a wise approach to take. Alleviation of poverty, debilitating inequities, and access to good nutrition, sanitation, and education, have long been recognized as crucial to human health, and we now know that this includes neuro-health throughout the life span. Dementia is apparently confined for the majority of individuals to old age. But it has been shown that the epigenome is particularly susceptible in utero to deregulation, and during neonatal development, puberty, and especially in old age. One article concluded that late onset Alzheimer’s: … may represent merely an extreme form of normal aging which would imply that every human being has a certain predisposition to developing Alzheimer’s. … the epigenetic effects can accumulate throughout life, especially from the time-point when the epigenetic machinery suffers from old age but also from early embryonal stages or even [as a result of] trans-generational [effects], influenced by epigenetic events in the parents. (Wang et al., 2008)

Researchers involved in the shift to biomarker detection show few if any signs of recognition of the importance of epigenetic research findings. A recent study highlights DDT exposure and DDT residues in human blood and tissue as significantly associated with risk for AD (Szabo 2014). Research also strongly suggests that exposure to lead in utero is associated with increased amyloid deposition in the aging brain (Basha et al. 2005). For numerous people, then, the prevention or postponement of AD will come about by a reduction in toxic environments. In addition, junk food consumption, smoking, obesity, and

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diabetes are all factors that have been shown to increase the risk of vascular dementia and hence AD. Social milieu is also important. Increasing isolation and loneliness of many elderly, and the stubborn persistence of stigma associated with dementia need attention. On a happier note, the Cambridge group led by Carol Brayne, certain findings of which appeared earlier in this paper, recently published newly amassed data about two random samples both of well over 7000 individuals aged 65 and over in the United Kingdom. One sample was tested between 1984 and 1994 and the second between 2008 and 2011. The results showed that dementia rates had dropped by about 24 % over the intervening years between sampling. These findings are assumed to be due largely to healthier life styles, especially changes in dietary and exercise habits; possibly also to fewer toxic exposures, and to higher levels of education (a variable that needs further untangling in my opinion) (Matthews 2013). The Danish study carried out by researchers at the University of Southern Denmark involved two cohorts: the first was born in 1905 and was assessed at 93 years of age, and the second was born in 1915 and assessed at 95 years of age. It was found that the 1915 cohort scored significantly better than did the 1905 cohort on both cognitive testing and in being able to carry out daily activities independently (Christensen et al. 2013). Medical commentators on these and other studies with similar findings suggest that better monitoring of cardiovascular and neurovascular conditions from mid life on probably account for a decreased incidence of mixed dementias. So here begins another story – one in which the oft-repeated mantra about a pandemic of Alzheimer’s rising exponentially year by year may have to be modified, although of course regional variation in AD prevalence will persist. Meantime, in 2012 it was announced that research has shown that imbibing dark chocolate on a regular basis is good for neuro-protection. However, the makers of the Mars bar contributed to funding, and elderly subjects diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment had to imbibe either a low, medium, or large amount of a chocolate based drink every day for eight weeks. Among those who imbibed the highest levels of flavanoids (found in chocolate), testing showed that cognitive health had apparently improved (Matthews 2012).

References Acosta-Baena, Natalia, Diego Sepulveda-Falla, Carlos Mario Lopera-Go´mez, Mario Ce´sar Jaramillo-Elorza, Sonia Moreno, Daniel Camilo Aguirre-Acevedo, Amanda Saldarriaga, and Francisco Lopera (2011): “Pre-dementia Clinical Stages in Presenilin 1 E280 A

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Familial Early-Onset Alzheimer’s Disease: A Retrospective Cohort Study.” In: The Lancet Neurology 10, no. 3, pp. 213 – 20. Alzheimer’s Association Report (2011): “Alzheimer’s Disease Facts and Figures 2011.” In: Alzheimer’s and Dementia 7, pp. 208 – 244. Basha, M. Riyaz, Wei Wei, Saleh A. Bakheet, Nathalie Benitez, Hasan K. Siddiqi, Yuan-Wen Ge, Debomoy K. Lahiri and Nasser H. Zawia (2005): “The Fetal Basis of Amyloidogenesis: Exposure to Lead and Latent Overexpression of Amyloid Precursor Protein and ß-Amyloid in the Aging Brain.” In: The Journal of Neuroscience 25, pp. 823 – 829. BBC News, May 19th (2011): “The Colombian Alzheimer’s Family Testing Possible Cures.” http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-13428265. Ballenger, Jesse F. (2006): Self, Senility, and Alzheimer’s Disease in Modern America: A History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Bateman, Randall J., Chengjie Xiong, Tammie L.S. Benzinger, Anne M. Fagan, Alison Goate, Nick C. Fox, Daniel S. Marcus, Nigel J. Cairns, Xianyun Xie, Tyler M. Blazey, David M. Holtzman, Anna Santacruz, Virginia Buckles, Angela Oliver, Krista Moulder, Paul S. Aisen, Bernardino Ghetti, William E. Klunk, Eric McDade, Ralph N. Martins, Colin L. Masters, Richard Mayeux, John M. Ringman, Martin N. Rossor, Peter R. Schofield, Reisa A. Sperling, Stephen Salloway, and John C. Morris, for the Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer Network (2012): “Clinical and Biomarker Changes in Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer’s Disease.” In: The New England Journal of Medicine 367, pp. 795 – 804. Bateman, Randall and John Morris (2012): “Exciting Current and Upcoming Alzheimer’s Therapy Trials, The Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer Network—Therapeutic Trials Unit.” In: Dementia Today: Daily News and Views on Alzheimer’s Disease and Other Dementias. http://www.dementiatoday.com/exciting-current-and-upcoming-alzheimers-therapy-trials/ Bennett, David A, Robert S. Wilson, Patricia A. Boyle, Aron S. Buchman and Julie A. Schneider (2011): “Relation of Neuropathology to Cognition in Persons without Cognitive Impairment.” In: American Neurological Association 72, pp. 599 – 606. Berrios, G. E. (1990): “Alzheimer’s Disease: A Conceptual History.” In: International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry 5, pp. 355 – 365. Boyle, Patricia A., Lei Yu, Robert S. Wilson, Julie A. Schneider and David A. Bennett (2013): “Relation of Neuropathology with Cognitive Decline among Older Persons without Dementia.” In: Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience 5, pp. 1 – 8. Christensen, Kaare, Mikael Thinggard, Anna Oksuzyan, Troels Steenstrup, Karen Anderson-Ranberg, Bernard Jeune, Matt McGue and James W. Vaupel (2013): “Physical and Cognitive Functioning of People Older than 90 Years: A Comparison of Two Danish Cohorts Born 10 years apart.” In: The Lancet 382, pp. 1507 – 1513. Dubos, René (1959): Mirage of Health: Utopias, Progress, and Biological Change. London: Harper and Row. Fleisher, Adam S., Kewei Chen, Yakeel T. Quiroz, et al. (2012): “Florbetapir PET Analysis of Amyloid-β Deposition in the Presenilin 1 E280 A Autosomal Dominant Alzheimer’s Disease Kindred: A Cross-Sectional Study.” In: The Lancet Neurology 11, pp. 1057 – 65. Gaines, Atwood, and Peter Whitehouse (2006): “Building a Mystery: Alzheimer Disease, Mild Cognitive Impairment, and Beyond.” In: Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology 13, pp. 61 – 74. Hamilton, Jon (2014): “People With Down Syndrome Are Pioneers In Alzheimer’s Research.” www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/08/25/341672950/

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Hardy, John A., and Gerald A. Higgins (1992): “Alzheimer’s Disease: The Amyloid Cascade Hypothesis.” In Science 256, pp. 184 – 185. Jack, Clifford R., Val J. Lowe, Stephen D. Weigand, Heather J. Wiste, Matthew L. Senjem, David S. Knopman, Maria M. Shiung (2009): “Serial PIB and MRI in Normal, Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer’s Disease: Implications for Sequence of Pathological Events in Alzheimer’s Disease.” In Brain 132 pp. 1355 – 65. Jack, Clifford R, Marilyn S Albert, David S Knopman, Guy M McKhann, Reisa A Sperling, Maria C Carrillo, Bill Thies, and Creighton H Phelps (2011): “Introduction to the Recommendations from the National Institute on Aging-Alzheimer’s Association Workgroups on Diagnostic Guidelines for Alzheimer’s Disease.” In Alzheimer’s & Dementia 7, pp. 257 – 262. Kolata, Gina (2014): “Researchers Replicate Alzheimer’s Brain Cells in a Petri Dish.” In: New York Times, Oct. 12th. Langreth, Robert (2010): “Eli Lilly Alzheimer’s Disease Failure Bolsters Amyloid Theory Skeptics— Forbes.” In: Forbes, August 17th. http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertlangreth/2010/08/17/eli-lilly-alzheimers-failure-bolsters-skeptics-on-amyloid-theory/. Lock, Margaret (1994): “Interrogating the Human Genome Diversity Project.” In: Social Science & Medicine 39, pp. 603 – 606. Lock, Margaret (2013a): “Detecting amyloid biomarkers: Embodied risk and Alzheimer Prevention.” In Biosocieties 8, pp. 107 – 123. Lock, Margaret (2013b): The Alzheimer’s Conundrum: Entanglements of Dementia and aging. New Haven: Princeton University Press. London, Alex John, and Jonathan Kimmelman (2008): “Justice in Translation: From Bench to Bedside in the Developing World.” In: The Lancet 372, pp. 82 – 85. Fiona E Matthews, Antony Arthur, Linda E. Barnes, John bond, Carol Jagger, Louise Robinson,and Carol Brayne (2013): “A Two-Decade Comparison of Prevalence of Dementia in Individuals Aged 65 Years and Older from Three Geographical Areas of England: Results of the Cognitive Function and Ageing Study I and II.” In: The Lancet 382, pp. 1405 – 1412. Matthews, Susan (2012): “MyHealthNews”, August 13th http://www.livescience.com/36607chocolate-cognitive-function.html. Mintun, M. A., G. N. Larossa, Y. I. Sheline, C. S. Dence, S. Y. Lee, R. H. Mach, W. E. Klunk, C. A. Mathis, S. T. DeKosky, and J. C. Morris (2006): “[11C]PIB in a Nondemented Population: Potential Antecedent Marker of Alzheimer Disease.” In: Neurology 67, pp. 446 – 52. National Institutes of Health (2014): “The Dementias: Hope Through Research.” http://www.nia.nih.gov/alzheimers/publication/dementias/types-dementia Reiman, Eric, Yakeel T. Quiroz, Adam S. Fleisher et al. (2012): “Brain Imaging and Fluid Biomarker Analysis in Young Adults at Genetic Risk for Autosomal Dominant Alzheimer’s Disease in the Presenilin 1 E280 A Kindred: A Case-Control Study.” In: The Lancet Neurology 11, pp. 1048 – 56. Richards, Marcus, and Carol Brayne (2010): “What Do We Mean by Alzheimer Disease?” In: British Medical Journal 341, pp. 865 – 67. Rowe, Christopher C, Kathryn A. Ellis, Miroslava Rimajova, Pierrick Bourgeat, Kerryn E. Pike, Gareth Jones, Jurgen Fripp, Henri Tochon-Danguy, Laurence Morandeau, Graeme O’Keefe,

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Roger Price, Parnesh Raniga, Peter Robins, Oscar Acosta, Nat Lenzo, Cassandra Szoeke, Olivier Salvado, Richard Head, Ralph Martins, Colin L. Masters, David Ames, et al. (2010): “Amyloid Imaging Results from the Australian Imaging, Biomarkers and Lifestyle (AIBL) Study of Aging.” In: Neurobiology of Aging 31, pp. 1275 – 1283. Savva, George M., Stephen B. Wharton, Paul G. Ince, Gillian Forster, Fiona E. Matthews, and Carol Brayne (2009): “Age, Neuropathology, and Dementia.” In New England Journal of Medicine 360, pp. 2302 – 2309. Snowdon, David (2001): Aging with Grace: What the Nun Study Teaches Us About Leading Longer, Healthier and More Meaningful Lives. New York: Bantam Books. Sperling, Reisa A, Paul S Aisen, Laurel A Beckett, et al. (2011): “Toward Defining the Preclinical Stages of Alzheimer’s Disease: Recommendations from the National Institute on Aging-Alzheimer’s Association Workgroups on Diagnostic Guidelines for Alzheimer’s Disease.” In: Alzheimer’s & Dementia 7, pp. 280 – 292. Sullivan, Michele G. (2011): “Studies Take Aim at Groups at High Risk for Alzheimer’s.” In WorldCare Clinical March 21st. Szabo, Liz (2014): “DDT Exposure Linked to Alzheimer’s Disease.” In: USA Today [www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/01/27/ddt-alzheimers-risk/…] Tyas, Suzanne L, David A. Snowdon, Mark F. Desrosiers, Kathryn P. Riley and William R. Markesbery (2007): “Healthy Ageing in the Nun Study: Definition and Neuropathologic Correlates.” In: Age and Ageing 36, pp. 650 – 655. Wang, Sun-Chong, Beatrice Oelze, and Axel Schumacher (2008): “Age-Specific Epigenetic Drift in Late-Onset Alzheimer’s Disease.” In: PLoS ONE 3, no.7: e2698.

Margrit Shildrick

Individuality, Identity and Supplementarity in Transcorporeal Embodiment Abstract: In the age of postmodernity with its multiple technological interventions into the human body, the reassuring image of a unified, unchanging material base for individual identity is increasingly under pressure. Recently, theorists have begun to engage with the affective significance of the supplement, whether as conventional external prostheses, internal donated organs, or more radically as the inherent cellular complexity of the microbiome. In uncovering the inherent plasticity of the body and its multiple possibilities of concorporeality, in incorporating both organic and inorganic non-self matter, such modes of corporeal transformation can comprehensively undo the conventional limits of individual selfhood and identity. My rethinking of the problematic relies on a reading of both Jacques Derrida’s notion of supplementarity and Gilles Deleuze’s assemblage. In their respective work, the infinitely deferred possibility, and the dis-organisation, of bodily integrity suggest a celebratory re-imaging of the multiple possibilities of corporeal extensiveness and hybrid identities.

Prosthetic Bodies In the era of postmodernity, the very notion of individuality and of the corporeal integrity of human beings is being increasingly disrupted by the development of multiple technologies that intervene into embodiment. In response to such newly emerging resources, the reassuring, and yet fundamentally illusory, image of the Cartesian body as the unified, unchanging material base of continuing existence has been radically contested, both pragmatically and disturbingly by advances in bioscience, and by postconventional modes of theoretical enquiry. In one influential response, the model offered by phenomenology – which insists on the experience of embodiment as coincident with the emergence of the subject – has begun to engage with the affective significance of the supplement. The deployment of various modes of supplementation, initially in a material form, is the take-off point for my enquiry. As I understand it, the problematic encompasses organic as much as inorganic technologies – donated organs and tisThis chapter draws in part on material previously published as “Re-imagining Embodiment: Prostheses, Supplements and Boundaries” (Shildrick 2013). My thanks to Edinburgh University Press for permission to use it. DOI 10.1515/9783110523812-009

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sues as well as artificial body parts – and more radically the inherent cellular complexity of the microbiome. All speak to the notion of prosthesis. It is by uncovering the inherent plasticity of the body and its multiple possibilities of transcorporeality through the incorporation of non-self matter that such modes of corporeal transformation can comprehensively undo the conventional limits of the individually embodied self, and question the attribution of specifically human identity. I shall call on my substantive research into prostheses in the arena both of physical disabilities and more specifically in organ transplantation to rethink the problematic conceptually through a reading of Jacques Derrida’s notion of the supplement, before turning to consider Deleuzian assemblages. In the respective work of Derrida and Deleuze alike, the infinitely deferred possibility, and the dis-organisation, of bodily being are not points of nostalgia for lost certainties, but an acceptance of, and sometimes potentially celebratory re-imagining of, the multiple possibilities of corporeal extensiveness. In conventional discourse, prostheses may operate in a seemingly unremarkable role as ‘replacements’, either externally as with missing limbs, for example, or internally as in the case of organ transplantation, but in both cases, they have the potential to shake our faith in corporeal integrity even as we endeavour to restore the clean and proper body. My claim is that prostheses can always effect powerful transformations to the embodied subject that move beyond mere modification towards the far more radical step of rethinking the limits of the human. In invoking both an inevitable – yet troubling and productive – hybridity, such supplements to the human body raise the question of identity to another register. Although there is an extensive history of the use of mechanical, and latterly organic, aids, to replace missing or faulty parts, and more recently of enhancement technologies to ‘improve’ bodily appearance or functionality, contemporary body theory goes well beyond those deceptively simple classifications. The word prosthesis has come to evoke a sense in which the human/technological interface figures not as a matter of instrumental expediency but as a deep ambiguity and final undecidability. In either sense, the notion of the prosthesis tellingly plays out an infinite confusion of identities and boundaries between the human, animal and machine, where each category itself is already highly complex and indeterminate. The once astonishing notion of the cyborg as a form of technologized human being is now greatly complicated by the realisation that biotechnologies, nanotechnologies, information technologies, and cognitive science are potentially mutually implicated in a model that raises the fundamental anthropological question of what constitutes the human as such. As Smith and Morra (2006, pp. 6 – 7) put it:

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Prostheses … have the potential to form an integral part of certain speculations on the corporeal surface, the psyche, and the interior and exterior limits of the body and to the ways that these efforts to renegotiate discourses on ‘the human’ might attend to the edges between these material and immaterial surfaces and limits.

Scholars as diverse as the feminist Katherine Hayles (1999), critical disability theorists David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder (2000), and philosopher Bernard Steigler (1998) all play critically with the idea that we are all always already prosthetic. What this means for either embodied individuals or for the socio-cultural imaginary is the focus of sustained debate, not least because while we cannot ignore the insight that the human body can be manipulated, extended or substituted seemingly without limits, there is, as Ihde (2008) insists, no certain outcome to such processes. The current popular fascination with the prostheticised body arises, nonetheless, not so much from any awareness that it might demand a radical reconfiguration of the concept of human corporeality, but rather from the ubiquity and availability of technological interventions into the body that have pushed the issue into lay consciousness. In such thought, as Cerqui and Warwick (2008, p. 190) remark, “both humanized machines – for example self-organized computers or robots – and machinized humans such as cyborgs could be the next step in evolution, the qualitative rupture point being linked to the important question of improved intelligence”. The supposed event horizon of technological singularity – the point at which the superiority of the strictly human is overtaken by technologically constituted forms of life – is of course highly disputed, and beyond the scope of this essay, but certainly the question of the limits of human individuality and identity can no longer be sidelined. We should not suppose, however, that the contemporary age is unique in such concerns. The emerging figure of the New Man in the inter-war period in Germany, who gave a positive spin to the appearance of ‘recovered’ veterans, promoted the notion that prostheses could offer something superior to the natural body (Biro 1994; Fineman 1999; Neumann 2010). In response to more contemporary developments, two contradictory directions are apparent in the problematic of the prosthetised body. Where some remain optimistic, others like Hayles – and indeed Haraway herself who has long since abandoned the cyborg – see endless enhancement as a “nightmare” (Hayles 1999, p. 5) insofar as it heralds a postbiological future that, whilst appearing to deconstruct the autonomous subject, carries the Cartesian self to new heights of disembodiment. Whilst the human/machine interface already has many troublesome aspects, I want to further complicate the term prosthesis, as do many of the contributors to the edited collection, The Prosthetic Impulse (Smith and Morra 2006). Whilst

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reasserting the “phenomenological, material and embodied nature of the ‘prosthetic impulse’” (2006, p. 3), the editors rightly caution against dismissing the speculative potential of the term – and in my own use, I look particularly at the significance of transplanted organic material and cellular translocation. As with Haraway’s cyborg, the prosthetic body makes no distinctions between the organic and inorganic, between the natural and artificial, between therapeutic and enhancement, or ultimately between self and other. Whatever the event of prosthetic embodiment – from the development of artificial limbs following the American Civil War, through the translocation of a beating heart from one body to another, or the functioning of microbial communities that not only inhabit but are crucial to the effective performance of my gut – it is clear that human corporeality is never self-complete nor secured against otherness, but manifests through a nexus of constitutive assemblages that contest the very idea of singular human being. Without doubt, contemporary biotechnologies have rapidly accelerated the potentials of the human body, but theorising corporeality makes clear that embodiment is never less than a highly complex and indeterminate state, held in place only by particular forms of psycho-social imaginary that privilege corporeal wholeness and integrity. What is at stake in the deployment of prostheses has been, then, a move to maintain that imaginary, and simultaneously a contestation of it that devolves on the inevitable transformation of bodily being. Taking a phenomenologically based approach, it is clear that to rely on a prosthesis is not a matter of a putatively given self using an exterior and impartial technology, but of incorporation, of becoming embodied as hybrid.

2. Organic prostheses and transcorporeality In an autobiographically-based account, Vivian Sobchack (2010) – whose left leg was amputated several years ago – indicates how the prosthetic experience may entail a complex and unsettling disruption not only of the relation between self and other, but of any subjective sense of self-identity. Using phenomenology as her take-off point, Sobchack shows how the lived experience of her body encompasses variously a sense of her originary corporeality, the absent presence of her ‘phantom’ limb – itself a prosthesis of sorts – and the materiality of her ‘real’ manufactured prosthesis. The various elements sit uneasily and ambivalently together, resisting any fixed meaning and significance because, as she acknowledges: “the material causes and processes of these sensations are not equivalent to their experiential effects” (2010, p. 52). Sobchack is acutely aware of the way in which both the phantom affects, which characteristically follow amputation, and

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the biomedical prosthesis itself profoundly unsettle the clean and proper body of the psycho-social imaginary. The binaries of real/artificial, objective/subjective, material/imaginary, here/there are all made undecidable such that they cannot capture what Sobchack existentially comprehends of her own embodied experience. Although she has no wish to evade or transcend the materiality of her altered incarnation, she speaks of still striving for a sense of a whole body, but that desire is constantly undone, not by the reduction associated with amputation, but by the strangely expanded boundaries of her embodiment. The complexity and slipperiness of incorporation, evident in Sobchack’s account, is taken to another level when we consider the transplantation of organs and tissue from one body to another, which includes not only of things like heart and kidney grafts but also hands, corneas or skin. For many recipients of human organic material, the literal incorporation of aspects of the other deeply complicates notions of selfhood, individuality, ownership and even kinship (Poole et al 2009). My own collaborative research on the PITH project – the ‘Phenomenology of Incorporating a Transplanted Heart’ – shows that in order to mitigate the unsettling effects and affects of transplantation, many Westerners cling to their heritage of a mechanistic view of an objectified body controlled by an autonomous subject. In so doing, they enact a determined separation of the discrete materiality of the body from questions of transcorporeality. Nonetheless such strategies of self-containment, which cut across any comprehension of fluidity or the coconstitution of the embodied self, are difficult to sustain particularly by those who have experienced first-hand the transformatory effects of biotechnical interventions. In any case, for many recipients the urgency of unfamiliar lived experiences post-transplant results in the failure of the strategies of separation and distinction that support individuality and identity; and of course other cultures – other psycho-social imaginaries – may generate very different responses, such as that of one Indian Muslim organ recipient who insisted: “The heart belongs to that person, so I’m not alive… he’s alive in the shape of me.”¹ In short, organ and tissue donation opens up the problematic of how prosthetic interventions into human corporeality always have implications for the embodied self’s supposed boundedness and unity. Despite being surrounded by positivist representations of biomedical advances in which organ transplantation is rightly presented as a life-saving procedure, the assessment of success and failure by recipients themselves is driven less by clinical measures than by their own ability to either re-

 Post-transplant cohort, PITH project REB File # 07– 0822-BE. It is important to note that all participants in the study were regarded as clinically and psychologically stable.

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identify with their own bodies, or to accept the hybridity that any embodied prosthesis entails. In two highly sophisticated texts, L’Intrus (2002) by Jean-Luc Nancy, who writes provocatively of his own heart graft, and the meditation by Francisco Varela (2001) on his liver transplant, the widespread unease experienced by the post-transplant respondents in my own research² is confirmed and theorised. The everyday language of those interviewees typically expresses confusion and anxiety around issues of ownership, their connections to the deceased donors and their remaining families, and their sense of self-alienation. As a poststructural phenomenologist philosopher, Nancy finds in his experience of having a donor heart the recognition that the body is always a stranger to itself, even before any technological intervention, and his realisation of the loss of corporeal integrity leads him to theorise dis-integration as the condition of all becoming. The felt experience for Varela is equally disturbing in that he is acutely aware of carrying an other which complicates the question of who is the subject of feeling in his multiply-constituted body. As he puts it: We are left to invent a new way of being human where bodily parts go into each other’s bodies, redesigning the landscape of boundaries in the habit of what we are so definitively used to call distinct bodies. (Varela 2001, p. 260)

In both accounts, the implications of transplantation are not limited to the direct consequences of the procedure, but raise the same profound existential concerns that many PITH respondents struggled to articulate. But perhaps Varela’s appeal for a ‘new way of being human’ is already too nostalgic, for what all prostheses do, whether mechanical or organic, is to implicitly contest the very attribution of human being. Contrary to the Western tradition in which the body is unified and complete, and the embodied subject is autonomous and distinct from its others, organ recipients are faced with a troubling sense in which their very lives are dependent on at very least intercorporeality. Except in very rare cases,³ the prevailing medical view, however, is that the donated organ is not simply assimilated to the DNA and immunological profile of the recipient, but remains an interiorised alien presence, an irreducible other, constantly threatened with rejection as a result of the recipient’s immune response. As a complicating factor, moreover, many recipients will have a double experience of prostheses. Those listed for human organic grafts may well undergo

 For the clearest indications of unease uncovered by the PITH project see Shildrick et al 2009; Ross et al 2010.  See the ensuing discussion of Alexander et al 2008.

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an interim period in which life is sustained by an implanted mechanical LVAD (left ventricular assist device). At present LVADS are driven by external batteries and are used primarily as bridging devices, but as the technological aspects become more sophisticated through better design, effective miniaturisation, and wireless operation, they are likely to be marketed for more permanent use. Our ongoing research seems to indicate that recipients are less disturbed by the implantation of an LVAD than by an organic transplant, though that may be explained by the firm belief that is merely a temporary state of affairs with few implications for the sense of self. But in either case, is this human embodiment as we usually understand it? Far from transplant prostheses restoring the unity and self-sufficiency supposedly integral to the nature of human being, the whole nexus of options that supplement a putatively originary body seems to figure a point of contestation. Just as external devices like Sobchack’s leg – and her imaginary phantom – complicate our sense of the boundaries of individual corporeality, so too internal procedures that implant non-self material speak to the undecidability of our embodiment.

3. Supplementarity What can be understood, then, from the imbrication of material examples and a developing theoretical framework is that an unproblematised account of prostheses (whether phantom, mechanical or organic) as replacements for missing parts of less than complete bodies cannot hold. In everyday terms, the convention is that prosthetic interventions make good what is lacking, and yet in the Western metaphysical tradition, technology itself is opposed to the pure presence of ‘the natural’ and could thus be said to alienate us from a proper sense of being. In other words, in spite of its apparent reparative use value, there is something about technology that undermines the stability of human being. In some senses the traditional characterisation reflects precisely what I am arguing, but for entirely different reasons which will become clearer as I turn to Derrida for whom technology figures a deconstructive moment. In addressing the conventional designation of prostheses as supplementary to an originary body, one is immediately reminded of Derrida’s ‘logic of the supplement’ (1973, 1974), in which the term emerges as a synonym of différance. It operates as one of a string of related terms through which Derrida signals the impossibility of fixing definitions or limits, and stresses instead the sense of deferral, the impossibility of completion, an irreducible ambiguity, and a thoroughgoing undecidability. In contradistinction Kant’s traditional view, in Critique of Judgement (2008), where a supplement – in the text, the parergon – is an inessential and

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external augmentation of an already complete object, Derrida (1987) argues that the very possibility of augmentation shows that the object must have been less than pure/complete/self-sufficient from the beginning. In other words, in place of the illusion of a prior wholeness, there must be an originary lack that the supplement supplements. In effect, supplementarity is essential in constituting the object as such so that the question of distinctions between internal and external is revealed as undecidable. As Derrida (1973, p. 89) remarks: “The strange structure of the supplement appears here: by delayed reaction, a possibility produces that to which it is said to be added on.” In short, technology constructs that which it purports to enhance. Derrida’s approach is especially pertinent to the question of biomedical interventions into corporeality and to the body-prosthesis interface, which are both figured as merely instrumental. In his own terms, he even suggests that what he calls ‘technological supplementarity’ may be the general logic of such discourses as those of drugs, surrogacy, AIDS, sex changes and organ transplants. As he puts it, technology has not simply added itself, from the outside or after the fact, as a foreign body…this foreign or dangerous supplement is ‘originarily’ at work and in place in the supposedly ideal interiority of the ‘body and soul’. It is indeed at the heart of the heart. (Derrida 1995, p. 244)

And there is a further complication to the logic of the supplement as it relates to accounts of prosthetic usage. If as Derrida insists,⁴ the event of supplementarity is always a paradox in that it implies a movement to both augment – even make whole – an existing object, and at the same time to substitute for or replace that object, then, in a double logic, a prosthesis may both extend functional agency and radically destabilize specifically human agency as such. As Peggy Kamuf explains it, a supplement is “at once something secondary, external, and compensatory, and something that substitutes, violates and usurps” (Kamuf 1991, p. 139, n. 9). The desire for harmonious restoration – the making ‘whole’ of the disabled person, or the re-establishment of normative life for the transplant recipient – cannot be fulfilled. In general, and however they are thought, prostheses contest the unity and integrity of the supposedly originary body; and, moreover, they fatally blur the boundaries between the categories of human, animal or machinic embodiment. In invoking that space of hybrid intercorporeality – and the point will become more pertinent yet when I turn to Deleuze – they question the notion of individually embodied identity.  The most sustained exposition is found in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ (1981).

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How do such theoretical reflections throw further light on the material contexts in which prostheses operate? There are few things in bioscience – or perhaps I should say the bioscientific imaginary – that give more credence to the Western obsession with the distinction between one individual and the other than the appeal to the putatively unique and stable DNA marker of each organic cell. Insofar as each one of us has a personal DNA signature, which in turn determines the precise make up of our immunological systems via the MHC (major histocompatibility complex),⁵ we consider that the distinction between self and non-self is absolute and embodied. Indeed in lay terms, immunology itself is described as the science of self/non-self discrimination. In reality, the purity of that distinction is illusory and what constitutes the proper ‘me’ is already shot through with otherness. All bodies swarm with, and are – in the normal course of events – sustained in health by, a multitude of putatively alien others such as the countless commensal bacteria that inhabit our gut (Waldby and Mitchell 2006). As Alfred Tauber spells out: “Animals are not individuals anatomically, and microbes, by cell number, constitute approximately 90 % of human bodies” (Tauber 2012, np). The volume of research into the microbial communities that cohabit in and on our bodies has grown exponentially in recent years, plotting the millions of genes that make up what is known as our microbiome.⁶ In a recent paper, Benezra et al claim that we must increasingly define ourselves as supraoreganisms ‘composed of microbial and human cells, as well as human and microbial genes, with the number of microbial components vastly exceeding the number of human… components’ (Benezra et al 2012, p. 1). The outcome of this proliferation of information, they suggest, is not a diminution of our humanness but a reinvigorated emphasis on ‘our uniqueness’, as it becomes possible, for example, to distinguish – as purely human genetics cannot – between monozygotic twins. It is an intriguing thought but it leaves open the question of what is meant by our uniqueness: to whom does ‘our’ refer? If ‘our’ bodies are not simply augmented but metaphorically overwhelmed by highly dynamic microcrobial sup In the conventional allopathic model of biomedical discourse, all the cells of the body incorporate the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) (in humans specifically called HLA – the Human Leukocyte Antigen) that marks them as self. When the immune system encounters cells without these precise combinations – as, for example, in bacterial or viral infections, tumours or transplants – it identifies them as not-self and launches an immune response that treats the unrecognised material as pathogens to be neutralised. It is very rare for two individuals to have the same set of MHC molecules, which are collectively called a tissue type.  This is far from speculative science with the Human Microbiome Project receiving substantial ongoing funding from United States National Institutes of Health. Nonetheless, the task of identifying the genetic entanglements of the specific biomass lends itself to profound speculation on the nature of the human.

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plements, then it is not clear that we can usefully think in terms of any personal distinctions. Research into the microbiome is still in its infancy, but we can in any case discern something of the same trans- and intracorporeality, and the questions those modes raise about the supplementarity of prostheses, in terms of the material already considered. I return, then, to the issue of donated organs, which retain their own DNA signature throughout life, usually at the site of the graft, but have been revealed – controversially – as having the potential for that DNA to migrate throughout the host body.⁷ This is somewhat similar to the ‘cell-trafficking’ that occurs – again contrary to conventional immunological expectations – between foetal and maternal bodies (Hird 2007), and which can persist many years post-pregnancy (Martin 2010). In my own research in organ transplantation, it is no surprise to find frequent analogies being drawn between the status of the foetus during pregnancy and that of transplanted organs. Given that immunological discourse conventionally distinguishes between self and non-self material and represents their relation as a potentially fatal incompatibility, the extent to which either foetus or transplant is construed as an integrated body part of the ‘host’ requires in both cases an acceptance of some ambiguity. At the simplest level the trajectory of the graft mirrors in reverse that of the foetus: rather than anticipating, at some undetermined point during pregnancy, a splitting of the integrated body into a distinct self and other, the transplanted body must successfully incorporate the non-self material of the transplant organ in order to maintain what appears to be a single genetic identity. Where, at the point of birth, literally and metaphorically at the cut, the neonate is deemed to emerge as a distinct self, and not just part of the mother’s own body, so in organ transplantation, the contrary expectation is that the alien material of the graft will be incorporated by the recipient into her own embodied experience, no longer as foreign, but as an integrated element of her own singular identity (Shildrick 2008). Nonetheless, for recipients of heart grafts, one of the first and often enduring difficulties to negotiate is precisely the question of ownership: to whom does the organ now belong? is it still the donor’s or my own (Shildrick et al 2009)? The PITH project shows that despite the familiar rhetoric of the clinic that promotes identification with the ‘new’ heart, recipients are typically uncomfortable in claiming the transplant as entirely their own, and are more likely to experience a range of affects and disturbances, both physical and mental, that indicate an acute awareness of the unresolved otherness of the donor organ. Even

 See Shildrick (2015) for a fuller account.

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though a significant proportion of respondents hold to a superficial mechanistic vocabulary of pumps and spare parts, as clinical discourse would encourage, in extended interviews few regard the transplant as merely a transferable and lifesaving organ. Many heart transplant recipients experience identity disruption during the process, and a more general sense of unease, even dysphoria, in at least some aspects of their continuing lives.⁸ Far from feeling that the organic prosthetic gave a sense of renewed wholeness, the participants in the study were often keenly aware that their sutured and hybridised bodies spoke to a different mode of being-in-the-world. Any expression by recipients of the feeling that the donor ‘lives on’ as a continuing presence in their phenomenological experience is likely to be discouraged, despite the clinical understanding that the post-transplant body is now, and will continue to be, sustained by two distinct sets of DNA.⁹ The inevitable – and finally unanswerable – question is which is foundational and which the supplement?

4. Cellular Chimerism If the implantation of ‘someone else’s heart’ is disturbing in its own terms, the biology of the procedure becomes even more unsettling with the recognition – by some clinicians at least – of the potential, and perhaps even probable, occurrence of dynamic chimerism within the recipient body. In biomedicine, chimerism generally refers to the existence of two or more genetically distinct but intermingled cell populations, and although the phenomenon is acknowledged in other areas like pregnancy, research in the specific field of transplantation is still limited. In principle, the DNA of the deceased donor is supposed to stay in situ in the transplanted organ itself, to be confined to the immediate site of the graft, but biomedical research shows that it may in fact be present throughout the host body in the form of circulating cells that code for the donor. According to the standard biomedical model, this should not be possible, and there is as yet no clear explanation of the process, which remains little reported, and even actively resisted.¹⁰ The conventional response would be that such incur-

 See Poole et al (2009) for a brief review of other literature indicating that recipients feel themselves to have taken on characteristics of their donors.  This information is, it appears, never explicitly given to patients even though it is the basis of the need to take a plethora of immunosuppressant drugs throughout life.  One is reminded here of Martin’s exchange with Diana Bianchi, head of a lab researching the occurrence of foetal cells in maternal blood. When Bianchi’s group unexpectedly discovered male DNA in the blood of women who had carried male foetuses between 6 and 27 years pre-

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sions could not be tolerated long-term without pathological consequences, but there are now at least some indicators of beneficial effect. As Aryn Martin (2010) notes with regard to the microchimerism of foetal material in the maternal body, the bioscientific language that describes the process has changed from metaphors of alien intrusion or invasion – which fit with conventional immunological discourse of the antagonism between self and non-self material – to that of productive migration. Like every other authoritative discourse, bioscience invests in strategies of representation that finesse the evidence to fit a particular structure, but perhaps there is an underlying subtle shift in the imaginary itself. In any case, the circulation of non-identical DNA post-transplant, throws into question not just the protective/defensive operations of the immune system, but the wider normative context in which the inviolability of clear corporeal boundaries between self and other is taken as given. Although it is discouraged in clinic settings, recipients of solid organs and donor families alike characteristically express feelings of kinship which inherently rely on the relation between self and other, so what are we to make not simply of intercorporeality as such, but the wholesale visceral transformations that chimerism implies? The cellular translocations marked by the circulation of maternal-foetal cells and donor organ cells alike figure a process far in excess of the highly contained conventional perception of prostheses. I want to flesh out this process with reference to a report concerning an Australian 9 year old female child which confirms the limits of our current understandings. Following an emergency transplantation of a liver, the child’s whole immunological response rapidly realigned itself with that of the male deceased donor, and her blood group switched from O-negative to O-positive (Alexander et al. 2008). In the dry circumscribed style of bioscientific journals, the clinical paper reports that ‘(t)he patient remains well 5 years after transplantation. She has not received any immunosuppressive therapy for 4 years, and the results of her liver-function tests are normal’ (Alexander et al. 2008, p. 371, my emphasis). The authors offer various tentative explanations for the surprising absence of what is called graft-versus-host disease, particularly as the transplant liver came, unusually, from a ‘fully HLA-mismatched, sex-mismatched’ (p. 373) donation.¹¹ In usual circumstances the long term success of transplantation supposedly depends on careful – though never complete – tissue matching and the viously, their paradigm-challenging findings were rejected for publication three times. As Bianchi remarks: ‘It didn’t make sense to them, you know, it was counter-intuitive that a foreign cell would live in somebody for that long’ (Martin 2010, p. 29).  HLA – Human Leukocyte Antigens – are the major agents of the immunological system and are coded for and expressed by a group of genes on a single chromosome.

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extent to which the recipient’s immunological rejection of the donor organ can be controlled by a life-long mix of immunosuppressant drugs. In the Australian case, however, the patient’s full and enduring recovery – after the chance discovery at 9 months post-transplant of extensive chimerism – was predicated on the decision to withdraw all immunosuppressant medication. This enabled the donor cells over the next few months to effect a full, and therapeutically beneficial, engraftment.¹² In lay terms, the discrete liver prosthesis produces a whole new form of embodiment. In seemingly isolated prior research, Starzl el al (1992), had already traced the occurrence of cell migration from the donor organ to the recipient and claimed that microchimerism might be a factor in graft acceptance. Most subsequent studies showed, however, that although the process “is common following liver transplantation … it usually disappears within the first 3 weeks” (Alexander et al 2008, p. 372). The Australian girl’s case, however, could scarcely be called one of microchimerism – in which the percentage of ‘non-self’ cells is very low – but a full scale transmutation in which an assay of 250 peripheral blood cells at around 16 months post transplantation showed “all of these cells were male” (Alexander et al 2008, p. 371). Despite the authors of the clinical report still retaining the language of immunological tolerance in their commentary, there is no doubt that their paper reiterates the question I raised earlier about the ambiguity of foundations and supplement. Moreover, one might speculate that this startling demonstration of genetic translocation suggests intriguing new ways to approach transplantation that rely less on immunosuppression – which increases bodily vulnerability – and instead seeks to stimulate similar chimeric effects. It may facilitate a new understanding of corporeal hybridity and a recognition that borders are permeable, and subject to startling transformations.

5. Deleuzian Assemblages In the light of the diverse instances of transcorporeal and supplementary embodiment that I have outlined – the ambiguous experience of prosthetic limbs, the feelings of affective disturbance to identity reported by post-transplant recipients, the translocation of cellular matter, or the newly emerging context of the microbiome – I wonder if the whole nexus would be better understood, not in

 It is not the case that clinical evidence of the translocation of genetic material is limited to a single direction. See Quaini et al (2002) who show how a heart graft itself may be genetically transformed by the incorporation of the recipient’s existing markers.

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terms of self/other or intercorporeality, but rather through the idea of assemblage. The term intercorporeality with its intimations of solid bodies begins to seem entirely inadequate to the dynamic combinations, connections and rejections that constitute life, including what we flatter ourselves to call ‘human’ life. The insights of Derrida concerning prostheses in the mode of supplementarity remain an important step in reimaging corporeal boundaries, but perhaps the Deleuzian notion of assemblage provides alternative opportunities to further explore an ongoing fascination with the nature of embodiment, and the way that it works to draw together – to create its own transdisciplinary assemblage – the humanities, social sciences and biosciences. If the human body is an organic assemblage as the notion of the microbiome implies, then it is also a technological assemblage with no useful distinction to make between the two. In much feminist work, designed to reclaim materiality against the elevation of disembodied epistemologies and ontologies of the posthuman, the emphasis has been on stressing the immersion of the human – and more importantly the singular ‘I’ – in its fully environmental context of multiple and highly complex relations, particularly with other species (Haraway 2007; Rossini 2006). As Rosi Braidotti puts it in her exposition of a nomadic ontology, the human self is fully immersed in and immanent in a network of non-human (animal, vegetable, viral) relations (2002, p. 140), but I would want to explicitly add in – as Braidotti does to some extent in Transpositions (2006) – an account of inorganic technologies as equally constitutive of life. It is here that a further turn to Deleuze might more adequately encompass all that a materialist analysis would wish. In the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1984, 1987) the embodied self, rather than being atomistic and complete, becomes a network of flows, energies and capacities that are always open to transformation, and that figure what they name as desire. For Deleuze and Guattari desire is positive force, something excessive to the embodied self, and unfixed in its scope. As Guattari (1996, p. 46) explains: desire is everything that exists before the opposition between subject and object, before representation and production. It’s everything whereby the world and affects constitute us outside ourselves, in spite of ourselves. It’s everything that overflows from us.

So, Deleuzian desire is not pregiven nor primarily sexual; it is not possessed by a singular subject; and nor does it flow directly from one individual to another. Instead it comes into being through what Deleuze and Guattari (1984) call ‘desiring machines’, assemblages that exist only through their constantly varying organic and inorganic interconnections. As Guattari (1996, p. 46) insists, “[Desiring] machines arrange and connect flows. They do not recognize distinctions between

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persons, organs, material flows, and semiotic flows” (1996, p. 46). A desiring machine expresses, then, no necessary continuity, nor – in contrast to the psychoanalytic model of (sexual) desire – seeks any return to the illusion of an originary wholeness. What mobilises desire are not the endless substitutes for psychic loss, but the surface energies and intensities that move in and out of multiple conjunctions that disrupt categorical distinctions or organisation. And instead of figuring a valorisation of autonomous action, separation and distinction, Deleuzian embodiment persists only through the capacity to make connections, both organic and inorganic, and to enter into new assemblages – which are in turn disassembled. In place of the normative organisation of the body, Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 34) propose “a body populated by multiplicities”. In effect, what they promote is a deconstruction, a queering, of all bodies to the extent that putative boundaries no longer function as limits. To think specifically of supplementarity in this context makes clear that it is not a special case, still less is it a response to corporeal inadequacy. Rather it is a material site of possibility where de-formations, ‘missing’ parts, and prostheses are potential enablers of innovative channels of desiring production that escape the constraints of normative organisation. In short, supplementarity promises an immanent desire that signals an embrace of the strange and that opens up to new linkages and provisional incorporations. These are connectors that eschew distinctions between the human and animal, between organic and inorganic, or between a supposedly originary body and a prosthesis. They figure not autocomplete and independent subjects secure in the illusion of identity to the self, but multiple and fluid assemblages. None of us are beyond such configurations, but they are perhaps more obviously manifest around people with disabilities and those with failing organs who may be intimately engaged with provisional assemblages on a pragmatic level: there are human–machine assemblages enmeshing flesh and blood with prosthetic limbs, ventilators, wheelchairs, LVADS; human–human assemblages with family carers or assistants, or donor organs; and human – animal assemblages that rely on service animals such as assistance dogs and helper monkeys, therapeutic encounters with cats and horses, or the incorporation into the body of animal-derived drugs or parts like pig’s valves. All of these are forms of prostheses, far exceeding superficial functionality, engaging with the production of new forms of embodiment, and mobilising an embodied self which can never be said to be pure. My argument is that the transcorporeality of the organic and inorganic, the assembly and disassembly of unanticipated, even startling, connections, the capacity to innovate, and the troubling of individuality may all be experienced productively, insofar as we are prepared to explore the uncharted potential of supplementarity, and its manifestation in prostheses. The breaking through of the

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normative limits of individual embodiment can both intensify the decomposition of binaries – body/machine; active/passive; biology/technology; self/other – and multiply non-repressive forms of desire. Above all, what mobilises or stalls the rhizomatic proliferations of desire is the extent to which the connective nodules escape organised patterns of operation. And because the emphasis shifts from the search for an ideal unity and completion of a specific organism to focus instead on the provisional coming together of disparate parts, there is no need to think of bodies as either whole or broken, able-bodied or disabled, but simply in an endless process of becoming. For Deleuze and Guattari what matters is what a body can do. To move attention away from what particular bodies may putatively lack makes clear that the experience of a dis-unified or dis-organised body – a state that may be thought characteristic of the disabled person or transplanted patient – allows for a nexus of potentially flourishing and productive connections that are no longer devalued as signs of failure. In Deleuzean terms, corporeal connectedness lies at the heart of creativity, and in place of negativity, repression and disavowal, those multiple dimensions of embodiment are figured as expansive, fluid, and interrelational. What is effectively celebrated – albeit with caution as the movement of liberation and repression is constant – is a new erotics of connection. For Deleuze and Guattari, such nomadic flows of energy extend embodiment way beyond the merely human. Microbes and machines are not simply the environment of the human, but an intrinsic part of the texture of all forms of embodiment. It is not that distinctions can never be made between one corporeal element and the next, or indeed between the human and its technologies; it is rather that becoming entails an inherent transgression of borders that resets the anthropology of embodiment away from privileged notions of autonomous human agency. And nor does the Deleuzian approach entirely give up on the notion of the subject. The interaction of bodies in time and space continues to produce subject effects – as they put it: “you have to keep small rations of subjectivity … to enable you to respond to the dominant reality” (Deleuze 1987, p. 160) – but it is only when those effects begin to coalesce and settle that the familiar sovereign individual of the post-Enlightenment could be said to appear. Their point is that such effects are unsustainable in fixed form, beyond the temporary or provisional, so although the molar politics of identity and subjectivity are never entirely dismissed, they are constantly confronted and displaced by the molecular politics of flows and intensities. The model speaks, then, not to individuals or identity but to transcorporeal embodiments whose fluidity and energies are engaged in mutual transformations. At times, these may invoke the negative, but the effects are always provisional, and once the stress has changed from achieving a secure sense of self to embracing the multiple possibilities of connection,

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then the uncertainty of outcomes can be recast as risky but always productive. Bodily difference is no longer a special source of anxiety, a mark of failure, but holds out the promise of productive new becomings.¹³ For Deleuze and Guattari the take up of this positive model of productive desire is limited neither to those who already fulfil certain corporeal criteria, nor to the modernist form of autonomous agency. It is a move from the fixity of being to the inventiveness of becoming. The corporeal extensiveness proposed by Deleuze seems highly appropriate to, but by no means theoretically generated by, the bioscientific possibilities of the present era. No form of knowledge can ever be taken for granted or treated as stable but, at the cutting edge, bioscience can provide a wealth of insight to inform and illustrate our wider understanding of supplementarity as intrinsic to embodiment. If the supplement is always already ‘at the heart of the heart’, then the body is always other than itself, dis-organised and incapable of restoration to an originary model. The conventional trust in the givenness and fixity of corporeal boundaries has long since been overtaken in both theory and practice, and to think the body now surely problematizes not only individuality and identity to the self, but the very intelligibility of human being as such. Though few of us will undergo anything so profound as a heart transplant, perhaps Nancy’s sustained and often brutal meditation on his very personal experience of transcorporeal embodiment marks precisely the point of re-imagining what is at stake in such transformations: I am the cancerous cell and the grafted organ, I am the immuno-depressive agents and their palliatives, I am the bits of wire that hold together my sternum, and I am this injection site permanently stitched in below my clavicle, just as I was already these screws in my hip and this plate in my groin…. We are … the beginnings of a mutation: man recommences going infinitely beyond man. (2000, p. 13)

 Where the ideas developed by Deleuze and Guattari with regard to the connectivity and implications of desiring machines have struggled for understanding, the similar and almost contemporaneous – albeit partially ironic – imaginings of Donna Haraway in ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ have become, for feminist and queer theorists at least, seminal fare. Of the ‘illegitimate fusions of animal and machine’ she writes: “These are the couplings which make Man and Woman so problematic, subverting the structure of desire, the force imagined to generate language and gender, and so subverting the structure and modes of reproduction of ‘Western’ identity, of nature and culture, of mirror and eye, slave and master, body and mind” (1991, p. 176).

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Kant, Immanuel 2008): Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Martin, Aryn (2010): “Microchimerism in the Mother(land): Blurring the Borders of Body and Nation”. In: Body & Society 16. No. 3, pp. 23 – 50. Mitchell, David and Snyder, Sharon (2000): Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc (2002): L’Intrus, trans. Susan Hansen. Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press. Neumann, Boaz (2010): “Being Prosthetic in the First World War and Weimar Germany”. In: Body & Society 16. No. 3, pp. 93 – 126. Poole, Jennifer, Shildrick, Margrit, McKeever, Patricia, Abbey, Susan and Ross, Heather (2009): “‘You might not feel like yourself’: on heart transplants, identity and ethics”. In: Murray, Stuart J. and Dave Holmes (eds). Critical Interventions in the Ethics of Healthcare. Farnham: Ashgate. Quaini, Federico, Urbanek, Konrad, Beltrami, Antonio et al (2002): “Chimerism of the Transplanted Heart”. In: New England J. of Medicine 346. No. 1, pp. 5 – 15. Ross H, Abbey S, de Luca E, Mauthner O, McKeever P, Shildrick M, Poole J (2010): “What They Say versus What We See: ‘Hidden’ Distress and Impaired Quality of Life in Heart Transplant Recipients”. In: J. of Heart and Lung Transplantation 29. No. 10, pp. 1142 – 1149. Rossini, Manuela (2006): “To the Dogs: Companion speciesism and the new feminist materialism”. In: Kritikos 3. http://intertheory.org/rossini, visited on 15 April 2016. Shildrick, Margrit (2008): “The Critical Turn in Feminist Bioethics: the case of heart transplantation”. In: I.J. of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 1. No. 1, pp. 28 – 47. Shildrick, Margrit (2013): “Re-imagining Embodiment: Prostheses, supplements and boundaries”. In: Somatechnics 3. No..2, pp. 270 – 286. Shildrick, Margrit (2015): “Chimerism and immunitas: the emergence of a posthumanist biophilosophy”. In: Wilmer, S. E. and Audrone. Zukauskaite (eds). Resisting Biopolitics: Philosophical, Political and Performative Strategies. London: Routledge. Shildrick, Margrit, McKeever, Patricia, Abbey, Susan, Poole, Jennifer, and Ross, Heather (2009): “Troubling Dimensions of Heart Transplantation”. In: Medical Humanities (BMJ Supplement) 35. No. 1, pp. 35 – 38. Smith, Marquand and Morra, Joanna (2006): The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman to a Biocultural Future. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Sobchack, Vivienne (2010): “Living a ‘Phantom Limb’: on the Phenomenology of Bodily Integrity”. In: Body & Society 16. No. 3, pp. 51 – 69. Starzl, T.E., Demetris, A.J., Murase, N. Et al (1992): “Cell Migration, Chimerism, and Graft Acceptance”. In: Lancet 339, pp. 1579 – 82. Steigler, Bernard (1998): Technics and Time: The Fault of Epimetheus No.1, trans. R. Beardsworth and G. Collins. Stanford: University of Stanford Press. Tauber, Alfred (2012): “The Biological Notion of Self and Non-self”. In: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (ed.), Edward N. Zalta. Available at: http://plato.stanford. edu/archives/sum2012/entries/biology-self/, visited on 15 April 2016. Varela, Francisco J. (2001): “Intimate Distances. Fragments for a Phenomenology of Organ Transplantation”. In: Journal of Consciousness Studies 8. No. 5 – 7, pp. 259 – 71.

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Waldby, Catherine and Mitchell, Robert (2006): Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs, and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Lars Fr. H. Svendsen

The Loneliness of the Liberal Individual Abstract: It has recently been argued that loneliness is a growing problem in modern society, and that the individualism of modern man is one of the main causes of this development. This individualism is shaped by liberalism, and the modern individual typically takes liberal rights to be unalienable. I will refer to this historical figure as the “liberal individual”. The hypothesis that the liberal individual is prone to suffer from loneliness seems plausible, since the liberal individual seems to have looser ties to others. However there is actually little evidence that confirms the hypothesis and much that speaks against it. In fact, a higher degree of individualism in a given society is a predicator for a lesser prevalence of loneliness. The paper consists of two parts, where the first part outlines the basic characteristics of the liberal individual and the second part attempts to see to what extent the liberal individual is haunted by loneliness.

Much recent literature argues that loneliness is a growing problem in modern society, and furthermore that the individualism of modern man is one of the main causes of this development. This individualism is shaped by liberalism, and the modern individual typically takes liberal rights to be unalienable, and I will therefore refer to this historical figure as the “liberal individual”. The hypothesis that this liberal individual is particularly prone to suffer from loneliness seems plausible, since the liberal individual seems to have looser ties to others. However, as we will see, there is in fact little evidence that confirms the hypothesis and much that speaks against it. In fact, a higher degree of individualism in a given society is a predicator for a lesser prevalence of loneliness. The paper consists of two parts, where the first part outlines the basic characteristics of the liberal individual and the second part attempts to see to what extent the liberal individual is haunted by loneliness.

1. The liberal individual I will not discuss the genealogy of the liberal individual at any length, whether this historical figure should be traced back to the late Middle Ages, to Ockham, or to the Reformation and Luther, or to Hobbes or Locke or Adam Smith or Kant or the Romantics. The answer is, of course, all of the above and more. The liberal DOI 10.1515/9783110523812-010

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individual did not suddenly appear at a particular time and place, but emerged over centuries. As Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim have argued: it is a social fact that the liberal individual “is becoming the basic unit of social reproduction for the first time in history” (Beck/Beck-Gernsheim 2002, p. xxii). Of course, not all humans live in liberal democracies. Today approximately half of the world’s population lives in liberal democracies, but far from all citizens in liberal democracies are embodiments of the liberal individual. On the other hand, the liberal individual can be found also in societies that most certainly are not liberal democracies, such as China. The general tendency is that the liberal individual is becoming the social and political norm, even though countless counter-examples and contrary developments can be mentioned. Why do I call this individual a liberal individual? Simply because she is deeply concerned with or takes for granted liberal rights such as freedom of expression, the right to private property, the right to privacy etc. She demands a space of non-interference in which she herself can decide what gives her life meaning and value. The basic idea is well expressed in John Stuart Mill’s romantic version of liberalism. In Principles of Political Economy, he writes: …there is a circle around every individual human being which no government, be it that of one, of a few, or of the many, ought to be permitted to overstep: there is a part of the life of every person who has come to years of discretion, within which the individuality of that person ought to reign uncontrolled either by any other individual or by the public collectively. (Mill 1974, p. 279)

I should emphasise here that I use “liberal” in a more European than American sense, i. e. a sense more closely related to classical liberalism and social liberalism. Absolutely crucial for this understanding of the individual’s role in society is what is often referred to as negative liberty: the existence of a wide range of alternatives. The liberal individual wants not only the availability of her preferred alternatives, but also the alternatives she does not wish to pursue (Cf. Berlin 2002). She feels violated if someone forces her to do something she would have done anyway. She does not merely want Hobbesian negative liberty, according to which the only thing that matters is nobody closes off her access to her preferred alternative. She wants negative liberty as defined by Isaiah Berlin, where someone’s liberty is restricted even if only alternatives that the individual has no wish to pursue is closed off. Negative liberty is a fairly empty concept which does not contain much more than that as many alternatives as possible should be available to agents. It does not prescribe any sort of self-realization as better than any other, but simply outlines the widest possible framework for self-realization. The liberal individual demands not only what Amartya Sen has called the opportunity aspect of freedom, but also the process aspect (Sen 2002, chs. 20 – 22). She

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not only wishes to pursue her goals in life, but also the right to make choices. She demands a sphere of non-interference, having her range of choices being restricted only by the equal rights of others for liberty. The liberal individual is not anti-social, but she wishes to decide for herself with whom to socialize. The liberal individual regards herself as unique, independent and self-governing. Liberal democracies encompass a plurality of life-styles and a wide range of opportunities for autonomous choice, with the aim of creating a unique personality. The liberal individual does not only want negative liberty, but also positive liberty, which in effect is synonymous with autonomy. Positive liberty consists in living in accordance with one’s own values. It is not about non-interference, but about taking charge of one’s life, of shaping this life. The liberal individual is supposed to be someone special – or at least appear to be. Individualism is so pervasive these days that it is hard to think of anything more conformist. If you emphasise your own individuality, you definitely do not go “against the grain”, since everybody does that these days. The emergence of individualism gave the individual a new responsibility for herself and a duty to become herself. The liberal individual is a firm believer in a notion of self-discovery where it is not a question of finding an already given self, but of making one up. An authentic self is one that is self-fashioned. Georg Simmel made a famous distinction between two forms of individualism, a quantitative and a qualitative individualism, where the former dominated in the 18th century and the latter from the 19th century and onwards (Simmel 1995a, Simmel 1995b). We could also call them Enlightenment individualism and Romantic individualism. The main feature of quantitative individualism, which Simmel associates especially strongly with Kant, is independence. The individual is conceived of as freed from all normative constraints except the selfimposed ones. Simmel argues that this understanding of the individual is deficient because it leaves the individual without any content except the general principles that stem from its own faculty of reason. As he puts it: According to this conception, “we are not really individuals, but merely have individuality” (Simmel 1995c). Another concept of the individual therefore began to emerge, in which not only the quantitative separation of individual, but also their qualitative difference was emphasised. I believe that Simmel exaggerates the purely quantitative aspects of Enlightenment individuality, and would argue that there are certainly aspects of a qualitative individualism in Kant, where one should develop a unique individuality for which one is personally responsible, but I will not pursue that here. According to Simmel, the most extreme variety of qualitative individualism was developed by Nietzsche (Simmel 1995a, p. 54). That might be the case, but it is somewhat surprising that Simmel does not even mention that the most radical variety of romantic, liberal individualism was conceived

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by Humboldt in his Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Gränzen der Wirksamkeit des Staats zu bestimmen (1792), which in turn was one of the main inspirations for Mill’s liberalism. Here, the necessity of having a space for the development of a unique personality is at the core of political and social philosophy. Simmel did not believe that qualitative individualism had replaced quantitative individualism, but rather that they existed side by side and that one had so far failed to create a synthesis between them. He argued that these two forms of individuality could be observed to co-exist in the modern metropolis (Simmel 1995d). The citydweller embodies both the quantitative and the qualitative individualism. She has a substantial space of freedom, being separate from others in both a physical and a mental respect, but this also creates a felt need to stand out as unique, to announce her personal uniqueness to the world. It took time and a vast growth of material wealth for history to catch up with liberal ideology. I would say that the crucial social transformation took place from the 1960s and onwards. The emergence of the liberal individual as a mass phenomenon required a significant growth of material wealth. Only in recent times has a majority of the population had the material wealth that makes freedom of choice such a central feature of their existence. Freedom is understood as the freedom to define who you are, to determine whether you should live one sort of life rather than another. And you are forced to make that choice. You have to make what Charles Taylor calls “strong evaluations” (Taylor 1989, p. 14). These are normative evaluations that deal with what sort of person one wishes to be. For Taylor, identity is inextricably linked to ethics, to personal questions of what sort of life one should realise. These questions are asked and answered within a historical and social context, i. e. our values are initially given us by the society in which we grow up. The values that are given us constitute our identity to a considerable extent. Here, however, a problem arises for modern Western man. Modern societies are no longer characterised by a selfevident set of values that the individual internalises. Premodern societies have a given framework of values that set a standard against which one can measure one’s life, but the frameworks for the strong evaluations have become problematic in the modern world. Therefore, our identities are no longer given us as something that is self-evident. Belonging to social groups is still essential for identity, but these days one typically belongs to a wider range of groups, which all contribute to your identity. But membership in these groups is often based on weak commitment, and it is a central feature of the liberal individual’s self-understanding that there are always exit-options. Taylor claims that values, and consequently identities, are to a greater extent something that has to be chosen by the separate individual. Seen in this way, identity becomes something

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that must be created, and this creation takes place on the basis of an interpretation of who one is and a strong evaluation of who one should be. The liberal individual is liberated from the force of tradition, but she has also gained a new responsibility for herself, for becoming herself. As Nietzsche puts it: You shall become who you are! (Nietzsche 1988, par. 270) This individual is characterised by a reflexive relation to herself. Of course, some measure of reflexivity has characterised humans in all society, but this reflexivity is radicalized in societies where persons are not as bound to traditions which tell them who they are (Giddens 1991, p. 5; Giddens 1992, p. 30). Therefore the individual must to a greater extent create her self-identity from whatever means she has available, rather than the self appearing as something given. The self must be created, surveilled, maintained, changed etc. The liberal individual cannot create herself from scratch. She has a wide range of beliefs about the world and herself, and values and preferences, and few of these are chosen by her. She has a capacity for modifying all of this, but only on the basis of other beliefs, values and preferences that have not been chosen. Any formation and modification of the self must be based on something already given. Does the liberal individual have an adequate self-understanding? Is she in fact as autonomous, as freely self-forming and independent of social structures as she believes? Individuals are social products, of course, but they are also more than that. The liberal individual will accept the descriptive claim that she is socially situated, but she will argue that this does not settle the normative question as to how she should live. This is also accepted by communitarians, like Michael Sandel, who writes: “as a self-interpreting being, I am able to reflect on my history, and in this sense distance myself from it” (Sandel 1982, p. 179). Charles Taylor’s concept of strong evaluation also grants this. And that is all that the liberal individual needs in order to justify that she is the ultimate judge in all moral matters. Personal freedom is a freedom to devote yourself to whatever you care about, and what you care about has never originated in a vacuum. But you have a capacity for reflection on what you care about, and can ask yourself if this is what you really should care about and how you could devote yourself to what you care about. The subject obviously has not itself invented all the practises she uses in the active formation of the self, and yet these practises, this labour that the subject subjects itself to, is an expression of freedom. You discipline yourself and liberate yourself from desires and preferences that are a part of the self, but that you nevertheless perceive as alien, as something that should not belong to the self. It is by asking such questions as to whether or

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not you accept or reject different sides of yourself that you define and takes responsibility for who you are. Personal freedom does not consist in letting go of all demands and commitments, in being completely self-absorbed. In order to become who you are, to realise your self, is also to take responsibility for more than yourself. Here a major problem is that the ideal of negative liberty, which should be granted a large role in the political realm, has come to occupy such a central role in our understanding of personal freedom, where it is far from obvious that it should be given an equally central role. The liberal individual is caught in a paradox where she both wants unlimited freedom and real belonging (cf. Marar 2003). In order to overcome this paradox, the liberal individual must redefine her understanding of personal freedom, from a negative conception in which all strong commitments and obligations to others are regarded as an obstacle, to a more positive conception where freedom consists in freely choosing such commitments. And that is a less lonely freedom. The liberal individual must see that there are crucial sources of meaning outside of its own subjectivity, and that these sources of meaning contribute to a realization of its freedom even though they also place limits on its freedom. Without such an understanding, the liberal individual would be trapped in its own subjectivity. As Hegel puts it in his criticism of romantic irony, you end up with a subject that “cannot free itself from its loneliness and self-withdrawal” (Hegel 1986, p. 96). If negative liberty is regarded as the supreme form of freedom, and not only in the political domain, but also in the personal, the result will be that both the subject and liberty itself will loose all substance. Of course, also personal freedom must contain some measure of negative liberty in a liberal democracy. The individual must have exit-options, from a dysfunctional marriage or a job. However, it is far more problematic to make negative liberty an ideal for living rather than a political ideal. Personal freedom in practice is not a freedom from all commitment, but rather a freedom to devote yourself to what truly matters to you. Commitments place restrictions on your actions, and they demand self-discipline. If you are truly committed to something, there are certain things you simply cannot do and other things you have to do. Freedom is more than the absence of restrictions. If I discipline myself, and choose to set aside certain actions and preferences, the fact that I myself have chosen this, eliminates the unfreedom of these restrictions. What matters for personal freedom is not that it has restrictions – which it will always have – but that these restrictions are self-imposed and therefore an expression of who I am.

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2. Loneliness What is life like for this liberal individual? Earlier, following Simmel, we distinguished between Enlightenment and Romantic individualism. It is well known that loneliness and solitude are common themes in romantic writings, but also the Enlightenment era saw a number of writings on these topics. There are, of course earlier writings on loneliness, such as Petrarchs De vita solitaria (1346 – 56), but only in the Enlightenment era does it seem to represent a common problem. In the British Enlightenment, Adam Smith describes how “the horror of solitude” forces us to seek the company of others (Smith 1976, p. 84). Shaftesbury claims that human beings are less capable than any other species of enduring loneliness (Shaftesbury 2000, p. 215). Edmund Burke describes loneliness as the greatest pain conceivable because it is contrary to the very purpose of our lives (Burke 1998, p. 53). Also Locke describes loneliness as a contrary to human nature because God has created human beings such that they are forced by their own nature to seek the company of others (Locke 1988, p. 318). And Hume describes loneliness as the harshest punishment we can be subjected to (Hume 1984, p. 412). In the German Enlightenment, loneliness is discussed by a large number of authors, but the two main contributors are Johann Georg Zimmermann, especially with his 1600-page opus magnum Über die Einsamkeit (1784/85), and Christian Garve, who wrote the two-volume study Ueber Gesellschaft und Einsamkeit (1797). In the French Enlightenment Rousseau’s Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (1776 – 78) towers above all the other contributions. I do not have room for a proper discussion of the emergence of loneliness as a theme in Enlightenment and Romantic philosophy, and merely settle for giving these few examples. However, the fact that such a literature on loneliness emerges at this point could indicate that the emergence of liberal individualism and loneliness are related. If we now move to more recent literature, the liberal individual appears to be a tormented soul, haunted by loneliness, alienation, anxiety and depression. According to an article in The Atlantic: “We suffer from unprecedented alienation. We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are” (Marche 2012). And Francis Fukuyama argues that we live in an extreme culture of individuality where society is dissolved by the liberation from traditional ties between people, where these ties cannot be maintained when they are to be chosen rather than given, and that people in this culture become lonely and disoriented (Fukuyama 1999, pp. 14 f.). There is no shortage of

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books arguing that we are becoming increasingly isolated and lonely, and they tend to be widely read. An early title is of course The Lonely Crowd (1950) by David Riesmann, Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney. Vance Packards A Nation of Strangers came in 1972. Then there is Richard Sennetts The Fall of Public Man (1977) and Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (1979). In 1995 Robert Putnam published his essay “Bowling Alone”, followed by his book with the same title five years later. In 2009 Jaqueline Olds and Richard S. Schwarz published The Lonely American, and in 2011 Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together appeared. These books have clearly had a resonance not only in academic circles, but also in a wider public. And even though these books for the most part were using empirical evidence from the USA, they have been taken as having implications for the Western world as a whole. The question remains, however, if they are making a correct diagnosis of contemporary life. According to Robert Putnam, the decline in participation in bowling leagues was a symptom of a general decline in social networks, which in turn has led to a decline in social capital. He admitted that Americans still joined organizations and even that they communicate more than before with each other, but argued that there was a major deficiency in “real ties to real people” (Putnam 2000, p. 158). Putnam’s essay and book received far wider attention than the numerous studies that disputed his claims (cf. Thomson 2005). While it is true that there was a marked decline in membership in the organizations studied by Putnam, there was an equal increase in others. In fact, there has been a remarkable stability in organizational membership. From the fact that the specific organizations studied by Putnam were in decline, very little follows, as it may simply be that these specific organizations are historically outdated and have been replaced by new ones. One should also note that voter turnout has been just as high or higher in the last three US presidential elections as in the three elections in the 1940s, which is Putnam’s golden age of civic participation. In recent studies of social capital in the USA, most find no significant change at all, some find a mixed picture, some even an increase (Thomson 2005, p. 425). Only Putnam finds just decline, and he paints a grim picture based on his findings: an “ebbing of community”, a “degradation of public life”, “weakened social capital”, the vanishing of “the reflective kindness of strangers” and citizens concerned only with “a solitary quest for private goods” (Putnam 2000, p. 403). There is in fact little reason to accept this conclusion. As Claude S. Fischer has shown in great detail, neither the quantity nor the quality of personal relationships has changed much since 1970 (Fischer 2011; Fischer 2010). There are, of course, some changes in personal relationships, as people live alone to a far greater extent, they marry later, have fewer relatives etc., but overall they are just as socially active as before. The percentage of those who report being social-

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ly isolated is virtually unchanged. Fischer points out that there is one significant change: Even though Americans are members of as many organizations as they used to, they are less active in those organizations (Fischer 2010, p. 155). They appear to be less committed, and membership is not as binding as it used to be. Numerous books and articles have also warned against the dire consequences of our use of social media. According to Hubert Dreyfus (2008), the Internet isolates us from each other und undermines trust, responsibility and commitment. Sherry Turkle (2011) writes about being “alone together” because of social media. What do empirical studies of Internet users tell us? Most people use the Internet to stay in touch with friends and family which they also meet face-toface, and they also expand their social network (Rainie/Wellmann 2012). The people who are more socially active on the Internet also tend to be more socially active outside of the Internet, have a larger social network and participate more in voluntary organizations (Hampton 2009). They have more face-to-face encounters than people who do not use social media to such a large extent. The social media appear to make us more social, not less (Kraut 2002; Whitty/McLaughlin 2007). We also communicate far more frequently with friends and family than we used to do. Are rates of loneliness increasing? Loneliness is hard to measure in an objective manner because it is an inherently subjective phenomenon. It is experienced by an individual as a lack of satisfying relations to others, either because of too few relations or because the existing relations do not have the kind of closeness that is wanted. In the literature on loneliness, a distinction is often made between social and emotional loneliness (Weiss 1975). Social loneliness is a lack of social integration where the lonely person wants to be a part of some kind of community. The emotionally lonely is someone who misses a really close relation to someone. These varieties of loneliness are distinct – they are qualitatively different. Therefore, one can suffer from one without suffering from the other. One can find a community and still be just as emotionally lonely, and one can find another person to whom one is closely attached, and still feel socially lonely. There are certain widely used tests for loneliness, such as the UCLA Loneliness Scale, which has been used since the late 1970s, and one can track scores over time. One of the major weaknesses of this test is that is seems to be developed primarily for American college students, and it is far from obvious that it is equally applicable to other groups, such as the elderly in Russia or Chinese children. Central terms in the test are also very vague, where repondents must state whether they feel all alone “sometimes” or “often”. Where is the dividing line between “sometimes” and “often”? More precise and complex tests are the de Jong-

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Gierveld Loneliness Scale (1982) and The Social and Emotional Loneliness Scale for Adults (2005). When one tracks scores over time, the results are mixed, as some show an increase, some a decrease and most no change at all. All in all, numbers appear to be very stable. We have reliable numbers for Norway, where loneliness has not increased in the last three decades (Svendsen 2015, ch. 3). The same generally seems to be the case for other countries. Studies of specific groups, such as the elderly, show the same result (Victor et al. 2002). Contrary to what we are regularly told in the mass media, there is very little evidence for an “epidemic of loneliness”. In fact, the prevalence of loneliness is higher in collectivist societies than in individualist societies (Lykes/Kemmelmeier 2014). Individualization does not seem to make people lonelier, but rather the opposite. The Scandinavian countries have a fairly low prevalence of loneliness compared to other European countries, and in the Scandinavian countries there are rather small differences in prevalence between different age groups, except for the very oldest (Yang/Victor 2011). There is a significantly higher prevalence of loneliness among women than among men. Women appear to be lonelier than men. This is a fairly consistent result in studies all over the world. Women have more contact with friends and family, and they are more likely to have a close confidant than men. Since having a social network and a close confidant are among the strongest protective factors against feeling lonely, one would assume that women would be less lonely than men, but the opposite is the case. I do not want to step into any essentialist quagmire here, but it may be worth considering the possibility that women usually have greater social needs than men and that this explains both why they have more and deeper social relations than men – and yet feel more lonely than men. It is a surprise that the prevalence of loneliness is so low in the Scandinavian countries, since these countries have a higher percentage of people living alone than any other countries in the world. 40 – 45 percent of Scandinavian households consist of one person. In the USA, 28 percent of households today consist of one person, up from 9 percent in 1950 (Klinenberg 2012). That is actually more common than households consisting of two adults and a child and just as common as two adults without children. A third of the people who live alone are aged 65 or higher, but the fastest growth is in the group below 35 years, where ten times as many live alone today as in 1950. More women than men live alone, and people who live alone tend to continue to do so for a long time. This development is not a purely Western phenomenon, as the largest increase in single person-households is in China, India and Brazil. Such an increase is,

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of course, made possible by the vast economic growth in recent decades, and it is quite likely that the current financial crisis will slow down or even reverse this development, but it is too early to say anything about this with much confidence. The number of single people also makes up an increasing proportion of the population. We can take it quite literally when Ulrich Beck writes: “the basic figure of fully developed modernity is the single person” (Beck 1992, p. 122). And this figure appears to be rather content. People who live alone have just as high satisfaction with life and they are no lonelier than people who live together with others (Mellor et al. 2008). In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Joseph Schumpeter argued that precisely this development would take place. He claims that family life and parenthood would mean less to people in modern, capitalist societies, and that an increasing amount of them would choose not to sacrifice much for living in a family. He writes: These sacrifices do not consist only of the items that come within the reach of the measuring rod of money but comprise in addition an indefinite amount of loss of comfort, of freedom from care, and opportunity to enjoy alternatives of increasing attractiveness and variety—alternatives to be compared with joys of parenthood that are being subjected to a critical analysis of increasing severity. (Schumpeter 2006, pp. 157 f.)

Schumpeter’s prophecy is becoming a social reality. However, it should be noted that not only a market economy, but also the welfare state is promoting such an individualism. It is no coincidence that the highest number of people living alone can be found in the Scandinavian welfare societies. In these societies, communities that were earlier to be found between the individual and the state, have been replaced by a more direct relation between the individual and the state. Rates of loneliness have changed surprisingly little through this momentous change in way of life. People who live alone have traditionally reported being lonely more frequently than people who live with others. This does not necessarily mean that they are lonely because they are alone. Maybe they are lonely because they find it hard to form adequate relations to others, and this also explains why they live alone. Nevertheless, one would expect the rising numbers in people who live alone to be followed by an equal increase in the number of people who feel lonely. But this is not what we find. Why this is the case, is a different question. It is well documented that those who live alone have more contact with friends than people who live with others, and one would assume that this would reduce their feeling of loneliness. On the other hand, it is also well documented that people who feel lonely do not spend more time alone than people who do not feel lonely (Cacioppo/Patricj 2008, p. 13).

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Loneliness is not predicated by the number of people one interacts with socially, but by whether or not this social interaction satisfies one’s need for attachment, if one experiences this social interaction as meaningful or not (Cacioppo/Patricj 2008, p. 94). Some people spend virtually all their time alone without being tormented by a feeling of loneliness and others feel deeply lonely even though they are surrounded by friends and family most of the time. Perhaps the reason why you are alone is of greater relevance than that you are alone. We can distinguish between different forms of aloneness, depending on what relation one has to others in this aloneness. One can be alone because one has chosen to be so or because one has been socially excluded. Voluntary aloneness is probably correlated with solitude and involuntary aloneness with loneliness. Is this the reason why the rising prevalence of people living alone does not seem to lead to an increase in the prevalence of loneliness? Are rates of loneliness stable despite that fact that people live alone and are single to a much greater extent, because people for the most part have chosen to be alone and single? At least it is worth considering. So how is the liberal individual doing? She seems to be doing all right. She does for the most part not lack social relations, but one might be tempted to say that she has a shallow relation to others, with low levels of commitment, and one could imagine that this would leave her especially vulnerable to emotional loneliness, as opposed to social loneliness, but there is little evidence for an increase in such loneliness. As for social loneliness, the liberal individual is a social being, but she wants to determine for herself with whom to socialise. The liberal individual wants solitude, but not loneliness. She wants independence, but also belonging. She is a bit of a narcissist, but nevertheless cares for others. As Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim point out: “There are also signs that point towards an ethic of ‘altruistic individualism’. Anyone who wants to live a life of their own must also be socially sensitive to a very high degree.” (Beck/Beck-Gernsheim 2002, p. xxii) The liberal individual is subject to numerous contradictions, but she seems to deal well with them for the most part.

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Cacioppo, John T./Patrick, William (2008): Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection. New York/London: W.W. Norton. Dreyfus, Hubert (2008): On the Internet, 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Fischer, Claude S. (2010): Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fischer, Claude S. (2011): Still Connected. Family and Friends in America Since 1970. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Fukuyama, Francis (1999): The Great Disruption. Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order. New York: Touchstone. Giddens, Anthony (1991): Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Identity in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Giddens, Anthony (1992): The Transformations of Intimacy. Oxford: Polity Press. Hampton, Keith/Sessions Goulet, Lauren/Her, Eun Ja/Rainie, Lee (2009): Social Isolation and New Technology. Washington: Pew Research Center. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1986): Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik I. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Hume, David (1984): A Treatise of Human Nature. London: Penguin. Klinenberg, Eric (2012): Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone. New York: The Penguin Press. Kraut, Robert/Kielser, Sara/Boneva, Bonka/Cummings, Jonathon/Helgeson, Vicki/Crawford, Ann (2002): “Internet Paradox Revisited”. In: Journal of Social Issues 58, pp. 49 – 74. Locke, John (1988): Two Treatises of Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lykes, Valerie A./Kemmelmeier, Markus (2014): “What Predicts Loneliness? Cultural Difference Between Individualistic and Collectivistic Societies in Europe”. In: Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 3, pp. 468 – 490. Marar, Ziyad (2003): The Happiness Paradox. London: Reaktion Books. Marche, Stephen (2012): “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely”. In: The Atlantic, March, 60 – 69. Mellor, David/Stokes, Mark/Firth, Lucy/Hayashi, Yoko/Cummins, Robert (2008): “Need for Belonging, Relationship Satisfaction, Loneliness, and Life Satisfaction”. In: Personality and Individual Differences 45, pp. 213 – 218. Mill, John Stuart (1974): “Principles of Political Economy with some of their Applications to Social Philosophy”. In: Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. 3. Toronto/London: University of Toronto Press/Routledge. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1988): “Die fröhliche Wissenschaft”. In: Kritische Studienausgabe, Vol. 3. Munich/Berlin/New York: dtv/de Gruyter. Putnam, Robert D. (2000): Bowling Alone. New York: Simon & Schuster. Rainie, Harrison/Wellman, Barry (2012): Networked: The New Social Operating System. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Sandel, Michael (1982): Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper Earl of (2000): Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schumpeter, Joseph (2006): Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. London/New York: Routledge. Sen, Amartya (2002): Rationality and Freedom, Cambridge: Belknap Press.

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Simmel, Georg (1995a): “Die beiden Formen des Individualismus”. In: Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1901 – 1908, Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 7. Frankfurt/Main Suhrkamp, pp. 49 – 56. Simmel, Georg (1995b) “Kant und der Individualismus”. In: Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1901 – 1908, Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 7. Frankfurt/Main Suhrkamp, pp. 273 – 282. Simmel, Georg (1995c): Kant. Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie (1905/1907). In: Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1901 – 1908, Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 9. Frankfurt/Main Suhrkamp. Simmel, Georg (1995d): “Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben”. In: Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1901 – 1908, Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 7. Frankfurt/Main Suhrkamp, pp. 116 – 131. Smith, Adam (1976): Theory of Moral Sentiments. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Svendsen, Lars (2015): Ensomhetens filosofi. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Taylor, Charles (1989): Sources of the Self. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Thomson, Irene Taviss (2005): “The Theory That Won’t Die: From Mass Society to the Decline of Social Capital”. In: Sociological Forum 20, pp. 421 – 448. Turkle, Sherry (2011): Alone Together. Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books. Victor, Christina R./Scambler, Sasha J./Shah, Sunil/Cook, Derek G./ (2002): “Has Loneliness Amongst Older People Increased? An Investigation into Variations Between Cohorts”. In: Ageing and Society 22, pp. 585 – 597. Weiss, Robert S. (1975): Loneliness: The Experience of Emotional and Social Isolation. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Whitty, Monica T./McLaughlin, Deborah (2007): “Online Recreation: The Relationship between Loneliness, Internet Self-efficacy and the Use of the Internet for Entertainment Purposes”. In: Computers in Human Behaviour 23, pp. 1435 – 1446. Yang, Kemin/Victor, Christina R. (2011): “Age and Loneliness in 25 European Nations”. In: Ageing and Society 31, pp. 1368 – 1388.

Vincent Descombes

The Dual Nature of the Modern Individual Abstract: The question to be asked is whether Louis Dumont’s conception of ‘the modern individual’ is genuinely comparative, as it should be in order to have any descriptive value in social anthropology. I will consider various objections that have been raised or could be raised against Dumont’s view: that ‘individualism’ is a term endowed with too many different meanings to be of any value, that there is not just one archetype of ‘the modern individual’, that we find already individualism in ancient times. I will argue that these objections fail to take fully into account Dumont’s central thesis: the modern individual is an ‘individual-in-the-world’, which is not the same as a ‘man-in-the-world’. What distinguishes them from each other is that the modern individual has a dual nature, since its ‘being-in-the-world’ is the result of his exercising an ‘other-worldly’ will. The individual striving after success in this world is hiding in its own constitution the will of an other-worldly individual.

1. Introduction Many authors have discussed the topic of individualism. What is distinctive about Louis Dumont’s approach to the problem of individualism is the sociological content he has always given to his analysis. This might not be obvious since in his Essais sur l’individualisme, he deals mainly with ideas and individual thinkers. So it is important to clarify the issue of a sociological perspective on the phenomena we call ‘individualism”. Individualism is taken to be the defining feature of the intellectual systems of our modern societies. Now, who is supposed to be this character of our times: the individual? Isn’t it obvious that ‘the human individual’ is to be found everywhere, since societies are made up of individual people? How would it be possible to claim that ‘the individual’ is a character to be found in modern societies and only there? So my aim in this paper is to ask whether our concept of individual is genuinely comparative. Does it give us the most distinctive characteristic of modern cultures?

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First, I will spell out the implications of what Dumont calls the ‘Comparison Principle’ (‘le principe comparatif”).¹ Then, I will argue that Dumont has provided us with a comparative definition of the individual – that is to say, a comparative definition of the way we think of ourselves as being ‘individuals’.

2. The Principle of Comparison What does it take for a perspective to be sociological in Dumont’s sense? Basically it has to be truly anthropological, i. e. comparative. Dumont has explained what he calls the Comparison Principle by laying down two preconditions. In order for a study to be comparative, it ought to comply with two requirements: 1. “That the reference to the global society should be maintained”; 2. “That our side of the picture be neither forgotten nor favoured” (Dumont 1975, p. 156). First, reference is to be made not just to social contexts, but to global societies. Of course, in a loose sense of the adjective ‘social’, a human being is engaged in social interaction as soon as he is not alone and has to take into account the reactions of other people. Most of the time, this is what the word ‘social’ would mean, say, in psychological or philosophical writings. Now, in a sociological sense of the word, individuals are not social beings just because they are interacting with each other. They are social because their interactions take place in global societies or because these personal interactions are themselves parts of interactions between global societies. This first precondition could be called the sociological condition: when studying an aspect or feature of social life, we should always see it in reference to the whole. According to Dumont, there is no room for specialized social sciences such as ‘political anthropology’ or ‘economic anthropology’, i. e. for a direct comparison of various sub-systems taken in isolation from their respective global societies. So the first methodological rule tells us that societies are to be described and studied as wholes, as systems. But what does it take for a human group to be a totality, a whole made up of parts? Dumont does not find the unifying principle of a social system in any sort of functional cohesion. We should not think of social wholes as super-organisms. For Dumont, social functionalism does not work

 Dumont gave that title to the second part of his Essais sur l’individualisme (Dumont 1983).

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precisely because it tries to give a naturalistic account of human societies. The unifying principle of a social whole is ideological, which means that the social cohesion of a society is a matter of social ideas hanging together. The unity of a social whole rests on the intellectual cohesion of its collective representations. And this brings us to the second requirement. Since, according to Dumont, sociology is a comparative discipline, it should never be kept apart from social anthropology. The division of labour between sociologists studying our societies and anthropologists doing fieldworks in exotic countries has no scientific justification. When sociology is separated from social anthropology, it runs the risk of being nothing more than a redundant expression of our common sense, expressing a ‘sociocentric’ view of ourselves. But then the question arises: What are we supposed to compare and how? As I said, the point of the Comparison Principle is to remind ourselves of the conceptual problems one has to address when reflecting on the diversity of human forms of life. In doing comparative sociology, we are trying to overcome an unavoidable conceptual limitation of our descriptions, the limitation of coming to observe and describe the other forms of social life with our own preconceptions and categories. We should not describe the other society in our terms. Rather we should attempt to make sense of its own self-understanding. But how could we come to understand their own forms of self-understanding unless we find a way to express them in our own language, the language we speak at home? So, as Evans-Pritchard pointed out, the sociological description of another form of life is analogous to the work of a translator. In order to translate our descriptions into theirs and their descriptions into ours, we need an analytic tool. According to Dumont, this tool is the notion of ‘functional equivalence’ between institutions (theirs and ours). ‘Functional’ does not mean here: contributing to the well functioning of a natural system such as a mechanism or an organism. It means: being located within a system of meanings, being defined by its position within a whole of significance. Since the work of comparison is similar to a work of translation, the starting point should be people’s ideas and values. The objects of comparison are ideological systems, which Dumont calls ‘configurations’ (in the sense of ‘patterns’ or ‘Gestalten’). In other words, comparative sociology is a radical undertaking. That is to say: it has to include the theorist in the process of making ideas and values relative to people. Each time we identify beliefs and practices as what they say and what they do, we should be able to identify on our side corresponding beliefs and values: this is what they would do on such-and-such occasion, whereas what we would do is of course this (and here we establish a relation of functional equivalence).

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Here, Dumont liked to quote a saying of Marcel Mauss: the sociological explanation has been given once we are able to say what they think and who they are, those who have such-and-such thoughts. Dumont expounds this idea by adding to “what they think and who they are” the following: “as opposed to what we ourselves believe in the same sort of situation” (Dumont 1983, p. 13, p. 177). So the Comparison Principle is a methodological principle. Its justification is our need for correcting our own sociocentrism. From an abstract point of view, one could imagine the comparison being impartial. We would judge that each side of the comparison is as significant as the other. Now, of course, Dumont is not asking the anthropologist to take sides in a confrontation of cultures, to stand with the partisans of modernity or to join the side of traditionalists. Nevertheless, from an anthropological point of view, the two sides are not even. Traditional societies are more representative of the human condition as such. For the anthropologist, the modern civilization is an exception and an eccentricity (which of course does not mean an aberration!). So Dumont comes to the following formulation of the ‘comparative task’: Taking into account the particular situation of modern civilization in relation to traditional civilizations, the main comparative task is to account or to express the modern case in traditional terms. (Dumont 1975, p. 169)

Obviously the question is then: how could we express the modern case – our case – in traditional terms? I mean: how do we get rid of the idea that the individual is somehow the universal norm? How could we come to think of it as an exception? What would be a comparative account of what we call the individual? Is such an account even possible, if we take seriously the idea that the non-Western cultures did not have our conception of the individual?

3. ‘Individualism’ as a comparative notion Do we have a comparative notion of ‘individualism’? Is it a notion we can use as a comparative tool? There are common objections to the idea that ‘individualism’ could be taken as being the distinctive mark of our configuration of values. Scholars have expressed doubts about the usefulness of the term ‘individualism’. They have complained the word is too vague, too indefinite, too equivocal. One such objector is Foucault in The Care of the Self (Foucault 1984/1988, pp. 42– 43). He points out that the term ‘individualism’ has been used in various

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meanings without any clear connexion between them. Foucault mentions three main uses. Under the label ‘individualism’, one can designate ‘attitudes’ such as: 1. The valuation of the individual. Individualism in this sense would be the case in a society based on the aristocratic values of warriors, where one would be praised for one’s individual performances (as opposed to one’s contributions to collective performances). We could say Homer’s heroes in the Iliad are ‘individualists’ in this sense. 2. The valuation of private and domestic life. Here, individualism means nothing more than withdrawal from public and political life. 3. Third, individualism could be defined as the attitude of self-concern, in the sense of caring for one’s spiritual perfection and salvation. This is the sort of individualism Pierre Hadot and others have attributed to Hellenistic schools of philosophy such as the Stoics or the Sceptics. So Foucault draws the conclusion that we do not have a clear notion of what is meant by the word ‘individualism’. What are we to do with his strictures against that term? Certainly, these three definitions cannot be brought together into a coherent one. They are unsatisfactory. But none of them can claim to provide us with a sociological conception of individualism as a system of values, on two counts. – First, nothing is said about the social conditions that make it possible for an individualistic system of values to emerge. There is no reference to the kind of global society in which such valuations can occur. – Second, these three explanations do not conform to the Comparison Principle. As a first meaning, Foucault mentioned the valuation of the individual. Now, it is not enough to say that the individual is valued. We need a contrast. But what would be the opposite valuation, i. e. the attitude in which what is most valued is the conformity to group values? Does individualism value originality as opposed to conformism? Such an antithesis of originality versus conformism would not comply with the Comparison Principle, since conformism as such is not a value. When people approve sticking with the values of the group, they are not praising the mere lack of originality. Or do we oppose individualism to good citizenship? If so, all the value is on the side of the holistic configuration, since the individualistic valuation amounts to egoism and self-serving behaviour. One could make the same comment on the two other definitions. In order to be comparative, the individualistic valuations should be opposed to antagonist

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values. But what we have is on one side a positive value and, on the other side, a mere lack of value. These explanations are not comparative because they are not radical enough. We do not know where the historian is supposed to stand (not as an individual, obviously, but as a member of his own society sharing the common views and values of his own social milieu). Foucault’s three definitions do not bring our common conceptions into the picture.

4. Two concepts of the individual: The empirical and the normative When Foucault complained that the term ‘individualism’ was too vague, he seemed not to be aware that at least some scholars had tried to give a scientific status to that notion. As a matter of fact, this is precisely what Dumont undertook to do in his Homo hierarchicus (Dumont 1979). As is well known, Dumont distinguishes two aspects of what we call an individual, that is to say a human individual: the empirical aspect and the normative one. In social sciences, the term ‘individual’ has two uses, and it often happens that an author will be shifting from the empirical to the normative meaning.² Here are the two concepts we have of the individual: a) The empirical individual: When speaking of individuals, one can mean the individual as ‘the empirical subject of speech, thought and will, indivisible sample of mankind’. Empirical individuals are to be found everywhere. Acknowledging the presence of such individuals somewhere amounts to noticing that there are human beings somewhere. It does not tell us anything about these people’s values and ideas. People from all cultural backgrounds can say ‘I’ or ‘me’, they don’t need to be committed to individualistic values to master the linguistic use of personal pronouns. b) The normative individual: As opposed to the empirical individual, we have “the independent, autonomous moral being, as found in the first place in our own ideology of man and society” (Dumont 1967, p. 228). Being an individual in the normative sense is basically a matter of being intellectually independent from one’s society. Of course, it is never the case that I am intellectually independent from the social milieu where I was born and raised.

 Actually, Dumont argues in his Homo aequalis I (Dumont 1977) that this is the case with Marx. When Marx writes about the individual in a primitive society (primitive form of communism), he shifts from the empirical notion of an individual to the normative one.

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Therefore the normative representation of the individual should be taken as a ‘regulating idea’, not a descriptive term. Becoming an individual is a goal to be pursued, an infinite task, a pure Sollen (Fichte). The normative concept of the human Individual (with a capital ‘I’) is an idealization about what it would take to be a full-fledged individual, i. e. a self-sufficient thinking being. Dumont asks us to recognize “the Individual” (as he puts it) “as being essentially a norm of modern thought, and not a universal fact of experience” (Dumont 1967, p. 230). He points out that in social sciences, most of the time, “the normative, the value content of ‘the individual’ is too easily hidden behind its empirical aspect” (Dumont 1967, p. 229).

5. Three versions of the modern individual Now historians have sometimes raised another sort of objection. Even when the notion of ‘the Individual’ has been given a more precise status – i. e. when it designates a ‘norm of modern thought’, not the mere fact that human beings are physically individuated and can be recognized as distinct existences – still it is too general. Is there such a thing as ‘the modern individual’? Here, one could argue on an historical basis that it is not legitimate to speak of ‘the modern individual’ since they are many distinct accounts of modernity. It will not do to refer to the Enlightenment to define modernity. The Enlightenment is one thing, les Lumières are another thing, die Aufklärung is still another one. Not to mention other intellectual trends such as the Italian Enlightenment (l’Illuminismo). Now, Dumont would agree with this observation. He has himself undertaken to spell out the differences between what he calls the national versions of ‘individualism’ (i. e. of the individualistic configuration of values). In doing so, he was just keeping to the Comparison Principle: even when we deal with ideas, ‘reference to the global society should be maintained’, since these ideas are social ideas. But in modern times, global societies tend to be national States. In the first chapter of Homo hierarchicus, Dumont makes clear that he himself comes from the French school of sociology, that is to say, that his intellectual background is French. This is why in his comparison of India with Western societies he puts all the emphasis on the opposition between the hierarchical principle and the equality principle. According to him, French individualism is primarily equalitarian, which implies that it will tend to express itself in the political realm.

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Now this is not necessarily the case in other Western traditions. In his book Homo aequalis II (Dumont 1991), which deals with the German culture, Dumont has pointed out that the German tradition of individualism is quite different. Because of the primacy of a spiritual concern about one’s salvation over a political concern about equality between citizens, German individualism has developed into ‘singularism’. Individualism as ‘singularism’ means that the emphasis is on the uniqueness of each individual rather than on the equality of individuals-as-citizens. In fact, ‘singularism’ is inimical to equalitarianism. Taking citizens to be strictly equals implies that they are substitutable to each other. Taking human beings to be singular existences implies that each one is unique and therefore irreplaceable. German individualism stresses the individual’s attempt at self-realization (through a personal process of Bildung). The German version of individualism is expressivist (in Charles Taylor’s sense). It advocates self-realization rather than rebuilding the social order on an equalitarian basis. Expressivism as such is apolitical and may even be conservative on political issues. Dumont had the project of devoting another study to the British brand of individualism, a project he intended to work out into a monograph. He was working on that project at the time of his death. We don’t know what he would have included in his intended monograph on Great Britain. However, we can take a hint of what he would have developed from an illuminating remark he made in his chapter on John Locke (in Homo aequalis I). I would like to develop this remark on my own.

6. The British version of individualism In this chapter (Dumont 1977, ch. 4), Dumont is discussing the modernity of Locke’s doctrine of private property. Some historians have argued that Locke’s philosophy of property was still continuous with mediaeval views. According to Dumont, Locke’s doctrine is eminently modern, since it bases the right of property on the individual’s labour, not on his needs. Dumont describes the shift from the mediaeval idea of property to the modern idea in the following way: The conception of justice as arising not from the idea of the whole and of ordered relationships within it, but rather from the individual in whatever aspect, is strikingly modern. The innovation stems from Hobbes, and was to be accepted by Hume, so it deserves to be called British. (Dumont 1970, p. 37)

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One could argue that Locke’s derivation of a right of property from the idea of the individual rests on a sophisticated play on the word ‘mine’. My possessions belong to me because they are an extension of my body, that is to say, to the body that is mine. An individual’s body and her physical operations, that’s what is most ‘proper’ to her. By extension, any bodily operation on an external object will somehow incorporate that object into the sphere of the individual’s own existence. Since my body is ‘mine’ (in the sense it cannot be taken away from me), the work of my hands is mine because it includes a part of myself and cannot be alienated from me without my consent. Dumont refers us to Peter Laslett’s distinction between two meanings of the word ‘property’ in Locke’s writings. In its specific meaning, it means ‘material possessions’. In an extended meaning, it designates the whole of the attributes constituting the personality of the human individual. For example, Locke writes that men unite “for the preservation of their Lives, Liberties and Estates, which I call by the general Name, Property” (Locke 1963, II, §123). In the state of nature, each individual has, in virtue of the Law of Nature, “a Power, not only to preserve his Property, that is, his Life, Liberty and Estate, against the Injuries and Attempts of other Men, but to judge of, and punish the breaches of that Law in others” (Locke 1963, II, §87). Hence Locke’s value theory of labour: Sec. 27. Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature hath placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men: for this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others. (Locke 1963, II, §27)

Does that mean that the British version of individualism could be described as ‘possessive individualism’ to use Macpherson’s label (Macpherson, 1962)? It certainly constitutes a ‘possessive’ understanding of the normative individual, since it holds that being a person is equivalent to having a personal estate. Now is possessive individualism especially British? Dumont, I think, would not agree. He observes that any individualism will have to be ‘possessive’ in some sense. He mentions sometimes the ‘Hegelian individual’. In Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right, the person is first defined by a possessive dimension: in order to be actual (wirklich), the individual needs to be reflected in his private

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property (Dumont 1997, p. 109). We cannot think of ‘appropriation’ as “a historically transient accident of a permanent phenomenon called individualism” (Dumont 1970, p. 37). We could not keep the normative Individual (its freedom) while getting rid of its ‘possessive’ relation to things in the world: this is why, according to Dumont, the communist idea was doomed to fail. So what seems to be distinctive about British individualism is rather the concept of justice itself, as expressed by the notion of ‘rights’, rather than an impetus toward appropriation. As a mark of what is distinctive about British individualism, one could mention the fact that it is impossible to translate the Latin word jus by the English word a right. What is meant by having a right in English does not correspond to having a jus, although this would be the correct translation according to dictionaries. Here I will refer to an analysis by Alan R. White (1984), a philosopher who was working in the style of ordinary language philosophy and has studied the English vocabulary of ‘rights’. The concept of jus is a correlative one: the existence of a jus on my side implies that there is a corresponding duty on somebody else’s side. Let’s suppose I have the jus of crossing your field in order to reach my own piece of land which is enclosed into yours. Then you have the corresponding obligation to let me walk across your property. On the other hand, the concept of a right (what the Germans call a ‘subjective right’) is individualistic: I can have a right which does not imply any obligation on anybody else’s part. Having a right does not necessarily relate the possessor of that right to other persons. Alan White shows that there is no internal relation between ‘somebody having a right’ (in the ordinary English sense of the expression) and ‘somebody else having a duty’. He gives some examples of such ‘absolute rights’, meaning that the possession of right does not necessarily impose any obligation on anybody: Thus, even if Robinson Crusoe could not have any legal right or, perhaps, moral rights, he certainly could have the right to feel pleased or proud, to assume that p, to hope that q, or to expect that r, for these rights do not relate to what others do. Indeed, even when others are involved, my right, for example, to pursue my business interests, need not make it wrong for them to interfere not need it lay on them any duty to help. (White 1984, p. 14)

White has also pointed out that this British notion of ‘a right’ is essentially individualistic. He writes: The late birth of the idea of a right, which seems to have been unknown to the Greeks and possibly the Romans, as contrasted with what is right, may be partly due to the delayed, but now pronounced, prominence given to the individual […] It is true, of course, that the language of duties, which seems to date back to classical times, also makes the individual central, but it does so more by stressing what is expected or demanded of him than what he can himself expect or demand. (White 1984, p. 175)

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This is the illuminating contrast: having a right versus what is right. If the emphasis is on the system of duties – i. e. on what it is right for a person to do – the normative order is supposed to be already there before the individual comes into existence. Such a concept of duty belongs to a holistic configuration of values. Whereas the concept of ‘a right’ is clearly individualistic. If we want to think in terms of rights, in the specific English sense of the word, we will try to derive the system of duties from the presupposition that persons have rights and that it is both natural and rational for them to want that theirs rights be protected. First comes the individual, then a normative social order emerges as an outcome of interactions and agreements between individuals.

7. Morality as a functional equivalent to group religion What can the comparison between the modern idea of private property and the traditional one tell us about the individualistic configuration of values? The conclusion to be drawn from comparing Locke’s doctrines to mediaeval ones is that the Lockean individual in a state of nature is already a normative individual. Here, in order to see the importance of that point, one has to focus on the role plaid by the new notion of morality, which is progressively replacing that of group religion. Dumont puts forward a ‘procedure for comparing holistic and individualistic values’. We should describe formally the individualist revolution as a transformation of a former configuration of values into a new one. In order to retrace the genealogy of the new configuration, we need to look for a relation of functional equivalence between social principles (on the side of the holistic configuration of values) and individual principles (on the modern side). On the traditional side, the situation is as follows. If we want to present a claim or a rule as legitimate, we have to find a way to locate it in the universal order, meaning the cosmic order as a symbolic representation of the social order. What this implies from the point of view of the empirical individual is that one has to govern oneself by conforming to the social norms as established in one’s milieu. Conformity to the social order is not thought of as a mark of conformism, as showing a deplorable lack of ambition and imagination. Rather it is the definition of human decency, of being a good person. A decent person is one who is able to rise to the legitimate expectations of people around her. Now, if we adopt the point of view of the modern side – in other words our own point of view – we will hold that morality is to be defined as a matter of

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conscience. Moral conscience is conceived as a principle each one will find in oneself. The moral conscience is what subordinates the individual to the moral law. Such a subordination has found its most interiorized formulation with the Kantian categorical imperative. So the transformation turning the holistic configuration into an individualistic one is a historical process of internalization. As Dumont puts it in his Myers Lecture, morality as understood in modern philosophy is the result of an ‘internalization of directly social values” (Dumont 1970, p. 38). What’s the difference between referring directly to social values and referring to them only in an indirect way? In a holistic context, you can mention ‘directly’ social principles when reproaching somebody with his conduct – or reproaching yourself with your own behaviour for that matter. Now, invoking the moral Law is a way of giving a normative status to individuals in a state of nature. True, these individuals are independent from each other (as long as they have not yet agreed to unite and to establish a ‘common judge’). However, they are already subordinated to the norms of the moral Law. Now, as long as the moral Law was called a ‘law of Nature’, it was in fact received as a divine Law, the expression of God’s will. And this allows Dumont to summarize the genealogy of the modern Individual in the following way: “the substitution for man as a social being of man as an individual was possible because Christianity warranted the individual as a moral being” (Dumont 1970, p. 39). In other words, man ceases to consider himself a ‘social being’ and becomes a (normative) ‘individual’ in our sense because moral obligation is taken for granted, without any reference to human needs (Dumont 1970, p. 39).

8. Asceticism ‘in the world’ (Max Weber) I will now turn to a third kind of objection that has been raised by historians. Once again, it is the very notion of a ‘modern individual’ which is under fire, but from another angle. The objection is that there is nothing specifically modern in the idea of the Individual. Individualism cannot be taken to be a characteristic of our modern times, since it can be found before our times, in other cultures, e. g. among the ancient Greeks. When does the modern individual emerge? Answering such a question presupposes that we have decided when modernity began. Was it in the 18th Century with the Enlightenment? Or in the 16th Century, at the beginning of ‘Modern Times’, with the Reformation and the Renaissance? Or could we find some elements of Enlightenment in ancient times? It has been sometimes argued that some Greek philosophers – e. g., the Sophists – were already holding the ideas

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of the Enlightenment. If we follow this last line of thought, we might end up agreeing with Durkheim when he writes in his study The Division of Social Labour that individualism has been constantly on the march and progressing since the very beginning of mankind and human history. So, if Durkheim is right, individualism is not peculiar to the culture of modern societies, since it has always been there to some degree. The objection amounts to an uncertainty about the historical meaning of the Middle Ages. As the very name given to that period suggests, it has often been regarded as an empty time, a sort of parenthesis between two great civilizations (the Greco-Roman one, the modern Western one). The reason for our difficulty of locating the Middle Ages in history might well be that we have not entirely decided when modernity itself begins. When should we locate the break with antiquity? The answer depends on our philosophy of history. Was the break with ancient times religious? Then we should say with Hegel that the modern idea of the free mind was brought into this world by Christianity. Or was it secular? Then modernity does coincide with Modern Times, with both the scientific revolution and the rise of the nation state. Dumont’s thesis is that modernity could not be brought about by just one break. It took two steps to carry out the transition from the traditional configuration of values to the modern one. First a religious step, then a secular, political step. Here we need to focus on the interpretation of Reformation, more precisely on the historical meaning of the Calvinist Reformation. First I will refer to Max Weber’s interpretation of Puritanism in his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Then I will explain how Dumont has worked out his own analytical tools by drawing on Weber. As is well known, Weber interprets the beliefs of the Puritans by means of a quadripartite typology of religious outlooks. As a matter of fact, Weber’s classification is not a general typology of human religions. Weber is interested in distinguishing various forms of ‘individual religion’. So he is not considering group religions (in the way Durkheim does), only personal disciplines of salvation. He is already dealing with individualistic attitudes. The typology is built by crosschecking two polarities. What is at stake is the question of one’s personal justification and salvation, or, as we could say, with the meaning of one’s personal life. The first polarity has to do with the fact that the religious person can be active or passive. There are two ways of emancipating oneself from the pressure coming from the social world (from the prevalent norms as implemented by people around us). One is to escape from the world by becoming indifferent to worldly values, success or defeats. The other is to work actively at mastering the social

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world as well as our personal desires. Weber opposes these two possible attitudes as (passive) mysticism versus (active) asceticism. The second polarity is taken from the difference between withdrawing physically from the social world (the way of the monk who joins a monastery – literally a place to be monos, to be left alone) and withdrawing only mentally (as St Paul said: “being in the world, but not of the world”). This is the dichotomy opposing the ‘otherworldly’ attitude to the ‘inner-worldly’ one. Seeking one’s salvation in the otherworldly way means leaving behind oneself the ordinary interactions of everyday life and joining a monastery. Weber classifies the Puritan attitude as an ‘asceticism in the world’. It is a complex attitude, to be defined by its opposition to both the ‘otherworldly’ orientation of a monk and the merely ‘worldly’ attitudes of ordinary people. Parsons explains that complexity in the following terms: The Calvinist is exhorted to labour in a calling, soberly and rationally, in order to bring about the Kingdom of God on Earth. He is neither to renounce the world and retire to a monastery nor to accept the traditional order, but, so far as it falls within his calling, to attempt to make over the world according to the dictates of righteousness. (Parsons 1968, p. 534)

This comment of Parson’s gives us an idea of the way leading from the Calvinist to the modern Individual, i. e. ourselves. Christian monks were practicing an otherworldly kind of ‘asceticism’ because they had to stand apart from ordinary people in order to work at making their lives conform to God’s will. The Protestants have repudiated the institution of monasticism (i. e. the ‘otherworldly asceticism’ of the monastery). All human beings are to be subjected to the same ethical standards. In a sense, everybody is now supposed to be as indifferent to merely worldly values as a monk, and at the same time to raise a family, to have a job, to be a good citizen, etc. So God’s will is progressively turned into the moral Law. The will of God is replaced by the ‘dictates of righteousness’: here we have the formula of functional equivalence which gives us a comparative perspective on the Reformation. Indeed, when one invokes the ‘dictates of righteousness’, the transition is accomplished, since we have completed the substitution of an interior morality of conscience for the Christian revelation as kept by the Church.

9. Individualism ‘in the world’ (Louis Dumont) Let’s call the process of becoming a normative individual – that is to say, the process of submitting one’s life and conduct regarding other people to individu-

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alistic values –‘self-individualization’. Our question was: Is self-individualization a specifically modern phenomenon? It seems that the quest for spiritual independence cannot be the distinctive mark of modernity. After all, it has occurred before modern times as well as in other cultures. Then, our question had to be rephrased: what is peculiar to modern individualism, since it is possible to describe Early Christianity or even some Hellenistic schools of philosophy as engaged into a process of self-individualization? At this point, we need to keep in mind Dumont’s reminder: the Western development is an exception, something eccentric from the point of view of a huge majority of human cultures among the world and during universal history. And that’s the reason why the process of individualization had to go through several stages. Dumont’s answer is precisely that our individualism is exceptional by being ‘in the world’. Here, we need to consider Dumont’s reformulation of Max Weber’s typology. Dumont argues that the emphasis should be on the ‘inner-worldly’ orientation of the Calvinist Puritan rather than on his asceticism. As is well known, Dumont brings to his interpretation of Calvin’s position an insight he has gained in studying the Indian system of casts. The traditional Indian society is certainly holistic in its values. Nevertheless, it contains within itself the possibility for a man to escape from the burdens of social life by becoming a renouncer (a forest hermit or sannyasi). In his Daedalus paper “On the Comparative Understanding of Non-Modern Civilizations”, Dumont points out that even if the Indian renouncer is not the same thing as our Individual, he has something in common with him (Dumont 1975, p. 167). He is not the same thing, since our Individual is in the world, whereas the renouncer had to leave it behind him. Nevertheless, he shares with our Individual a way of thinking. As Dumont puts it, the renouncer is thinking as a (normative) Individual. Undertaking to individualize oneself is working at thinking ‘as an Individual’, that is to say, without reference to a social encompassing order.³ Who is the renouncer? Where does he come from? According to Dumont, what happens is something like this: a man of superior birth decides to leave the social world and his duties in the world because he wants to care for himself and to liberate himself “from the fetters of the human condition” (Dumont 1975, p. 167), that is to say, from the burden of being caught in the on-going cycle of duties and debts as defined by one’s station in the social order. The difference

 One way to do it is to substitute, as the Stoics did, a cosmic universal order to the local merely human order.

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between an Indian renouncer and us is that the renouncer who seeks self-individualization cannot accomplish it ‘in the world’. He has to withdraw materially from his social position whereas we are happy to seek for individuality while staying ‘in the world’. The comparison between the renouncer’s way of thinking and our own way of thinking teaches us one thing. It is impossible to imagine a direct transformation of the renouncer into a modern believer in human rights. It is just impossible to become an ‘individual-in-the-world’ in a holistic society. In such a society, personal emancipation can be pursued solely by way of withdrawing from it – but this is only possible because renouncement has become an institution of the (global) Indian society. In this respect, the mediaeval solution is analogous to the Indian one: a Christian believer has to decide whether to stay in the world or to seek a more perfect form of Christian life by becoming a monk, which is made possible by the social institution of the monastery. Nevertheless, the character of the renouncer is not completely unknown to us. He reminds us of such figures as ancient Cynic philosophers or early Christian hermits. His way of accomplishing self-individualization is closer to their kind of wisdom than to our own views. There is no way a ‘man-in-the-world’ living in a holistic society could turn himself directly into an inner-worldly individual. In a holistic context, people can understand what a renouncer is after, but they would not be able to make sense of a revolutionary figure. Self-individualization in the world is not even conceivable in such a context. It is not a matter of repression or authoritarian morality. The very idea of being a normative individual in this world is just not there. Such a character would be unintelligible to his fellow citizens. Nobody would understand him. Therefore even he himself could not explain what he would be after. There is no direct transition possible from the traditional type to the exceptional one. That’s why Dumont found it necessary to modify Weber’s typology. Instead of putting the emphasis on the asceticism of the Calvinist set of mind, he stresses its ‘innerworldliness’. This is what is really distinctive of the Calvinist transition from the Middle Ages to the modern era. The Puritan is certainly busy trying to conform his life to God’s will through asceticism. However, according to Dumont, this is not the most significant feature of his attitude. What is really important is that he can be active in the world without sharing with ordinary ‘men in the world’ an appreciation of mundane values. He is not supposed to be interested in the good things of life for themselves. He is not active because he enjoys the world as it is, but because he is under the obligation to make the world more perfect – more conform to God’s will, or, later, to the ‘dictates of righteousness’. In a word, his person is

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in the world, where he makes a living by working hard, where he raises a family, etc. but his will is not. The objects of his will are not taken from the world, they remains ‘other-worldly’.

10. The dual nature of the modern individual Our question was: do we have a comparative definition of the individual? We need such a definition if we want to claim that individualism is the distinctive mark of modernity. Now, the test of our definition being truly comparative is that it does allow us ‘to account for the modern case in traditional terms’. First, it looks as if the terms of our comparison were not well taken. There seems to be a discrepancy between the two sides of the correlation. Indeed, the two terms of the correlation are, on the traditional side, the universal order, and, on our modern side, the normative individual. How can we compare an atomic entity (the individual) with an hierarchical order? There seems to be no way we can spell out a relation of functional equivalence between them. But we have learnt to distinguish the normative individual from the empirical individual. Which individual are we considering? First, there is the empirical individual: is it a complex entity, like a living body, or a simple entity, in the way philosophers have claimed that the soul or the ego were without complexity? Well, the empirical individual is obviously a physical whole as an organism, but it is indivisible as a person. The personal pronoun ‘I’ is singular: it cannot be shared with somebody else. And when a part of the person is performing a personal act, it is the person who is acting. For example, if my hand writes my signature at the end of a letter, the signature is mine, since there is no way we could distinguish letters written by my hand from letters written by me. Then, we have the self-individualized individual, i. e. the normative one. Is it an ‘atom’, an indivisible entity? What Dumont has shown is that the modern individual ‘in-the-world’ contains, hidden within himself, an element of ‘otherworldliness’. Therefore, the normative individual is a whole rather than an atomic entity. And it is not just any kind of whole. Rather it is a structural whole, since its make up is defined by a hierarchical relation between the empirical person and the ideal subject of the will. The empirical individual is subordinated to the subject of an other-worldly will: that’s why this individual is ‘warranted as a moral being’. Therefore on both sides of the comparison, we find a complex entity, a whole made up of parts. These wholes are both constituted by a relation of subordination, and this is how they can be described as normative orders.

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Dumont’s definition complies with the Comparison Principle since it accounts for our case in traditional terms. The individual is indeed the modern ‘bearer of value’. The normative individual as a whole is the functional equivalent of the universal order, i. e. the religious ordering of everything. How could an individual replace a ‘universal order’? In order to replace an order, it needs to bring with itself a principle of order. But there is such a principle within the modern individual: in its internal dimension, the empirical individual confronts the transcendent subject of an autonomous will. And the formal object of an autonomous will is not to be found in the world. From the point of view of the modern individual, the domain of ultimate value remains otherworldly.

References Dumont, Louis (1967): “The Individual as an Impediment to Sociological Comparison and Indian History”. In: B. Singh and V. B. Singh (eds): Social Change and Economic Change: Essays in Honour of Prof. D. P. Mukerji. Bombay, Allied Publishers. Dumont, Louis (1970): “Religion, Politics and Society in the Individualistic Universe. The Henry Myers Lecture 1970”. In: Proceedings of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 1970, pp. 31 – 41. Dumont, Louis (1975): “On the Comparative Understanding of Non-Modern Civilizations”, Daedalus, Spring, pp. 153 – 172. Dumont, Louis (1979): Homo hierarchicus. Essai sur le système des castes. Paris: Gallimard. Dumont, Louis (1977): Homo aequalis I: genèse et épanouissement de l’idéologie économique. Paris: Gallimard. Dumont, Louis (1983): Essais sur l’individualisme. Une perspective anthropologique sur l’idéologie moderne. Paris: Le Seuil. Dumont, Louis (1991): Homo aequalis II. L’idéologie allemande. France-Allemagne et retour. Paris: Gallimard. Dumont, Louis (1997): Groupes de filiation et alliance de mariage: introduction à deux théories d’anthropologie sociale. Paris: Gallimard. Foucault, Michel (1984/1988): The Care of the Self, Volume III of the History of Sexuality. New York: Vintage Books. Locke, John (1963): Two Treatises of Government, with introduction and notes by P. Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Macpherson, Crawford Brough (1962): The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Parsons, Talcott (1968): The Structure of Social Action, Vol. II. New York: The Free Press. White, Alan R. (1984): Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Index of Names Albertus Magnus 29 Althusser, Louis 47 Alzheimer, Alois 5, 133 – 145, 147 – 149 Anscombe, Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret 3 f., 67 – 72, 77 – 79, 82 – 89, 91 f., 111 Arboleda, Joseph 145 Aristotle 27 – 29, 67 Austin, John Langshaw 37 Ballenger, Jesse 138 Barthes, Roland 47, 50 Beck, Ulrich 174, 183 f. Beck-Gernsheim, Elisabeth 174, 184 Bennett, David 139, 141 f. Benschop, Ruth 99 f. Bergson, Henri 12, 14 f. Berlant, Lauren 108 Berlin, Isaiah 174 Bielschowsky, Max 137 Boring, Edwin 99 Braidotti, Rosie 26, 108, 166 Brayne, Carol 140, 149 Bruno, Giordano 29 Burke, Edmund 179 Cattell, James McKeen 99 – 101, 107, 115 Chertkow, Howard 139 Clough, Patricia 108 Coon, Deborah 99 f. Cusanus, Nicolaus 29 Damasio, Antonio 108, 110 Danziger, Kurt 98, 101, 107 de Saussure, Ferdinand 47 Deleuze, Gilles 108 f., 153 f., 160, 166 – 169 Denney, Reuel 180 Derrida, Jacques 32, 47, 54, 57 f., 65 f., 153 f., 159 f., 166 Descartes, René 30, 124 f. Devitt, Michael 68, 73 Dreyfus, Hubert 181 Dumont, Louis 6, 187 – 190, 192 – 204

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 193 Fischer, Claude Serge 180 f. Foot, Philippa 67 f. Foucault, Michel 26, 47 f., 51 – 53, 87 f., 190 – 192 Freud, Sigmund 63, 137 Fukuyama, Francis 179 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 36, 40 f. Galilei, Galileo 128 Gandy, Samuel 136 Garve, Christian 179 Gibson, James 17 f. Glazer, Nathan 180 Golgi, Camillo 136 Grant, Ulysses S. 9, 11, 20 Grossberg, Lawrence 108 Grosz, Elizabeth 108 Guattari, Félix 108, 166 – 169 Hacking, Ian 70, 87 f. Hadot, Pierre 191 Haraway, Donna 26, 142, 155 f., 166, 169 Hardy, John 134 f. Haslanger, Sally 67 – 69, 89 – 92 Hayles, Katherine 155 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 31, 53, 178, 195, 199 Heidegger, Martin 26 f., 32, 34, 36 f., 39 f., 42 f., 65 Hertzberg, Lars 121, 126 f. Higgins, Gerald 134 f. Hochschild, Arlie 113 Hull, David 68 Humboldt, Alexander von 176 Hume, David 179, 194 Hyslop, Peter 139 Jackson, Michael 35 Janowski, Monica 11, 20 Kamper, Dietmar 27 Kant, Immanuel 30 f., 77, 124, 159, 173, 175 Katzman, Robert 138

206

Index of Names

Kierkegaard, Søren 31, 41 Kleinman, Arthur 35 Kraepelin, Emil 137 f. Kuhn, Thomas Samuel 134

Plessner, Helmuth 1, 25, 32 – 34, 36, 39 Praet, Istvan 20 Putnam, Robert 180

Lacan, Jacques 63 f. Laidlaw, James 35 Lasch, Christopher 180 Laslett, Peter 195 Latour, Bruno 142 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 29, 31 Leslie, Sarah-Jane 67 – 69, 89 – 92 Lévinas, Emmanuel 36 Lewens, Tim 73 Leys, Ruth 108 – 110 Libet, Benjamin 4, 110, 120 – 123, 125, 128 Llull, Ramon / Lullus, Raimundus 1, 9 – 13, 20, 22, 25, 28 – 30, 32, 34 – 36, 38 Locke, John 173, 179, 194 f., 197 Lopera, Francisco 144 f. Marcuse, Herbert 52 Martin, Aryn 162 – 164 Marx, Karl 192 Masschelein, Jan 9, 16 – 18 Massumi, Brian 108 – 110, 112 Mattingly, Cheryl 35 Mauss, Marcel 190 Mayr, Ernst 68 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 33 Mill, John Stuart 174, 176 Mitchell, David 155, 161 Morris, John 144 Myers, Charles Samuel 3 f., 97, 102 f., 105 f., 114 Nancy, Jean-Luc 20 f., 28, 43, 65, 158, 169 Nietzsche, Friedrich 31, 33, 36, 53, 175, 177 Okasha, Samir 68, 79 Olds, Jacqueline 180 Ortega y Gasset, José 9, 12 f., 15 Packard, Vance 180 Parsons, Talcott 200 Petrarch, Francesco 179 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni

Reich, Wilhelm 52 Reiman, Eric 145, 147 Rhees, Rush 112, 114 f. Riesmann, David 180 Rivers, William Halse Rivers 102, 105, 112, 115 Robinson, Daniel N. 121, 128 Rubin, Gayle 112 f. Sandel, Michael 177 Sartre, Jean-Paul 51, 65 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 25, 30 – 34, 36, 39 – 41 Schumpeter, Joseph 183 Schwarz, Richard S. 180 Searle, John 37 f. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 108, 110 Sen, Amartya 174 Sennett, Richard 180 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper 179 Shouse, Eric 108 Simmel, Georg 175 f., 179 Sinnot-Armstrong, Walter 121, 125, 128 Smith, Adam 173, 179 Smith, Kerry 119, 123 – 125 Snyder, Sharon 155 Sobchack, Vivian 156 f., 159 Stewart, Kathleen 108 Tanzi, Rudolph 136 Tariot, Pierre 145 Taylor, Charles 176 f., 194 Thompson, Michael 3, 68, 70 – 74, 76 f., 79 f., 82, 85, 90 f. Thrift, Nigel 108 Titchener, Edward Bradford 99 Tomkin, Silvan 108 f. Tugendhat, Ernst 34 Turkle, Sherry 180 f. Varela, Francisco

29

108, 158

Index of Names

Waldenfels, Bernhard 1, 20, 25, 35 – 39, 41 Weber, Max 198 – 202 White, Alan Richard 196 Whitehead, Alfred North 14 f. Whitehouse, Peter 137 Wieman, Henry Nelson 9, 14 f., 17, 19 f. Wilson, Elizabeth 108

Wittgenstein, Ludwig 4, 74, 88, 97, 99, 105 – 107, 111 f., 114 – 116 Woodworth, Robert Sessions 115 Wundt, Wilhelm 3, 98 – 102, 106, 115 Zimmermann, Johann Georg

179

207

Index of Subjects action 4, 16 f., 21, 30, 37, 47 – 64, 106, 108, 110 – 112, 119 – 121, 123 – 130, 167, 178 activity 4, 10, 12, 17, 20, 39 f., 42, 53, 64 f., 74, 110, 112 f., 120, 125, 127, 130 affect 4 f., 48, 98, 107 – 110, 112 f., 115, 156 f., 162, 166 – affect theory 97 – 99, 107 f., 110, 112 f., 115 f. agency 2, 21 f., 25, 35, 47 – 57, 59, 62, 64 f., 123, 130, 160, 168 f. Alzheimer’s disease (AD) 4, 133 – 149 Amyloid cascade hypothesis 4 f., 133 f., 136, 147 Amyloid plaque 5, 133, 135 – 137, 146 – 148 anatomical picture 80 – 82, 87, 89 animism 11, 20 anthropocene 25 – 28 anthropology 1 – 3, 7, 9, 22, 25 – 29, 32, 34 – 37, 40, 42, 97 f., 104, 113, 116, 168, 187 – 189 a priori 1, 5, 12, 20, 31, 129 asceticism 198, 200 – 202 assemblage 5, 153 f., 156, 165 – 167 attention 9, 17 f., 21 f., 32, 56, 63, 67 f., 71, 105 f., 114, 119, 121, 124, 137 – 139, 141 f., 144 f., 147 – 149, 168, 180 autonomy 5 f., 47, 51 – 53, 55 f., 65, 108, 175 biomarker 5, 133 – 135, 143 – 148 bioscience 153, 161, 164, 166, 168 body 5, 10, 12, 17, 19, 33, 108, 110, 112 f., 124 f., 128, 153 – 164, 166 – 169, 195, 203 brain 4 f., 67, 97 f., 101, 107, 109 – 111, 113, 119 f., 122 – 125, 133 – 141, 143 – 146, 148 Brazil 1842 Calvinist reformation 6, 199 Cartesian 19, 124 f., 127, 153, 155 category 20, 29, 72 – 74, 77, 82, 104, 137, 142, 154 causation 125, 134, 146 China 174, 182 commodification 111 configuration 167, 189 – 191, 193, 197 – 199

consciousness 4, 47 f., 54 f., 66, 101, 105 f., 108, 120, 123, 125, 128, 155 context 2 – 5, 27, 29, 48 – 53, 55 f., 60, 62 f., 71, 80, 85, 97, 99, 102 f., 106, 111 – 115, 121, 127 – 129, 161, 164 – 167, 176, 188, 198, 202 convention 81, 109, 113, 159 corporeal 108 f., 153 – 156, 158, 164 – 169 – corporeality 156, 159 f. cosmology 9, 20 creativity 14 – 16, 22, 47 f., 65, 107, 109, 113, 168 cyborg 154 – 156, 169 degenerate case 119 f., 129 dementia 133 – 135, 137 f., 140 – 145, 147 – 149 democracy 178, 183 description 26, 70, 74, 80, 87, 91, 103, 106 f., 111, 114, 119, 124 f., 127, 189 determinism 48, 124 dual 187, 203 – dualism 125 education 2, 5, 9, 13 f., 16 – 19, 145, 148 f. eliminativism 125 embodiment 15, 33 f., 153, 156 f., 159 f., 165 – 169, 174 emotion 106, 108 – 110, 113, 115 enhancement 154 – 156 Enlightenment 168, 175, 179, 193, 198 f. environment 17 f., 30, 33, 72 f., 79, 83, 86 – 88, 101 – 104, 106, 112, 127, 148, 168 epistemology 29, 58 – epistemological 1 f., 6 f., 25, 28 essence 1, 3, 10, 15, 32, 67 – 69, 73, 76, 80, 85, 89 – 91, 93 essentialism 3, 25 f., 29, 67 – 69, 73, 79, 83 f., 91 ethics 26, 35, 88, 109, 176 – ethical 25 f., 35, 37, 133, 147, 200 ethnography 25, 32, 97, 115, 129 evolution 15, 68, 75, 77, 80, 83, 84 f., 110, 155

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Index of Subjects

existence 6, 10 – 12, 21, 25, 27, 30, 32 – 36, 38 – 43, 52, 58, 70, 76 f., 88 f., 107, 133, 153, 163, 174, 176, 193 – 197 existential 6, 18, 25, 32, 34 – 36, 38 – 42, 158 experience 4, 30 f., 33 – 35, 37, 39 – 42, 54 f., 57, 59, 62 f., 66, 94, 97 f., 101 f., 105, 107 f., 111 f., 121, 126, 153, 156 – 158, 162 f., 165, 168 f., 184, 193 experiment 4, 97 – 105, 110 f., 115, 119 – 123, 125 – 128, 130, 138 experimental psychology 3 f., 97 f., 101 f., 105 – 107, 115 exposure 9, 17 – 19, 148 f. facticity 38 – 40, 42 feminism 113 – feminist 113, 155, 166, 169 freedom 6, 29, 31, 33 f., 51 f., 65, 121, 127 f., 133, 174, 176 – 178, 183, 196 free will 4, 119 – 125, 129 functional equivalence 189, 197, 200, 203 functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) 119 – 123, 125, 128 – 130 generality 67 – 69, 77, 114 f. generics 69 f., 89 – 92, 94 – generic statement 67, 89 f., 92 f. hermeneutic 1, 25 f., 28, 40 – 42 hermeneutics 25, 28, 35 f., 39 – 43 history 12, 21, 30 f., 48, 53, 65, 79, 97 f., 106, 115, 133, 154, 174, 176 f., 199, 201 human 1 – 7, 9 – 15, 19, 21 f., 25 – 36, 38 – 42, 47, 50, 53, 64 f., 67, 69 – 72, 78 f., 85 – 89, 92 – 94, 97 – 100, 103, 106 f., 109 – 115, 119 f., 125 – 127, 130, 135 f., 147 f., 153 – 161, 164, 166 – 169, 174, 177, 179, 187 – 189, 192 – 195, 197 – 202 – human condition 26, 35, 39, 51, 190, 201 – human corporeality 155 – 157 – human life 2, 9, 12 – 16, 21, 36, 38, 64, 67, 69 f., 86, 93 f., 113 – human nature 12, 20, 22, 25 f., 33, 53, 67, 69, 85, 88 f., 179 Human Genome Diversity Project 147 humanism 26, 28, 34, 64 f.

humanity 1, 3, 9, 20, 27, 29, 33 hybridity 154, 158, 165 identity 66, 93, 153 – 157, 160, 162 f., 165, 167 – 169, 176 f. imagination 9, 14 – 16, 19, 197 immune system 135, 161, 164 indeterminacy 1 f., 27, 33 f., 36 India 157, 182, 193, 201 f. individual 2, 6 f., 27, 29, 42, 47 f., 51 – 53, 56, 58 f., 61, 63 – 65, 68, 73, 76, 78 – 80, 84, 86, 99, 107, 111, 123, 133 f., 140 – 144, 146 – 149, 153, 155, 159, 161, 166, 168, 173 – 179, 181, 183 f., 187 f., 190 – 204 individualism 173, 175 f., 179, 183, 187 f., 190 – 196, 198 – 201, 203 individuality 5 f., 153, 155, 157, 167, 168, 174 – 176, 179, 202 inorganic 153, 156, 166 f. intention 4, 16 f., 21, 32, 37, 48, 57, 109 – 112, 115, 119, 121 f. – intentionality 2, 4, 17, 38, 47 f., 53 – 60, 62 – 64, 109 – 112, 115 – intentional states 54, 57 – 59 intercorporeality 158, 160, 164, 166 internet 181 interpretation 42, 58, 63, 109 f., 121, 124 f., 128, 177, 199, 213 introspection 97 f., 100 f., 106, 115 – introspective method 3, 99, 115 irreducibility 70, 74 f. language 3, 11, 37, 47, 52, 54 – 61, 63 f., 67, 69 f., 72, 76, 78, 85 f., 88 – 90, 93, 107, 109, 111, 114, 129, 158, 164 f., 169, 189, 196 – language, ordinary 37, 55, 59, 196 liberal 6, 94, 173 – 179, 184 liberalism 6, 173 f., 176 liberty 174 f., 168, 195 life 1, 3, 9 – 17, 19, 21 f., 25, 30, 34 f., 38 f., 41 f., 54, 65, 67, 70 f., 74 – 77, 80, 84, 86, 88 f., 91, 94, 100 – 103, 108, 112, 114, 121, 123 f., 133, 135, 140, 148 f., 155, 157, 159 f., 162 f., 165 f., 174 – 176, 179 f., 183 f., 189, 191, 195, 199 f., 202

Index of Subjects

limb 154, 156, 165, 167 lip key 100 f., 107, 115 logic 28 – 30, 34, 37 – 39, 41, 47, 53, 67 f., 77, 80, 90, 123, 159 f. loneliness 6, 149, 173, 178 f., 181 – 184 map 16, 81, 138 mathematics 112, 129 mechanism 52 f., 90 f., 119 f., 126, 141, 145, 189 metaphysics 26, 31, 64, 114 microbiome 153 f., 161 f., 165 f. mind 9, 13 f., 16 – 19, 21, 53 f., 60 f., 99 – 103, 106, 110 – 112, 123 – 125, 139, 141, 169, 199 modern 6 f., 30 f., 36, 47, 53, 173, 176, 183, 187, 190, 193 f., 197 – 204 modernity 6, 31, 183, 190, 193 f., 198 f., 201, 203 morality 94, 197 f., 200, 202 music 18, 103, 105 f., 114 natural-historical judgment 76 f., 80, 82 – 84, 90 – 92, 94 naturalistic 70, 189 neuroscience 107, 119, 122, 136 norm 38, 61 – 63, 74 – 77, 80, 84, 87, 94, 112, 174, 190, 193, 197 – 199 normativity 71, 74 – 76 Norway 182 ontology 12, 26, 28 – 30, 32, 34, 166 organ 5, 67, 72 – 74, 84, 91, 113, 153, 157 f., 160, 162 – 165, 167, 169 – organ transplantation 154, 157, 162 organic 70, 73, 153 f., 156 – 159, 161, 163, 166 f. organism 15, 30, 71 – 75, 78 – 80, 82 – 88, 91, 109, 135, 168, 188 f., 203 otherness 25, 36 – 41, 156, 161 f. other, the 36, 66 otherworldly 200, 204 perception 9, 17, 19, 21, 100 f., 103 – 107, 115, 164 phenomenology 25, 34, 36 f., 39, 121, 153, 156 f.

211

philosophy 1, 3, 9, 25, 27 f., 30 – 32, 34, 36 f., 41, 54, 58 f., 67, 69 f., 79, 97, 106, 116, 119, 122, 176, 179, 191, 194 – 196, 198 f., 201 potentiality 97, 107 – 110, 112 f., 115 f. pragmatism 38 – pragmatist 25, 38 privacy, right to 174 private property 174, 194, 196 f. prosthesis 154 – 158, 160, 165, 167 psychoanalysis 63 f. puritan 199 – 202 rationality 2 f., 29, 38 f., 53, 59 – 62, 64, 109 readiness potential (RG) 120, 122 reason 36, 48, 53, 55, 57, 62, 65, 109, 175 reasoning 29, 47, 58, 62 f., 128 – reasoning, local 48, 62 f., 65 reduction 70 – 72, 148, 157 repression 52, 58, 168, 202 response 9, 19, 21, 35, 37– 41, 54, 77, 98, 109 f, 122, 128, 158, 161 – responsiveness 25, 28, 34 – 43 responsibility 10, 28, 43, 51, 120, 126, 129, 175, 177 f., 181 right 173 – 175, 194 – 197, 202 salvation 191, 194, 199 f. Scandinavia 182 f. secular 6, 65, 199 self 5 f., 12 f., 26, 31, 47, 50, 52, 55 – 57, 59 f., 62 – 66, 70, 93 f., 119, 124, 126, 153 – 162, 164 – 169, 175 – 178, 189 – 191, 193 f., 201 – 203 – self-concern 191 – self-realization 29, 174, 194 sexuality 52, 112 signifier 50, 57, 137, 139 social 3 – 6, 16, 33, 35, 38 f., 42, 47 – 49, 51 f., 54 f., 60, 63 f., 97, 101, 106 f., 111 – 113, 115, 130, 147, 149, 156 f., 166, 174 – 177, 180 – 184, 187 – 189, 191 – 194, 197 – 202 – social being 42, 184, 188, 198 – social functionalism 188 – social life 6, 14, 102, 188 f., 201

212

Index of Subjects

– social media 181 – social system 188 sociology 33, 189, 193 species 30, 68, 73, 79 f., 83 f., 87, 166, 179 strong evaluations 176 subject 2 – 4,., 11, 17, 25 – 31, 36, 38, 42, 47 – 53, 55, 58 – 63, 65 f., , 97 – 102, 105, 107, 110 f., 113, 115, 120 – 123, 126, 128, 130, 135 f., 140 – 149, 153 – 155, 157 f., 165 – 168, 177 f., 184, 192, 203 f. – subjectivity 3 f., 30 f., 47, 49, 51 – 56, 59, 61 – 65, 97 f., 107, 168, 178 substance 10 f., 29, 73, 104, 125, 178 supplement 153 f., 159 f., 162 f., 165, 169 – supplementarity 153, 159 f., 162, 166 f., 169 technology 26, 64, 103, 122, 138, 156, 159 f., 168 teleology 71, 73 – teleological 71 – 76, 85 time 4, 15, 48, 60 f., 75, 83, 87, 99 – 105, 110, 120., 122, 126, 136, 160, 168, 174, 181 – 184 tissues 154

transcorporeality 154, 156 f., 167 transhumanism 25 translation 10, 27, 39 f., 114, 189, 196 transplantation 157 f., 163 – 165 unconscious 52, 54, 63 f., 112, 119 – 121, 124 f. understanding 11, 29, 31, 40 – 42, 63, 93 f., 97, 100 f., 112, 114, 119, 127 – 130, 141 f., 163 – 165, 169, 174 – 178, 189, 195, value 6, 36, 105, 113 f., 124, 142, 159, 174 – 177, 187, 189 – 193, 195, 197 – 202, 204 verb 9 – 11, 14, 16, 18, 20 f., 29 Victorianism 52 volition 100, 126 voluntariness 126 walking 16 – 18, 20, 79, 114 world 9 f., 12, 14 – 21, 27, 30, 32 f., 40, 42 f., 58, 64, 66, 72, 81, 92 f., 101, 103, 106, 113 f., 124, 127, 130, 133 f., 140, 163, 166, 174, 176 f., 179 f., 182, 187, 199 – 203 – world, in-the- 6, 21, 58, 60, 129, 182, 196, 198, 200 – 204