Sociality as the Human Condition: Anthropology in Economic, Philosophical and Theological Perspective  9789004207486, 9789004191990

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Sociality as the Human Condition

Philosophical Studies in Science and Religion Series Editor

F. LeRon Shults, University of Agder, Norway Advisory Board

Philip Clayton, Claremont University, USA George Ellis, University of Cape Town, South Africa Niels Henrik Gregersen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Antje Jackelyn, Bishop of Lund, Sweden Nancey Murphy, Fuller Theological Seminary, USA Robert Neville, Boston University, USA Palmyre Oomen, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands V.V. Raman, University of Rochester, USA Robert John Russell, Graduate Theological Union, USA Nomanul Haq, University of Pennsylvania, USA Kang Phee Seng, Centre for Sino-Christian Studies, Hong Kong Trinh Xuan Thuan, University of Virginia, USA J. Wentzel van Huyssteen, Princeton Theological Seminary, USA

VOLUME 3

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.nl/pssr

Sociality as the Human Condition Anthropology in Economic, Philosophical and Theological Perspective

By

Rebekka A. Klein Translated by

Martina Sitling

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2011

First Published as: Rebekka Klein Sozialität als Conditio Humana. 2010 Edition Ruprecht, GÖttingen. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Klein, Rebekka A. Sociality as the human condition : anthropology in economic, philosophical and theological perspective / by Rebekka A. Klein ; translated by Martina Sitling. p. cm. — (Philosophical studies in science and religion ; v.3) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-19199-0 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Philosophical anthropology. 2. Anthropology—Philosophy. 3. Anthropology of religion. 4. Social groups. 5. Social participation. I. Sitling, Martina. II. Title. III. Series. BD450.K586 2011 301.01—dc22 2011012998

ISSN 1877-8542 ISBN 978 90 04 19199 0 Copyright 2011 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change.

For my mother Undine Klein

CONTENTS Volume Foreword .............................................................................. Acknowledgements ............................................................................

xiii xv

Introduction ........................................................................................ 1 Phenomenological Criticism of Science .............................. 2 The Primacy of Philosophical Anthropology ..................... 3 Natural Foundation of Anthropology in Current Economics ................................................................................ 4 The Relational Approach to Anthropology in Social Philosophy ................................................................................ 5 The Double Description of Anthropology in Theology ...

1 1 3

Chapter One Anthropology as a Representation of Humanity ........................................................................................ 6 Interdisciplinary Anthropology ............................................ 7 Anthropology and Sociality in the Individual Disciplines ................................................................................ 7.1 Theological Figures of Thought on Nature and Humanity ........................................................................ 7.1.1 The Difference between ‘Natura Lapsa’ and ‘Oeconomia Naturae’ ........................................ 7.1.2 Isomorphism of Nature, Humanity and Society? ............................................................... 7.2 Basic Anthropological Paradigms of Experimental Economics ....................................................................... 7.2.1 Human vs. Rational Behavior ......................... 7.2.2 Human vs. Animal Behavior .......................... 7.3 Philosophical Points of Entry in Anthropology ....... 7.3.1 Anthropology as Human Self-Inquiry .......... 7.3.2 Alternatives: The Dualism and Monism of Anthropology ..................................................... 8 Anthropological Key Differences ......................................... 8.1 Heidegger: Humanity as the Truth of Being ............ 8.2 Agamben: The Dissolution of the Animal Construct ........................................................................

10 15 20

27 27 29 30 32 34 35 36 38 42 42 48 50 52 56

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8.3 Adorno: Dehumanization through Society .......... 8.4 Conclusion ................................................................. 9 The Human Condition as a Concrete Condition of Existence ................................................................................. 9.1 Barthes: The Human Condition as Myth ............. 9.2 Arendt: Loss of the Social ‘Human Condition’? ... 10 Plessner: Humanity and Bodily Existence ........................ 10.1 The Broken Relation to the World ........................ 10.2 From the Shared World (‘Mitwelt’) to Interpersonal Relations ............................................ 10.3 Conclusion ................................................................. 11 Concreteness, Objectivity and Phenomenal Excess ........ Chapter Two The Conflict between Egoism and Altruism ..... 12 Possibilities and Limitations of an Empirical Anthropology ........................................................................ 13 The Economic Modeling of Human Social Behavior ..... 13.1 The Methodological Paradigm Shifts of Experimental Economics ......................................... 13.2 Skepticism about the Homo Oeconomicus .......... 13.3 Backgrounds to the Critical Assessment of the Homo Oeconomicus Model .................................... 14 The Methodology of Experimental Economics ............... 14.1 Translatability of Laboratory and Experiential World .......................................................................... 14.1.1 Empirical Explanation and Methodological Object Constitution in Experiments ................................................. 14.1.2 The Validity of Experimental Findings Outside of the Laboratory ........................ 14.2 Construction Principles of Economic Laboratory Experiments ............................................................... 14.2.1 The Experiment as a Strategic Course of Action ...................................................... 14.2.2 The Experiment as Selective Replication of Reality ...................................................... 14.2.3 Game Theory and Hypothesis Formation in the Behavioral Experiment .................. 15 The Modeling of Social Preferences .................................. 15.1 What are Preferences? ..............................................

63 66 67 68 70 77 81 83 87 89 91 91 94 97 101 104 109 111

111 114 117 118 119 123 129 129

contents 15.2 16

17

18

19 20 21

The Ultimatum Game and Inequity Aversion of Social Agents .............................................................. Norms for Cooperative Behavior ....................................... 16.1 Sanctions in Public Goods Games ......................... 16.2 Social Norms as a Second-Order Public Good? ... From ‘Homo Reciprocans’ to ‘Homo Altruisticus’ ......... 17.1 Negative Reciprocity: Ultimatum Game ............... 17.2 Positive Reciprocity: Trust Game ........................... 17.3 Pure Altruism: Dictator Game ............................... 17.4 Strong Reciprocity: Altruistic Punishment and Rewarding ................................................................... The Utility Expectation of Altruistic Agents .................... 18.1 Psychological, Biological, and Moral Altruism .... 18.2 Personal Satisfaction in Altruistic Punishment ... Affective Empathy: The Significance of Social Emotions ................................................................................ The Phenomenal Excess of Social Interaction ................. Conclusion ............................................................................. 21.1 Critique ....................................................................... 21.2 Theses .......................................................................... 21.3 On the Sense and Nonsense of Talking about Altruism ......................................................................

ix

Chapter Three Difference in the Interpersonal Relation ......... 22 Three Constellations of the Interpersonal Relation ........ 23 Human Nature and its Function for the Legitimation of Political Order .................................................................. 23.1 The Separation of Politics and Nature in the Model of Societal Order .......................................... 23.2 The Genesis of Order from Contingence ............. 24 Antagonism: The Irreducibility of Difference .................. 24.1 Laclau and Mouffe: Antagonism and Democracy ................................................................. 24.2 Critical Assessment of the Liberal, Deliberative Model of Society ........................................................ 25 Recognition: The Pacification of Difference ..................... 25.1 Recognition: Normative Demand or Real-Life Practice? ...................................................................... 25.2 Post-Hegelian Perspectives on Recognition .........

132 136 136 140 148 150 150 152 154 157 158 161 167 171 173 173 178 184 187 187 189 191 195 198 199 204 206 208 210

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contents 25.2.1

Honneth: Recognition and Its Negative Forms ........................................................... 25.2.2 Taylor: Recognition and the Risk of Homogenizing Difference ......................... 25.2.3 García Düttmann: A Critical Assessment of Restorative Recognition ........................ 25.3 Ricœur’s Concept of Mutual Symbolic Recognition ................................................................ 25.3.1 The Critique of Reciprocity ...................... 25.3.2 The Critique of Equal Recognition ......... 25.3.3 Symbolic Recognition ................................ 25.3.4 States of Peace: Recognition and Religious Agape .......................................... 26 Alterity: Difference as the Source of Responsibility ....... 26.1 Levinas’ Ethical Reconception of Humanity ........ 26.2 The Impossibility of Social Inhumanity ................ 26.3 The Relationship to the Other as the Third and the Standards of Justice ............................................ 26.4 Beyond the Symmetry of Egalitarian Relationships .............................................................. 26.5 God’s Invisibility ....................................................... 27 Conclusion ............................................................................. Chapter Four Humanity and Inhumanity in the Love of Neighbor ......................................................................................... 28 Theological Reservations against an Immanence of the Social ....................................................................................... 29 Biblical Usage and Hermeneutical Function of the Word ‘Neighbor’ ................................................................... 29.1 The Biblical Contexts of Caring for the Other Human Being ............................................................. 29.2 Who is my Neighbor – the Wrong Question? .... 29.3 Terminological Delineations ................................... 29.4 Hermeneutical Analysis of the Word ‘Neighbor’ ................................................................... 29.5 Proximity and Distance in the Love of Neighbor ..................................................................... 30 Social Criticism Instead of Morality .................................. 31 Meisinger: Anthropological Awareness of Difference ....

210 214 217 221 222 223 224 225 227 229 232 235 237 238 241

245 245 252 254 256 258 259 260 263 267

contents Kierkegaard: Humanity as the Phenomenal Excess of God’s Love ............................................................................. 32.1 Kierkegaard’s Method of Analysis ......................... 32.2 The Negative Definition of the Neighbor ............. 32.3 Self-Love and the Deficiencies of Interpersonal Love ............................................................................. 33 Beyond Kierkegaard: The Love of Neighbor and Inhumanity ............................................................................ 33.1 Adorno: The Dead Neighbor .................................. 33.2 Žižek, Santner, Reinhard: The Neighbor as a Figure of Inhumanity ............................................... 34 Humanity and Inhumanity as Reflected by Mercy ......... 34.1 Lack of Consequences and Resources ................... 34.2 Lack of Expectations ................................................. 34.3 Unpredictability: The Phenomenal Abundance of Practicing Mercy .................................................. 34.4 Inhuman Mercilessness ............................................ 35 Conclusion .............................................................................

xi

32

271 271 273 279 283 284 287 291 291 293 295 297 299

Final Thoughts .................................................................................... 36 Multiperspectivity Instead of Transdisciplinarity ........... 37 Result of this Study ..............................................................

303 303 305

Bibliography ........................................................................................ Index of Names .................................................................................. Index of Subjects ................................................................................

309 321 323

VOLUME FOREWORD The PSSR book series seeks to offer critical analyses of and constructive proposals for the interdisciplinary field of “science and religion.” In this volume, Dr. Klein addresses the issue of human sociality from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, with special attention on the economic study of altruistic behavior and theological reflection on the “love of neighbor.” One of the basic goals of the PSSR series is to demonstrate the mediating role of philosophy in the late modern dialogue among scholars of science and religion, which Klein accomplishes by a careful analysis of the influence of thinkers such as Heidegger, Agamben, Arendt and Kierkegaard on this interdisciplinary discussion. F. LeRon Shults, Series Editor University of Agder, Norway

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The groundwork for this book was laid in the years 2005 to 2008 during a time of intense interdisciplinary work at the University of Zurich. Above all, I have to thank Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Ernst Fehr of the Institute for Empirical Research in Economics for giving me the opportunity of carrying out this unusual endeavor. As the head of the University Research Priority Program “Foundations of Human Social Behavior: Altruism and Egoism,” he provided the external framework for my work on this project. The excellent working conditions, the competent organization and the internationally oriented way of working in his team were of great benefit to me. For providing advice regarding the study’s content, I want to thank Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Ingolf U. Dalferth, director of the Institute for Hermeneutics and Philosophy of Religion at the University of Zurich. His continuous and persistent support allowed me to finish this project on time. For the evaluation and acceptance of the work into the series ‘Philosophical Studies in Science and Religion,’ I am indebted to the editorial board, especially Prof. F. LeRon Shults of the University of Agder. It was upon his encouragement that this book was translated into English. For her fast and thorough work in translating the book into English, I am deeply indebted to Martina Sitling. Furthermore, I want to thank Kathleen Ess for providing numerous suggestions concerning the English style of the book. For the competent help with going to press, I also want to thank Ms. Liesbeth Hugenholtz at Brill Academic Publishers. The student assistants from Heidelberg Elisa Victoria Blum, Annemarie Kaschub, Johannes Lösch and Charlotte Reda offered their hands-on support for proofreading the final manuscript. This book is dedicated to my mother, whose financial support made the English translation possible. Halle/S., November 2010

Rebekka A. Klein

INTRODUCTION 1

Phenomenological Criticism of Science

Since antiquity, sociality has been considered a basic condition of human existence. Aristotle already spoke of the human being as a zoon politikon, and Seneca used the term homo sociale. But what do we presently understand by sociality? Has our idea of human beings as naturally social creatures changed since then? Alongside the classical disciplines of anthropology (philosophy, theology, pedagogy), sociality is now also the subject of scientific examination in the natural and social sciences (sociobiology, neuroscience, economics). Within the framework of these approaches, traditional anthropological questions and concepts are being reconstructed and remodeled using new methods. Here, classical questions of anthropology, such as whether human beings are capable of acting altruistically or whether they possess natural empathy, are subjected to new ways of finding answers. Thus, in order to characterize and describe the sociality of human beings according to the current state of research, we must clarify what contribution the studies of natural and social sciences can make to the discourse of the social nature of human beings in philosophy and theology. To that end, this book will examine current studies on human cooperative behavior from the discipline of economics along with thoughts on the nature of conflict in interpersonal relations from social philosophy and theology. The methodological aim of this study is to initiate a discourse between three different social-anthropological descriptions of human beings. These descriptions, however, are not evaluated from the perspective of a superordinated approach. Instead, they will be subject to phenomenological criticism. Phenomenology conceives of anthropological concepts as different ways of describing an object. Phenomenological criticism is based on the intuition that the unique characteristics of an object of description show themselves precisely in the object’s appearance, in its phenomenality to the observer. This applies to experiences in the lifeworld [Lebenswelt] as well as to the scientific analysis of an object. As a phenomenon, therefore, an object can never be described independently of the modality of its observation or description. Consequently, there can also be no perspective-free representation of the

2

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object in a phenomenological analysis that reduces the various aspects of its appearance to a single, supposedly more objective or more fundamental view. The multitude of appearances of an object is resistant to further analysis and cannot be resolved by interdisciplinary discourse or otherwise. Rather, it is the basic phenomenological task of an interdisciplinary study to bring its individual perspectives to a point where they acknowledge that their representations are limited, and that they need to be supplemented with other perspectives regarding the phenomenality of their object. The object always appears as something to someone. Thus, phenomenological criticism is called for wherever this intentional structure is methodologically neglected or ignored in the representation of an object. This phenomenological criticism has to demonstrate the extent to which there is a phenomenal excess regarding the object that cannot be recovered by an objectifying comprehension, but that must be maintained in a hermeneutically sensitive description of its mode of appearance. As most phenomena, the sociality of human beings is different from its empirical or theoretical comprehension. Thus, it has to be conceived as a phenomenological starting point of anthropological description. To mark the difference between the phenomenon of human sociality and the scientific attempts to describe, comprehend and explain this phenomenon, the study will refer to the phenomenological given as ‘interpersonal sociality.’ The latter shows itself in human interaction as an interpersonal sphere, a range of proximity and distance between human beings. From an empirical perspective, it can be detected in those modes of behavior in which human beings affect each other through gestures, looks, words or silence and thereby make themselves aware of the presence and needs of the other. This range of interpersonal interaction with one another will represent the phenomenological starting point of this interdisciplinary study of social anthropology. Furthermore, this study aims to demonstrate an excess of the phenomenon of sociality vis-à-vis its thematizations with regard to the difference between humanity and inhumanity. Hence, the phenomenological analysis is not only meant to reveal the limitations of anthropological descriptions and to prevent an inappropriate reduction of its perspectivity; it also pursues a factual concern. It seeks to be a reminder of the fact that invoking a natural sociality of human beings must not be blind to the phenomenon of social inhumanity, which makes the coexistence of human beings impossible at times: The

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3

span of human social behavior ranges from the violent annihilation of others to taking responsibility for their vulnerability. Therefore, the sociality of human beings should not be appropriated as a foundation of morals and political order, but treated as a twofold phenomenon. The fundamental argument of the social anthropology developed in this book is therefore: the social humanity of human beings includes an excess of inhumanity, and thus must always be discussed in such a way that the anthropological description shows an awareness of its dark side, and does not remain indifferent to the phenomenon of the inhuman. 2

The Primacy of Philosophical Anthropology

The first chapter of this study will clarify what characterizes the social humanity of human beings, and the extent to which it can be examined hermeneutically and phenomenologically. To this end, it will primarily be guided by the questions of philosophical anthropology, because its ideas, concepts and theories also determine the formation of hypotheses and the interpretation of research results in the empirical sciences. The possibility of developing an interdisciplinary anthropological examination based on the natural and social sciences can therefore be refuted on the following grounds. First, the formulation of research questions in empirical anthropology presupposes philosophical terminology, both in the establishment of initial hypotheses and later in the interpretation of empirical data. The premises contained in this terminology, however, should already be reflected upon when choosing the research question, and not simply adopted as is often done in empirical research. Second, the approach of empirical anthropology does not provide enough leeway to be sufficiently clear about the preconditions of a question and its implied normative preliminary decisions about the presentation of the object. This, however, is of crucial importance, especially when it comes to the study of human beings and their humanity. Therefore, this study describes human beings not with the help of empirical methods (by asking ‘What is a human being?’), but by initiating a philosophical human self-inquiry and asking ‘What is human about human beings and their sociality?’ If the question about human beings is understood as a philosophical question, various differentiations of anthropological cogitation about human beings can be established.

4

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The first problem arising here for an interdisciplinary study pertains to the fact that many ideas about human beings in philosophical anthropology are traditionally determined by essentialism. They are meant to determine the essence or nature of human beings. Also in this tradition, formulas like the animal rationale attempt to identify the essence of being human with an attribute of human nature – rationality, faculty of speech or free will. However, the distinction between human and non-human underlying these anthropological determinations can also be understood and applied in an analytical manner. In order to shed light on this complex, the first chapter will highlight various key differences of anthropology with which humanity can be conceptualized. Ever since the time of antiquity, a characteristic of thought about humanity was that it was defined by separating human from extrahuman entities (divine or animal). From this differentiation developed the classical concept of human beings, which described them as an animal rationale, a being that, in contrast to animals, had the capabilities of reason and language. The human attributes of reason and language, and later of personality and freedom, formed the rationale for the superiority of human beings to all things animalistic and barbaric, i.e., to the irrational. Here, the definition of human nature more and more took on the function of the rational self-assertion of human beings in opposition to that which could be defined as opposed to their human nature, and could thus be contrasted with their own lives as ‘non-human.’ Just like its classical counterpart, the Christian definition of human beings took this relationship to the extra-human as its starting point. In Christian occidental culture, therefore, the human attributes of human nature were interpreted as reflections of the divine in human beings. Humanity was attributed to human beings insofar as the creative power of their reason and the freedom to develop their existence in the world characterized them as similar to God in the eyes of other creatures. Accordingly, language, freedom and reason formed the educational ideal of modern humanism in the 18th and 19th century (Wilhelm von Humboldt, Johann Gottfried Herder), which was based on Christian principles.1

1

See Pannenberg 2004, 60–74.

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The separating distinction of human/extra-human (animal, God) and the juxtaposing distinction of human/non-human (animal rationale) determined the anthropological contemplation about human beings in cultural history. As a consequence, another anthropological difference was neglected that only entered the awareness of philosophical and cultural discourse through the 20th century crimes against humanity as the dark side of human reason and rationality.2 The awareness of the inhumanity of human beings, of their aggression and violent behavior toward the other that defies control by morals or reason led to a shift in thinking about the human capability to be or to become human(e). Of course, traces of this shift can be found in earlier thought, for example in the Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes and his depiction of human hostility in the state of nature. But a philosophical awareness of those phenomena in which humanity is not simply perverted into its opposite (namely, inhumanity), but rather co-exists with it in the locus of the human being, has only been formed by historical experiences that clearly showed the possibilities of human dehumanization. The inhuman, even though it could formally be cast as the negation of human humanity, is nevertheless also ‘witnessed’ in the locus of the human being (e.g. in the case of the so-called Muselmann, the ‘living dead’ of the Nazi concentration camps)3 and thus from a phenomenological perspective is not negating, but indifferent to the humanity postulated at the locus of the human being. Therefore, with regard to the social humanity of human beings, there has been discussion about a ‘paradox of indifference’ in human social life (Giorgio Agamben,4 Slavoj Žižek,5 Judith Butler6 etc.) which should be overcome by an ethics of non-indifference to the humanity of the other (Emmanuel Levinas).7 The term ‘non-indifference’ contains a double negation of

2 The book “Dialektik der Aufklärung” (“Dialectic of Enlightenment”, first published 1947) by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno can be cited as a document of this growing awareness of inhumanity as an ‘Other’ of reason (see Horkheimer and Adorno 1972). On the use of the category in postmodern philosophy, also see Lyotard 1991. 3 See Santner 2005, 100; Žižek 2005, 160–161. 4 See Agamben 2003b. 5 See Žižek 2005. 6 See Butler 2003. 7 Of course, these authors do not share the same understanding of the paradox of indifference which is at work in human social life. In fact, they criticize each other for their misunderstandings of the differentiation human/inhuman. Furthermore, they do not agree on the point that Levinasian ethics might be the solution of this issue.

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humanity here which allows approaching the difference of humanity and inhumanity without neglecting the dangers of its possible indifference.8 Thus, it is only where the inhuman can be addressed in the description of the human that the difference of humanity and inhumanity is maintained. The second problem of an interdisciplinary study of various anthropological approaches concerns their understanding of human corporality. This book holds the view that this is not to be understood as an exclusively biological category. Where it is utilized for a naturalistic rationale of human sociality and morals, the awareness of its human phenomenality is in danger of being lost.9 As a reaction to the possible reduction of human ‘nature’ to biology, representatives of 20th century ‘philosophical anthropology’ in Germany (Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner, Arnold Gehlen) have presented concepts that take human beings seriously in their status as a biological creature without reducing their existence to a purely animal life.10 They tried to base their understanding of the human capacity for consciousness and reflexivity in the conduct of life, on fundamental biological principles of life, thus refraining from excluding biological life from the description of human nature.11 Consequently, they also gave up on the attempt to determine an unchangeable and universal human ‘nature’ and instead conceived of human beings as visible creatures situated in the world

8 A different understanding of the term ‘non-indifference’ is proposed by Slavoj Žižek who refers to the Kantian distinction of negative and indefinite judgment and applies it to the differentiation of human/inhuman: “‘He is not human’ means simply that he is external to humanity, animal or divine, namely, that he is neither simply human nor simply inhuman, but marked by a terrifying excess which, although it negates what we understand as ‘humanity’, is inherent to being-human.” (Žižek 2005, 159–160). 9 See Arlt 2001, 200: “Anthropology would not be a philosophical endeavor if it did not ask about the ‘humanity’ of human beings that apparently is not identical with the form brought forth by nature, the natural morphology (walking upright, sophisticated language, invention and use of tools).” (transl. M.S.). 10 For this classification of the concept of philosophical anthropology in the 20th century, see Arlt 2001, 66–179. 11 A different position is put forth by Christian Illies in his “Philosophische Anthropologie im biologischen Zeitalter.” For him, the concepts of philosophical anthropology are mainly “attempts to take a part of the human being out of the brackets of scientific explainability” (Illies 2006, 19 [transl. M.S.]). However, he fails to see that the attempt to forego severing human ‘life’ and ‘existence’ is above all an integrative concept of anthropology. The primary interest of Scheler, Plessner and Gehlen thus was not to remove human beings from a biological context, but to combine the representation of human existence with an understanding of the biological foundations of life.

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whose bodily existence is dependent on natural as well as cultural environments of their existence. They described human existence neither as being determined by a timeless core or essence, nor as being determined by a specific set of naturalistic characteristics. Instead, they conceived of human existence as the interplay of innate abilities and acquired characteristics that are cultivated through living life as ‘a human among humans.’ Entirely in keeping with this approach of philosophical anthropology focused on the concrete existence and corporality of human beings, and linked to it by her vehement rejection of a biological or social determination of the range of freedom in human life, Hannah Arendt has argued against ignoring the connection between human existence and the (natural) conditions of life on earth.12 She, too, is not interested in determining the essential character of human beings, but focuses her description of human beings on what she calls the human condition, the basic condition of human life on earth.13 Arendt understands the human condition as a description of the practical circumstances under which human life on this earth exists. Therefore, it is not to be understood as a conditio sine qua non (logical condition), but in the sense of a conditio per quam (practical condition).14 For Arendt, the crucial practical condition of human existence is the social form of human life: human beings do not live as solipsistic individuals, but together with other people; and thus, they have to face the plurality15 and heterogeneity of human interaction. For Arendt, this plurality is expressed in the difference between one human being and another. This difference plays such a significant role because it brings out the uniqueness of a human counterpart in the social relationship. According to Arendt, this is what characterizes humanity. Thus, humanity for Arendt is not to be identified with the principle of ‘humanness’ in the

12

With her phenomenology of the three human activities, ‘labor’, ‘work’ and ‘action’, Arendt attempts to maintain the tension between nature and culture, between biological labor and cultural-artificial work. All three of these human activities are rooted in the duality of natality and mortality, of birth and death, and thus cannot be separated from the natural conditions of life (see Arendt 1958, 8–9). 13 See ibid., 9–10: “To avoid misunderstanding: the human condition is not the same as human nature, and the sum total of human activities and capabilities which correspond to the human condition does not constitute anything like human nature.” 14 See ibid., 7. 15 See ibid., 8: “Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.” (also see ibid., 176).

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person of the other in a Kantian sense. On the contrary, this principle obscures the fact that the concrete human being is human precisely in that he or she is different from every other human being, that he or she is unique. Based on her observation of the irreducible plurality of human life on earth, Arendt criticizes the concept of sociality which is given in the social sciences. She holds the view that the modern definition of human beings as social creatures fails to take into account what she calls ‘human plurality and uniqueness,’ which is lost in the process. She criticizes the Latin concept of the homo sociale because it conceives of human beings as individuals in society and thus levels the difference between human social and political life. In modernity, sociality and political actions are treated as synonyms. Arendt has drawn attention to this especially in her book “The Human Condition” (1958). Here, she argues that the description of a human being as homo sociale, which was first used by Seneca, represents a momentous shift from the Greek to the Roman world view that is based on a mistranslation of the term zoon politikon.16 According to the Greek world view, the humanity of human beings is expressed precisely not in sociality, which also occurs in animals, but in their ability to act politically in the public domain of the polis, an ability that separates them from animals. Thus, the political occupies a space outside of the social. What is genuinely ‘human’ is not sociality, but the bios politikos of human beings: It is not that Plato or Aristotle was ignorant of, or unconcerned with, the fact that man cannot live outside the company of men, but they did not count this condition among the specifically human characteristics; on the contrary, it was something human life had in common with animal life, and for this reason alone it could not be fundamentally human. [. . .] According to Greek thought, the human capacity for political organization is not only different from but stands in direct opposition to that natural association whose center is the home (oikia) and the family.17

In order to provide a rationale for her critique of human sociality, Arendt works with the antique juxtaposition of polis and oikia, which differentiates between the sphere of living in which human beings primarily are occupied with providing for their livelihood and the sphere

16 17

See ibid., 23.28. Ibid., 24.

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of living in which their unique otherness, their ‘alteritas,’ reveals itself in their actions and communications with their peers.18 Arendt’s line of argument carries certainly not a historic, but rather a systematic truth. If one takes this truth seriously, her statement can be interpreted as a claim that the description of the human being as homo sociale fails to live up to the human condition characterized by human plurality and uniqueness. This claim is justified with the argument that the human being as homo sociale is ultimately reducible to the animal sociale. The economical and biological way of life of human beings cannot be separated from that of animals. As such, however, it opposes that which Greek philosophy has determined to be the human attribute of life. In Arendt’s interpretation, this is the human ability to speak and to act (zoon politikon). A humanity defined in this way is therefore no longer taken into account in the concept of homo sociale and must, according to Arendt, even be placed in direct opposition to it. Arendt’s argumentation, which reaches back toward the anthropological ideal of Greek philosophy, is underpinned by Heidegger’s famous demand, formulated in his “Humanismusbrief,”19 that human beings no longer be defined by differentiating them from animals, but instead through a description of their ‘being-in-the-world.’ Arendt applies this demand to the description of human sociality and criticizes its inherent reduction of the interpersonal difference between one human being and another. On the other hand, however, her argumentation also draws attention to the fact that sociality (and not politics, law and ethics) is often seen as an anthropological category that best describes the continuity of human life with animal life. In the biological-evolutionary description of human beings, which seeks not to comprehend the human essence or ‘nature’, but the particularity of the human species in its continuity to animal life, sociality therefore becomes a favorite topos in the description of human beings. With its help, the analogy of human and animal life can be cast into profile.

18 19

See ibid., 176. Heidegger 2004a, 313–364.

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introduction 3 Natural Foundation of Anthropology in Current Economics

As a representative for such a biological-evolutionary explanation of human sociality, the experimental approach for studying human social behavior in current economics will be analyzed in the second chapter. From the 1970s and 1980s onwards, economists have increasingly endeavored to test basic theoretical premises and models of human social behavior in experiments.20 In their efforts, they have also made use of theoretical questions that had originated in sociology or social psychology, but had so far not been subjected to experimental study.21 As a consequence, the approach of experimental economics has been developed into a transdisciplinary approach. Together with psychologists, biologists, neuroscientists and ethnologists, the economists started to develop experimental designs in order to study the foundations of human social behavior within a transdisciplinary framework.22 Their question about the ‘nature’ of human beings, i.e., about those variables of social interaction that are true of human behavior in

20 The emergence of experimental economics as a research approach in economics since the 1960s has been extensively presented in the introduction to the “Handbook of Experimental Economics” (Kagel and Roth 1995, 3–109). The principal representatives of experimental economics since the 1960s were Vernon L. Smith and Daniel Kahnemann (Nobel Prize 2002). Heinz Sauermann, Reinhard Selten, Reinhard Tietz and Otwin Becker were some of the eminent scholars of experimental economics in Germany (see Sauermann 1967). 21 In his current paper “Aktuelle Probleme der empirischen Sozialforschung”, Andreas Diekmann calls it a “paradox” (Diekmann 2004, 19), that, for example, sociology leaves the experimental examination of norms and sanctions completely to economics, a field where social norms and sanctions have only played a minor role in theory formation until very recently. 22 The publication “Foundations of Human Sociality” (Henrich et al. 2004) may be referred to as an example at this point. The book, which was jointly published by economists, anthropologists and ethnologists, documents the researchers’ eleven-yearlong effort to find empirical proof for their hypothesis of a universal human nature as the basis for the manifold social forms of human interaction. By developing a transdisciplinary design for behavioral experiments, they established a basis for testing this hypothesis of a foundation for behavior that is shared by all human beings, not only in Western countries but also in fifteen non-Western small-scale societies. The results of the global study confirmed the hypothesis that economic theory, with its exclusive focus on rational self-interest, indeed cannot adequately describe the actual diversity of social behavior. At the same time, however, it also became obvious that there are significantly more variations of behavior within groups and between groups than previously assumed. One single model of social behavior is not sufficient to explain the culture-specific and ethnographic diversity of human behavioral patterns.

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general, has with time increasingly become a question about the biological foundation of human behavior. A research group at the University of Zurich has recently endeavored to demonstrate, with the help of a natural-science-based research program (“Foundations of Human Social Behavior”),23 that especially the setting of social norms and rules of behavior in human interaction cannot be explained without exploring the basic biological configuration of human beings. The efforts of these Zurich researchers (among them Ernst Fehr, Urs Fischbacher, Michael Kosfeld, Tania Singer and Markus Heinrichs) are part of a bigger movement toward naturalist explanatory approaches in the human and social sciences.24 Additionally, they represent an expansion of the experimental approach within the field of economics.25 In order to clarify the character of this expansion of the experimental method, the second chapter will first turn to the philosophy of science to categorize and reconstruct the experimental approach within economic studies, thereby also taking a look at the synthesis of economics with social neuroscience (neuroeconomics). The critical analysis will show that the experimental method of economics with its modeling of social interaction processes consciously ignores the agents’ intentions and motives, as well as their intersubjective communicative and expressive behavior, in order to draw a consequentialist picture of their behavior. It does not determine individual

23 Further information on the academic research program “Foundations of Human Social Behavior” at the Institute for Empirical Research in Economics at the University of Zurich can be found on the following web site: http://www.socialbehavior.uzh .ch (last viewed 09/12/2008). 24 On the complex of problems regarding ‘social science’ and ‘natural science’ see the contributions in the second part of the publication “Gesellschaft denken. Eine erkenntnistheoretische Standortbestimmung der Sozialwissenschaften” by Leonhard Bauer and Klaus Hamberger (Bauer and Hamberger 2002, 79–173). Here, the integration of natural science methods into the treatment of social science problems is discussed as the predominant mindset (next to formal model analysis) of the social sciences in the 21st century. 25 See the account of the ‘early history’ of experimental economics by Alvin E. Roth (Roth 1993): The first experiments on individual human decision-making behavior were conducted as early as the 1930s and 1940s by L.L. Thurstone, Stephen W. Rousseas and Albert G. Hart. The first experiments on social interaction between human beings followed in the 1950s and 1960s (Melvin Drescher, Meril Flood, Edward H. Chamberlin) after the publication of the first fundamental description of game theory by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern in 1944 (see the authoritative second edition: Neumann and Morgenstern 21947). Roth sees a connection between the two events (see Roth 1993, 199).

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behavioral intentions, but the agents’ preferences, which are measurable in behavior on the basis of the goods chosen by the agents. At the same time, however, its modeling of preferences does provide a method of describing precisely the actual social behavior of human beings and shows that this behavior cannot satisfactorily be explained with the model of the homo oeconomicus. The modeling of prosocial and altruistic behavior in experimental economic research thus makes a crucial contribution to reforming the idea of human beings in the economic sciences, which is based on an egotistical self-interest maximizer. Thus, the second chapter will introduce the findings of experimental economics on the inequity aversion and fairness preference of economic agents, as well as on the formation and sanctioning of social norms and the altruistic punishment of norm violators. However, the approach of experimental economic research has also provided impulses for the study of human sociality that reach far beyond their own discipline. For example, it presents a solution to the free-rider problem (the ‘tragedy of the commons’), which is a central topic of the social sciences: the factors that are responsible for a permanent solution of the conflict between egoistic and altruistic individuals can be isolated in a behavioral experiment with a punishment option. Likewise, the question of whether purely altruistic behavior exists in human beings can be answered in the framework of experimental modelings: it can be observed that social agents sanction the compliance with and enforcement of social norms even if it comes at personal cost. The neuroeconomic studies also offer an explanation for this behavioral pattern: altruistic individuals are hedonistically motivated; they find satisfaction in their decision to punish antisocial behavior. Looking at the modelings of experimental economics and neuroeconomics, it becomes obvious that they establish a view of human sociality that does not turn a blind eye toward its dark side, the pure egoism of human beings, and yet shows ways of overcoming it. Thus, these studies represent the basic concern of this book, which seeks to describe sociality not only based on a positive anthropology, but also by taking into account the possibility of lapses and errors in the social behavior of human beings. In addition, the experimental studies model a social anthropology that ties in with the debate about the nature and sociality of human beings in political philosophy and social philosophy. The biologically oriented research program of neuroeconomics is looking for a foundation of social order in human biology. But from the

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perspective of a methodological concept rooted in natural and social science, it recasts fundamental questions of political and social theory that (in different form) have already been playing an important role in the philosophical justification of the modern state. With the dawn of modernity, the social order of society could no longer be legitimized by referring to a higher authority (God, nature, tradition), as it had been in pre-modern societies. The problem arose of how to prove its legitimacy without taking recourse to the ‘ultimate’ foundations of faith and knowledge. From the 17th century onward, the normative question about the legitimacy of the social order of human societies has therefore been answered with references to human ‘nature.’ The ‘nature’ of human beings represented universal anthropological constants by which the politically shapeable area of human life could be delineated and understood. Consequently, human nature was regarded as a priori, something that preceded the formation of social order. In this manner, an existing social order could be justified by referring to a universal anthropology, a practice that, for example, made the establishment of a state power monopoly in the 17th century seem necessary and plausible. The anthropological rationale for social order that emerged in the 17th century can also be found in the Zurich research program “Foundations of Human Social Behavior.” Here, too, the subject of ‘human nature and sociality’ is matter-of-factly interpreted through establishing an empirical model of the connection between (biological) human nature and social order. But this naturalization of human sociality is also fraught with problems. One problem that arises regarding the interdisciplinary discourse with neuroeconomics is the Zurich behavioral researchers’ claim of providing a universal account with their research projects on human sociality. They view their field itself as a new empirical foundational anthropology that can demonstrate that all human social orders – whether they are political, religious, ethical or legal – can be traced back to their biological foundations. The programmatic title of the research program in Zurich “Foundations of Human Social Behavior” is aimed exclusively at the biological foundations of human behavior and, in the actual implementation of the experiments, exclusively at human neurobiology.26 Within the boundaries of such a narrow research

26 Here, the neuroeconomic behavioral experiments in Zurich are linked with a more recent development in neuroscience that increasingly concerns itself with

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perspective, the neuroeconomists make unusually expansive explanatory claims. Through their modeling of biological determinants of human behavior, they attempt to give recommendations and prognoses for the political and economic control of human behavior. Thus, they describe the transition from nature to society no longer as the justifiable establishment of political power, but as a natural evolutionary development of society from human biology. The problem of this naturalistic approach becomes manifest in the anthropological rationale of neuroeconomics. In its description of human nature, neuroeconomics invokes an analogy between human and animal behavior. This analogy is empirically implemented by modeling human biology and behavior in an experimental design that is geared toward gaining insight into cause-and-effect relationships. By adding the referential point of animal behavior to their experimental modelings, these experiments liken the human being to the animal to the point of near indistinguishability. Consequently, neuroeconomics conceives of human beings as creatures that merely ‘behave’ in reaction to stimuli in a specific behavioral environment. Human sociality is also studied with this explanatory approach. From a neuroeconomic viewpoint, human social behavior is always related to neural processes through which a social stimulus from the environment – e.g. the behavior of a fellow human – is ‘evaluated’ in the brain and linked to a behavioral motivation. The basic premise of neuroeconomic behavioral research – that human behavior is conditioned by external stimuli and coordinated by neurobiological processes in the very same manner as animal behavior – does not exclude the possibility that there are specific cultural incentives for human behavior that go beyond physical stimuli. But at the same time, this basic premise states that cultural incentives must be studied within a biological-behavioral-scientific approach in a way that renders their function completely analogous to the physical stimuli. In the logic of this research perspective, the interplay of cultural incentives with the motivational systems of human biology is also subject to evolutionary mechanisms and thus is by no means exempt from the regularities and principles of biological life.

researching the ‘social brain’ (so-called social neuroscience). See for further information the reviews of Matthew Lieberman and Ralph Adolphs (Lieberman 2007; Adolphs 2003).

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This naturalistic interpretation of human social behavior cannot be maintained in the framework of an interdisciplinary study that seeks to investigate the phenomenon of human sociality. Therefore, the second chapter ends with a phenomenological criticism of the (neuro-) economic experiments, exploring the ways in which they fail to fulfill their own claim of presenting a better description of human sociality based on transdisciplinary integration. 4

The Relational Approach to Anthropology in Social Philosophy

The third chapter starts with Thomas Hobbes’ provocative thesis that human beings are unsocial by nature and that their behavior is governed by radical egoism.27 Hobbes’ description of human nature has challenged modern social anthropology. At least since his doctrine of the natural state, the statement that human beings are social creatures that naturally turn to others and care for their well-being has been in need of empirical and philosophical justification. Based on Hobbes’ rejection of the Aristotelian view that the sociality of human beings is an integral part of their nature, the third chapter provides an overview of various anthropological approaches in current social philosophy and ethics. Here, just like in the studies of experimental economics, human sociality in both its positive and negative form is used as a basis for the analysis of societal interaction processes. In the tradition of the English philosophers of state (Thomas Hobbes, Anthony Shaftesbury, John Locke), these theories of social philosophy attempt to describe the possibilities and limits of human society-formation based on an optimistic or pessimistic assessment of the basic anthropological situation. This approach can indeed be compared to that of experimental economics, whose modeling of egoistic and altruistic agents gives both positive and negative connotations to the anthropological preconditions of social interaction. However, its approach differs from the perspective of social philosophy in that it tries to comprehend the characteristic of conflict in social interactions through the ‘coexistence’ of egoistic and altruistic behavior in one and the same context

27

See Hobbes 2002.

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of interaction, thus basing itself on both a positive and a negative anthropology. In contrast, the theories of social philosophy show a twofold view of sociality only in their plurality. This means that in order to be able to even begin discussing a similar constellation like in the chapter about social research in the economic sciences, several theories and approaches of social philosophy must be presented and analyzed. It is also important to take into account the fact that that the theories of social philosophy apply entirely different methods in describing human sociality. The potential in social philosophy for reflection that goes beyond the empirical studies shows itself where a phenomenological description of the interpersonal encounter begins before the state of ordered interaction. In such a phenomenological description, the social dynamics of the interpersonal encounter is not simply reduced to the juxtaposition of behavioral types (altruists, egoists) as in empirical studies; instead, the difference of one from the other is revealed as the ground for the negative and positive social consequences of the interpersonal encounter. A move toward relational anthropology can thereby be observed in the more recent debates of social philosophy. Unlike in current economics, the description of sociality is not based on the individual and his preferences, but on a phenomenological analysis of the basic structure of the interpersonal relation: In its relational gestalt, human existence represents the starting point for analyzing the social interactional structure of society. Thus, the dissociation from the methodological individualism of the social sciences first of all implies a phenomenology of human sociality which makes the inner dynamic of the interpersonal relation structure the indicator for the potential for conflict in societal interactions. From the perspective of the philosophical theories analyzed in this book, this relationship structure is predominantly characterized by the plurality and heterogeneity of that which is human. Conceptually, this circumstance is taken into account in that the social relationship is considered to be preceded by an irreducible difference. Describing this difference, and thus becoming aware of aspects of alterity in the processes of societal interaction, then, is what characterizes the humanity of human interaction. Based on this observation regarding the method of social philosophy, the third chapter discusses the extent to which the structure of differentiation in the social relationship can be the starting point for three very different descriptions of human sociality. The simple emphasis of interpersonal difference does not therefore indicate a determination

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of the form that difference can take in the individual philosophical concepts of human society. Social philosophy, which was only established as an autonomous philosophical discipline in the 19th and 20th century, considers human society to be the basic model of social order. It uses the term ‘society’ as an umbrella term for human coexistence in legal, political, economic, religious and cultural constellations. In engaging with its object, social philosophy can take on a descriptiveanalytical as well as a normative-critical function. When it proceeds in a descriptive-analytical way, it examines the individual societal spheres of the social, exposing the conflicts between their respective logics and the human way of life. In contrast, when it proceeds in a critical manner, it posits the normative standard of the successful life and on that basis diagnoses the limitations and deformations under which human beings must live in society. The two approaches are not to be understood as alternatives, but as complementary to each other. This book introduces three different approaches from social philosophy and compares them in regard to their profiling of the interpersonal difference: post-Marxist discourse theory, the critical social theory of recognition, and the social-phenomenological theory of alterity. (i) The first theoretical approach takes up Thomas Hobbes’ description of the human social relationship as antagonistic. The impact of antagonism, however, is not limited to the natural state, but is also of central importance in the theory of the formation of human society. In the radical-democratic theory of society 28 developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, the interpersonal difference is expressed in the fundamentally irreconcilable confrontation and antagonism of human beings that can only temporarily be channeled into hegemonic power options in the framework of societal interactions. Here, interpersonal difference is interpreted as an inextricable antagonism of societal agents and groups, and is made the starting point for a critique of the liberal, deliberative model of society that assumes the possibility of peaceful coexistence in a rational community engaged in discourse. The radical-democratic theory of society strongly rejects the ‘rational idealization’ of the liberal model, invoking the genuinely political character of the social relationship: this is considered to be the origin of an irreducible difference and the locus of a fundamentally inextricable antagonism of political positions. The function of this basic

28

See Laclau and Mouffe 22001.

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antagonistic pattern of the social relationship consists in revealing the contingency of hegemonic acts of power in the political discourse, and making sure that none of these acts of power can attain unlimited and permanent dominance. Therefore, the antagonistic social relationship is considered to be constitutive of the plurality of political options in a democratic society. (ii) In the debate about a politics of recognition, in contrast, interpersonal difference is interpreted ethically. Its locus is in the individual’s desire for social recognition. For in the wish to be recognized and accepted by others the fundamental moral constitution of the social agent reveals itself: he can achieve an identification with his own identity only insofar as his individual character is met with the affirmation and support of those with whom he interacts.29 In the debate about a politics of recognition, interpersonal difference is therefore interpreted as the mutual dependence of individuals upon one another, and thus as the origin of natural human morality. The analysis of the human desire for recognition therefore also represents the starting point for the moral interpretation of the sense and purpose of societal conflicts. Accordingly, all of these conflicts are ultimately concerned with this very striving for recognition, which makes human beings moral subjects in the first place. Thus, the social conflicts themselves have a moral core. They can only be pacified with a politics of recognition that allows the agents to dissolve or quell these conflicts in a reciprocal and equitable relation of recognition. This point of view is primarily represented in the critical social theory of Axel Honneth30 and the theory of multiculturalism developed by Charles Taylor.31 By interpreting the social relationship as an expression of a pacified conflict, both theoreticians follow in the footsteps of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s theory of recognition. Paul Ricœur,32 however, demonstrates the difference from a hermeneutical-phenomenological interpretation of the relation of recognition. He asks how the original asymmetry of the subjects can be preserved in recognition. Responding to the current French debate on the phenomenology of the gift and the practice of agape in Christian religion, he develops an understanding of recog-

29 30 31 32

See Honneth 1996, 22. See Honneth 1996. See Taylor 1994. See Ricœur 2005.

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nition that comprehends it not as a social-critical ideal, but as a lived and actualized gesture. (iii) In the social-phenomenological theory of alterity developed by Emmanuel Levinas,33 the sociality of the human being is also interpreted ethically. But Levinas attempts to step beyond the basic Hobbesian paradigm of antagonism in modern political anthropology in an entirely different way than the theories of recognition. He understands the interpersonal difference with its conflict potentials not as a transitional phase on the way to a reconciled and egalitarian societal order in which mutual relationships of recognition determine social togetherness and coexistence. Instead, he posits the difference and not the normative ideal of its reconciliation as the insurmountable starting point of describing the interpersonal relation. The difference of one from the other is not primarily a source of conflict, struggle and antagonism among human beings. Rather, it causes a transcendence of the other, an (intersubjective) withdrawal and elusiveness of the other that in turn calls the subject to responsibility. This discovery of an ethical dimension of meaning within the interpersonal encounter is the most significant insight into the social relationship that Levinas develops in the course of his social-phenomenological studies: the protagonists of the interpersonal encounter become indispensable to each other and aware of a non-negotiable responsibility of one for the other. But this concrete and unique relationship of responsibility is lost as soon as the interpersonal encounter is included in the immanence of social orders. Unlike the social theory of recognition, Levinas believes that the act of one person selflessly taking on responsibility for the other excludes a reciprocal or egalitarian relationship between them.34 Instead, the social relationship to the other is interpreted as the site of an intensified relationship of difference, in which precisely this one-sided withdrawal of the other and the asynchronicity of the protagonists of the social relationship provokes the constitution of ethical subjectivity. However, Levinas’ positive, ethical appraisal of the interpersonal difference comes at a price. He does not give adequate thought to the social ambivalence of this difference, its potential to lead one to become the enemy of the other as well as becoming responsible for the other. His thoughts thus remain indebted to a conception of social

33 34

See Levinas 1979; 1981. See Levinas 1998, 82.

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humanity that does not pay as much attention to its dark side – social inhumanity – as it does to the responsible approximation to the other which occurs in interpersonal difference. Therefore, Levinas’ concept ultimately must be critically refered back to the possibility of a negative anthropology. The considerations of the third chapter arrive at the following conclusion: If it cannot be made clear in the course of social-philosophical argument how the interpersonal difference is to be interpreted in the social relationship, then it is also impossible for social philosophy to give a definitive interpretation of human sociality or an unequivocal phenomenological description of the phenomenon of social humanity. Therefore, the study asks for a perspective of description that can improve our understanding of the ambiguity of interpersonal difference in distinct anthropological terms, and that can also explicitly differentiate it terminologically in its twofold consequence for social interaction. Only in this way can anthropological reflection prevent an indifference in the description of social humanity toward the phenomena of social inhumanity (violence, murder, war, disrespect etc.). The final thesis of this study, which shall be developed in the last chapter, is that theological anthropology, with its conception of God’s neighbor unfolds an understanding of humanity that can live up to this demand. 5

The Double Description of Anthropology in Theology

Within interdisciplinary discourse, theological anthropology is usually challenged like no other perspective of description to prove that its insights are compatible with the principles of empirical or philosophical anthropology, whose perspectives are thought of as neutral and universal. For this reason, many interdisciplinary anthropological studies in theology attempt to prove the particularity of theological anthropology on the basis of its compatibility with a general anthropology, and claim to justify the religious perspective on human beings in this way. In the context of this study, which seeks to offer a phenomenological criticism of all attempts to fundamentally describe human beings, the contribution of theology cannot be to construct a universal or general perspective on human beings. Rather, theological anthropology, just like its non-theological counterparts, must be aware of the difference between that which it describes as human sociality and that which can

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be differentiated from its representations as the phenomenon of social humanity. Therefore, its contribution to interdisciplinary discourse is to be seen in the fact that it offers a representation of human sociality that is particularly aware of the perspectivity and the limits of representation of its object. It will be my argument in chapter four that theological anthropology can demonstrate this by representing ‘human sociality’ always in terms of its difference to ‘God’s sociality’ (love of neighbor). Here, the word ‘God’ is to be understood as an index of theological description indicating that the describer locates herself within a religious horizon of description and therefore is particularly aware of the contingency of her intentional approach to the object.35 Thus, theological anthropology not only conforms to the limit of every representation of the phenomenon of sociality, but even makes this limit describable within its own perspective by employing the differentiation of God and the social world (indexical word ‘God’). Therefore, its perspective of description is structurally characterized by a double asymmetry regarding its intentional object and the latter’s phenomenal elusiveness: the word ‘God’ not only indicates the intentional elusiveness of the object for its describer (phenomenality of the object) but also the possibility of an elusiveness of the world’s objects for human intentionality at all (contingency of the object). Thus, from a methodological standpoint, theology is not less but even more competent to engage in the interdisciplinary discourse on the phenomenon of human sociality than other perspectives, because it provides the discourse with a grammar and phenomenology of description that is sensitive to the phenomenal excess of an object’s representation. Based on this methodological approach, the fourth chapter develops an independent social-anthropological concept. It presupposes that the social is not purely immanent, since God is a partaker in the social field, as the neighbor of human beings. Here, the word ‘neighbor’ is to be understood as a hermeneutical category whose function for everyday social orientation is reinterpreted in the horizon of God’s presence. In everyday speech, the ‘neighbor’ is a socially close person whose immediate familiarity constitutes the point of reference for the perception of other people. For the most part, this is a person whom

35

See Dalferth 2003, 466–474, here 468.

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we have a personal kind of relationship with (friendship, family, partnership). Their function is to organize the social sphere of proximity and distance for us through their presence. The neighbor’s presence thus represents a yardstick for both social proximity and the distance between human beings. In the New Testament narratives about the Good Samaritan (Lk 10: 25–37) and the Last Judgment (Mt 25: 31–46), this function of the neighbor is reinterpreted. Because a stranger with whom no personal, ethical or religious ties exist experiences care, sympathy and help, the immanence of social orientation is transcended. Human community can now open up to outcasts or marginalized persons. They can be identified as neighbors of God, to whom God relates even where interpersonal relations are suspended or denied. Thus, the stories show that through God’s devotion to human beings in Jesus Christ, a new form of humanity between human beings is (made) possible. In connection with the biblical testimony of love of God and neighbor, the fourth chapter therefore focuses on the question of the extent to which the discussion of the (other) human being as a neighbor of God suggests its own description of human sociality. Here, the analysis of Christian love put forth by the Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard36 can serve as a guide: He transfers the twofold Christian commandment to love God and one’s neighbor into a social-critical phenomenology. Here, he relates the word ‘love’ not only to partnerships or friendships, but includes in it all forms of interpersonal relation. In this respect, Kierkegaard’s concept is methodologically close to the theories of social philosophy discussed in the third chapter, and like them, it argues for a relational anthropology. Nevertheless, his phenomenology of Christian love also represents a decidedly theological description of human sociality. This is because it reflects the double perspective of theological anthropology that, unlike the theories of social philosophy, combines positive and negative anthropology. With his negative description of interpersonal love, Kierkegaard lays the groundwork for a positive description of Christian love, which is capable of revealing the errors and deficiencies of interpersonal love. His description thereby represents the approach characteristic for theological anthropology, which describes the human being in its status as both sinner and saved. Christian love is described as a revision of the

36

See Kierkegaard 1962.

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old social relationship in the light of the new, whose distinctiveness is first realized with the perception of the fellow human as a neighbor of God. The phenomenality of Christian love is thus also expressed by God’s invariable presence in interpersonal love. According to Kierkegaard, ‘God’ functions as the middle term of interpersonal relations of love.37 His nearness and devotion to human beings, as this was actualized in the humanity displayed by Jesus, disrupts the social patterns of relationships and behavior, and realigns them. With his critical distinction between love of self and love of neighbor, Kierkegaard makes clear how this realignment takes place hermeneutically.38 If we were to interpret this distinction in a consequentialist manner, as egoistic and altruistic behavior is distinguished in experimental economics, our interpretation would fall short. Rather than the sacrifice of personal gain, Kierkegaard asks about the selflessness and self-denial of neighborly love. Here, he is thinking of a profound human selfrenunciation that goes beyond an externally effective self-sacrifice for the other. The self-renunciation which characterizes neighborly love, however, cannot always be immediately distinguished from selfish love by observing the social phenomena. Kierkegaard demonstrates that selfish love in caring for the other can take on such a subtle form that it appears to be identical with love of neighbor and is actually mistaken for it. Therefore, the phenomenon of love itself is ambiguous, and the impossibility of completely overcoming this ambiguity is what guides Kierkegaard’s thoughts. He by no means assumes that the social relationship can be freed from the tension of this ambiguity through Christian love and thus does not offer any vision of replacing interpersonal love with Christian love. However, by placing interpersonal love into the horizon of Christian love, he shows that gaining a new perspective on the social phenomena is possible. This new perspective allows us to use these social phenomena critically to identify the distinction between self-love and love of neighbor. Kierkegaard’s theological social anthropology is not a dualist concept that would merely juxtapose the positive and negative description of sociality. Instead, it relates the two concepts to each other in order to guide readers toward changing their behavior in a process of critical discernment. Therefore, Kierkegaard’s analysis of Christian love does not

37 38

See ibid., 58. See Dalferth 2002.

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propagate love of neighbor as an ethical ideal or normative demand. Instead, it uses a description of the deficiencies of interpersonal love to show the kind of life reality in which love of neighbor is possible at all. The description of love of neighbor is therefore always connected to a critical revision of those forms of interpersonal love that stand in tense opposition with the ethos of love of neighbor. In this way, his description of human sociality always remains concrete and related to the reality of human life. The last part of the fourth chapter is devoted to the question of the extent to which Kierkegaard’s theological description of human sociality takes up and realizes the initial factual concern of this study, namely, that the description of human sociality can never turn a blind eye to the phenomena of social inhumanity and thus must prevent a possible indifference to humanity and inhumanity. In connection with the reception of Kierkegaard in critical theory, the fourth chapter concludes with an investigation of whether the method of twofold anthropological description demonstrated by Kierkegaard can be interpreted in this vein. Based on Theodor W. Adorno’s39 critique of Kierkegaard, Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner and Kenneth Reinhard have attempted to interpret the Christian figure of the neighbor not in the horizon of a phenomenology of humanity, but as a figure of inhumanity.40 In dealing with Kierkegaard’s analyses of love, Adorno had pointed out that Kierkegaard stylizes love into a supramundane ideal. He accused Kierkegaard of presenting a description of the neighbor that empties the discussion of the neighbor of all empirical significance. Here, Adorno paid particular attention to Kierkegaard’s praise of love for a dead person, which he describes as the litmus test for interpersonal love because it is not ‘burdened’ by any reciprocity between the lover and the loved.41 Adorno, however, sees this perspective as a basis for the surrender of the social reality of the life of human beings in Kierkegaard’s work. Žižek and his colleagues productively invert Adorno’s critique, interpreting Kierkegaard’s dissociation from the social reality of life as a negative phenomenology of human sociality. They show how Kierkegaard, in his analysis of Christian love, suspends the ethical interpretation

39 40 41

See Adorno 1939/40; 2003. See Žižek et al. 2005. See Kierkegaard 1962, 345–358.

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of sociality as the way to a good life and righteous conduct, thus enabling a description of sociality that centers on its downside, inhumanity. Kierkegaard’s idealization of love for a dead person thus is to be considered a symbol for the loss of the actual fellow human being in modern society. The neighbor denotes a social void within human society. He functions as a figure manifesting the ostracized, outcast and negated aspects of humanity in society. In this sense, the real presence of the neighbor is no longer comprehensible within the symbolic orders of the social. Here, unlike in Kierkegaard’s theological interpretation, the figure of the neighbor does not show the new humanity in tension with the reality of sinful human existence. Instead, it points out an immanent limit of humanity at the site of the human being himself. Thus, it lets the two perspectives of human social life that Kierkegaard had distinguished phenomenologically coincide in the description of the phenomenon of social inhumanity. This new interpretation cannot be found in any theological exegesis of the Christian love commandment. Therefore, in conclusion, the chapter will take up the suggestion of asking about inhumanity as a phenomenal absence of interpersonal sociality and investigate whether the theological perspective, too, is prepared to describe inhumanity in the paradoxical manner of Žižek and his colleagues. The concluding remarks summarize the results of the individual chapters with regard to the study’s initial question. Again, it will be made clear why an interdisciplinary study must refrain from suspending the multiperspectivity of the anthropological descriptions of sociality; to do so would be to abandon the possibility of critical differentiation and the mutual correction of their knowledge claims that lies in the difference between the individual approaches of the disciplines.

CHAPTER ONE

ANTHROPOLOGY AS A REPRESENTATION OF HUMANITY 6 Interdisciplinary Anthropology The aim of this study is to describe human sociality within the framework of an interdisciplinary anthropology. ‘Interdisciplinary’ means that the object of the study will be examined from multiple perspectives. The presentation of the individual perspectives of description will, however, not only include an analysis of the respective methodological approaches and results, but above all will look at the ‘object’ of these descriptions: human existence as it shows itself at the site of sociality, i.e., in human interaction. In order to be able to evaluate the factual adequacy of the descriptions which come from different disciplines, this study proposes to define a hermeneutic-phenomenological criterion for the way anthropological descriptions refer to their object. On the basis of a hermeneutics and phenomenology of human humanity, the possibilities and limits of comprehension in the individual descriptive perspectives can be better evaluated. It will therefore be the task of this chapter to investigate the possible meanings of ‘humanity’ and to determine why an anthropological description of sociality cannot work without a reflection on human humanity. Here, it will be important to show in which ways that humanity can be taken into account as a phenomenon, rather than just in its representations and descriptions. Before we tackle this methodological problem, however, we will first deal with a question of content: what constitutes the humanity of human beings? Is it their essential nature, the concrete conditions of their existence on earth (the human condition), or is it the manner of their phenomenal self-perception (corporality)? To shed light on this matter, we will systematically examine various positions of 20th century philosophical anthropology to investigate how human humanity can not only be normatively justified, but also anthropologically described. By asking what constitutes human humanity, I want to demonstrate that human sociality cannot be examined in an interdisciplinary way without methodologically reflecting on the way anthropology refers

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to its object. Otherwise, the anthropological descriptions may be in danger of missing their mark; because, as has been explained above, their object is not simply the empirical fact of the human being, but its phenomenal concreteness [Gegenständlichkeit].1 In the following, this chapter will explicitly reflect on the characteristics of the object of the various disciplinary efforts to represent human sociality in its phenomenal concreteness. To speak of the ‘concreteness’ of the human being and not only of ‘the human being’ as an object is to assume that human existence is more than that which can be objectified with methodological tools; that human existence in itself is also characterized by forms of concreteness that allow for the representation of the object from various perspectives in the first place. In order to flesh out this hermeneutic-phenomenological approach to concreteness in the context of anthropology, a short examination of the corporeal-bodily dimensions of being human is in order. Because of their bodily existence, human beings are forced to always refer to others from an irreducibly separate position (interhuman difference).2 It is also their visibility and corporality that enable them to express themselves and represent themselves in the presence of others.3 In their expressive behavior, human beings enter into a relationship with others, but at the same time remain withdrawn from them. They play with the manifold modes and forms of their visibility for others and yet also remain invisible in them, insofar as they are not completely absorbed into any intersubjective relationship. At all times, their social presence also contains forms of their absence through which they hide from the gaze of others and elude the appropriation of their presence. This interplay of presence and absence is constitutive of the phenomenal concreteness of human beings in the social lifeworld. Therefore, it also represents a yardstick and a frame of reference for the scientific description of human beings. When human beings are examined in their ‘concreteness,’ it means that their humanity is not viewed as a given precondition of the representation and interpretation of human beings, as a human ‘essence’ or human ‘nature.’ Instead, human humanity is to be located in or

1

On the hermeneutics of concreteness also see §11 of this study. See Dalferth and Hunziker 2007, X. 3 See the works of Helmuth Plessner on corporeal phenomenology and their social significance that are presented in §10, as well as in Blumenberg 2006, 777–895. 2

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rather at the site of their phenomenal concreteness and not outside of it. It is, as mentioned above, the phenomenal excess of any representation and interpretation of the phenomenon of ‘the human being’ that offers itself to interpretation in all its abundance and at the same time eludes it. How can this approach be utilized for an interdisciplinary anthropology? Since this study is conducted in an interdisciplinary manner, it deals not with only one, but several vastly different ideas of human sociality that are each considered to be fundamental in various disciplines. In the perspectives in question, sociality is viewed either as a neurobiologically rooted preference structure of human behavior (neuroeconomics), or as a basic structure of difference and relationality in the interhuman relationship (social phenomenology and ethics), or as a structure of the human relationship to God and neighbor (theology). To take account of the fact that these perspectives are not merely dissimilar, but actually, fundamentally different from each other, this study is not based on a uniform concept of human sociality that integrates all of the perspectives and that differs from them only in specific characteristics. As has been explained in §2, such an approach would not be justified from a phenomenological standpoint, and is in fact not even feasible. Instead, this study will examine the phenomenon of human sociality, which can be distinguished and set apart from all of the discussions about it in the various perspectives. 7

Anthropology and Sociality in the Individual Disciplines

The aim of this study is to analyze human sociality as a basic phenomenological structure of human interaction. The study proposes to do this from three different perspectives and to point out the particular relationship between anthropology and sociality that determines each respective modeling or description. Each of these perspectives on human sociality must therefore be examined for its basic anthropological concepts, and it must be demonstrated how each perspective is based on a particular relationship between humanity and sociality that needs to be more closely defined. Since the individual perspectives do not necessarily build upon each other but indeed often stand in opposition to each other, the experimental modeling presented in the second chapter cannot be viewed as the foundation of the philosophical and theological description of

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sociality – even though it certainly may claim to be so. Instead, the individual perspectives in this study will initially be treated as independent and only be directly compared with each other at certain points of conflict in which they ignore or negate the other perspectives’ understanding of reality. Therefore, their lines of conflict and differences will only be traced in the last step at the end of the study. In the following, the anthropological concept of each perspective will be outlined in order to profile the defining anthropological differences of this study. Since the perspectives do not build on each other in the framework of this study, we will first examine the figures of thought of theological anthropology, then the anthropological paradigms of experimental economics, and finally the hermeneutical and phenomenological foundations of a philosophical anthropology and its critique of the classical definition of the human being as animal rationale. 7.1

Theological Figures of Thought on Nature and Humanity

In his book “Schöpfung im Widerspruch” (2003), Dieter Groh examines how and to what extent the various ideas of nature that influence the image of the human being are rooted in a theological view of history and the world. He describes how figures of thought about nature and human beings in cultural history have significantly contributed to the preformation of the attitude and even the style of concrete formulations of theories in many academic fields4 by providing a culturally constructed frame of reference.5 Often, they refer to an unquestioned basis6 from which a theoretical model about human beings and human society is developed. The analysis and reconstruction of these ideological preconditions of academic theory formation is thus essential in two ways: on the one hand, it makes us acknowledge these preconditions of theory formation and reveal their implications, and on the other hand, in intercultural and interreligious dialogue, it enables a

4 Groh mainly refers to theology, natural philosophy, political philosophy, economics, moral philosophy, the natural sciences, and anthropology (see Groh 2003, 17). 5 See ibid., 15–23. 6 For identifying these figures of thought, Groh also uses the term ‘symbolic field.’ In contrast to ‘paradigm,’ the term ‘symbolic field’ accounts for the formation of theories implicitly and across disciplines because it is a cultural construct and not an explicitly academic one (see ibid., 15).

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provocative discussion about not only the explicit differences, but also the implicit premises of our own and others’ constructions. Of course, Groh concedes that the underlying anthropological thought patterns of theory formation can only be reconstructed as an ideal model,7 which implies that their reconstruction cannot claim to do justice to the various theoretical concepts in every single aspect. The reconstruction of underlying thought patterns cannot replace the construction and conceptualization of the questions and problems within a perspective; nor does it claim to do so. In the anthropological discourses of European cultural history, Groh most importantly identifies the determination of an essential human nature as a thought pattern that is as far-reaching as it is problematic.8 For the determination of essential human nature is based on the premise that the relationship between human beings and nature is a relationship of accordance. The human being must be understood according to its nature, and in anthropological discourse is regarded as a creature whose possibilities of social and personal self-realization are determined by the positive or negative determination of its nature.9 Of central interest is the question of whether the human being is good or evil by nature, because the answer to this question serves to develop either a progressive or regressive image of human development and human society.10 Groh tests his hypothesis mainly on the example of theological interpretations of nature and the human being. He observes that in these interpretations, human nature is always represented in terms of an ‘inner nature’ as a mirror of an ‘external’ world nature.11 Thus, the construction of humanity in dependence on the respective concept of nature is also a catalyst for developing a teleological or antiteleological view of the world and the course of history. According to Groh, such an interpretation of the connection between human nature and the course of history is prefigured in part by the early Christian tradition of theological anthropologies of

7

See ibid. See ibid., 20–23. Groh also criticizes the determination of human nature as a “totalization of particularities” (ibid., 20), since it refers to the particular experiences that human beings have with human beings and universalizes it with the concept of human nature. 9 See ibid., 16. 10 See ibid., 21. 11 See ibid. 8

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creation.12 Here, the condition of the world and of human nature is not a matter of cosmology, but of creation theology and salvation theology. Looking at the anthropological discourses of theology from the post-biblical origins up to Reformation times, Groh thus identifies one ideal-typical13 model of nature based on creation theology and one based on salvation theology and distinguishes the two (in reference to theological terminology, but not completely identifying them with it) as natura lapsa and oeconomia naturae, as fallen nature and harmonious natural balance.14 7.1.1

The Difference between ‘Natura Lapsa’ and ‘Oeconomia Naturae’ The first model of nature paints a negative and pessimistic picture of humanity.15 The thought pattern of natura lapsa assumes that after the fall of the first human being, as portrayed in the Bible in the Book of Genesis (Gen 2–3), human nature is corrupted and cannot be rebuilt at all or only incompletely. The previous unity and perfection of human nature has thus been irrevocably lost. By including a reception of the originally anti-teleological Epicurean idea of the aging of the world (mundus senescens), the concept of a fallen or – on a temporally extended plane – decaying human nature is also considered in view of its effects on the external or world nature. The disruption of the divinely ordained order by the fall of the first human being results in a sort of derailment of the natural process as a whole and thus entails cosmic repercussions. This extension of the natura lapsa idea to an idea that includes external nature is particularly common in the apocalyptic literature of early Christianity (Apocalypse of Ezra, the Syrian Apocalypse of Baruch, and the Ethiopian Book of Henoch).16 It stretches all the way to Reformationist theology, whose idea of human beings is decidedly based on a theology of sin.17

12

See ibid., 21. See ibid., 16: “Since the [. . .] nature models [. . . .] in their purest of forms (as it were) have not emerged very often in the course of history, it is also seldom possible to ascribe specific faiths or philosophical schools exclusively to one of the two nature concepts.” (transl. M.S.). 14 See ibid., 17–20. 15 See ibid., 17–18. 16 See ibid., 24–59. 17 See ibid., 474–744. 13

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A positive view of internal and external nature is conveyed in the second model of nature,18 which assumes that human beings are capable of gaining insight into the divine well-orderedness of nature (Rom 2:14). The (post-biblical) doctrine of natural knowledge of God provides a thought pattern that allows conclusion by analogy from the constitution of the natural world to God, or rather his plan of salvation, as its creator. Beside the Stoic and Platonic-Aristotelian thinkers of antiquity, the Eastern and Western church fathers of the second to the fourth century are largely responsible for the development of positive anthropology.19 They created the idea of an oikonomia of God, of a divine plan for salvation that includes the teleological wellorderedness of the world. It was particularly Clement of Alexandria and Origen who adapted the Greek term of oikonomia, which had previously been used by the Stoics and by Xenophon for describing the cosmos, and reshaped it into a salvation-theological understanding of nature, the world and human beings.20 Both models enter into a momentous “coalition”21 in the theology of John Calvin, who as a good Reformationist believes in the radical decay of human nature, but at the same time rejects the notion that the well-orderedness of the world has been permanently disrupted.22 According to Calvin, God’s benevolence toward human beings shows itself precisely in his “insatiable desire for an order”23 for human beings; but he can only bestow this order unto them as a gift of mercy from the outside through his permanently effective omnipotence in all orders of the cosmos. On the basis of the separation of creator and creation that had started to emerge after the Middle Ages, Calvin develops a functional understanding of the nature of the world. Because of his positive evaluation of nature in general, he can view it as an external instrument of God for the gradual reconstruction of humanity’s imago Dei. Thus, Calvin’s theology (as opposed to Luther’s) posits that external nature, which is determined and guided by God’s intervention for the purpose of protecting an imperfect human nature, allows for a progressive view of the course of the world.24 According to Groh, 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

See ibid., 18–20. See ibid., 21. See ibid., 22–23. Ibid., 16 (transl. M.S.). See ibid., 708–718. Ibid., 719 (transl. M.S.). See ibid., 739–741.

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Calvin’s theology exemplifies the fact that the two ideal-typical models of natura lapsa and oeconomia naturae can very well be at work within one theological horizon of thought. 7.1.2 Isomorphism of Nature, Humanity and Society? An important point of criticism made by Groh regarding the concept of nature in anthropological discourses in theology (and, from a larger perspective, in Western cultural history as a whole) pertains to the purported isomorphism of nature, humanity and society in these concepts.25 The uniformity of these three factors is one of those unquestioned ideological preconditions of anthropological and societal theoretical concepts up to the present. The (unfounded) assumption of uniformity of these three factors plays a constitutive role for fundamental decisions of theory formation, as well as for the empirical examination of the human being. Based on this observation, Groh claims that the isomorphism of the three factors will always result in an ideological basis for explicating the interrelationship between human nature and societal order. Thus, he writes: Both of these models of human nature are ideologies. The positive model serves to justify liberal forms of governance; the negative model serves to justify authoritarian forms of governance. As the first one [oeconomia naturae] results in adopting the principle of societal self-regulation, the second one [natura lapsa] results in adopting the principle of state control over dangerous elements. However, they are not only ideologies in their function, but also in their origin: as a totalization of particularities, as a definition of human nature.26

Groh’s ideological criticism may apply to definitions of the human of the animal rationale type, in which the human in its totality is defined by universalizing a particular aspect of its existence, e.g. the capability of acting rationally. With regard to theological anthropology, however, we can argue against Groh’s reasoning that theology did not pit the two thought patterns of natura lapsa and oeconomia naturae against each other, but has continuously related them to each other in new connections and ‘coalitions’ – as Groh himself puts it. Theology has thus not advanced a one-sided idea of human beings27 in order to justify

25

See ibid., 21. Ibid. (transl. M.S.). 27 On the double perspective on human beings in theological anthropology see §5 and the remarks on ‘non-identity’ in the human self-relationship that Wolfhart 26

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existing societal forms of governance; instead, due to its double perspective on human beings, it has been able to connect the factors of humanity and nature, as well as humanity and society, in ways that are far from uncritical. It was only the isolation of a one-dimensional chain of argument – from nature to humanity to society – that brought forth the ideologically narrow thought pattern of modern political anthropologies from Hobbes to Marx, which cast the human as either friend or foe to its fellow humans and that thus always narrowed down the aspect of their sociality to the alternative between egoism and altruism, between a negative concept of humanity and a positive one. 7.2

Basic Anthropological Paradigms of Experimental Economics

In recent years, experimental economics has been developing an idea of humanity that wholly subscribes to the alternative between egoism and altruism, between a negative and a positive idea of the social nature of human beings. In its behavioral experiments,28 it develops a behavioral-economic concept of human sociality by modeling social interactions and transactions of goods.29 Here, human beings are examined as homo cooperativus, as beings that are able and willing to contribute to the well-being of the community. Their ability to cooperate is interpreted as an expression of their sociality and contrasted with the neoclassical idea of human beings in economics, the self-serving homo oeconomicus. From an epistemological perspective, the new aspect in behavioral science studies on homo cooperativus is that human behavior is Pannenberg, following a thought of Helmuth Plessner, develops in his “Anthropologie in theologischer Perspektive” (“Anthropology in Theological Perspective”) and also applies to the social relationship between human beings (see Pannenberg 2004, 34–42.157–179). By developing his anthropology on the basis of the relationship between human beings and nature and the field of sin theology (ibid., 27–153), Pannenberg shows that the fundamental criterion for describing human beings in theological anthropology is not the definiteness, but the ambiguity of human existence. 28 In the following, the term ‘experiment’ will always be used in a narrow sense, in which experimenting is restricted to a procedure of artificial data collection conducted by an experimenter. Experiments in the narrow sense are “in the overwhelming majority of cases connected to measuring and are performed to gather quantitative results.” ( Janich 1997, 97 [transl. M.S.]). Merely making observations, questioning people or gathering experiences in other ways cannot be called controlled data collection in a strictly (natural ) scientific sense. 29 The second chapter will describe in more detail to what extent social behavior in economics is always modeled analogously to the game theory model of strategic cooperation between individuals.

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modeled in a transdisciplinary experimental design that combines methods from both the social and natural sciences through a synthesis of neuroscientific and economic methods. The economic method can be understood as a social science method.30 Because the two methods enter into a synthesis, these studies should be thought of as transdisciplinary experimentation and not only as an interdisciplinary reading and interpretation of experimental results. At the heart of transdisciplinarity lies a research strategy that strives to unify the methodological and theoretical pluralism within the social and behavioral sciences.31 The transdisciplinary modeling of human social behavior serves to develop method paradigms that give a wider scientific foundation to the hypotheses of behavioral economic research, thereby expanding their relevance.32 7.2.1 Human vs. Rational Behavior In their inception, the hypotheses of experimental economics about human behavior emerge from a confrontation with the neoclassical economic explanatory model33 for rational behavior: the homo oeconomicus.34 Neoclassical economics constructs rational behavior by developing mathematical models for determining the preference relations of behavior. In these models it always presupposes economic subjects (homo oeconomicus) to have a self-serving preference relation. In contrast, experimental economics are advancing the hypothesis that human beings align their behavior to social norms and behavioral rules 30 Why and to what extent economics can be understood as a social science is fundamentally established by Bruno S. Frey, an economist and happiness researcher, in his book “Ökonomie ist Sozialwissenschaft” (Frey 1990). 31 The thesis of a new synthesis between the social and behavioral sciences in experimental economics is explicitly advanced and argumentatively supported by Herbert Gintis (see Gintis 2007; 2009). 32 As an example, see the study on behavioral patterns of ‘altruistic punishment’ in economics, neurobiology and psychobiology: Henrich et al. 2004; Henrich et al. 2001; Gintis et al. 2005; Fehr and Fischbacher 2003; Fehr et al. 2002; Fehr and Gächter 2002; DeQuervain and Fischbacher 2004; Fehr and Rockenbach 2003; Fehr and Singer 2005; Singer et al. 2006; Bernhard et al. 2006; Fehr et al. 2005; Kosfeld and Heinrichs et al. 2005; Knoch et al. 2006; Fehr and Fischbacher 2004a; Fehr and Fischbacher 2004b; Fehr and Fischbacher 2005; Fehr 2005; Fehr 2004; Fehr 2001. 33 See the definition of economics in Kirchgässner 22000, 2: “Economics is the attempt to explain human behavior by assuming that individual persons behave rationally.” (transl. M.S.). 34 On the background and relevance of the homo oeconomicus model in the social sciences and philosophy see Kirchgässner 22000; Manstetten 2000; Demeulenaere 2003; Rolle 2005. For the discussion in theology, see this recent work: Dietz 2005.

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and thus are not as self-serving as the neoclassical model predicts and purports. In order to prove its hypothesis, experimental economics seeks to show empirically that human behavior can be modeled not only by egoistic, but also by social preferences. The latter can be studied predominantly in cooperative and prosocial patterns of behavior (strong reciprocity, altruism). In recent years, individual experimental studies35 have indeed provided empirical proof that not only egoistic, but also altruistic preference relations play an important role in the various basic situations of human social behavior, a finding which sharply contradicts the claims of the canonical model of rational behavior. However, this result has only been proven in experiments with test subjects at European universities and American colleges in the artificial environment of a behavioral laboratory. On the basis of this limited experimental evidence, however, behavioral researchers have already developed the hypothesis that social preference behavior could be a universal characteristic of human nature in the sense of a biological-empirical behavioral disposition. They presumed that the existence of social preferences manifests itself in a culturally invariant willingness to cooperate, which human beings display in social dilemma situations. Social dilemma situations are situations in which human beings face decisions to behave either in a prosocial or antisocial manner toward their fellow humans. In order to validate their hypothesis that human beings are prosocial and altruistic by nature beyond the setting of laboratory studies, economists Ernst Fehr, Herbert Gintis, Colin Camerer and Samuel Bowles, together with several ethnologists, psychologists and anthropologists (Joseph Henrich and Robert Boyd, among others), conducted worldwide field experiments on human social behavior.36 In a large-scale study with fifteen small-scale societies on three continents, behavioral experiments on the significance of fairness and cooperation were conducted. Here, the researchers came to the conclusion that there are significantly more culturally determined differences between the basic patterns of social interaction than they had previously assumed.37 But 35

See note 32. “Our goal was [. . .] to explore the motives that underlie the diversity of human sociality.” (Henrich et al. 2004, 10). The analysis of the empirical field studies in fifteen small-scale societies in Henrich et al. 2004 arrives at the conclusion, however, that the respective cultural context exerts a very high influence on the realization of social preferences in behavior (see ibid., 8–54). 37 See ibid., 5. 36

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the field studies also showed that the social behavior of human beings indeed cannot be fully explained by the neoclassical standard model of an individually rational maximizer of self-interest.38 The assumption that the empirical behavior of human beings can also be modeled by social preference relations thus proved to be justified. 7.2.2 Human vs. Animal Behavior In the wake of its cross-cultural field studies, experimental economics has now begun to investigate the biological foundations of the divergences from the neoclassical standard model of economics that had been observed in experiments. For this purpose, a new field of study was founded: neuroeconomics. The central hypothesis guiding the insights of neuroeconomics is that not only cognitive, but predominantly emotional and affective neural motivational systems of behavior are participating causes in evaluating the social utility of an interaction. Specifically, neuroeconomic experiment design is characterized by combining the behavioral-scientific modeling of social interactions with the neuroscientific study of the brain. The combination of social and neuroscientific research tools thus has led to the development of a new experimental paradigm for the modeling of human social interaction and decision behavior. With the help of imaging techniques and other neuroscientific methods of observation, researchers were able to design behavioral experiments that were precisely geared to study those neural centers in the brain that are active during a decision process. They were able to show that in the case of prosocial decisions, there are two particularly active neural centers: first, centers responsible for creating negative social emotions such as schadenfreude, envy and revengefulness;39 and second, centers in charge of processing anticipated satisfaction.40 The value of a neuroeconomic modeling of human social decision-making behavior thus lies in the possibility of empirically proving the influence of emotions on rational deliberations over advantages and utility in the brain. Further evidence gathered through the neuroeconomic modeling of human behavior was also used to support the hypothesis of economists Ernst Fehr and Urs Fischbacher about the existence of a

38 39 40

See ibid. Also see Sanfey and Rilling et al. 2003. See DeQuervain and Fischbacher et al. 2004.

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biological ‘altruism’ in human beings.41 According to the behavioristeconomist definition, human beings are ‘altruistic’ agents in that they (i) stand up for the well-being of others or of their social group at personal cost and (ii) actualize the unique behavior pattern of ‘strong reciprocity’ that contributes to the maintenance of cooperation norms in individual or group interactions by human beings. This definition of altruism in the sense of (i) can initially be applied to all kinds of biological organisms and living beings. But beyond that, neuroeconomic modeling claims that altruistic behavior in human beings manifests itself in a specific behavior pattern (ii) that cannot be found in other living beings. The thesis of a specifically human altruism that is presented here can be supported with the following quotation: Experimental evidence indicates that human altruism is a powerful force and unique in the animal world. [. . .] Human societies represent a large anomaly in the animal world. They are based on a detailed division of labour and cooperation of genetically unrelated individuals in large groups. [. . .] In contrast, most animal species exhibit little division of labour and cooperation is limited to small groups. [. . .] Exceptions are social insects such as ants and bees, or the naked mole rat; however, their cooperation is based on a substantial amount of genetic relatedness.42

The quotation shows that Fehr and Fischbacher have consistently developed their hypothesis about a specifically human altruism in the context of a biological anthropology. But their thesis of a biological altruism in human beings can also be called unusual within the naturalistic theoretical horizon that they are focusing on. From a sociobiological perspective, the altruism of living beings is always subject to the caveat that every phenotype of altruistic behavior can be traced back to a genetically determined, inclusive fitness advantage of interrelated organisms and thus is self-serving, in that it provides the organism with a genetic advantage. Thus the basic problem of socio-biological altruism research consists in ignoring any altruism that extends beyond the genetic relationship between human beings.43 In contrast to this, Fehr

41

See Fehr and Fischbacher 2003. Fehr and Fischbacher 2005, 6. The quoted passages are identical with Fehr and Fischbacher 2003, 785. 43 See the portrayal of this situation in Meisinger 1996, 249: “The basic problem of [socio-biological] altruism research is the extension of altruistic behavior to genetically unrelated human beings. [. . .] The classical theories of altruism theory, group selection, selection of relatives, and reciprocal altruism attempt to explain altruism in the context of Darwinist biology. Such approaches are often understood as a legitimization of a naturalistic idea of human beings and a reductionist interpretation of 42

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and Fischbacher claim that homo sapiens is the only known biological species showing cooperation between individuals that are not related to each other in a narrow sense,44 while animals limit their cooperation to closer familial relationships. It is a characteristic of such a human form of altruism that human individuals live together in ‘society’-type social forms whose way functionality is not based on family relationships and biological hierarchies but on a shared system of norms and values that regulates individual behavior. In order to account for the specificity of human social behavior in the context of a biological and evolutionary anthropology, Fehr and Fischbacher aim to develop a model of altruism that is valid independently of selective mechanisms that benefit the inclusive fitness of related individuals. Fehr and Fischbacher’s neuroeconomic modeling of human altruism is predominantly based on two models of socio-biological altruism research while at the same time distancing itself from them: (i) The model of ‘reciprocal or direct altruism’ by Robert Trivers45 explains altruistic behavior with the principle of reciprocity. Altruists behave selflessly toward other individuals because they expect them to reciprocate by helping them in the future. In the long run, then, altruists benefit from their cooperative behavior because short-term personal investments will be offset by the reciprocal compensation of the other individual in the future. (ii) The model of ‘reputational or indirect altruism’46 by Martin A. Sigmund and Karl Nowak is also based on the premise that altruists can gain an advantage over other individuals through their cooperative behavior, but the advantage is an indirect result of such behavior. In large groups, altruists can present themselves to third parties as fair and unselfish in order to gain a reputational advantage with regard to future acts of cooperation with new cooperation partners. They therefore act selflessly in order to profit from future cooperation. human morals [. . .]. But they do not succeed in explaining altruistic behavior extending beyond the closest relatives. [. . .] True altruism is unthinkable for living beings that are observed purely in terms of biology.” (transl. M.S.). 44 ‘Not related’ in the biological sense already applies to organisms from the second or third degree of relation on. Under this premise, the biological organization structure of human societies mainly distinguishes itself from those of ants or termites in the fact that biologically unrelated individuals interact with each other on a large scale. 45 Trivers 1971. 46 Nowak and Sigmund 1998a; 1998b.

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Neuroeconomics is critical of these two models of altruism because they fail to explain altruistic behavior in singular interactions between individuals that are not closely related or acquainted. In addition, these models do not account for the ability of human beings to anticipate the consequences of their behavior in advance and to include them in their actual calculations of utility and decision-making. This situation has far-reaching implications for deeming a behavioral pattern to be ‘altruistic.’ Provided that individuals will take into account not only the short-term personal costs, but also the long-term personal advantages and disadvantages of a certain behavior and weigh them against each other, it becomes obvious that they can make a decision at one point in time in order to gain a cooperative advantage at another point in time. Thus, neither ‘reciprocal altruism’ nor ‘reputational altruism’ can explain altruistic behavior in a way that does not ultimately reduce altruism to mere self-interest. In order to overcome the basic problem of socio-biological altruism models, Fehr and Fischbacher have invoked the behavioral pattern of ‘strong reciprocity’ among human beings. According to its definition, ‘strong reciprocity’ shows itself in the altruistic punishment of antisocial modes of behavior and the altruistic reward of prosocial modes of behavior.47 In order to prove empirically that both forms of ‘strong reciprocity’ are ‘purely’ altruistic modes of behavior, Fehr and Fischbacher modeled them in singular interactional processes between individuals that are not related to or acquainted with each other. A so-called ‘one-shot’ experimental design ensures that no advantages of reciprocity or reputation can have an impact on behavior. An additional relevant factor for the experimental modeling of human altruism was that human beings were put into a situation in which they had to interact with each other under conditions of anonymity. The interest of economists Fehr and Fischbacher in an empirically verifiable modeling of altruistic behavior and their attempt to surpass the socio-biological altruism models shows that they, with the help of neuroeconomic methods, seek to develop an autonomous perspective on human social behavior that satisfactorily explains this behavior on both a biological and a behavioral level. In an anthropological perspective, they present the altruistic behavior pattern of ‘strong reciprocity’ as a differentia specifica that sets human social behavior apart from animal social behavior. They also claim to be able to use their 47

See Fehr and Fischbacher 2003, 785.

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neuroscientific observations for giving a realistic representation of not only rational, but also human body-bound behavior.48 7.3

Philosophical Points of Entry in Anthropology

The following basic anthropological question seems to be equally significant for both the experimental economists Fehr and Fischbacher and the representatives of a philosophical anthropology: What constitutes the differentia specifica of human beings compared to other living beings? Is it (still) possible to determine this differentia specifica in the context of biology, or does it require a different frame of reference that locates human beings outside of the biological determinants of behavior, namely, in culture? The fact that both lines of inquiry aim to give a definition of human beings, i.e., to determine their essential nature on the basis of similarity and difference to other living beings, makes their basic conception a problematic one. This will be demonstrated in the following passages through a hermeneutical critique of the anthropological definition. This critique is motivated by the notion that without determining the idiosyncrasy of the basic question and object of anthropological study, it is impossible to assess whether the various academic descriptions of the human being, which gain their knowledge about human beings by using different methods, are able to do justice to the object of their study. Two steps are necessary to justify a critique of the methods and results of the individual disciplines: first, hermeneutical criteria must be established for whether a description of the human being can legitimately be called a representation of its ‘humanity’; and second, it must be made clear why a description of the human being is not to be mistaken for a definition of its essential nature. For this task, the ‘humanity’ of the human being must be defined based on its phenomenal concreteness [Gegenständlichkeit], and not on its biological foundations or cultural characteristics. 7.3.1 Anthropology as Human Self-Inquiry In experimental economics, any examination of the human being is based on developing an appropriate experimental modeling of human

48 A more extensive discussion and critique of the experimental modelings of human sociality will be deferred at this point because for now, the focus will be on the anthropological differentiations of the philosophical perspective.

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interaction that enables researchers to establish and verify hypotheses about human social behavior. There are no explicit reflections on the potential hermeneutical implications of these hypotheses, i.e., the aspect of how their objects of study are represented. In contrast, philosophical anthropology is interested in and open to hermeneutical and phenomenological questions. The following section will discuss the orientation of philosophical anthropology in connection with the example of Hans Blumenberg’s ideas. Those texts by Hans Blumenberg in which he explicitly deals with the basic questions of a philosophical anthropology have only become accessible through the publication of the posthumous volume “Beschreibung des Menschen” (2006).49 This book contains a number of considerations dealing with both the hermeneutical basis and the philosophical rationale for the question of the human being.50 Blumenberg demonstrates that the continued task of philosophical anthropology, even after the scientific examination of the human, is to consider the starting position and hermeneutical characteristic of the anthropological line of inquiry.51 The legitimacy of philosophical anthropology thus is not called into question by present developments in the human sciences. According to Blumenberg, the unique aspect of anthropology lies in the fact that the object it refers to exists because of an act of human self-inquiry, which is not the case with any other object of inquiry. When human beings ask about the human being as such, they ask neither about the immanent structures of their consciousness (subjectivity) nor about the existence and shape of something existing outside of them (objectivity).52 Instead, they ask about those beings who ask the question. The question of the human being thus is the only question in which the asker at first glance seems to be identical with that which is asked about.53 However, it is important to note that by

49 Oliver Müller has already demonstrated that the work of Hans Blumenberg not only contains a historical phenomenology of ‘cave exits’ [Höhlenausgänge] in the posthumous volumes, but also describes the attempt of a ‘phenomenological anthropology’ of consciousness (see Müller 2005, 313–324). Also see the discussions about Blumenberg’s anthropology in the essay collection “Auf Distanz zur Natur” (Klein 2009) and Müller’s essay in that book (Klein 2009, 101–116). 50 See Blumenberg 2006, 478–549. 51 See ibid., 482. 52 See ibid., 503–504. 53 See ibid., 503.

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posing this question, human beings do indeed ask about themselves, but specifically about themselves as human beings. Thus, they ask about creatures whose existence cannot be described without also looking at their self-relationship, which in turn is impossible to consider without also looking at a world dimension.54 The awareness that the question of the human being is a question of human self-knowledge which is not absorbed into pure subjectivity can be integrated into a scientific discussion about human beings, insofar as the ability of the human being to ask about itself and to be aware of its situation in the world fundamentally sets it apart from other living beings and thus represents a definitive characteristic of its essential nature.55 And yet, in Blumenberg’s work, the knowledge about the self-reflexive starting position of anthropology remains a proprium of philosophy that always precedes56 the methodological disciplination of the question about the human being in the sciences and that always lies beyond their grasp.57 In his posthumously published texts, Blumenberg has demonstrated time after time the extent to which the universalizing basic anthropological question of ‘What are human beings as such?’58 is in need of revision, and he has done so by subjecting it to various modifications. For him, the possibility of answering the question about the human being in a positive way is by no means a given. For this reason, Blumenberg continues to emphasize throughout his thoughts that when it comes to the human being’s question about itself, the apparent 54

See ibid. Thus, Carl Linnaeus chose the name for the biological species of human beings in his taxonomy (1735) in reference not to a specific biological characteristic, but to human self-knowledge. Human beings are those living beings that can be classified as their own species because of their capability of self-awareness (homo sapiens). 56 See Blumenberg’s objection to the claim that philosophical anthropology could be replaced by the human sciences in Blumenberg 2006, 498: “To me, this seems to be even one of its [the philosophical question about the human being; R.K.] most important functions: to declare that the sum of scientific answers is not the answer to the formerly asked question. Disciplines that today call themselves [. . .] anthropologies [. . .] would be inconceivable without a philosophical question potential that precedes them.” (transl. M.S.). 57 It is Blumenberg’s opinion that all scientific studies of human beings “in their sum do not [yield; M.S.] anything that could be called an answer to the philosophical question.” (ibid., 499 [transl. M.S.]). 58 Blumenberg points out that especially the question of human beings as such refers from the outset to a generalization of the answer and thus to an abstract object. Things would be different if the question was about some human beings that could be referred to concretely (see ibid., 503–504). 55

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identity between the asker and the object of inquiry is actually not a given at all: Why do we have to ask at all what the human being is, if we are one ourselves? This is a starting position that we do not have for any other object of inquiry. Knowing the answer to this question should be the surest of all knowledge as a matter of course. So sure, in fact, that it should be safe to say that he who asks what the human being is does not want to receive an answer at all, much like Pilate did not want an answer to his question ‘What is truth?’ – in this case, because none is required. But the identity of the asker with that about which he asks does not seem to be as evident as the borderline case that Descartes constructed for himself at the beginning of modernity: Whoever asks about that which is absolutely certain can, in any case, be absolutely certain that he demonstrates his own existence to himself by asking the question. But this identity of consciousness and its content does not extend any further, or at least not much further. In any case, we ourselves are not the contents of our consciousness beyond the fact that we exist, insofar as we have consciousness at all. That which is meant with the question of ‘What is the human being?’ must lie beyond the immediate contents of our consciousness. Because after all, the answer to this question should tell us about the essence of the human being, or at least its essential aspects.59

Blumenberg’s philosophical anthropology strives to ask about not only the essence, but also the essential aspects of human existence. To this end, he formulates the basic hermeneutical situation of the question about the human being in analogy with the Cartesian problem of certainty. Unlike the question about certainty, which aims at the mere existence of human self-consciousness, the question about what the human being is cannot simply be answered by pointing out the mere existence of self-consciousness. For this question is about something that cannot immediately be called into consciousness. For this, Blumenberg deduces “the fate of the absolute indirectness of anthropological theory.”60 Since anthropology usually focuses on the universal aspects of human existence, it cannot utilize the (supposed) immediacy of self-experience in order to gain clarity about its object. It is not even able to make self-experience the starting point of its considerations if it has developed into critical-methodological self-observation, because

59 60

Ibid., 503 (transl. M.S.). Ibid., 527 (transl. M.S.).

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self-consciousness lacks the object to which it can refer.61 The basic anthropological question of ‘What is the human being as such?’ therefore must always be set apart from the question of self-consciousness: ‘What am I?’ Blumenberg explains the uncertainty of the existence of a definitive answer to the question of what the human being is with the lack of immediate self-experience, which precedes the rationality of anthropology and must always be compensated for in it. The question about the human being is asked in the face of missing evidence and thus is geared toward a specific mode of response. All anthropological theories endeavor to “name all those and only those characteristics that are required for the function of differentiating [the human being] from other things.”62 According to Blumenberg, the determination of the human differentia specifica sometimes causes anthropology to see its task as merely ‘making an inventory’ of positive defining characteristics of the human being.63 In his opinion, this practice leads to positivistic reductionism. For this reason, he modifies the question about the human being. He replaces the basic anthropological question of what the human being is with the new question of ‘How is the human being possible?’64 (‘anthropogenesis’), thereby questioning the legitimacy of an anthropology that merely describes the actuality of the human being, but not its possibility.65 His new starting question of ‘How is the human being possible?’ is a question that seeks to “guide us toward the contingency of human beings.”66 In his opinion, anthropological thought must take into account the contingent existence of the human being because this is the only way to avoid the consequence that anthropology assumes human existence to be “a given and a necessity.”67 By introducing the contingent existence of human beings, Blumenberg succeeds in progressing from the construction of necessary questions about human essence to the construction of possible human self-descriptions. If it

61 Here, Blumenberg refers to Immanuel Kant’s critical resolution of the concept of soul into consciousness in time that is constituted in the inner sense (see ibid., 527–528). 62 Ibid., 504 (transl. M.S.). 63 See ibid. 64 See ibid., 535. 65 See ibid. 66 Ibid., 511 (transl. M.S.). 67 Ibid., 550 (transl. M.S.).

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is further assumed that the starting point of anthropological description should not be the introspective self-awareness, but the mundane self-experience of the human being, then that which characterizes mundane human beings, i.e., their lack of immediate self-evidence, can also be understood as a productive impulse of their cultural and philosophical attempts to find (or invent) themselves. The notion that human beings are not the object of immediate experience but can only be represented indirectly demands a plurality of attempts to describe and represent them. Here, the ideal-typical descriptions of the human being in the cultural sciences may also serve as an example.68 In Blumberg’s view, one of the genuine achievements of human beings is that they can invent a multitude of possible self-concepts for themselves through the creation of cultural symbols – precisely because they are never determined in pure immediacy. Thus, Blumenberg’s anthropology always describes the human being in a perspective of becoming, i.e., in a perspective that is based on the ‘improbability’69 and ‘un-self-evidence’ of the human being and attempts to replicate these features in a philosophical description of the human being. Such a description must represent not those characteristics that are important for defining essential human nature, but those characteristics that “have become crucial for the development and idiosyncrasy of the human being.”70 In the anthropological perspective proposed by Blumenberg, what constitutes an essential characteristic of human life thus can only be assessed retrospectively from the present status, by looking back into a past that searches for the contingent conditions of becoming human. Blumenberg’s line of argument opens up a new perspective on the manifold scientific and philosophical definitions of the human being. First and foremost, it demonstrates that these definitions must not be misunderstood as essentialist. Instead, their hermeneutical function is to take a particular aspect as an example for highlighting that which

68 For a compilation of ideal-typical answers from the cultural sciences see Rösel 1975. From Ernst Cassirer’s animal symbolicum to Helmuth Plessner’s homo sociologicus, scientific thought always supposes a model of human life in its studies and thus reduces its complexity. However, these ideal types are no longer essentialist determinations of human nature, but instead they convey aspects by which human beings can represent and interpret their existence in the world. 69 See Blumenberg 2006, 550: “Human beings are improbability incarnate.” (transl. M.S.). 70 Ibid., 518 (transl. M.S.; emphasis added R.K.).

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characterizes human beings in general. Every attempt at defining the human being thus is geared toward representing one specific human characteristic as an absolute and therefore threatens to totalize that which is determined as essential individually (see §7.1.2). 7.3.2 Alternatives: The Dualism and Monism of Anthropology The anthropological definition of antiquity that viewed rationality as an essential characteristic of humanity (animal rationale) was given a new form in the age of modernity. A tendency emerged to interpret human nature as dualistic by juxtaposing the material nature of humanity with a second, spiritual nature.71 In its analytical abstraction, the differentiation between first and second nature was readily called into question when the human being became the object of the natural sciences in the 19th century.72 In the context of Darwinist evolution theory, which interpreted the definition of animal rationale monistically, rationality and spirit were declared to be an accidental byproduct of the evolution of life. The assertion of a second human nature independent from the first one now only sounded like an indefensible philosophical speculation that was not compatible with scientific findings about human beings. It then became a new strategy of anthropology to describe human nature with those natural characteristics that set them apart from other living beings. However, the postulated existence of the human being as a ‘special being’ within nature was cast into doubt at the moment when those rational abilities and cultural skills that had been exclusively attributed to human beings were found in other primates as well, particularly in highly developed apes.73 The endeavor

71 With his differentiation between res cogitans and res extensa, René Descartes can be called the originator of a dualistic anthropology (see Illies 2006, 29–31). 72 See ibid., 18–19. 73 The ‘cultural’ social life of animals has been described in numerous publications by Frans De Waal (among others). De Waal follows the hypothesis that the behavior of chimpanzees or bonobos is structured like the behavior of human beings, not only with regard to aggression and violence, but also with regard to morals and sociality. De Waal describes the human-like behavior of animals as a model for the ‘inner nature’ of human beings (thus the title of one publication: “Our Inner Ape”, De Waal 2005). See De Waal 1989; De Waal 1996; De Waal 1997; De Waal 2001a; De Waal 2001b; De Waal and Tyack 2003; De Waal 2005; De Waal 2006. The studies of Jane Goodall also put chimpanzees and bonobos into close proximity to human beings (see Goodall 1986; 1990). Hypotheses about the social behavior of apes are also currently assessed by a group of researchers at the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (Germany). The results, which largely contradict those of De Waal, can be tracked in the following publications: Hauser et al. 2003; Brosnan and

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to assert the uniqueness of human beings at the point of species was thereby reduced ad absurdum. From the perspective of evolutionary biology, there is no gap or quantum leap from animal to human being, but merely gradual differences in the evolutionary line of life. The 20th century attempt to reestablish philosophical anthropology against the dominance of an evolutionary and biological perspective on the human being thus was fraught with certain problems. As a reaction to the biological human and behavioral sciences, the main representatives of so-called ‘philosophical anthropology’ in the 20th century (Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner, Arnold Gehlen) and their successors endeavored to develop alternatives to the monistic and dualistic theoretical concepts of anthropology.74 They reinvented anthropology as a philosophy of life whose description of human existence as a self-interpreting existence also included the aspect of bodily human existence. With mediating terms such as ‘body’ (Plessner), ‘distance’ (Blumenberg), ‘feeling’ (Schmitz) etc., it was now possible to describe structures of existence that set human beings apart from other biological life forms (animal, plant) and at the same time designate their humanity.75 The philosophical analysis of these anthropological mediating terms focused on emphasizing structural aspects of human existence that do not ignore their bodily-corporeal form. They helped prepare a viable path for contemporary anthropology: to focus on (phenomenological) structural description rather than on essentialist definition. In this paragraph it has been demonstrated that the definition of human beings by way of their differentia specifica to animals is inherently problematic because firstly, it fails to grasp the hermeneutical characteristic of its object and thus the basic anthropological situation of the question about the human being, and secondly, it subjects this question from the outset to the curious logic of a definition of human nature that aims to cast human beings as necessarily existing living beings while losing sight of their contingency. Following Dieter Groh, it can be said that such a course of action makes anthropology highly susceptible to ideological constructs. Therefore, it is necessary to look

De Waal 2004; Brosnan et al. 2005; Dubreuil et al. 2006; Roma et al. 2006; Brosnan and De Waal 2006; Brosnan et al. 2006; Jensen et al. 2006. 74 See Arlt 2001, 66–179. 75 For an overview of seminal 20th century approaches also see Fuchs 2000, 43–85.

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for other forms of making the human being the object of examination, forms that refrain from determining their humanity through their biological difference to animals or their cultural difference to nature. 8 Anthropological Key Differences Beside the attempts to revise and reinvent the tradition of philosophical anthropology in the 20th century, there has also been severe criticism. This section will introduce several critical voices in order to outline the key differences [Leitdifferenzen] of an anthropology that can give a description of human humanity that serves as an alternative to the definition of human beings based on a biological foundation or on cultural characteristics. However, this chapter will not approach this topic chronologically, but in a systematic manner focusing on specific problems. (i) In his conception of a hermeneutical phenomenology, Martin Heidegger76 worked on the premise that the ‘Being’ [Sein] of human beings only shows itself at the site of a hermeneutical clarification of human ‘being-there’ [Da-Sein] as a “self-relationship comprehending itself and the world.”77 Thus, it cannot be found in a general definition and essential determination of human beings. He therefore rejected both the basic lines of inquiry of classical philosophical anthropology and the approaches of empirically studying and biologically explicating the human being. Precisely because Heidegger’s relationship to philosophical and biological anthropology was tense, his thoughts on human humanity are relevant at this point and will be used in a first step in approaching a closer definition of the category of ‘humanity’ which is the topic of this study. (ii) Following that, Heidegger’s critique of the anthropological principle of thought called the ‘humanism’ of metaphysics can be developed further based on the example of the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben.78 Following Heidegger’s accusation that the metaphysical tradition of thought reduces the ‘Being’ of

76 77 78

See Heidegger’s work “Being and Time” (Heidegger 2001). Arlt 2001, 46 (transl. M.S.). See Agamben 2004.

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the human being to a mere ‘entity’ [Seiendes] and thus “ultimately abandons [it] to the realm of animalitas,”79 Agamben attempts to understand the basic layout of an anthropology that has always determined human nature by its difference to the extra-human (deitas, animalitas). Agamben views the ancient idea of life and its essential indeterminacy (or resistance to being determined) as the background to humanistic anthropology. In order to forge a new anthropological approach in the context of late modern thought, he first examines, in a historical perspective, the biopolitical function that the animal construct fulfils for anthropology in Western civilization. Then, he takes the dissolution of humanist thought that he has observed in that civilization as an opportunity to develop the difference between the human being and the animal not as a differentiation from the extra-human, but as an inner-human separation. (iii) Another consequence of criticizing the humanist constructions of the human being that determine its nature through differentiation from something non-human, i.e., from an ambiguously defined ‘Other’ of their humanity, is the choice of the category of the ‘inhuman’ as the key concept of a negative anthropology by Theodor W. Adorno. Adorno’s anthropology and moral philosophy are based on the supposition that all positive determinations of human beings and the good life have failed. For Adorno, this verdict of the failed objectivity and positivity of the human also extends to Heidegger’s proposed determination of human existence as ‘being-there’ [Dasein], which programmatically neutralizes the sphere of ‘entities’ [Seiendes] as well as the metaphysical concept of ‘Being’ [Sein] by claiming ‘ontological purity’ and thus fails to comprehend the actual, concrete gestalt of human beings.80 Adorno’s critique of Heidegger shall not be repeated here, but shall serve merely as a hint toward his motive for developing a completely different kind of anthropology that does not aim to discuss the essential nature of human beings, but rather the disappearance of their humanity in modern society. Because the conceptions of anthropology that rely on the positivity of human beings and morals fail, says Adorno, their destruction can only

79 80

Heidegger 2004a, 323 (transl. M.S.). See Adorno 1973, 97–100.

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Heidegger: Humanity as the Truth of Being

In the ancient philosophical tradition, human nature had always been defined by differentiating the humanity of the human being from its opposite. The opposite of the human could take many different forms and thus contribute to the manifold positive definitions of human nature. According to Heidegger, this differentiation first happened in ancient Rome when the Romans saw themselves as homo humanus, in contrast and opposition to the homo barbarus, from which they set themselves apart due to their paideia, their education handed down from the Greeks.81 Following in the footsteps of the Romans, the humanist thought of the Renaissance, along with 18th century humanism in Germany (Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Friedrich Schiller), thus was rooted in the studium humanitatis, a revival of Hellenism.82 In his so-called “Humanismusbrief ”83 (“Letter on Humanism,” 1946), Martin Heidegger turns against ‘humanism’ as an approach based on an idea of the human being that he calls ‘metaphysical’: “Every determination of the essence of man that already presupposes an interpretation of beings without asking about the truth of Being, whether knowingly or not, is metaphysical.”84 According to Heidegger, such a way of thinking that seeks to determine the human being “with regard to an already established interpretation of nature, history, world, and the ground of the world”85 has accompanied philosophical tradition since Plato and still dominates the modern natural sciences,86 which 81 82 83 84 85 86

See Heidegger 2004a, 320. See ibid. Ibid., 313–364. English Translation: Heidegger 21993, 213–267. Heidegger 21993, 225–226. Ibid., 225. See Heidegger 2004a, 324.

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with their empirical and technical constructions of the human being are merely heirs to the philosophical tradition. In Heidegger’s opinion, all conceptions about the Being of the human being that determine its essential nature on the basis of metaphysics in the above described sense are part of an approach that prevents a determination of the true existence of the human being even as a question.87 For the humanist approach ignores that which determines being human at heart, i.e., its connection to the truth of Being, as Heidegger calls it. Thus, ‘humanist’ thought always constitutes itself as a counter-movement to the proper understanding of the Being of human beings. Heidegger claims to have uncovered a metaphysical thought operation in the ‘humanist’ approach that always obscures the true Being of human beings. And yet, he does not abandon the concern for the human being as an endeavor to attain the true knowledge of its humanity. Instead, he tries to use his critique of the ‘humanist’ approach of anthropology to push through to an object-appropriate line of inquiry without falling back on the conceptual pre-decisions of the philosophical tradition. In an attempt to find new thought patterns in his “Humanismusbrief,” Heidegger questions the foundation of thinking about the human being that is reflected in the definition of the human being as animal rationale: “Are we really on the right track toward the essence of man as long as we set him off as one living creature among others in contrast to plants, beasts, and God?”88 For Heidegger, this question about man as a living creature is precisely the wrong question. He makes it clear that thinking about the human being should start in an entirely different place than in determining humanity by presupposing an essential human nature. He accuses the latter of giving primacy to animalitas over the ‘actual’ true humanitas of the human. Thus, this approach is patently unable to truly think human humanity. But Heidegger also sees a close connection between his endeavors and the original cause of ‘humanism.’ ‘Humanism’ wanted to ‘free’ human beings to access their humanity by setting them apart from animals.89 Heidegger shares the opinion 87 See Heidegger 21993, 226: “In defining the humanity of man humanism not only does not ask about the relation of Being to the essence of man; because of its metaphysical origin humanism even impedes the question by neither recognizing nor understanding it.” 88 Ibid., 227. 89 Heidegger’s idea of ‘humanism’ includes its liberating dimension: “But if one understands humanism in general as a concern that man become free for his humanity

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that human humanity is not simply a given or an empirical fact, but needs to be brought to awareness and to be ‘liberated’ as essential human nature. However, Heidegger’s path to liberation is wholly different from that of ‘humanism.’ He in no way disputes that the scientific-technological90 or metaphysical91 determination of essential human nature can yield some knowledge,92 but he doubts that this knowledge can account for the true essence of human beings.93 In Heidegger’s own words: Metaphysics determines the human being as homo animalis, as a being that always locates its identity “within being as one being among others”94 and thus is recognized by the logic of separation and differentiation from the non-human. But how can the metaphysical mentality of ‘humanism’ be overcome without also advocating inhumanity, barbarism and irrationality, those things that the essential nature of the human being was to be separated from in the first place?95 Heidegger proposes to overcome ‘humanism’ not with new answers, but with a different line of inquiry, which he calls the question of the ontological-historical meaning or the truth of human existence.96 Unlike the ‘humanist’ approach that he criticizes, he views the humanitas of the human being as an ontological mode of its existence through which the human being becomes truly human (homo humanus) in the first place.97 But what is this ontological mode, this execution of Being, if the human being cannot and must not locate the reason for its Being in the approximation to entities, in setting itself apart from animals? Heidegger demonstrates the difference of his ontological-historical examination of the human being from the ‘humanist’ approach primarily by marking a different mode of asking about the human being: the Being of the human is not adequately expressed in a theoretical determination of its essential nature that thinks of the human “as a specific kind of living creature among others,”98 but only in the perforand find his worth in it, then humanism differs according to one’s conception of the ‘freedom’ and ‘nature’ of man.” (ibid., 225). 90 See Heidegger 2004a, 324. 91 See ibid., 330. 92 See ibid., 323. 93 See ibid., 324–325. 94 Heidegger 21993, 227. 95 See Heidegger 2004a, 346. 96 See ibid., 345–346. 97 See ibid., 352. 98 Heidegger 21993, 228.

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mance of an experience of essential nature in which something happens that brings to the surface the “[human] essence [. . .] of Being”99 – and in Heidegger’s thought, this always also means its essential quality. The essential quality of human existence is the privilege only granted to the human being “to think the essence of [its] being and not merely to give accounts of the nature and history of [its] constitution and activities.”100 For Heidegger, only the awareness of the true relationship of the human to Being can lead the way to the true awareness about being human. Being human must be laid open in its ‘belonging’ to the truth of Being by the act of thinking in order to avoid any more lapses into the mistaken determinations of the human-animal-difference. Therefore, the human humanity that Heidegger focuses on can only be discussed where being human and thus the human self-understanding is made the basis of thinking about the human being from the very start.101 Beyond that, as Heidegger states in the “Humanismusbrief,” being human is to be understood as answering the ‘call’ of Being. Human beings thus cannot comprehend or determine their true existence cognitively by, for example, describing themselves as living beings with rationality and freedom. Instead, they receive their existence in understanding the truth of Being by allowing themselves to be made the (as Heidegger calls it) “shepherd[s] of Being,”102 the protectors of their truth. This is why Heidegger describes being human as an answer to a ‘call’ because, in contrast to Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism,103 he seeks to comprehend the existence of the human being through its passive, listening character and not its active, choosing one. Human beings are aware of their existence by allowing the truth of Being to be articulated historically. By ignoring this set of circumstances, the determination of essential human nature in classical ‘humanism’ is borne by an idea of the human that fails to capture its essence, the historically experienced ‘fate’104 of its existence.

99

Ibid. Ibid. 101 See Heidegger 2004a, 347–349. 102 Ibid., 342 (transl. M.S.). 103 Heidegger accuses Sartre’s existentialism of merely reversing the metaphysical thought operation that put substance before the existence of human beings. (see ibid., 328). 104 See ibid., 326. 100

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In Heidegger’s opinion, then, the essence of being human is not rooted in theoretical cognitive achievement, but in the historical experience of one’s own existence that has the character of listening and responding to a truth that reveals itself to and conceals itself from human beings in history. This response to the truth intensifies in the so-called ‘ek-sistence’ [Ek-sistieren] of human beings, which Heidegger describes as an eventful occurrence in which human beings are liberated from their bond to the entities [Seiendes] and thus inducted into the resulting openness of a world.105 The induction into that which Heidegger calls ‘world’106 becomes the basis of a human selfunderstanding that, unlike the determinations of homo animalis, is no longer exclusively based on their differentiation from animals. In the experiential space of the ‘world,’ human existence can be conducted in a way that assigns human beings a ‘sojourn,’ or a site where they can unfold their humanity independently from the comparison to animals.107 According to Heidegger, the essential quality of being human thus is always rooted in the possibility of describing human humanity as a self-understanding that is based on the hermeneutical experience of a historical ‘fate of Being’ in the world. 8.2

Agamben: The Dissolution of the Animal Construct

The philosopher Giorgio Agamben attempts to follow Heidegger’s critique of the ‘humanist’ understanding of the human being. At the same time, he reacts more resolutely than Heidegger to the inquiries of ‘humanism’ that are presently cropping up in the face of the influence of the biological life sciences on anthropology. In his book “The Open: Man and Animal,”108 published for the first time in 2002, Agamben attempts to explain the ‘humanization’ of the animal (animal rationale) as a politically motivated thought operation.109

105 Heidegger himself translates ‘ek-sistence’ not as the emergence of an inside into expression, but as an emergence of human beings into the truth of Being. Human beings are abandoned (‘set out’) and made free to understand themselves in the indirectness and openness of a world. (see ibid.). 106 See ibid., 350. 107 It is problematic that Heidegger himself is tempted to reapply his determination of being human to being animal and to comprehend animals via human beings. As an example, see his thesis of the world-deprivation of the animal in his lecture “Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik” (Heidegger 2004b). 108 Agamben 2004. 109 Although Agamben stages his considerations as a re-reading of the ontologicalhistorical difference between the world deprivation of animals and the world openness

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Following Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics,110 Agamben therefore places much stronger emphasis on the political and ethical context of thinking about the human than Heidegger.111 He rejects the notion that the explanatory recording and ordering description of human physiology is an a-political mandate that science and biotechnology exert on the life of human beings. In his view, every endeavor to define the creature called ‘human being’ continues to free up political room for maneuver insofar as the humanization of human beings in the ‘humanism’ of tradition has always been articulated as a relationship of human dominance112 over animals, and thus ultimately – Agamben continues – as the dominance of human beings over themselves. And this notion has not fundamentally changed in the modern life sciences that strive to biologize the essential nature of human beings. With their descriptions of human beings, they are at the center of a political conflict about the preservation or destruction of the true humanity of human beings. Agamben’s thesis that human beings hold dominion over themselves by humanizing the creatures that they are also forms the basis for his term of animalitas. According to Agamben, animal nature is to be thought of as not only a factor existing outside of the human being (‘the animal’), but also as a self-description of the human being (homo animalis). Here, Agamben retraces Heidegger’s footsteps. But he goes beyond him when he shows that animal nature is not excluded from the Being of the human being in ‘humanism,’ but instead is understood as a “mobile border”113 within human beings themselves. Where the human begins and the animal in the human ends is the result of a biopolitical and not of a biological differentiation. Agamben refers to the separation of human from animal nature as an anthropological

of human beings in Martin Heidegger, at the core, his theories are geared toward Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics and Hannah Arendt’s interpretation of the human condition as the natural and cultural conditionality of being human (see Arendt 1958, 7–8). 110 Foucault provides a short, comprehensive overview about the conception of a biopolitics in his lecture from March 17, 1976: Foucault 1996. 111 Agamben himself, though, believes that this political intensification of anthropology can already be located in Heidegger’s own line of inquiry: “The ontological paradigm of truth as the conflict between concealedness and unconcealedness is, in Heidegger, immediately and originarily a political paradigm” (Agamben 2004, 73). 112 Agamben identifies humanism with the rational project of dominating over animal life (see ibid., 90.19). 113 Ibid., 15.

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“machine” or a “device.”114 It is the product of an initial separation of human life, performed by human beings themselves, that as a movement of inclusion or exclusion gives rise to an economy of animalhuman relations. The basic thesis of Agamben’s anthropology book is thus: The development of the human being is not to be understood as a selfcontained event in the developmental logic of natural or human history, but instead as an ongoing event of a continuously occurring self-exploration of human humanity through the logic of an animalhuman-difference. Should the separation process within the human being grind to a halt one day, as Agamben is afraid it will in present times, human culture threatens to descend into nihilism.115 Unlike Heidegger, then, Agamben does not simply leave behind the animal nature of the human being. He clarifies his thesis of a peculiar economy of becoming human by analyzing several cornerstones of the manifold variations of anthropological thought systems that have determined the relations between human beings and animals in the East-West culture for centuries. He identifies a countercurrent dynamic as an economy of these relations: the humanization of animals on the one hand and the animalization of humans on the other have mutually caused and strengthened each other. The classical humanist construction of the human being is not the only variant of ‘anthropogenesis’116 but brings forth a counter-movement that responds to its counterpart. The direction of the gaze in the relation between human beings and animals can be reversed: it occurs as becoming-human, as the inclusion of an animal ‘external’ aspect (animal rationale), but also as becoming-animal, as the exclusion of a human ‘inner’ aspect (the biological ‘man-ape’).117 Both variations118 of ‘anthropogenesis,’ the humanization and animal-

114

Ibid., 26. See ibid., 22. 116 Agamben’s understanding of the word ‘anthropogenesis’ is entirely different from Hans Blumenberg’s (see §7.3.1). For Blumenberg, anthropogenesis includes proof of the contingency of human beings and their (biologically speaking) improbable potential for self-preservation. In contrast, Agamben uses the expression in analogy to Heidegger’s talk about humanism: anthropogenesis is that basic ontological thought operation of metaphysics through which the animal physis dominates human beings and through which the humanity of human beings shall be liberated (see ibid., 97–98). 117 See ibid., 33–34. 118 Interestingly, Agamben focuses his thoughts almost exclusively on the relationship between human beings and animals, ignoring that an analysis of the paradigm of 115

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ization of the ‘human’ creature, have one thing in common: they contain a continuous process of decision and re-decision about what the human being is and what the animal is.119 For Agamben, drawing the line between the human and the animal thus remains a risky political act of culture creation that must be performed again and again in the conflict between both possibilities. How, then, does Agamben deal with naturalistic description of the human? His claim that ‘anthropogenesis’ is dependent on the production of an animal construct,120 a non-human artifact that keeps generating new differentiations between the animal and the human, is based on the premise that the human being as a species does not possess a biologically “distinctive nature”121 that substantially distinguishes it from other living beings.122 Agamben discovers the impossibility of finding clear differences between human beings and animals in the biological sphere even in the work of the ‘inventor’ of the biological species name for human beings, the nature researcher and zoologist Carl Linnaeus.123 When Linnaeus introduces the species term of homo sapiens for human beings in the tenth edition of his “Systema Naturae”124 by ranking human beings with the primates, he does not cite a biological difference, but a philosophical aphorism (nosce te ipsum) as the feature distinguishing human beings from primates. This means that human beings are solely defined as human by their capacity for self-awareness. To make his own point, Agamben reads Linnaeus’ aphorism as the becoming human should also be extended to the paradigm of the deitas-humanitas differentiation. Here, it would have been necessary to discuss the thesis that philosophical anthropology and its constructions of humanity always have a hidden reference to Christology and its doctrine of dual nature (see Haeffner 32000, 169). 119 See Agamben 2004, 36. 120 On the animal construct as a political argument, also see Jobst 2004. In his discourse analytical study “Das Tier-Konstrukt – und die Geburt des Rassismus”, Jobst investigates the function of the animal construct as a dispositive of power constellations. In a perspective informed by religious theory, he identifies the origin of animal constructs as a Greco-Christian hegemony in contrast to the ethical universalism of Judaism. According to Jobst, this hegemony repeats itself in the Jewish holocaust of the 20th century. Unlike Agamben, Jobst views the animal construct merely as a destructive stereotype of social exclusion and does not reflect on its anthropological function and significance. Also unlike Agamben, however, Jobst investigates the religious roots of the animal dispositive. 121 Agamben 2004, 26. 122 See ibid. 123 See ibid., 23–27. 124 Linnaeus 1735.

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expression of a human experience of difference. In Agamben’s interpretation, Linnaeus’ statement “that man is the animal that must recognize itself as human to be human”125 turns into the statement that man “must recognize himself in a non-man in order to be human.”126 Thus, in order to be able to determine human nature, that which is non-human but nevertheless inherent in human beings must be determined. At this point, a momentous differentiation for anthropological thought emerges. According to Agamben, a construction of the nonhuman is constitutive of the self-awareness of human beings. However, he presents the ‘non-human’ as ambivalent and interpretative: as a difference or fracture in the human being, it can manifest itself both as a humanization or an animalization of the human being. Agamben presents one more peculiar interpretation in the context of his analysis of Italian Renaissance humanism.127 In his view, the usage of the word ‘man’ as a nomen dignitas, which is rooted in Renaissance humanism, represents the attempt to replace the nonexistent biological hierarchy and individual nature of the human being with an artificially created term of dignity. In his brief interpretation of the script “De Hominis Dignitate”128 by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Agamben shows that even the apparent founding document of early modern humanism does not make dignity (which is never mentioned in the text) the requirement for discovering free will and self-determination, but the indeterminacy and inconstancy of human beings (nati sumus condicione, ut id simus, quod esse volumes).129 In Pico’s writing, human beings are depicted as chameleons, as creatures that can change their essential nature autonomously and continuously (se ipsam transformantis naturae).130 Thus, they are created as beings that do not and cannot have a clearly defined determination of their essential nature. Pico justifies this argument with creation theology, as he points out that human beings even were created without a defining ‘model.’ Thus, human beings are completely unlimited in their development and have the God-given task to determine their essential nature completely autonomously.131 125 126 127 128 129 130 131

Agamben 2004, 26. Ibid., 27. See ibid., 29–31. Quoted in Pico 1997. Ibid., 12–13. Ibid., 10–11. See ibid., 8–9.

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Agamben now reverses this positive description of the freedom of human nature between divine gift and human task into the negative. He concludes: “The humanist discovery of man is the discovery that he lacks himself [. . .].”132 He states that what is described in Pico’s writing is precisely not the determinedness and identity of essential human nature, but the lack of any essential nature whatsoever, which is why human beings can only hope to attain fragile identities and are exposed to the invasion of inhumanity.133 At this point, Agamben’s own argumentative interest emerges quite clearly. He claims that any determination of the human nature holds the human being “suspended between a celestial and a terrestrial nature, between animal and human.”134 There is no determination of essential human nature that can truly protect the humanity of the human being against this ‘unsteadiness’ or ‘fluctuation.’ But Agamben’s thesis that essential human nature can never be determined conclusively and that therefore ‘anthropogenesis’ must be defined as an antagonistic process of juxtaposing the human and the animal is only a preparation for his actual point that the anthropogenesis and its construction of human/ non-human is indeed preceded by an indifference. Agamben’s thesis can be outlined in three argumentative steps: (i)

Essential human nature does not exist in itself (substance), but is caused by a construction of the non-human that manifests itself in the ‘artifact’ of the human animal (animal rationale). (ii) The non-human category is essentially ambiguous because the non-human is not to be located outside of the human being, but instead marks a site of inclusion or exclusion of animal life in the human being itself. (iii) If the non-human is thought of as a ‘fracture’135 between humanity and animality in the human, this fracture produces, beside the human and the animal life, also an indifferent life that is neither human nor animal. Anthropogenesis thus turns out to be the origin of inhumanity as well.

132 133 134 135

Agamben 2004, 30. See ibid. Ibid., 29. See ibid., 36.

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These three argumentative steps lead Agamben to the establishment of his actual main thesis: the assertion (also postulated in other publications)136 of an existence of a bare life whose essential indeterminacy not only designates a non-differentiability of human beings and animals, but also a non-differentiability of life and death. The bare life is neither human nor animal; instead, it is constituted in a biopolitical “zone of non-knowledge”137 between the two. Agamben develops his main thesis in the following line of argument: it is the nature of the so-called “anthropological machine”138 to create the figures of the human and at the same time its antagonists, the figures of the non-human, and thus cannot come to a standstill by its own power. Only if the differentiation of the human from the non-human is examined from both sides, i.e., if the humanization of the animal and the animalization of the human are juxtaposed as mirror-image operations for the purpose of a separation of the genuinely human within human beings, instead of bringing them into coincidence – only then does it become completely clear that the merging of human being and animal (animal rationale) is not the origin of this differentiation, but rather an indifference or fracture “which cannot be mended from either side.”139 Thus, in the midst of this tension within the human being that gives birth to the human, something emerges whose exclusion or inclusion legitimizes every anthropological determination. In this perspective, the human-animal differentiations of anthropology reveal the fragile identity of the human being, an identity that is based on an indifferent ‘threshold’ and not on solid ground, according to Agamben’s thesis. Agamben uses the term ‘threshold’ for “a topological process in which what was presupposed as external [. . .] now reappears, as in a Möbius strip or a Leyden jar, in the inside [. . .].”140 For Agamben, the threshold thus is not a point of intersection or transition, but an ontological border zone in which inside and outside as that which has been separated by an order of thought, merge and blend with one another to the point of indistinguishability. According to Agamben, such a border zone in which a rational and orderly

136 137 138 139 140

Agamben 1998; 2000; 2006. Agamben 2004, 90. Ibid., 37. Ibid., 36. Agamben 1998, 28.

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conduct of life is no longer possible constitutes a zone of inhumanity.141 Since orders of thought also have an ontological character for Agamben, this inhumanity is indeed an actually existing place for him, as can be seen in his remarks on Third Reich concentration camps, stateless migrants or comatose patients in the intermediate stage between life and death.142 All these places are characterized by “excluding as not (yet) human an already human being”143 from the scope of humanity. In his argument, Agamben calls attention to a threefold difference. The differentiation between the human and the animal is always the origin of anthropological rationality. Not only does it point forward to two opposed thought processes (humanization/animalization of the human being), but it also points backward to a site between them, in which the two originally separate from each other and reveal a central void of humanity. Agamben calls this the site of inhumanity in human beings. He argues for making this site, in which the ambiguity of life becomes tangible, the starting point for a biopolitical conception of anthropology. It is essential for Agamben’s conception that it points out the blurriness of anthropological differentiations of human life. He takes up a basic intuition of recent phenomenology: within every order of thought there remains a residue that is unaccounted for and that cannot be represented by the order of thought’s basic differentiations. However, the problematic aspect of Agamben’s conception is that it wants to ‘ontologize’ this blurriness or void of anthropological differentiations regarding human life by talking about a site of inhumanity. 8.3

Adorno: Dehumanization through Society

Like Heidegger and Agamben, Theodor W. Adorno deals with the category of the inhuman and its consequences for a social phenomenology and ontology of being human. In his thoughts about the human

141 In earlier publications, Agamben had referred to this site as the bare or the sacred life. He presents the thesis that all orders of life base their legitimacy and sanctioning power on a sovereign act by suspending and excluding from their order that which cannot be positively an object of their form of order. This results in a lawless territory outside of the orders (of life). In it, its first constituent is a bare or naked life that is characterized by being killable, i.e., by the fact that it can be negated as life. This can be compared to publications from Agamben’s so-called “Homo Sacer Project” (see Agamben 1998; 2000; 2006). 142 Evidence of this can also be found in his anthropology book: Agamben 2004, 37. 143 Ibid.

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being, he assumes that the discussion of human humanity has become obsolete in modern times and has been replaced by its negation, the discussion of the inhuman. However, unlike Agamben, he conceives of ‘the inhuman’ not as indifference, but as a definite negation of the ethical humanity of human beings: We may not know what absolute good is or the absolute norm, we may not even know what man is or the human [das Menschliche] or humanity [die Humanität] – but what the inhuman [das Unmenschliche] is we know very well indeed. I would say that the place of moral philosophy today lies more in the concrete denunciation of the inhuman, than in the vague [unverbindlichen] and abstract attempts to situate man in his existence.144

Considering all positive determinations of the human being and the good life to have failed, Adorno concludes that a critical understanding of anthropology cannot be based in ontology or metaphysics, but instead in a societal-theoretical analysis of the social constitution of the human being. For Adorno, thought about the human being that strives to determine the human without first analyzing how human beings are conditioned by the social circumstances in which they live is not only wrong; it is actually unable to say anything concrete at all about human beings in view of the present situation. Such a way of thinking loses itself in the abstractions of a terminological definition of humanity in which the particular is always absorbed into the general, the negative always neutralized by the positive.145 Methodologically speaking, concrete knowledge about the human can thus only be gained by applying the principle of ‘determined negation’ [bestimmte Negation]. In the case of the human being, ‘determined negation’146 signifies the exploration and identification of concrete inhumanity, i.e., of ways of life and places in which human beings are determined by the superiority of social circumstances and radically experience their own powerlessness. For Adorno, too, the inhuman resides not outside of human 144

Adorno 2000, 175. This criticism is aimed in particular at the Hegelian idea of dialectics that Adorno analyzes in his “Negative Dialectics” and criticizes it by referring to the term of the insolubly ‘non-identical’ (see Adorno 1973, 158–161). 146 In Adorno’s work, the term ‘determined negation’ (of existence) connects on the one hand to a philosophical approach that is aimed against the separation of theory and practice, and on the other hand to a protest against the loss of empirical reality in social ontology. See Schweppenhäuser 42005. 145

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beings but instead marks the site of their existence in a negative manner.147 However, unlike Agamben, Adorno does not view the inhuman as a constitutive indeterminacy of human life between humanity and animality; from his perspective of social criticism, it indicates the present social state of human coexistence. In his book “Minima Moralia” (1951), which contains a free collection of aphorisms, Adorno develops the notion that the disappearance of human humanity is caused by the “overwhelming objectivity”148 of social structures in modern society.149 The structure of modern society, with its technical progress and consequent rationalization and economization of human interaction and exchange dynamics, leads to a loss of interpersonal relations [Zwischenmenschlichkeit].150 For Adorno, Zwischenmenschlichkeit shows itself in an ‘individuality’ of human relationships that is not absorbed into the dominant generality of social structures but still is very much in danger of being dissolved and destroyed by them.151 The dominance of rules and norms of interaction in modern societies successively transforms individual circumstances into administered and institutionally regulated circumstances. In these circumstances, Adorno states, the humanity of human beings is lost to the extent that it comes to represent no more than a mask for the tacit acceptance of the inhuman.152 Where the individual structures of human interaction are suspended by the objective social structures of society, Adorno speaks of a disappearance of humanity that he calls the “liquidation of the particular”153 by the general. Adorno’s anthropological reflections aim to understand what has caused human humanity in current society to become impossible. He implicitly equates human humanity with an ideal of individuality in interhuman relations. Where this ideal cannot be actualized, human beings are dehumanized by society. It is a strong point of Adorno’s analysis that it does not stop at merely criticizing modern dehumanized society but also tries to think of possible ways to counteract this

147

See Breuer 1985, 34–51. Adorno 2006, 15. 149 See ibid., 15–16. 150 In his collection of aphorisms, Adorno uses an analysis of the manifold social relationship patterns of human beings to show “how impossible it has become for people to co-exist under present conditions.” (ibid., 37). 151 See ibid. 152 See ibid., 29. 153 Ibid., 17. 148

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dehumanization. According to Adorno, one possible way to rescue the humanity of human beings lies in their concrete resistance to everything that incites them to simply play along within the structures of an inhuman society and thereby to give up their individuality. Thus, Adorno’s reflections represent an attempt to interpret human humanity not within the horizon of a biological differentiation between human beings and animals or the cultural characteristics of the humanum (rationality, language, freedom), but to develop it from the phenomenon of social interpersonal relations. A problematic aspect of his thoughts is that he wholly identifies human humanity with the individuality and particularity of the individual and sets them in opposition to the structures of social generality (society), thereby remaining stuck in the modern juxtaposition of individual vs. society, of particular vs. general, and unable to develop a conception of social humanity that is independent from these concepts. Adorno’s argumentation does, however, achieve a reversal of humanist thinking: his analysis of the negativity of being human is not a method to determine human nature once and for all, but a method that is meant to unsettle the way of thinking about human beings. It does not exclude the concretizations of social inhumanity, but instead considers them the starting point of thinking about the humanity of the human.154 8.4

Conclusion

Reflections on the legitimacy of anthropological key differences and critique of an anthropology whose concept of human beings is based on a determination of their essential nature have influenced the thoughts of Heidegger, Agamben and Adorno. What is remarkable about Heidegger’s and Agamben’s analyses is that they trace back both the humanist and naturalist descriptions of the human being to one and the same thought process. Both disciplines assume that human nature cannot be determined without also constructing its opposite, the non-human. For Heidegger, the humanist determinations of human nature portray human beings as lost to their animality, and Agamben discovers in them a peculiar biopolitical rationality of anthropology that must always focus on the difference between human beings and animals. While Heidegger attempts to re-establish human humanity through his ontological-historical understanding of the truth of 154

See Adorno 1996, 248–249.

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human existence, Agamben intends to show that the anthropological differentiation of human beings and animals is based on an indifferent, ambivalent life. Unlike Heidegger and Agamben, Adorno interprets the inhuman as the concrete negation of the human at the site of human coexistence and values it as an instrument of social criticism in thinking about human humanity. When Adorno talks about humanity, he first and foremost is interested in an analysis of the real societal conditions which make being human not only possible and successful, but also lead to its failure and perversion. In addition to the hermeneutics and phenomenology of the human self-concept, which are the focus of Heidegger’s thoughts on the human, Agamben and Adorno emphasize the political, societal and ethical conditions of human existence. Here, especially Adorno’s anthropological reflections are aimed not only at the questions of validity, but just as much at the real and practical conditions that determine the factual existence of human beings. Therefore, they can be understood not as an examination of human nature, but as anthropological descriptions of the social condition of humanity. 9 The Human Condition as a Concrete Condition of Existence In modernity, the term ‘human condition’ refers to the universal basic conditions of existence shared by all human beings. With the discussion of this term, the question of the human being is recast in a specific new way. The scientific description of the world as a causality, the radical mechanization of the lifeworld, the complete culturalization of the natural environment and the exploration of virtual living spaces and human modes of existence have changed the way the human and its world are perceived. These developments show quite clearly that the conditions in which humans live are always subject to change and can be increasingly determined by humans themselves. The notion that human nature is timeless and immutable is not readily compatible with all of this. Instead, scholars now have turned to examining those conditions of being human that irreducibly and permanently determine human life throughout all of those changes. In the 20th century in particular, the human condition has become the topos of a discussion about humanity that explores the constant characteristics within the manifold modes of appearance of human

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life. Precisely the awareness that the conditions in which the human lives are subject to continuous change has caused the existential selfexamination of the human being to take on a central importance. Hanging on to the human, to that which conditions human life, was supposed to guarantee a continuity that had seemingly vanished from a rapidly changing world. With the exposure of the historical, contingent conditions of human existence and with the awareness of the cultural disposability [Verfügbarkeit] of their life circumstances, it was possible to imagine human self-transformation and self-empowerment beyond anything that had been thinkable before. In this process the awareness of the indisposable, untouchable basic constants of human existence and life reality (death, birth, joy, pain etc.) that are shared by all human beings acted as a counterbalance to slow down the core forces of technological progress and uninhibited cultural development. 9.1

Barthes: The Human Condition as Myth

The specifically modern interest in discussing the human condition is motivated by the attempt to cope with the uncertainty of the traditional experience of the world with recourse to anthropological constants and basic existential givens of human life. In his book “Mythologies”155 from 1964, Roland Barthes thus views the discussion of the human condition as a contemporary form of mythology and refers to it as the myth of ‘Adamism.’ He illustrates his thesis with the example of the then-famous photography exhibition “The Family of Man.”156 In the aftermath of the Second World War, this exhibition was hosted at the New York “Museum of Modern Art” and showed a series of photos that were taken in different countries and cultures across the world and that displayed human gestures taken from everyday life. The message the exhibition aimed to convey in showing the diversity of gestures and forms of human behavior was that these modes of behavior manifest an identical human nature in the form of basic constants of human expressive behavior. For according to this view, the various behavioral modes of human beings are all based on a common and unchangeable essential nature that is “magically produced.”157 Barthes concludes: “The myth of the human ‘condition’ rests on a very old

155 156 157

Barthes 1972. For documentation see Steichen 2006. Barthes 1972, 100.

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mystification, which always consists in placing Nature at the bottom of History.”158 Thus, Barthes understands the question of the human condition as an expression of the search for an existential foothold in the swirl of diversity found in the forms and shapes of human life on earth. The universalities of human identity are birth and death, work and joy, laughter and tears. Like a mythical basis of existence, they serve to ban the uncertainty that emerges from the plurality of life’s modes of appearance in the modern world. For Barthes, the discussion of the human condition represents a rational strategy of defusing differences which actually are signs of the openness, multi-dimensionality and changeability of the human being and its world: “So that I rather fear that the final justification of all this Adamism is to give to the immobility of the world the alibi of a ‘wisdom’ and ‘lyricism’ which only make the gestures of man look eternal the better to defuse them.”159 Barthes’ contemporary diagnosis of a return of anthropological myths in the form of the human condition is based on the notion that differences in human behavior are usually interpreted as unsettling and threatening. The diversity of human beings in expression and behavior bears a potential for social conflict that, in the face of a pluralist world, must be defused by the myth of an originally identical human nature in all historical manifestations. Barthes sees the danger of the myth of identical human condition in the fact that it is designed to dissolve or trivialize the actual difference of modes of appearance and forms of expression present in human life. According to Barthes, the discussion of the human condition replaces the phenomena of human life with a foundation and creates a legitimization for the suspension of human diversity. Barthes shows that the discussion of the human condition can be used to create a justificatory narrative for the suspension of human plurality and difference. In this way, talk about the human condition can even contribute to the solidification of differences between human beings by interpreting the contingent and changeable forms of the expression of the human as eternal truths. Thus, although a photography exhibition like “The Family of Man” shows the diversity of human behavior, this behavior is not accepted as a difference

158 159

Ibid., 101. Ibid., 102.

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but forced into an assumed identity of human nature that takes on mythological qualities in its function of explaining the world. If we pursue this train of thought, every discussion of the human condition is potentially in danger of turning into an anthropological ‘oblivion of difference’ [Differenzvergessenheit] insofar as it does not reveal the plurality of human behavior but instead eradicates it by reducing it to one immutable human nature. Barthes’ statements show that the question about the basic conditions of human existence has emerged from a way of coping with the deep uncertainty of human self-experience and world-experience in modernity. If in reaction the human condition is understood exclusively as the universality, identity and unity of the human in the diversity of its appearances, reflections about the human being are in danger of taking on a mythological quality and failing to capture the concrete form of human life. This, however, is not the case when the plurality of the human itself is interpreted as the human condition. 9.2 Arendt: Loss of the Social ‘Human Condition’? In her book “The Human Condition” from 1958, Hannah Arendt makes an attempt to re-appropriate political action, which had been considered a basic condition of human existence in antiquity, for the modern question about the human condition.160 Following in the footsteps of the Aristotelian “Politics,” she thinks of the human being as a creature whose experiential horizon is bound to the natural conditions of living on earth but who at the same time can only exist as a human being within the cultural experiential space of a human world.161 Arendt describes the position of the human being in the world as a position between natural and cultural conditionality and does not attempt to separate the biological from the cultural existence of humanity.162 With this integrative approach, she expresses the particularity of the line of inquiry she considers necessary for the discussion of the human condition.

160 Seyla Benhabib has demonstrated that Hannah Arendt’s work can be read in the context of a theory of modernity (see Benhabib 1996). 161 See Arendt 1958, 1–11. 162 Recently, Martha Nussbaum has adopted a similar position regarding the idea of human nature. She also refers to Greek antiquity for unfolding her normative description of being human (see Nussbaum 1995).

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In her reflections, Arendt does not foreground any one aspect of being human, nor does she make one condition of human life the starting point of her description. Instead, she bases her thoughts on several basic conditions that determine human existence: life and earth, natality and mortality, worldliness and plurality.163 However, “the conditions of human existence [. . .] can never ‘explain’ what we are or answer the question of who we are for the simple reason that they never condition us absolutely.”164 Arendt thus draws a strict distinction between contemplating the human conditions and attempting an unequivocal determination or definition of human nature. The conditions of human existence are not accessible from a position outside of human existence, but only within the commonly shared experiences of human beings that live together and speak to each other.165 This is the core statement of Arendt’s book. In order to make it plausible, Arendt begins by focusing her description of being human on how the human experience of the world has been unsettled by the modern sciences. The concrete occasion prompting these reflections was the first Russian Sputnik mission into space (1957), which at the time seemed to herald the immediately impending possibility of an extra-terrestrial existence for humanity. According to Arendt, this previously unrealizable possibility for human life to leave earth behind and settle on another planet demonstrates that human beings are not earth-bound creatures in the same sense as other living beings.166 Not only are they able to transgress their natural conditionality with the help of cultural skills, but it is also possible to imagine possibilities of their existence that are entirely dissociated from the natural conditions of life on earth and enable the artificial conditioning of their existence. For example, ever since astrophysics discovered the telescope, human beings have been capable of orienting their own existence not only to the physical laws of earth, but also to those of the cosmos that can now be studied with the help of the telescope. Thus, they are in a position to leave their natural habitat, first in thinking and later in action, as the

163 See Arendt 1958, 11. Especially her ‘discovery’ of natality as a basic condition of the human self-concept has found its way into bioethical debates, some of them quite recent (see Habermas 2006, 58–60). 164 Arendt 1958, 11. 165 See ibid., 175–181. Arendt also refers to the human act of speaking to each other as a ‘second birth,’ following the terminology of a second human nature (see ibid., 176). 166 See ibid., 11.

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development of manned space travel after the publication of Arendt’s book has shown. In her book, Arendt argues that the cultural achievements of human beings do not free them from their conditionality; instead, these achievements continuously develop into new conditions of human existence that, in turn, they are subject to again.167 Thus, Arendt views technical and cultural achievements not as acts of liberation from the natural conditionality of human life, but only as a way of producing new, artificial conditions of human life.168 This also includes the detachment from the world169 enabled by the scientific perspective, which for Arendt is not a theoretical, contemplative attitude, but a practical construction of and dominion over reality.170 For her, scientific objectivity is identical with a methodological and terminological reification171 [Vergegenständlichung] of the world. This reification is not a contemplative ideal, but a practical, action-oriented goal.172 The reification of the world produces realities that become the condition for all subsequent human thoughts and actions and do not represent the human experiential horizon, but actively reconfigure it. Precisely for this reason, science is one of the basic conditions of human life par excellence. The awareness that human beings in modernity have radically subjected themselves to self-generated conditions motivates Arendt to confront a thesis, going back to Karl Marx, about the (self-)alienation of human beings through gainful labor in the capitalist production process.173 Arendt responds to Marx’s critique of modern society by attributing the alienation of human beings to the loss of their social human condition. She develops a phenomenology of the three human activities (vita activa), in which political action takes up a prime posi-

167

See ibid., 9. See ibid. 169 See ibid., 257–268. 170 See ibid., 268–273. 171 See ibid., 139–144. 172 Arendt tries to demonstrate in her book that modernity has effected a consequential reversal within the hierarchy of the human activities of ‘labor,’ ‘work’ and ‘action’ by elevating goal-oriented ‘work,’ i.e., producing things, to be the only preferred activity of human beings (see particularly ibid., 294–304). According to Arendt, this is particularly obvious in the scientific reduction of experience to experimental action, which implicitly rests on the conviction that only that can be known which can be produced by human beings (see ibid., 295). 173 See Marx’s “Paris manuscripts” from 1844 (Marx 1987). 168

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tion: she argues that not the labor in the cycle of birth and death or the manufacturing of things in the production process (work) are the basis of human humanity, but only their capability for political action.174 Arendt defines ‘political action’ as an activity which is open to all human beings and which is connected to the natural communal spirit of human beings.175 Because action takes place exclusively in the presence of other human beings, it is only possible in the context of the actuality of people talking to each other.176 Since the result of such an event unfolding in human interaction is rather unpredictable, action is unproductive in an economic sense.177 Human beings talking to each other do not need to use objects as instruments to stabilize their interaction, nor do they have to obey the natural laws of survival while talking and interacting with each other. Instead, in sharing word and deed, they are free to appear as who they are.178 To take action in this sense means to make a beginning that is based on nothing but human beings talking to each other. Arendt therefore refers to action as the “second birth”179 of human beings. In her conception of the human condition, political action is the only human activity whose performance causes human beings to become who they are (or should be) in the actual sense.180 According to Arendt, the displacement and replacement of this activity and the political ‘public sphere’181 or the commonality that it creates is the root of human failure and self-alienation that is radicalized in the reduction of human activity to gainful labor. For human interaction, which is the origin of ‘humanity’ and is a requirement for action, can only take place in the public sphere that modern society has deemed dispensable by commercializing and objectifying it.

174

See Arendt 1958, 175–247. See ibid., 208–209. 176 See ibid., 206. 177 Arendt refers to this as the process character of action: ibid., 230–236. 178 Arendt assumes that action and speech are characterized by human selfrevelation and not by self-masking (see ibid., 175–181). This approach is at odds with modern sociological role theory. See e.g. Goffman 1959. Goffman describes the ‘role’ as an intentionally created impression that evokes a certain perception of the situation in the other. 179 Arendt 1958, 176. 180 For Arendt, the questions of who human beings are and who they should be are not questions that, in the spirit of practical Aristotelian philosophy, can be answered separately. 181 See Arendt 1985, 50–58. 175

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The tendency to completely replace action and speech with ‘labor’ and ‘work’ distinguishes the modern idea of human community from its ancient predecessors. According to Arendt, the way was already paved for this development in early modernity through the reinterpretation of the political in the sense of a social power hierarchy.182 The consequence of this reinterpretation is that modern man is not a zoon politikon, not a creature of political action, but a social creature. While the Greeks did not consider sociality a unique characteristic of human beings, but a characteristic shared by human beings and animals, human sociality is elevated to a basic condition of being human in modernity, where human beings are thought of as individuals within a society. In Arendt’s view, this far-reaching shift was already set in motion by Seneca’s crucial act of translating the Greek term of zoon politikon into Latin as animal sociale. However, it first came to full expression in the Middle Ages, when the political nature of human beings was expressly identified with their social nature.183 According to Arendt, the communal life of the social creatures that human beings have become in modernity is determined by the societal system of social norms and by commercialized trade. This form of sociality, Arendt states, has a crucial downside: it replaces the presence of a human world in the action of the individual with the conformism and rational calculation that are oriented toward institutions and goods, but not toward a human counterpart.184 But Arendt believes that the concrete presence of a fellow human being in action and speech cannot be replaced by any social institution or material good. For it is only in interpersonal encounter that human beings can dare to enter the adventure of enduring the uncertainty and instability of free contact in speech and action.185 The connection and separation that takes place in these encounters between human beings is, says

182

This does not only concern the social system of society. Arendt points out that science, too, gains more and more knowledge that cannot be presented verbally, but only mathematically and verified technically. Thus, its findings are withdrawn from the human sphere of action and the interhuman event of talking to each other (see ibid., 3). 183 See ibid., 23: “homo est naturaliter politicus, id est, socialis.” This is a verbatim quote of the “Index Rerum” of the “Taurin Thomas Edition.” But Arendt refers to the “Summa Theologica” I.96.4 and II.2.109.3 to verify this wording (in meaning) in Thomas Aquinas. The following passage could also be cited: “Summa Theologica” I.II.72.4c: “homo naturaliter est animal sociale.” 184 See Arendt 1958, 38–49. 185 See ibid., 188–192.

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Arendt, “not tangible, since there are no tangible objects into which it could solidify [. . .].”186 In order to emphasize the essential importance of a phenomenology of human action, Arendt reminds us of yet another interpretation of the human condition, which states that human life on this earth is always determined by plurality.187 By thinking of human beings as determined by plurality, Arendt wants to explain why they can encounter each other in a different way than other living beings. She points to the fact that human beings are capable of telling each other apart, thereby revealing their uniqueness. To be capable of uniqueness means more than just being able to be distinct from each other and to coexist.188 Arendt refers to the ‘more’ of human plurality as a web of interpersonal relations [Zwischenmenschlichkeit]. Interpersonal relations exist between human beings and do not extend to the relation between humans and objects.189 This is realized in the human capability of ‘being-different-from-each-other,’ which is expressed as a ‘difference of the one from the other’ in the relationship between human beings. This is the core of that which Arendt identifies as the conditionality of human existence through plurality. The lines of inquiry about the human condition that are characteristic of modernity are condensed in Arendt’s book. She responds to these lines of inquiry by using an alternative reading of pre-modern tradition (Greek and Roman antiquity) to interpret the scientific and technological achievements of modernity as movements that displace

186

Ibid., 183. Although Arendt distances herself from the notion of reducing human plurality to the characteristic of diversity, her reference to the fact of plurality can be taken as evidence of a fundamental heterogeneity of human life: “Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives or will live.” (see ibid., 8). 188 See ibid., 176. Arendt’s phenomenological description of human difference could also be reconstructed as mutual recognition of uniqueness or as a reciprocal asymmetry in interhuman relationships. 189 Werner Goldschmidt therefore claims that “Hannah Arendt actually does not have a concept of the social. For her, society with its inherent ‘social’ question is always an (albeit en masse) human-nature relationship and not a human-human relationship; for the latter, she has reserved the sphere of the political. The idea of a social emancipation, i.e., a society based on freedom, equality and solidarity (‘brotherhood’) in which shared, non-hierarchical human cooperation is also realized in the sphere of work etc., that is, in the relationship between human beings and nature [. . .], is an entirely alien concept to the thinking of Hannah Arendt.” (Goldschmidt 1994, 225 [transl. M.S.]). 187

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and replace human sociality, thereby questioning the justification of the modern idea of human beings as social creatures. Arendt’s argument is built on the retrospectively perceived difference between a social and a political existence of human beings in antiquity. She claims that even in Roman antiquity, “to be among men”190 (inter homines esse) is a genuinely political term that exclusively refers to life in the polis, the city state, and is to be distinguished from the natural sociality of human beings in house and family.191 In modernity, on the other hand, human beings become the object of social sciences and treated as social animals while their political existence is ignored.192 The loss of their ‘true’ sociality, which lies in the interhuman encounter, causes their human existence to dissolve into the anonymous mechanisms and social techniques of mass society. Arendt herself outlines an anthropology that places the political, creative and free action and speech of human beings and their relatedness to a shared environment at the center of human self-understanding. Arendt’s attempt to regain an idea of humanity through social criticism shows the possibilities and limits of an anthropology that focuses on the human condition of sociality, on human plurality. However, the fact that Arendt presents her argument for an anthropology focused on the concrete social life conditions of human beings as the rehabilitation of an already existing, ancient idea of human beings is highly questionable and historically inadequate.193 What is more, her reflections fail to address the question of social inhumanity, which has been touched upon in the previous section in the analysis of Adorno. Her notion that interpersonal relations might be the root of the excess of humanity in every ordered form of human coexistence can be taken as a sign that she, much like Adorno, would consider the difference between the human and the inhuman as a difference between the interpersonal and the societal type of sociality. However, a reflection on the possible indifference of that distinction at the site of the human being as proposed by Agamben is absent in Arendt’s work.

190

Arendt 1958, 7. Arendt refers to a “sharp distinction” between the natural and political organizational structures of human life (see ibid., 24). 192 See ibid., 323. 193 §23 of the second chapter will explain that the distinction between politics and society that guides Arendt’s thinking is not a distinction made in ancient philosophy and will only become relevant with the legal philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. 191

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Plessner: Humanity and Bodily Existence

The rehabilitation of the bodily existence of human beings, in combination with a phenomenology of the body, represents another important step beyond the classical humanist idea of human beings. To show the possibilities of such a combination, this section is dedicated to the early texts of Helmuth Plessner, which establish a relationship between anthropology and bio-philosophy.194 Plessner’s work, which characteristically always positions itself between disciplines and research areas, is relevant at this point because it argues that the conditions of human life cannot be defined conclusively by biology, but can be investigated in the context of a bio-philosophical examination of human existence.195 Plessner thus attempts to integrate biology and anthropology in a way that enables him to describe the humanity of the human being without ignoring its bodily, corporeal existence. According to Plessner, a description of the human being as a creature with a ‘special position’ in nature defines the broadest possible context for the philosophical exposition of the possibilities for human life.196 Other philosophers of his time had decidedly rejected such a broad context of human existence as ‘anthropologism.’197 In contrast, Plessner consciously includes the discussion of the biological conditions of human life into the context of his studies as an opportunity for understanding the human being. The biology of human beings and their mode of existence cannot be isolated from one another. In the 1920s, at the same time as Heidegger, Plessner thus attempts to develop a reconstruction of human existence that is rooted in natural philosophy. In contrast to Heidegger, he emphasizes that human beings can also be aware of their humanity in a bio-philosophically articulated self-understanding,198 because their humanity manifests itself in the

194

See Plessner 2003a. Plessner’s work Die Einheit der Sinne (1923) will not be referred to in this study. 195 See Plessner 2003e, 228–229. 196 See Plessner 2003b, 314. 197 Above all, Plessner’s teachers Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger must be mentioned here. See Husserl’s lecture on phenomenology and anthropology (Husserl 1989, 164–181). 198 In his preface to the 2nd edition of “Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch,” Plessner extensively deals with Heidegger’s claim of the “methodological primate of existence” over life (Plessner 2003a, 21 [transl. M.S.]). He rejects the notion that Heidegger was, before or after the so-called turn in his thinking, capable of making a contribution to philosophical anthropology at all (see ibid., 22). Plessner’s evaluation

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biological indirectness and ambiguity of their behavior.199 Therefore, the fulcrum for the articulation of a human self-understanding is the reflection on the bodily existence of human beings, which human beings do not have but are: “Therefore, man does not only have a body that he may someday discard like a coat, but he is the body. [. . .] He also is that in which he is not himself, and he is it in no external and inferior and subordinated sense.”200 By talking about the bodily existence of the human, Plessner thus wants to refute the notion that the body is only the material shell of the ‘human’ spirit being. Body and spirit cannot be isolated from one another, because human beings are nothing more than their bodies. Still, the examination of the body only becomes a medium when the body is not seen as purely physical, but also in its “spiritual possibilities.”201 The study of the human body as an object that unifies material and spirit instead of separating them thus requires a point of view and a method that is able to overcome the strongly dualistic202 streak of traditional ideas about the human in modernity, as well as the empirically restricted, purely biological view of human beings.203 In contrast to an anthropology that is specifically devoted to questions of the humanities (subject and meaning theory), Plessner thus develops his hermeneutical phenomenology of the human on the basis of natural and bio-philosophical ideas. In his “Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch” (1928), he unfolds an integrative concept in which the reality of the human being is not ‘posited’ theoretically but instead is explained as one possibility among other possibilities of biological life.204 Human beings are real as possible entities [das Seiende] – this is how Plessner’s concept in “Stufen” could be distinguished from Heidegger’s. That which defines human existence is not only revealed in light of the ontological difference between Being and entities; rather, it is possible to make anthropological descriptions by simply observing the physical world – to which human beings belong – through the

demonstrates that he considers a philosophical anthropology that completely ignores biological behavioral research to be inconceivable. 199 See ibid., 27. 200 Plessner 2003e, 226 [transl. M.S.]. 201 Plessner 2003a, 27 [transl. M.S.]. 202 See ibid., 101. 203 See ibid., 63. 204 For this reason, Plessner’s anthropology has also been referred to as the outline of an “ontology of the possible” (Haucke 2000, 16 [transl. M.S.]).

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lens of natural philosophy. Therefore, physical existence cannot simply be ignored in the philosophical examination of the human; indeed, it must be placed at the center of the hermeneutical phenomenology of the human. At the same time, however, Plessner in no way suggests a naturalistic foundation205 or rationale206 for philosophical reflection on humanity. Moreover, his bio-philosophical description of human existence is connected to an extensive critique of philosophical existentialism.207 Plessner insists that human existence cannot be analyzed solely by describing phenomena such as consciousness or language. Instead, any attempt at explication must start with an analysis of the non-verbal structures of organic life. In Plessner’s view, what is to be called ‘life’ in the context of a bio-philosophical description of human beings is not only conveyed through an examination of the material and physical foundations of life, but primarily through an examination of the tangible structures of the ‘aliveness’ in bodily objects [Körperdinge]. Plessner calls bodily objects, which have the characteristic of appearing concretely, ‘alive’ or ‘living.’ In his description of the human from 1928, he thus develops a phenomenology of being-alive [Lebendigsein] that portrays the genesis of human existence from the positionality of the human body in the midst of objects of perception. His thesis can be summed up as follows: the human body can be described as an object among objects and yet must always be more than an object, namely, a ‘lived body.’208 Thus, his phenomenology of life uses the terms of ‘Leib’ and ‘Körper’ as tools for “understanding the human being as a spiritual-moral and as a natural existence on the basis of one position of experience.”209 With the dual designation of the organic modality of human existence as ‘having a (physical) body’ [Körper] and ‘being a (living) body’

205

See Plessner 2003e, 144–146. In this text from 1931 (“Macht und Menschliche Natur”/“Power and Human Nature”), Plessner mainly objects to anthropological reinforcement of the political, and in particular of government actions. Here, Plessner emphasizes once again that there is no way to prove the claim that human beings can only be comprehended in a purely biological way. 206 See Plessner 2003a, 123. 207 Plessner once again clearly registers his resistance against an existentialist analysis of human existence and a consciousness-theoretical determination of human beings in the 2nd preface of his “Stufen”, which he wrote in 1964 (see ibid., 13–34). 208 Plessner explicitly refers to the so-called double aspect of human existence as physical body and as living body in the physical body in ibid., 367. 209 Ibid., 49 (transl. M.S.).

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[Leib],210 Plessner emphasizes the notion that the human body occupies a dual role. Not only can it be viewed under two different aspects (as a subject and as an object), but it also imprints its ambiguity onto human existence as a whole. It is the center of the spatial orientation of human existence in that it situates human beings in a location in space, and at the same time, it is their medium of indirectly putting themselves in relation to this location. Thus, human beings in their corporality are never just there (as a condition), but at the same time, they also set themselves apart from their environment (as an object). In the performance of this twofold orientation, human beings are ‘as a (living) body in the (physical) body’: “Man is his living body [Leib] [. . .] and also has this body as a physical object.”211 By describing the corporality of human beings as a dual role, Plessner points out that a bio-philosophical examination of the physical existence of human beings cannot ignore that human existence in its bodily existence at the same time has a phenomenological structure. For in human beings, the body’s purely physical mode of actuality is always already mediated in the mode of existence of the living body and thus tied to the reflective human experience. Thus, Plessner writes, human beings “not only live and experience, but they experience their experience.”212 This notion, however, does not give primacy to the subjectivity of experience within the understanding of human existence, but names a structure of distancing and concreteness in the human relation to the world that affects the conduct of life. In order to justify his approach regarding the perception of the phenomenal form of human beings, Plessner distances himself from the method of introspection. He considers introspection insufficient because it fails to relate the terminological results of its thinking back to the process of perception. In his opinion, introspection is thus inadequate for an anthropology that aims to describe the existence and the life of human beings equally. Looking at the identifiers of living things described by Plessner, it becomes clear that the characteristics which evoke the impression of aliveness in a physical object are not experienced internally, but manifest themselves in the external visibility

210 211 212

Translator’s note. Plessner 2003d, 238 (transl. M.S.). Plessner 2003a, 364 (transl. M.S.).

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of its appearance and form. It is crucially important for Plessner that organic life is alive and does not only appear to be alive. 10.1

The Broken Relation to the World

In “Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch,” Plessner endeavors to integrate anthropology into a systematic examination of organic life. Making organic life and thus biology his starting point is an obvious choice for him because there are no substantial biological differences between human beings and animals on an organic level. Unlike inorganic life, which has no direction and form-gaining appearance in and of itself, the ‘object-appearance’213 [Dingerscheinung] of organic life manifests itself in a phenomenal quality that inanimate objects do not possess. Plessner investigates this notion in his analysis of the ‘perceptual objects’ [Wahrnehmungsding] and its various modes of appearance that he calls ‘existence modes of aliveness.’214 The sensory perception of an object is characterized by the perception of a spatial difference between interior and exterior that makes it possible to set one object apart from another and to delimit it in its environment. If an object is perceived to be alive, however, its delineation is not only determined by the exterior, but it manifests itself as an internal relation or as a specific relatedness of organism and environment. The living thing can not only be found in its environment, but it is at the same time positioned within it and against it.215 For a living body implies its own limit in such a way that it not only fills a ‘place’ in space but also claims, on its own strength, a ‘position’ in space in which it presents itself to its environment.216 Plessner therefore uses the term “positionality”217 to refer to the inverse relationship of a body to its own delimitation. He describes the connection and separation of body and environment in living things as inverted in principle and proposes to think of it as an entanglement between limited body and the adjoining medium.218

213 With the term ‘thing-appearance’ [Dingerscheinung], Plessner introduces an idea of the concreteness of human beings that does not ignore the form or mode of appearance of the human body in favor of pure materiality (see ibid., 136). 214 See ibid., 177. 215 See Plessner’s account of the body’s relationship to its border: ibid., 149–156. 216 See ibid., 186.215. 217 Ibid., 28.184.215 (transl. M.S.). 218 See ibid., 154–155.

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The positionality of living perceptual objects is also the criterion for differentiating between different types of aliveness.219 Living beings (plants, animals, human beings) are all ‘positioned’ in material ‘thingness’ in their own specific way. But they only claim ‘thingness’ for their existence insofar as their physical delimitation is not a real, verifiable border, but a “border crossing”220 between inside and outside that keeps itself open in its relationship to the environment. In this respect, living things are not only ‘positioned’ into a body, but also transcend it at the same time. Within the order of perceptual things, the body of living beings therefore always presents itself in the form of an open immanence. Its positionality shows how life is geared toward an environment and how it sets itself apart from it at the same time. This, however, does not yet explain why certain living things are alive as ‘human beings’ and others as ‘plants’ or ‘animals.’221 To clarify this difference, Plessner distinguishes between a centric and an eccentric positionality.222 Unlike the inorganic life of a ‘plant,’ animal life is always positioned frontally to its environment due to its position in space.223 Unlike the animal, which acts from the center of its living body, human beings actualize the relationship to their environment in an eccentric relation to the world.224 Thus, the eccentric position marks their difference to the aliveness of animals. With it, human beings do not suspend the positionality of their living body, but they transcend it by being able to “stand outside of [themselves] within [their] perspective.”225 The being-outside-of-oneself, the exteriority of their bodily existence, gives them a range of possibilities in which they can behave toward themselves as things in the world and “have distance from [themselves]”226 at the same time. Plessner does not describe this range between the human organism’s distance from and relatedness to an environment as a range mediated by the media and symbols of culture, but rather as a “fracture,” a “hiatus” and also as “the empty throughway of mediation” between body and

219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226

See ibid., 192–193. Ibid., 154 (transl. M.S.). See ibid., 246–382. See ibid., 364. See ibid., 308. See ibid., 364. Plessner 2003e, 223 (transl. M.S.). Plessner 2003a, 362 (transl. M.S.).

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environment.227 The site of mediation between body and environment thus cannot be identified as such. Instead, it is characterized as a border that must always be crossed whenever the being-inside of one’s own living body changes into a being-outside of the living body. This notion marks an idiosyncrasy in Plessner’s anthropology. According to Plessner, such a transition point or immanent border of the body is essential to being human, and it enables the singular particularity of human existence. The Körper-Leib-body of the human being in its living organizational form thus already possesses a structure that can be called ‘human’ insofar as an “indissolubly dual aspect of existence”228 is realized within it. This structure of life enables human beings to position themselves in and toward their environment in a way that is characterized by a distantiation of themselves, as well as of others. However, unlike animals, human beings may therefore also have a problem with relating to their environment.229 The distance in the conduct of life that emerges from the living body and its positionality not only helps human beings to distance themselves from themselves, but it also opens up an almost boundless multitude of potential selfrepresentations that makes a definite identity impossible.230 Therefore, states Plessner, the existence of human beings appears to be rooted in ‘nothing.’231 In later works, Plessner also developed the social and political implications of this concept of an indefinable human nature.232 10.2

From the Shared World (‘Mitwelt’) to Interpersonal Relations

Plessner’s reflections on the corporality of human existence tie the description of human self-understanding back to the experience of bodily concreteness. However, he does not view ‘concreteness’ as a culturally mediated relation to the self, but as the phenomenological circumstance of an originally broken human relation to the world. This idea of the bodily existence of human beings is also relevant to Plessner’s critical analyses of human community and sociality. According 227

Ibid., 365 (transl. M.S.). Ibid. (transl. M.S.). 229 Plessner refers to conflict as the middle of human existence (see ibid., 391–392), because human beings cannot be at rest at any point of their existence due to the fracture at the root of their existence, due to their ‘manner of positionality.’ 230 The expressivity of human existence therefore represents one of the three basic anthropological laws in Plessner’s “Die Stufen des Organischen” (see ibid., 396–419). 231 See ibid., 365. 232 See Plessner 2003e and Schürmann 1997. 228

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to Plessner, human sociality must be described on the basis of the social ‘shared world’ [Mitwelt] of humanity, which does not dissolve into mere interpersonal relations with other human beings [Zwischenmenschlichkeit]. Thus, an adequate idea of human sociality can only be derived from looking at the difference between interpersonal relations and the shared world of the humanity. As a consequence of his bio-philosophical analysis of human existence in “Die Stufen des Organischen,” Plessner develops a threefold possibility for human beings to relate to reality. For the human, reality exists as an outside world [Aussenwelt], an inside world [Innenwelt] and a shared world [Mitwelt].233 In addition to the outside and inside worlds, there is a social sphere of reality that Plessner calls the ‘shared world.’234 This shared world is characterized by the fact that it places human beings in relation to other life, without first consciously relating to that life’s existence.235 Due to the entanglement of outside and inside in their relation to the world, other living beings are always present to them, and thus their existence does not have to be discovered through a process of mental awareness.236 The eccentric positionality of their bodies causes human beings to become aware of other beings not through conscious acts of relating to an external reality. Rather, the shared existence of others is already a permanent precondition in every aspect of life, due to the inverse positioning in relation to themselves. Due to their broken relation to the world, human beings do not need to relate to a social shared world by secondary means, i.e., by empathically projecting their own experience onto others. Instead, the entanglement of inside and outside causes them to always consider themselves part of this shared world.237 Thus, Plessner states, the epistemological problem of being aware of others’ minds is an inadequately applied theoretical problem which suffers from theory’s abstractness. It is evoked by a dualistic pre-decision about

233

See Plessner 2003a, 356–382. See ibid., 375–382. 235 See ibid., 375. According to Plessner, the shared world has the same basal status as the outside and inside worlds. It differs from human world-existence and selfexistence only in its intensified form of vitality. 236 Plessner explicitly points out that the shared world is not something that “can only gain consciousness due to specific perceptions.” (ibid., 375). 237 See ibid., 376. 234

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human nature that ignores the ‘shared existence with others’ as the primary sphere of human existence.238 According to Plessner, the shared world is “the form of a human being’s own position perceived as the sphere of other human beings.”239 These words show that Plessner’s anthropology locates the origin of human sociality not in intersubjectivity, in an act of relating to others added to subjectivity, but much earlier.240 The shared existence of others plays an integral part in comprehending one’s own position and thus provides the communal mode of existence for human life in general. Plessner therefore also refers to the shared world as the ‘we-sphere’ of human existence. Only within this structure can the “internal existence of the person”241 and the reality of the human spirit, which Plessner thinks of as a consciousness that situates itself at the site of the body in the midst of the world, be realized.242 However, insofar as the shared world is not limited to the narrower sphere of life among human beings, but also includes other living beings, it is not yet a label for the exclusively interpersonal relation. Plessner approaches the latter by further differentiating his shared world concept, or rather its concrete relational structure.243 Thus he writes that human beings are able to maintain a shared world relationship with all living beings, but “a real mutual relationship (in the objective, not the antagonistic sense) is only known to human beings [in their relation to their fellow humans].”244 Plessner defines the mutual relationship in the objective sense as the specifically human form of being with each other (or against each other) and also takes it as a basis for his idea of the personhood of human beings. In conflict, which includes a mutual distancing of the one from the other, the explicit ‘I,’ ‘You,’ ‘He’ of personhood emerges. In contrast to other social relational structures, the relationship between human beings is

238

See ibid., 376–378. Ibid., 375 (transl. M.S.). 240 See Haucke 2000, 163, and Plessner 2003a, 377: “The shared world is real as long as one single person exists, because it represents the sphere secured by the form of eccentric position that is the basis of every selection in the first, second, third person singular and plural.” (transl. M.S.). 241 Plessner 2003a, 377 (transl. M.S.). 242 See ibid., 378. 243 However, the focus on the presence of fellow human beings always remains a narrowing down of the shared world concept in Plessner’s anthropology (see ibid., 379–381). 244 Ibid., 382 (transl. M.S.). 239

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thus characterized by the possibility of a mutual objectification from which the personal structure of life emerges.245 Personal relations, then, make human beings at once unique and replaceable: they can change their position in the structure of mutual relationships and yet always maintain a position that is different from that of others. In conclusion, the extent to which it is possible to progress from the bio-philosophical and hermeneutical analysis of the shared human world, to social-theoretical terminology will be discussed. In spite of the bio-philosophical broadness that characterizes “Stufen,” there is a connection to social-theoretical reflections that one condensed in Plessner’s later work.246 Plessner’s point here lies in the notion that a bio-philosophical approach to anthropology enables him to undermine the reductionist tendencies of social and political anthropology. An example of this is his inclusion and interpretation of the difference between community and society. Following the now classical differentiation of Ferdinand Tönnies,247 Plessner also discusses the difference between a human coexistence based on personal relationships and one based on normative societal structures.248 But Plessner gives this differentiation a different accentuation than Tönnies, who interprets community as the more natural social model of human beings. For Plessner, the ambiguity of human behavior, in the impossibility of its having an unbroken relation to the shared world, necessitates the establishment of normative societal structures that provide human beings with an additional social sphere beyond their personal relationships. Unlike Arendt and her concept of the human condition, Plessner believes that being human in itself takes on a societal dimension. For him, the humanity of organic life is expressed in its ability to perform social objectification, to find an intensified form of refracting social life relationships; and the artificially created institutions of societal order provide for these abilities splendidly. According to Plessner, 245

See ibid., 381–382. See Plessner 2003e. 247 See Tönnies 1979. According to Ferdinand Tönnies, society is to be understood as an aggregate of natural and artificial individuals that relate to each other not through mutual bonding and responsibility, but through the mechanisms of exchange. He juxtaposes this concept with a model of society that, in analogy to an organism, is based on mutual dependence. 248 Kurt Röttgers sees Plessner and Tönnies united in the “defense of the shared basic thesis that the social is not absorbed into the societal, but that there is also the communal (Tönnies) and that the social should nevertheless also not be absorbed into the communal (Plessner).” (Röttgers 2002, 95 [transl. M.S.]). 246

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sociability is therefore an expression of the need for human beings to develop social strategies in order to cope with their permanently broken relations to the world and to themselves. They need a social sphere to enact their indirect self-perception in a playful and distancing manner. Plessner has this in mind when he postulates the anthropological law of ‘natural artificiality’ in his “Stufen.”249 According to Plessner, the humanity of human beings shows itself in the phenomenological structure of a distanced self-perception that is rooted in the organic structure of human life. The ‘natural artificiality’ of society therefore does not contradict the bio-philosophical description of human beings, but is rather one of its consequences. That human beings organize their existence not only in the spheres of personal familiarity (community) but also in the anonymous, social systems of a society is a sign of the twofold possibility of their life, whose tension here intensifies to the point of ambiguity: “Inside our own selves, there exist not only the forces that crave and support community, but also the distancing forces that crave society, in the living body as well as in the soul, in every social relationship, one of them awaits its awakening as long as the other is still in effect.”250 In this way, Plessner’s social phenomenology unearths a conflict quite similar to the one pointed out by Arendt in her juxtaposition of ancient politics and modern society. Plessner, however, unfolds this conflict as a tension between community-craving and society-craving forces at the site of the human being itself and not as an irreconcilable opposition between being human and society (Adorno). For Plessner, the difference between the social forms is rooted in the conflicting nature and ambiguity of human beings, in their ability to transgress the range of proximity to and distance from their fellow humans on both ends of the continuum. In this, his thought goes beyond that of Arendt and Adorno. 10.3 Conclusion In “Die Stufen des Organischen,” Plessner develops his description of human beings out of a bio-philosophical examination of the phenomenological structures of the aliveness of bodily things. In the course of his analyses, he graduates his description of life into regional ‘life 249 250

See Plessner 2003a, 383–396. Plessner 2003e, 115 (transl. M.S.).

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circles’ from the perceptual thing to the living organism to human beings. This approach has the advantage of avoiding false dichotomies like that of nature and spirit in the description of human life. Nevertheless, Plessner’s expansion of bio-philosophical analyses to a phenomenology of human life is not without its problems. For it is questionable whether the corporeal-phenomenological self-understanding of human beings always needs to encompass the whole plurality of life forms in order to integrate the bodily existence of human beings into a description of their existence in general. In the context of his study on the corporeal phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Günter Figal has proposed a correction to Plessner’s approach.251 Unlike Plessner, he holds the view that the singular particularity of being human should not be lifted out of the general structures of biological life by analyzing a particular phenomenological structure. In a complete reversal, he suggests that instead, organic life should be analyzed on the basis of the human mode of existence: “Human beings are an intensification of nature; what nature is, is expressed in them in particular conciseness. If that is so, the phenomenological self-clarification of human beings leads into nature. It leads from us to an understanding of life and yet does not lead away from us.”252 Thus, such a reversed phenomenological examination of human life must show to what extent the human being is open to the possibility of representing their bodily existence, and is able to see in this possibility both the natural and the cultural complexities of its existence. Accordingly, the starting point of a hermeneutical phenomenology of the human does not lie solely in the phenomenon of biological life, but in the human view of the world and of themselves. According to Figal, the description of human beings must start with an analysis of the hermeneutical experience in which human beings can access their concrete bodily existence. In the following, this approach will be outlined briefly in terms of its methodological implications of a confrontation with the scientific description of human beings.

251 See the comparison of Merleau-Ponty and Plessner in Figal 2006, 36: “While Plessner arrives at the aliveness of living beings by focusing on their concreteness, Merleau-Ponty determines the concreteness of living beings from their living reference to things.” (transl. M.S.). 252 Ibid., 362 (transl. M.S.).

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11 Concreteness, Objectivity and Phenomenal Excess From a hermeneutical perspective, every anthropological description must first be understood as a representation of its object. Thus, a hermeneutical discussion of the phenomenal concreteness of human beings within the framework of an interdisciplinary anthropology must elaborate on the difference between accessing an object in a scientific and methodological way, and relating to it in an effort to understand it. This difference is essential in the context of an interdisciplinary study, because it can be assumed that the individual perspectives of the study will discuss and present their object in their own respective manners. The different ways of access make it partly impossible to reduce the results of these perspectives to a common denominator. But in order to critically evaluate these approaches, instead of just compiling them, the hermeneutical reference to their object of study will be introduced as a transcendent reference of the description of human beings. Here, this hermeneutical reference provides the critical horizon for understanding how scientific access to human life must situate itself so that it can communicate the possibilities and limits of its investigation across interdisciplinary borders. In the natural sciences, scientific objects can be observed, measured and statistically represented through the mathematical analysis of their principle of operation. In the context of a hermeneutical perspective, however, the objective reference is by no means completely absorbed by the scientific representation.253 Instead, the objective reference demonstrates what a representation must be prepared to do if it wants to approach its object in a hermeneutical manner. That which the representation shall be focused on in this case, and that which represents the objectivity of its approach, will be referred to in the following as the phenomenal concreteness [Gegenständlichkeit] of the object. Here – and this is where the hermeneutic-phenomenological and the transcendental philosophical examination part ways254 – phenomenal concreteness is to be understood as something that remains external to the representation itself.255 If a representation strives to account for

253

Also see Gadamer 61990. A similar differentiation can be found in Plessner 2003a, 86: The experience of the concrete must be distinguished from an epistemological idea of concreteness that thinks of concreteness more formally as a relation of two relations. 255 See Figal 2006, 126–141. 254

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phenomenal concreteness, it must describe its object in a way that ensures its continuous reference to its exteriority, to its elusiveness to methodological access. Talking about the exteriority of the object at this point makes it clear that every representation does have an elusive element, namely, the objective reference. The phenomenal concreteness of the object, its mode of appearance for an observer, is not entirely absorbed into any of its representations. Nevertheless, it is precisely the concrete presence of ‘something’ that continues to incite us toward representation. The fact that the object confronts and resists representation means that every attempt of representation must take into account the fact that an object takes on a certain appearance ‘from within itself.’ This can only be validated insofar as the concrete is not prematurely equated with that which is recognized in its representation. The phenomenal concreteness of an object is only perceived where we also think beyond its methodological examination. In the following, this thinking beyond the methodological examination of the object shall be referred to as the perception of a ‘more,’ a phenomenal excess inherent in every representation and methodological examination. The phenomenal excess is that aspect of the absent presence of the object that is never ultimately captured by its representation and that thus incites us inexhaustibly toward renewed, toward different ways of representation. This excess is also the root of the phenomenological assertion that phenomenal concreteness cannot be determined by theory nor pinned down by pragmatic action, which is also made clear in the exteriority of the concrete. The full interpretive power of a description of human beings for the world in which we live can only be gauged when taking into account the phenomenal concreteness of its representation. Therefore, a description of the humanity of human beings must focus on their concrete phenomenality; in this study, more specifically, it must focus on the phenomenal excess of humanity in human interaction and must protect it against its being ignored in scientific representation.

CHAPTER TWO

THE CONFLICT BETWEEN EGOISM AND ALTRUISM 12

Possibilities and Limitations of an Empirical Anthropology

The first chapter of this study focused on the possibility of a hermeneuticphenomenological self-inquiry of human existence. It was shown that the basic task of an interdisciplinary anthropology is not seeking an essentialist determination of human nature, but adequately interpreting and representing the phenomenon of human humanity. In the context of its sociality, the humanity of human beings is to be interpreted neither in terms of the biological difference between human beings and animals nor as a description of the cultural characteristics or rational abilities of the human animal. Such an interpretation neglects those phenomenal forms of expression and structures of humanity that precede the biological and cultural defining characteristics of human beings. Therefore, the possibilities and limitations of being human in social interaction can only be described insufficiently. The humanity of human beings does not refer to a characteristic that is common to all human beings, but rather to the inherent capability of all human beings to relate to themselves and to others. Therefore a better phenomenological description of humanity requires that humanity be interpreted by analyzing interhuman differences. Thus, the focus in the examination of humanity now shifts from the human/ animal difference to the human/human difference. Interhuman difference is the origin of social community formation, and also the source of unsocial enmity between human beings. It enables the experience of proximity as well as that of distance. To account for this natural ambiguity of interpersonal relations, social-anthropological description cannot ignore the forms and patterns of social inhumanity in concrete encounters between human beings. In acknowledging and describing the inhuman, i.e., applying a negative phenomenology of human sociality, it must be shown to what extent the humanity of human beings cannot only be established normatively, but also described at the site of the human being.

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The second chapter will examine studies from the field of empirical social anthropology in experimental economics. These studies are not only dedicated to the empirical observation of human social behavior in economic and neuroscientific experiments; in addition, they also attempt to provide a naturalist1 explanation for the observed social behavior. This naturalist explanation is based on the anthropological assumption that the human body can be regarded as an animal organism with a special biological status. Of course, the findings of the first chapter contradict this explanatory approach, as they have clearly shown that anthropology does not need any biological underpinnings to integrate the bodily existence of human beings into a description of their humanity. Rather, the bodily-corporeal dimension of human humanity can be asserted within a phenomenology of the corporeal self- and world-perception of human beings. Hence, three problems have to be considered in regard to the integration of an anthropology that uses empirical research methods and scientific explanatory approaches into an interdisciplinary study of human sociality. Briefly outlined, they are: (i) Double description: The hermeneutic-phenomenological description of human beings fundamentally differs from the social-scientific and natural-scientific explanation attempted in the behavioral studies of experimental economics and neuroeconomics. Therefore, empirical explanation and phenomenological description cannot be realized together in a single act of interpretation. What is shown to be the humanity of human beings in phenomenological analysis cannot be measured like an object or exactly dated like an empirical process. Thus, a double description of empirical studies is necessary if they are to take into account the phenomenon of humanity. This double

1 “From the beginning of the 17th century on, ‘naturalism’ can designate any doctrine that in some way declares ‘nature’ the basis and norm of all appearances, also in history, culture, morals and the arts.” (Gawlick 1984, 517 [transl. M.S.]). Here and in the following passages, however, naturalism is understood as a position stating that only the natural-scientific method is capable of providing true knowledge about and descriptions of reality. Related to this position is a refutation of any and all claims of validity or truth that are independent from the natural-scientific method of gaining knowledge. Thus, naturalism itself can no longer be justified in a scientific, empirical way, but only philosophically. An overview and discussion of the possible ideas and variations of ‘naturalism’ can be found in an essay collection edited by Geert Keil and Herbert Schnädelbach (Keil and Schnädelbach 2000). A systematic compilation and critical analysis of contemporary philosophical-naturalist positions can be found in the essay collection edited by Thomas Sukopp and Gerhard Vollmer (Sukopp and Vollmer 2007).

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description must not only critically reconstruct the methodologically secured way to empirical knowledge, but also find a way to discuss those aspects of the study object that cannot be represented by empirical methods. (ii) Reducing instead of rejecting the empirical constructs: Although human life can be replicated and examined by technical means in artificial conditions, these methodologically produced replications of human life nevertheless do not represent its phenomenal concreteness. Thus, the natural-scientific explanation of human beings must be made aware that its approach to the object is a constructed one. Nevertheless, this study will not consider empirical constructions to be a corruption or falsification of the actual mode of human existence. In the methodologically gained experiences in the experiment, human life is rendered differently than it is, but it is not rendered as something else. Thus, the difference between methodological and phenomenological experience is not a difference in which both approaches to the object exist on the same level and merely ascribe different meanings to one and the same object. Rather, the difference between the two only becomes obvious once the validity claims of the methodological constructions are scaled back without being disposed of entirely in a phenomenological description. (iii) The basic task of a phenomenological critical analysis: The main task of a hermeneutic-phenomenological examination of experimental social research is to discuss those aspects of the phenomena that cannot be recorded and comprehended with the scientific method, but which nevertheless belong to the area of human life and its attempts of self-comprehension. This phenomenal excess of the object vis-à-vis the scientific method demonstrates the limitation of the methodological perspective and allows the gathering of entirely different and new knowledge about human beings, which would not be the case if the examination exclusively and unquestioningly adhered to the constructions of empiricism. The potential contributions of economic experimental studies of human beings to an interdisciplinary anthropology of the homo sociale must be discussed by examining and evaluating their empirical results from a hermeneutic-phenomenological perspective according to the three aspects outlined above.2 Such an approach implies that the object

2 An increased focus of experimental economics on a perceived situational similarity between laboratory and the lifeworld is proposed by Güth and Kliemt 2003: “The

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of empirical research should not be prematurely identified with the methodologically gained results of said research. Therefore, the following portrayal of experimental social research is not (only) dedicated to the precise reporting of empirical evidence, but more to the critical discussion of this evidence.3 13

The Economic Modeling of Human Social Behavior

Since the 1980s, the field of experimental economics has been emerging as one of the key areas of research in current economics.4 It includes all economic studies that use experimental methods.5 Therefore, it is not the homogeneity of subjects and questions that defines the field, but its focus on the experimental method, which previously had been generally considered to be unsuitable for the economic and social sciences.6 The starting point for the reassessment7 of the experimental method in economics toward the end of the 20th century was the interest of several economists in empirically examining the axiomatic suppositions of standard economic theory. These pioneers of experimental economics include, among others, Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahnemann, Vernon L. Smith and Charlie Plott.

economic subjects who are or have been subjected to certain situations follow a dictum of linking similar things with similar expectations. In this respect, the similarity of the situation perceived in the laboratory with the situation that is of interest in reality thus is by no means insignificant. As far as the perceptions of subjects play a decisive role for their actions, these considerations of similarity must be taken into account [. . .]” (ibid., 27 [transl. M.S.]). However, Güth and Kliemt do not deduce a phenomenological concern from their proposition, but refer to psychological approaches in order to explain selective performances of perception and framing effects. They also point out the distinction between the congruity/incongruity of theory with empirical data and the congruity/incongruity of theory with reality, a distinction that has been largely ignored in behavioral economics (see ibid., 17). 3 In this respect, the following presentation is an external description of the behavioral-scientific explanatory approach that claims to be able to do justice to the object of experimental studies – even though its approach differs in manner from the strictly methodological approach. The presentation therefore is always confronted with a basic problem: that the explanatory approach of economic social research itself does not demonstrate the relevance of hermeneutic-phenomenological aspects. 4 See for example the ground-breaking study of Tversky and Kahnemann 1981. 5 See for this definition Bardsley et al. 2010, 2. 6 See the paradigmatic statement in Friedman 1953, 10. 7 For the ‘early history’ of experimental economics see Roth 1993 and Bardsley et al. 2010. Both emphasize that experimental work was only a marginal activity in economics until the end of the 20th century.

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The reassessment of the experimental method was also brought about by innovative developments. Experimental designs were created, allowing the suppositions and predictions of economic models and theories to be tested in the completely controllable environment of a computer lab. The development of z-Tree software (Zurich Toolbox for Readymade Economic Experiments) by Urs Fischbacher in 2007 supported endeavors to conduct behavioral experiments in a laboratory, since the program facilitated the implementation of computerized experiments. Moreover, the further development of the experimental method gave rise to a completely new field of research toward the end of the 1990s: the field of neuroeconomics.8 In the wake of the cognitive neuroscientific revolution at the start of the 1990s, it became possible to examine mental processes noninvasively through imaging technology, i.e., without physical or neurobiological intervention. Moreover, new technologies such as PET (positron emission tomography) and fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scanning enabled a real time correlation of observed behavior with neuron activation in individual brain regions. Economists were willing to utilize these methodological innovations because with their help, they were able to subject human psychology, which they previously had considered a ‘black box,’ to a precise empirical data analysis.9 The neuroscientific measurement of thoughts and feelings in the human mind called into question the traditional approach of determining behavioral preferences through the agents’ observable decisions (revealed preference approach) that had been a staple of standard economic theory. After all, this approach is characterized by the tenet that the basic psychological forces of human beings cannot be measured precisely and thus can be ignored in the formulation of economic models. In contrast, current neuroeconomic studies show that the influence of individual psychological forces on the behavior and the decisions of human beings can be precisely measured by neuroscientific means. This book will primarily introduce and discuss those experimental and neuroeconomic studies that deal with the observation and explanation of social preferences and/or prosocial and altruistic behavior. In 8

For an overview of history, research questions, and methods of neuroeconomics see the handbook “Neuroeconomics: Decision Making and the Brain” (Glimcher et al. 2009). 9 See Camerer et al. 2004.

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this area, the research done by Ernst Fehr and his colleagues in Zurich is particularly relevant. Their primary aim is to confirm and explain human altruism and the factors for the development of fairness and other norms in social interaction. Moreover, the studies conducted by Fehr are among the seminal works contributing to the development of neuroeconomics as an academic field.10 This chapter will progress in the following manner: first, the methodological premises of economic experimental studies will be reconstructed and analyzed. Here, the main focus of investigation will be on the pragmatic approach to designing a behavioral experiment and the methods applied when modeling behavioral decisions. In addition, we must take a closer look at the origin of the various types of behavioral experiments in economic game theory and discuss the economic model for behavior, the preference model. After that, the results of individual economic studies on cooperative and altruistic behavior will be presented and analyzed, with particular attention being paid to the behavioral pattern of altruistic punishment, defined as a disposition to punish unfair agents even if costly and when the punishment provides neither present nor future material rewards. The use of functional neuro-imaging for the examination of affective and cognitive decision-making structures of altruistic agents has yielded new insights about their motivations and expectations. At the same time, the study11 of the motivation behind altruistic punishment also shows that neuroeconomic studies are at risk of no longer being able to make a critical distinction between the neural correlates of the test subjects’ affective states and the phenomenology of their motivations and intentions. Thus, the question of whether personal attitudes and intentions can be adequately modeled and represented in the framework of a neuroeconomic behavioral experiment will be discussed in more depth using the example of a neuroeconomic study on the effect of affective empathy on social behavior. Answering this question has far-reaching implications for the interdisciplinary significance of neuroeconomics. However, regarding the analysis of economic experimental studies in this chapter, it should be clear from the start that economic social research does not intend to provide a phenomenological description

10 11

See Glimcher et al. 2009, 10. DeQuervain and Fischbacher et al. 2004.

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of social phenomena. Rather, its goal is to explain human sociality as a strategic interaction between individuals and, in its advanced incarnation as neuroeconomics, to identify neural correlates for cooperative and prosocial behavior12 in the human brain. Its methodology is completely geared toward the technical operationalization and mathematically exact representation of human behavior. For this reason, it may be initially surprising that this book chooses experimental studies from the field of economics to provide empirical descriptions of human sociality and not, say, studies from the area of interpretive social research. But this interest in economic behavioral studies is based on the fact that in recent times, the conduct of experimental studies in economics has been increasingly related to a theory-critical agenda and the demand for a methodological paradigm shift within the field of social research as a whole. Experimental economics intends to use empiricism to correct the weak points and one-sidedness of economic human behavioral theory that have already been criticized in psychology, sociology, and moral philosophy. 13.1 The Methodological Paradigm Shifts of Experimental Economics Experimental social research in economics and neuroeconomics is related to three methodological paradigm shifts: (i) Anthropological reconception: Experimental economics abandons the dualist idea of human beings in favor of an evolutionary mode of examination.13 Therefore, its synthesis with the endeavor to naturalize the mind in neuroscience and evolutionary biology represents an interesting reconception within the framework of social scientific attempts to explain human social behavior. Methodologically speaking, this reconception is characterized by the integration of a 12 For the difference between cooperative and prosocial behavior see Henrich and Henrich 2006. Behavior is considered cooperative if it directly contributes to the wellbeing of others. Behavior is considered prosocial if it serves to increase the average level of cooperation in a group. 13 This thesis of a paradigm shift in an economically oriented neurobiology of human beings can be viewed in detail in Glimcher 2003. In the course of his neurophilosophical study “Decisions, Uncertainty, and the Brain,” neurobiologist Paul W. Glimcher shows that the synthetic approach of neuroeconomics must be understood as an overcoming of dualist theorems in anthropology (the Cartesian framework). The methodological link between the study of sensation and action in neuroeconomic experiments serves to overcome the neurobiological fixation on philosophical theorems such as ‘consciousness’ or ‘reflection’ and to replace them with a strictly empirical and mathematical construction of human beings.

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natural-scientific view of human beings into a social-scientific perspective. The goal of this integration is to develop a model for the empirical explanation and prediction of human behavioral reactions. Such an integrative model, developed in the context of a transdisciplinary research field (that of neuroeconomics), is designed to provide access to the cognitive and affective modes of human behavior, as well as to the prosocial and antisocial ones, in one single explanatory formula that combines economic, psychological, biological, and social aspects of behavior. Thus, experimental social research in economics embodies an explanatory approach that seeks to develop a universally valid paradigm for the study of human behavior. (ii) Methodological synthesis of neuroscience and experimental economics: The development of a new paradigm and explanatory approach for human behavior is accompanied by a methodological synthesis of adjoining research fields (social neuroscience, psychobiological research, experimental economics) belonging to different disciplines. The concrete collaboration of researchers that has contributed to this synthesis is a new development as well. It no longer occurs mostly by way of discursive communication about the respective disciplinary concepts and terminological predecisions of an empirical study (interdisciplinary dialogue). Instead, it follows a different paradigm of generating knowledge: transdisciplinary practical science and integral knowledge gain.14 In concrete terms, the pragmatism of transdisciplinary experimenting enables researchers to integrate the methods and questions of vastly different disciplines into a common perspective from the very start and to thereby collect data that are relevant across the disciplines. In a transdisciplinary laboratory experiment, the goal is to establish a complementary explanatory model that encompasses several dimensions of the object. E.g., experimental studies always examine human beings on a behavioral, an emotional and a cognitive level at the same time. The researchers then look for causal relationships in the various dimensions of human behavior. Therefore, economic experimental studies can also be considered a synthesis of various disciplines’ methods of gaining knowledge. The disadvantage of this transdisciplinary approach is that data are always gathered in a way that ensures that

14

See Mittelstrass 2000, 10–11, and Mittelstrass 2003.

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they are compatible with each other afterwards. The field of neuroeconomics itself considers this an advantage: The behavioral sciences all include models of individual human behavior. These models should be compatible. Indeed, there should be a common underlying model, enriched in different ways to meet the particular needs of each discipline. We cannot easily attain this goal at present, however, as the various behavioral disciplines have incompatible models. Yet, recent theoretical and empirical developments have created the conditions for rendering coherent the areas of overlap of the various behavioral disciplines. [. . .] The standard justification for the fragmentation of the behavioural disciplines is that each has a model of human behaviour well suited to its particular object of study. While this is true, where these objects of study overlap, their models must be compatible.15

This preference for examining the mutually compatible aspects of an object, however, is quite problematic in terms of scientific methodology. The proposed integral mode of examination is designed to ignore those aspects which are usually allowed to remain different or even incompatible on various levels of empirical examination, and to subject them to a unifying perspective even at the stage of access. As a consequence, the difference between mutually compatible and incompatible aspects of an object loses its heuristic value. At the very least, the limitations of one’s own method and one’s own point of view can no longer be indicated by the difference from another mode of investigation. (iii) Empirical explanation and the critical assessment of abstract theory formation: Traditional theoretical models of economics represent human behavior in mathematic utility functions and strive to make these utility functions as consistent as possible. In contrast, experimental economics claims that its models offer an explanation of the reality of human behavior.16 It therefore abandons the analysis

15

Gintis 2007, 1. It is questionable whether the consistent focus on methodologically gained experiential data and the reliable replicability of evidence suffice to validate the claim of an empirical explanation. If the methodological approach of experimental economics is viewed as a pragmatic action from a culturalist perspective, then the systematic operationalization of life performances [Lebensvollzüge] in the behavioral laboratory serves the purpose of using these life performances to demonstrate those economic behavioral principles that can be replicated within the framework of a controlled situation. In this respect, a behavioral experiment does not replicate the real conditions of behavior, but rather constructs an artificial behavioral environment that serves to verify model hypotheses. 16

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of behavior based on mere assertions and assumptions, and criticizes the unrealistic nature of theoretical economic models. Experimental economics presents itself as an explanatory approach that only accepts those hypotheses about human modes of behavior in which real behavior can be reproduced and explained in laboratory and field experiments. Therefore, experimental economics is mainly interested in the empirical validity of economic utility functions. It attempts to use empirical anthropology for the formation of its models in order to create a better transition between model thinking and reality.17 In addition, at the point where experimental economics turns into neuroeconomics, it almost completely disengages from economic theory formation. It uses neuroscientific behavioral experiments to demonstrate how human beings can learn from their emotional experiences to make better social decisions, and it models the structure of these experiences through the neuroscientific procedures of representation and examination. In its advanced incarnation as neuroeconomics, experimental economics is able to gain knowledge about human beings that is far beyond the reach of the economic approach. For example, the entire area of emotional decision-making is not addressed in traditional economic theory. However, experimental economics and neuroeconomics tend to be strongly opposed to any theory formation that could prove to be an obstacle for the economics-internal reception of its research.18 Economic experimental studies thus seek to set themselves apart by displaying innovative power and by criticizing the traditional dogmas and doctrines of their discipline. They are beginning to form a research field whose possibilities and limits cannot yet be entirely foreseen and evaluated because of its extraordinary dynamism. The rise in popularity that experimental economics has seen since the 1990s – among other things, Vernon L. Smith and Daniel Kahnemann received a Nobel Prize for their experimental work in 2002 – has earned it attention in the majority of theoretically oriented economic and social sciences.19 As a consequence, experimental research has become more generally accepted and disproved the prejudice that 17 See Guala 2005, 229: “[T]he proper role of experimental economics is to mediate between abstract theory and concrete problem solving in the world.” 18 See the discussion in Held et al. 2003. 19 Evidence can also be found in Rubinstein 2001; Erlei 2003; et al. Also see “Kurze Erfolgsgeschichte der experimentellen Ökonomik” by Kubon-Gilke et al. 2003.

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experimental research is unnecessary or impractical in economic science. At the same time, however, it continues to be confronted with demands to prove that its experimenting is guided by and contributing to theory. These demands are fueled by the attempt to re-marginalize the autonomous type of knowledge constituted by experimentally gained experiential knowledge as a whole and to reduce it to its utility for theory formation. Unlike the economics-internal confrontation with experimental research, this study proposes that the autonomy of experimental studies be acknowledged, and that its findings be taken seriously and honored as experientially guided insights into human sociality. Of course, this appreciation cannot be achieved without also including a phenomenological critical analysis of the experiments. The three briefly outlined paradigm changes of experimental economics and neuroeconomics revise both the anthropological and the methodological foundations of economic theory formation. They propose a methodological approach in which economics no longer deduces human rational behavior from unproven assumptions (as-if constructions) but instead explains it using empirically verifiable hypotheses. However, economics does not consider the quantitative or qualitative interview studies of sociology, in which ‘social reality’ is understood as a primarily linguistic reality, an adequate method of verification. Instead, it methodologically focuses on behavioral experiments in which human social behavior can be modeled in actu, resulting in a high degree of control over every single interaction. Experimental economics thus turns to experimental knowledge gain in the classic natural-scientific sense, thereby committing to a very specific type of empirical knowledge, which will be described in more detail below. For now, however, it is necessary to shed more light on the contentrelated innovations that experimental economics has brought to economics as a whole. 13.2

Skepticism about the Homo Oeconomicus

The attempts within experimental economics to reorient the field toward empiricism were accompanied by the need to amend and correct some premises of economic theory that had previously been considered to be canonical. Likewise, their methodological reorientation has resulted in a critical reassessment of the content-related premises of economic theory. Thus, reevaluation of the empirical research field is also a manifestation of the increasingly distant attitude toward those

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knowledge paradigms of economics established by neoclassical or neoliberal theory from the 1870s on; most notably in this context, the central premise of neoclassical thought that casts the human being as homo oeconomicus.20 The homo oeconomicus is an economic model that was developed for the purpose of theoretically representing rational decisions in a mathematical utility function. It is based on a conception of human beings that defines them as completely rational agents. In this model, human beings are conceived of as incarnations of purely rational calculation. By being transferred into everyday life, homo oeconomicus has become an established contemporary image of human beings. As a caricature homo oeconomicus represents a creature that is nothing more than an intelligent but heartless calculating machine that accordingly always behaves in an egoistic and selfish manner toward other human beings. The scientific value of such a construct of human beings as purely rational decision subjects is that it enables researchers to create a precise mathematical model of human behavior and to model the social interaction of several rational agents through stable mathematical balances. Accordingly, the functional value and performance capability of the homo oeconomicus model for theory formation are its most important aspects for the theoretical economic approach. The model provides a schematic that can give a reliable mathematical representation of and prognosis for the ‘typical’ (from an economic viewpoint) decisionmaking behavior of individuals. Its applied value is that it can be used to model the behavior of a bigger group of individuals, i.e., a behavior aggregate. Thus, the economic behavioral model is a tool for constructing average types and patterns of behavior. It is based on theoretical assumptions about human beings that do not need to be proven empirically, and it defines human beings as strictly rationally acting individuals who, when confronted with a range of behavioral options, will always act according to a stable preference order, choosing the option that will best benefit them personally and thus will always maximize their own benefits in a concrete situation with specified restrictions.

20 The Latin term homo oeconomicus was first introduced in 1906 by economist Vilfredo Pareto.

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This minimal definition of homo oeconomicus, which disregards its countless varieties and differentiations,21 reflects on two central premises of economic thinking: firstly, the economic idea of behavior and secondly, the economic idea of rationality. The economic idea of behavior is based on an assumed difference between the preferences of an individual (behavioral goals) and their situation-dependent limitations (behavioral restrictions). In order to create a rational construct of their respective behavioral options, individuals must first define their goals within a specified range of behavior. Within this range of behavior, they give top ranking to the behavioral option that promises to maximally increase their own utility expectation under the given circumstances. The economic idea of rationality therefore schematizes a selection from various behavioral options as a means-ends structure and confines rational behavior to an instrumental use of rationality. The two above-mentioned structures of human behavior (preference + restriction = behavioral option, and means + ends = rational utility expectation) are even retained in critical modifications of the homo oeconomicus model because they are a general, fundamental element of behavioral economics. By now, however, it has been empirically disproven that (i) rational decision-making behavior is exclusively geared toward egoistic preferences and behavioral goals;22 (ii) only cognitive attitudes and situational perceptions contribute to the genesis of rational decision-making behavior.23 Thus, the empirical modeling of the basic anthropological assumptions used in the homo oeconomicus model has at least shown the empirical limits of the model’s validity. It has done so mainly by proving that human behavior is decisively influenced by social norms. It is not yet clear to what extent this insight will cause the canonical economic

21 Well-known expansions of the homo oeconomicus model are REMM (resourceful, evaluating, maximizing man) by Brunner and Meckling (1977) and RREEMM (resourceful, restricted, expecting, evaluating, maximizing man) by Lindenberg (1985), as well as Siebenhüner’s (1997) homo oecologicus. 22 An individual who behaves rationally in a social interaction also assesses the possible utility expectations of his interaction partners and includes them into his utility function. 23 An individual who behaves rationally in a social interaction assesses his behavioral options not only cognitively, but also emotionally.

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model of human beings to be corrected, or even replaced, in the long term. But the efforts of empirically verifying and concretizing the model indicate a fundamental turn of economics from abstract economic theory to strictly empirical science; for the formal consistency and analytical capability of the canonical behavioral model alone are no longer sufficient for it to be accepted by a research field with a strictly empirical explanatory claim. The model’s hypotheses of completely rational and exclusively self-serving human decision-making behavior were disproved by empirical studies. Some of these studies will be introduced in more detail in the following paragraphs (particularly §§15–17). Before that, however, we will take a brief look into those developments that paved the way for an economics-internal critical assessment of the canonical behavioral model. 13.3

Backgrounds to the Critical Assessment of the Homo Oeconomicus Model

For many decades now, there has been skepticism within the field of economics about the anthropological premises of the homo oeconomicus model. The critical assessment of this model within experimental economics and neuroeconomics is therefore not a new development, but only the intensification of a tendency toward criticism that had not been able to establish itself previously. There were two main reasons for the lack of a powerful critical assessment: firstly, there were no persuasive alternatives to the canonical behavioral model that could have replaced it, and secondly, the model had not actually been disproven. Additionally, it was frequently supported that the model put forth a hypothesis so general that it could not be empirically verified at all.24 Therefore, the skepticism toward the model’s empirical reality content was usually brushed aside with the argument that the model represented an ideal-typical fiction without actual truth content. Its raison d’être consisted in its usefulness for theory formation, and its concrete empirical explanatory claim was to be considered insignificant in comparison.25 24

E.g., this argument can be found in Kirchgässner 22000, 19–20. Franz 2004 provides a paradigmatic justification of the homo oeconomicus model. Armin Falk (2003) provides a critical assessment of the homo oeconomicus from the perspective of experimental economics. Most importantly, he shows the consequences of a wrong model of human beings for political advice services and demands its replacement with the prosocially and cooperatively acting homo reciprocans. 25

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Now that the field of experimental economics has informed economic theorists of its intentions to make the hypotheses of their theoretical model empirically verifiable and that it will no longer work with generalizing assumptions about fictive economic agents and their rationality, the skepticism toward the reality content of the model has been given a new justification that had heretofore eluded methodological articulation. The empirical verification of economic models through experiments is thus a methodological tool that can help substantiate the anthropological and psychological intuitions that lie behind its critical assessment. The methodological shift of experimental economics toward a scientifically operating social science could therefore turn out to be a decisive shift for the field of economics as a whole, or at least for the field of social research within economics. This shift is based on five important steps of development in the field of economics, and it can be described as their consequent continuation: (i) Interdisciplinary opening of sociological and social-psychological lines of inquiry: The internal critical assessment of the homo oeconomicus in economics has been provoked by a decades-long phase in which economics has started to open itself to interdisciplinarity. Economists were increasingly interested in social-scientific and psychological lines of inquiry. Examples include the sociological question about the significance of social norms or the psychological question about intrinsic factors of motivation for altruistic behavior in human beings. The consideration of psychology’s empirical approaches to explaining human behavior in particular has made the field of economics aware of the fact that its basic anthropological assumptions do not reflect reality. Thus, the economic conception of human beings had been criticized as wrong because it failed to take into account the influence of collective learning processes, emotional experiences, and intrinsic motivations on individual decision-making behavior. However, even though economics shifted to deal with the insights and findings of other disciplines, it did so without ever abandoning the economic explanatory approach for rational behavior. This persistence shows that the interdisciplinary opening of economics does not mean that it is prepared to abandon the basic assumptions and models of economic thinking. Instead, it aims to expand its content matter and to correct its methodological flaws in order to make economic thought catch up to the current state of research in other social sciences. (ii) A new idea of institutions: The methodological shift in economics from purely theoretical model thinking toward empirical studies of

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human behavior was also preceded by a new way of thinking within economics: the neo-institutional approach. This research approach began to gain widespread acceptance in the 1990s. Since then, economists have shown (renewed) interest in the relevance of institutions and other forms of social order. Institutions already played an important role in classical national economics, but their relevance for individual decision-making behavior had been largely ignored in neoclassical economic theory. As a whole, the expansion of neoclassical economic theory to include questions about institutional incentive structures is today referred to as New Institutional Economics (NIE).26 The basis of NIE is a new idea about the way institutions work. The crucial difference between this concept and the neoclassical way of thinking is that NIE regards institutions as essentially incomplete organizations of human coexistence. Institutions can provide for stability and security in individual actions, but the guidance of concrete human behavior by institutional regulations is and can only ever be incomplete, a fact that has been demonstrated time and again by legal loopholes, unconsidered contingencies in contracts etc. In addition, NIE has found out that the use of formal and informal normative systems and their enforcement in society requires the continuous investment of real resources on the part of the individuals. This investment of resources is acknowledged by NIE in the modeling of social ‘transaction costs.’ (iii) Economics as a Social Science: Following the emergence of NIE, economic thinking has increasingly expanded to include general social-scientific methodology, and its explanatory power is no longer limited to economic topics and lines of inquiry in the narrow sense.27 The efforts to forge a modern, applied economics are based on

26 Further terms and concepts related to NIE include the ‘theory of modern institutionalism,’ ‘market-external economics’ or ‘new political economics.’ Furubotn and Richter 22005, 501–554, emphasize that above all, NIE has curbed the generalizing potential of the neoclassical analytical apparatus with its theory of institution. Its ‘revolutionary’ tendency to create new paradigms in economics is carefully scaled back, and the intentions of NIE have been limited to introducing additional secondary conditions of economic action. In contrast, Frey 1990 clarifies that NIE is mainly focused on the applicability of economic forms of thought and the interdisciplinary connectivity of its findings. Voigt 2002, however, emphasizes its economic competence to analyze informal institutions. 27 See paradigmatically: Frey 1990. Also see the section on “Ökonomie als ‘imperialistische’ Wissenschaft” (“Economics as ‘Imperialist’ Science” [transl. M.S.]) in Kirchgässner 22000, 153–156. Unlike classical national economics according to Adam

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a methodological differentiation that economist Gebhard Kirchgässner describes as follows: The concept of ‘economics’ that has been introduced and applied here is radically different. Economics is the attempt to explain human behavior by supposing that individual persons behave ‘rationally.’ Individuals act by making a rational selection from the available options while basing their decision on the (anticipated) consequences of their actions. This applies regardless of subject matter: human beings have different possible courses of action, but they do not behave in fundamentally different ways when solving social and political problems than when dealing with economic or legal tasks. Economics as a method and economics as a subject matter of economic science are two different things.28

Separating economics as an explanatory approach from its subject matter has successfully demonstrated that the economic method can be used to examine many subject matters that had previously been lionized by other social sciences. Now, economics is in a position to ask how social order comes about, what makes a good society, or how human beings can be happy, and to offer concrete answers to these questions. The explanatory approaches and premises of economics can not only be applied to economy, law and politics, but also to religion, the arts, morals, the environment, education and health. This expansion of economics to ‘unorthodox’ subject matters has gradually caused economics to take into account the findings of other disciplines and to even adopt some of their methods (e.g., in the field of neuroeconomics). (iv) Bounded rationality: Another new approach that has found widespread acceptance in the field of economics and contributed to the skepticism toward the homo oeconomicus model is the ‘bounded rationality’ approach.29 This explanatory model for human behavior assumes that the rationality of economic agents is limited. It has brought awareness to the fact that it is not practicable to base the modeling of decision-making situations on the assumption that

Smith and political economics influenced by Marxism, civil economics was focused on the analysis of economy as a subsystem of society. In contrast, the last decades of the 20th century have shown that economic models can be developed for almost all societal subsystems. The three economists and Nobel Prize winners (1991) James M. Buchanan, Ronald Coase and Gary S. Becker are considered to be the pioneers of this development. 28 Kirchgässner 22000, 2 (transl. M.S.). 29 See Selten 1990.

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all potential courses of action are transparent to the agent and can thus be calculated in a rational manner. For example, interaction situations can be affected by asymmetrical levels of information, lack of time, or unforeseeable interferences from third parties. In those cases, the given situation no longer represents a reasonable decisionmaking basis for the subject. Therefore, it is more appropriate to assume a priori that the ability of human beings to gain information and to rationally define their behavioral options is limited. Accordingly, it often happens in human behavior that decisions must be made under conditions of uncertainty. Uncertainty prevents the individual from making a precise calculation of all courses of action. For this reason, the ‘bounded rationality’ approach offers a detailed analysis of a different type of decision-making rationality: the rationality of decisions made in uncertainty and guided by heuristic rules. For example, human beings are guided by heuristic rules when they select a behavioral option that they already know from the previous experience in a similar situation, or one that is tied to a personally significant event or person.30 As contextual conditions, such decisive factors must be taken into account in the modeling of human behavior. (v) Experimental modeling of social interaction: The most significant methodological step for questioning traditional economic approaches is the application and examination of the classical models of game theory through behavioral experiments. Game theory attempts to apply the economic stereotype of a rational agent to types of situations in which two or more individuals interact with each other. It exclusively focuses on the strategic rationality of the involved agents and represents their decision-making behavior in so-called game trees (mathematical graphs). The empirical examination of game-theoretical analyses in the context of experimental economics has made it possible to prove or disprove the purely theoretical rationality parameters of game theory with empirical data. In addition, experimental economics has succeeded in developing new experimental paradigms for gametheoretical rationality31 that can help to model modes of behavior that had previously been considered irrational and questionable from an economic standpoint. However, this development also represented the 30

See Tversky and Kahnemann 1974. “Behavioral game theory extends rationality rather than abondoning it.” (Camerer 2003, 24). Also see the summarizing paragraph on the further development of the analytical models of game theory in experimental behavioral studies: ibid., 465–476. 31

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first step toward the emancipation of experimental economics from the rationality models of game theory. The remaining link between game theory and experimental economics is the notion that the analysis of social interaction must always start with individuals and their decisions (the premise of methodological individualism). The recent economic approaches outlined here represent a new development that leads away from economics exclusively guided by principles and toward economics guided by empirical science. These approaches have helped bring about the shift toward transdisciplinary forms of knowledge in experimental economics. The synthetic research approach of neuroeconomics in particular is therefore not a surprising new invention, but can be described as the consequent continuation of a tendency that has been developing within economics for some time. Besides the economic background of experimental studies, it is necessary to discuss the claim that they offer empirical explanations [Realerklärungen]. The following section will approach this topic from the perspective of philosophy of science, which will also serve to reveal the constructedness of experimental methodology. 14

The Methodology of Experimental Economics

Experimental economics32 examines the social behavior of human beings in laboratory and field experiments. Much like the natural experiment in physics, these experiments are based on methods of examination and observation that serve to gather empirically backed knowledge about a hypothesis. In the case of experimental economics, the hypothesis to be examined is that human beings display a behavioral pattern that is unique in the animal kingdom, the pattern of ‘strong reciprocity’ or ‘altruism.’ Due to the excellent manageability of its methodology, the field of experimental economics has recently been of interest to many disciplines of empirical social research and in some instances also works

32 In the economic sciences, the term ‘economics’ does not designate a particular object such as the economy or the market, but a specific explanatory approach that can be applied to a wide variety of study objects. Thus, there can be an economics of racial segregation, an economics of crime, or even an economics of brushing one’s teeth. The explanatory approach of economics is characterized by the fact that it views human behavior as a decision-making behavior under the conditions of scarcity (see Voigt 2002, 26).

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in close cooperation with them. Important cooperating disciplines include social neuroscience, psychobiology, evolutionary anthropology, developmental psychology, and primatology. These disciplines make use of the methodological paradigms of experimental economics and apply them to new lines of inquiry or research practices. This demonstrates the crossdisciplinary utility of an experimentally verifiable explanatory approach for human social behavior.33 In contrast, experimental economics is viewed rather critically in those disciplines that are concerned with the normative theories of justice, fairness, altruism, and sociality.34 Far more positive points of contact can be found between the theories of ethical naturalism, which strive to establish a socio-biological rationale for human morality, and the neuroscience of morality, which investigates the significance of neuroscientific findings for the ethical self-understanding of human beings. The following passages will develop a perspective on the studies of experimental economics that a) does not need to fall back on normative or naturalistic theoretical horizons and b) also distinguishes itself from the way the empirical disciplines deal with experimental economics. Unlike social research, which simply adopts and applies the paradigms of experimental economics, this study aims to unfold an independent reconstruction and critical analysis of behavioral experiments and their knowledge claims from the perspective of philosophy of science and, in a second step, to evaluate the economic modeling of human sociality. This study begins with reconstruction because it can make a more well-founded and justified critical analysis of the findings of economics after examining the formation of experimental modelings in detail. Hence, this study is at no point interested in merely presenting the results of empirical research, but always intent on examining and confronting the methodological premises and conceptual hypotheses of this research. Another goal of methodologically reconstructing behavioral-scientific research is to render transparent the constructedness and method-dependence present in a behavioralscientific description of human beings; for only the evidence of the

33 The interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary connectivity of experimental economics is well-documented by the two publications “Moral Sentiments and Material Interests” (Gintis et al. 2005) and “Foundations of Human Sociality” (Henrich et al. 2004). 34 See particularly the articles in the journal “Analyse & Kritik,” Number 27/1 (2005) on the topic of “Ernst Fehr on Human Altruism: An Interdisciplinary Debate.”

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constructive character of empirical research work justifies interpreting experimental modelings as perspectival, location-bound representations of human beings, and exposing them to dialogue with other description perspectives instead of considering their naturalist foundation. 14.1

Translatability of Laboratory and Experiential World

Experimental economics claims that it can explain the biological and behavioral foundations of human social behavior with the help of scientifically verified methods. It assumes that there is a correlation between the social behavior of human beings studied in the behavioral laboratory and their actual, real social behavior. But from the perspective of scientific methodology, such a real-scientific explanatory claim is quite astonishing. After all, the economic experimental studies do not study physical objects or natural occurrences, but human behavior. Thus, their subject matter is entirely different from the study objects of the classic natural experiments in physics. This difference between natural and human experiments could be a problem in interdisciplinary studies, mainly because experimental economics bases its validity claim on the notion that the reliability and precision of research findings from human experiments is comparable to those from a standardized natural experiment. This notion is also the basis for their methodological advantage and the innovation present in its empirical description of human sociality. However, such a validity claim can by no means be taken for granted. Rather, it requires justification from the perspective of philosophy of science. The following passages will investigate whether such a justification is possible. 14.1.1

Empirical Explanation and Methodological Object Constitution in Experiments Like any other discipline, the field of experimental sciences requires verbal communication to present and interpret its findings. However, its knowledge gain can never be reduced to just its verbal dimension. It is crucially based on a technical knowledge of action and effect as can be gained from experiments. As a means for verifying hypotheses, experiments are only valid if their findings are reliable and repeatable. Repeatability means that it must be possible to reproduce the experimental setting and its apparatuses independent of a concrete implementation of the experiment, and that it is possible to conduct the

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experiment again, producing the same result. Due to this stipulation of reproducibility, the constitution of a study object in experiments must be completely controllable and independent from subjective factors of influence. This can be achieved most easily by using technical methods of representation and measuring. These methods make it possible to constitute a study object in an objective and observer-independent manner. However, from the perspective of natural-scientific research, the natural characteristics of a study object and their generalizability determine whether the study object can be considered to be explained under real conditions by experimental modeling. For example, while it is easy to observe the laws of gravity under real conditions, the same cannot be said of the laws of human social behavior, or at least so it would appear. Therefore, Peter Janich’s “Kleine Philosophie der Naturwissenschaften” states regarding the limits of experimentation with human beings: The experimental sciences have become the model for a type of experience that guarantees the highest degree of reliability. However, it must not be overlooked that this reliability is only achieved in the field of technical reproducibility; in contrast, when it comes to something like (cultural) historical processes, or economic decisions for that matter, this reproducibility cannot simply be assumed or produced: a human being, for example, who has memories and can reflect on his or her experiences, cannot, strictly speaking, step into the same situation twice.35

Peter Janich’s statement is based on the notion that human beings are creatures whose existence is embedded in historical and cultural forms of life and whose individual perception of a certain situation can never be repeated in a standardized manner. Thus, Janich asserts that human beings with their natural experiential horizon are incapable of experiencing a situation several times in exactly the same way. In human experiments, however, scientists examine their test subjects as if they could be induced to undergo the same experiences over and over again simply by controlling the external situational conditions. This practice fails to take into account that the artificially created laboratory setting is not identical to the type of situation that the test subjects associate with the situation of the experiment in their experiential horizon. Human beings can even relate individual experiences and memories

35

Janich 1997, 104 (emphasis in the original; transl. M.S.).

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to a situation without being fully aware of it. Therefore, total control over their experiential horizon cannot be ensured even by interviewing the test subjects after the experiment. In the face of this fact, it is questionable whether experimental economics comes any closer to its goal of explaining the ‘real social life’ of human beings by using the experimental methods and technical instruments of the natural sciences. Indeed, it is much more likely that the rigorous focus on natural-scientific object study and its concept of empirical explanation will again produce problems like the unilateral trust in theories formed on the basis of unproven assumptions in economics. The use of human experiments and the creation of an empirical anthropology as the basis of economic model formation will not automatically solve the problem of economic theories that are out of touch with reality. Indubitably, experiments are an important methodological instrument to gain valid knowledge in the natural sciences. But the experimental knowledge gain alone does not yet guarantee knowledge that is more suitable for human life than the formation of models on the basis of unverified premises. Thus, from the perspective of philosophy of science, it is problematic to make human beings with their biographical experiences the objects of methodologically exact experimental studies. Accepting the fact that this, indeed, is precisely what experimental economics is doing, this study will investigate what exactly is studied in experimental studies, if it is not human beings with individual experiential horizons. In other words, it is necessary to ask what is actually constituted as the object in an experimental modeling of interactional processes. Such a line of inquiry represents a form of science criticism. In addition, it offers a point of entry to ask about the practical consequences of experimenting with human beings beyond the goal of constituting a strictly methodological object. For example, previously conducted successful neurobiological experiments have made it possible to systematically reproduce the material basis of human perceptual and experimental structures through stimulating areas of the brain or administering hormonal substances. Thus, neuroscientific experimenting is establishing a technical basis for artificially creating the physiological conditions of human experience. It is difficult, however, to gauge the far-reaching consequences of making human experiences available through technology in the interest of reproducibility.

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14.1.2

The Validity of Experimental Findings Outside of the Laboratory It is part of the self-concept of experimental economics that experimenting creates access to something like an objective reality independent from subjective experiential attitudes. The claim that the experimental method can use available technical testing methods to provide knowledge that is independent from every human point of view also has consequences for the discussion about the validity of experimental findings outside of the laboratory. Thus, it is necessary to ask how valuable an empirical explanation that is valid in laboratory conditions can be for understanding human social behavior outside the laboratory. Methodological discussion within the field of experimental economics is mainly concerned with this last problem.36 Unlike science theory, which delves into how the validity claims of scientific methods can be justified and critically limited, experimental economics inquires into the significance of its experimental findings for the prediction of actual human behavior and asks how they can be applied to the ‘real world.’ Thus, it views the issue of translatability between the laboratory and the real world not in terms of the clarification and limitation of its validity claim (philosophy of science), but in terms of finding a pragmatic approach that ensures the applicability of its study findings under real conditions outside of the laboratory. Thus, experimental economics tends to reflect on the limits of its own methods only when it seems appropriate to use a control method or other supplementary methods. By forming analogies between the laboratory and the experiential world, it aims to find ways of increasing the significance of its experimental findings. Experimental economics employs two main strategies for increasing the real-world significance of its findings: (i) External validation of laboratory evidence: Experimental economics defuses critical inquiries into its own methodological design by pointing out the limited nature of all individual scientific methods and instruments, and emphasizes that the findings of laboratory experiments must necessarily be complemented by field experiments. The possibility of an external validation of experimental laboratory findings is thus discussed under the label of ‘external validity issues.’37

36 37

See Güth and Kliemt 2003; Levitt and List 2006. See Guala 2005, 141–160.242–248.

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For example, in order to externally validate behavioral experiments that only included test subjects from Western countries, researchers conducted ethnographical field experiments with fifteen small-scale societies from different parts of the world.38 By and large, these field experiments have verified the results of laboratory experiments, but they also revealed cultural differences that could not have been modeled in the laboratory.39 Thus, it can be observed that the transfer of experimental laboratory settings into the field represents a supplementary research strategy that serves to expand the validity of the explanations for behavior found in the laboratory, but not to critically evaluate the experimental method per se. In addition, the direct transformation of laboratory experiments into field experiments represents a first step toward the practical implementation of laboratory reality in the everyday experiential world, which is not as harmless as it may seem at first glance. Experiences with field experiments have shown that they yield empirically significant results mainly when the behavioral setting selected by the experimenters, such as the laboratory, is marked by very clear and unambiguous characteristics that can be maintained throughout the duration of the experiment. This is most likely the case in the lifeworld of ‘primitive’ small-scale societies because they are situated in a very isolated living environment far away from big cities and because their way of life is still far removed from the complexity and pluralism of modern civilization. Thus, the supplementation of laboratory experiments with field experiments is a first step toward taking standardized types of behavior observed in the laboratory and applying them in the lifeworld of human beings. (ii) Phenomenological situational similarity in the laboratory: A second strategy to increase the significance of experimental findings is establishing situational similarity between the laboratory and the ‘real world.’ This is a non-empirical approach which nevertheless can contribute to increasing the plausibility of experimental findings. Unlike the transfer from laboratory to field, the experimental situation here

38 The results of these field experiments with fifteen small-scale societies (among them the Machiguenga, Mapuche, Tsimane, Ache, Achuar and Quichua from South America; the Orma, Hadza, Sangu and Shona from Africa; the Torguad and Khazax from Central Asia and the Lamalera, Au and Gnau from Southeast Asia) are summarized in the essay collection Henrich et al. 2004. 39 See ibid., 8–54.

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is not reproduced in the ‘real world’ to construct correspondence to identical paradigms (laws of behavior). Instead, the researchers attempt to bring a portion of ‘real-world’ complexity into the laboratory and establish a correspondence to the level of perceived situational similarity on the part of the test subjects. This implies a research strategy that aims to ensure not only the external control of behavior but also the transferability of the laboratory situation to the experiential world of the test subjects. This strategy is based on the psychological assumption that human beings always go into laboratory situations with the expectation that things will be similar to the situation outside the laboratory. Thus, there will be certain recognition effects that, if systematically modeled, can increase the naturalness of behavior. However, creating situational similarity is only rarely done systematically in economic behavioral experiments conducted without the participation of psychologists. For this reason, economists Werner Güth and Hartmut Kliemt, in their critical assessment of pure data generation in economic behavioral experiments, advocate an epistemological-critical differentiation between the explanans (a law of behavior) and the explanandum (real behavior) of a study.40 Regarding the modelings of experimental economics, they have suggested41 responding to the question of whether laboratory findings are able to be translated to the experiential world by reversing the direction of the question. Instead of only asking about the relevance of laboratory findings for the real world, the goal should be to find ways to transfer the experiential world of human beings into the laboratory. Güth and Kliemt propose to create so-called ‘thick’ experiments which provide “descriptions of the experimental situation” that “test subjects are familiar with.”42 In their opinion, experiments have a mostly heuristic value: they help determine exactly what can be explained with a theoretical model and do not represent a justified explanatory approach as such. In conclusion, the approaches of experimental economics can be assessed as follows: the first approach, externally validating experi-

40 In concrete terms, Güth and Kliemt 2003, 27, propose to aim for a description of the experimental situation that seems familiar to the subjects and to use the advantage of situational similarity to better determine the subjects’ real motivation. 41 See ibid. 42 Ibid., 28. (transl. M.S.).

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mental findings though field studies, ignores the problems that come with a purely methodological object constitution. It runs the risk of merely testing the ‘feasibility’ of an experimental method paradigm under ‘real-world’ conditions. In contrast, the second approach presents the possibility of including the test subjects’ self-understanding in the methodological constitution of their behavior. Unfortunately, this proposal for creating lifelike situations in the laboratory is not widely implemented. Although researchers are aware that a laboratory setting should display a lifelike situational shape, this intuition is not realized systematically and purposefully in the experimental design. Instead, it proves its helpfulness underhandedly, in the creative phase of experimental design, modelling a behavioral setting in a way that enables the desired interaction between test subjects in actu. However, the testing of various modelings during the pilot phase of a behavioral experiment does not include an actual phenomenological situational analysis that would take into account the test subjects’ impressions and attitudes. 14.2

Construction Principles of Economic Laboratory Experiments

For further orientation, it is useful to delineate and represent the construction principles of economic laboratory experiments as precisely as possible. It has already been demonstrated that the conduct of behavioral experiments with human beings in the laboratory does not take into account the individual self-perception of the test subjects. This means that laboratory experiments do not start their investigation with the ‘position’ of the study object in life, but with the controlled production and realization of the study object’s constitutional conditions. Here, the experimental study aims to overcome the blurriness and complexity of the object’s pre-scientific or science-external actuality and to establish methodological reliability. We have already seen that the claim of gaining verified knowledge in a laboratory experiment requires a reproducible form of knowledge gain. Such a form of knowledge gain can be achieved by establishing a methodological order of experimental actions. By establishing a methodologically ordered sequence of actions, it becomes possible to make technical measurements and controlled observations of the study object and to expand them into empirical facts through statistical evaluation. However, the evaluation of laboratory measurements is not only used for gathering data, but also for producing evidence. Empirical

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‘evidence’ relates back to theoretical assumptions, i.e., it provides information about whether the presented laboratory measurements prove or disprove a hypothesis.43 Therefore, modeling evidence in an experiment relies on the concretization of theoretical models in hypotheses. Hypotheses show how and to what extent a model should be valid for empiricism.44 In economic behavioral experiments, the hypotheses for examining empiricism are almost always derived from the models of game-theoretical rationality. To what extent game theory already determines the experiment in its design phase and during the preparation of the behavioral setting in the laboratory will be discussed later. First, however, the constructive and action-pragmatic aspect of experimenting will be examined in more detail. 14.2.1 The Experiment as a Strategic Course of Action Experimenting can be viewed as a sequence of actions that follows clearly defined principles of construction. This has been shown, for example, in the context of the approach of methodological culturalism in philosophy of science, which views experiments as a pragmaticoperational construction of reality.45 According to methodological culturalism, experimental actions are intended to create pragmatically accessible conditions for legitimizing certain explanatory approaches. This methodological categorization of experiments will be briefly outlined with regard to the behavioral experiment. A behavioral experiment can be classified as

43

See Guala 2005, 40. See ibid., 220. 45 By referring to scientific practices of knowledge gain, such as the experiment, as pragmatic-operational constructions, this study follows the approach of methodological culturalism in philosophy of science, which traces the possibilities and limits of knowledge formation in the natural and technical sciences through a methodological reconstruction of their formation context. The central insight of methodological culturalism is that every natural-scientific experience and object constitution is dependent on a technical (not a verbal ) foundation of observing, measuring and experimenting. Based on this insight, culturalism criticizes the fixation on language in lingualistic science theories in the tradition of Logical Empiricism (Rudolf Carnap) and Critical Rationalism (Karl Popper). These are accused of not being able to question scientific paradigms and validity claims in an epistemological-critical way due to their own ‘obliviousness to the object.’ See the following publications: Janich 1996; Hartmann and Janich 1996; Hartmann and Janich 1998; Weingarten 1998; Janich and Weingarten 1999; Janich 2000; Janich 2006. 44

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(i)

a pragmatic construction, because it is based on the practical implementation of an action sequence in which the experimenter uses certain technological means (medical devices, computers, scanners) in an instrumental-rational manner. For example, in order to test the influence of hormones on behavior, hormones must be injected into the test subjects’ bloodstream with an administration device in the laboratory. (ii) an operational construction, because it is dependent on technical methods to constitute its object in the first place. For example, unrestricted communication among the test subjects in the laboratory is not permitted. Instead, it is reduced to standardized message options that appear on the computer screen. (iii) a social construction, because it emerges from the communal knowledge-gaining efforts of researchers in which the standardized action sequences and knowledge patterns must be reconciled with each other. This is demonstrated with particular clarity by the fact that planning and implementing a behavioral experiment requires coordinated cooperation with other researchers and cannot be completed alone in the first place. 14.2.2 The Experiment as Selective Replication of Reality The pragmatic operationalization of objects within a methodological order only represents one aspect of the methodology of behavioral experiments. This constructive aspect runs the risk of being misunderstood if it is not complemented with the aspect of reality replication. This second aspect of experimenting can be clarified by distinguishing between the behavioral experiment and the simulation.46 In a simulation, the implications of a model can be replicated and analyzed in an artificial system environment (e.g., a flight simulator, a computer program, a city planning model etc.). A simulation process starts by abstracting a model in terms of the applied representation mode (e.g. at the computer), and then its functionality is optimized by modifying or adjusting individual parameters (characteristics). For example, computer-based simulation of neural networks is used to analyze the

46 Guala 2005, 239, also differentiates between the material examination of an independent variable’s influence on a dependent variable (experiment) and the formal examination of a theorem under the complete implementation of all of its assumptions in an artificial system modeling (simulation or theoretical demonstration). Also see ibid., 214.

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biochemical exchange of information between neurons. In a simulation, the exchange of information between two neurons is modeled with the help of threshold functions whose parameters are adjusted so that the model can be optimized. Such an abstracting method demonstrates that the simulation models its object in a theoretical and not an empirical manner. Although behavioral experiments also realize an object’s constitutive conditions along the lines of abstract construction principles, empirical modeling differs markedly in at least one respect from the formal optimization of a selected model aspect in a simulation: the simulation models its objects in an abstract system environment and therefore can not be ‘interfered with’ by real interaction processes in the laboratory or field. In contrast, the conduct of an experiment is precisely about developing a methodological order in which the natural individual behavior of an object (its empirical resistance) still has its place without causing the methodological order to break down. A modeling of interaction processes in behavioral experiments only makes sense if the human agents have alternative behavioral options within the respective behavioral setting and if their choice is not guided by experimenters but occurs freely and based on their own motivation. Thus, behavioral experiments with human beings presuppose a natural individual activity of the study object, and it is precisely this individual activity that is experimented with. But how does this relate to individual activity if we take into account that the laboratory experiment was originally developed to observe determining causal processes? In physics, the experiment is a methodological instrument to determine cause-and-effect relationships between an independent and a dependent constant. At the same time, however, it systematically utilizes natural laws in the context of cultural purposive actions; for it is only through experimental modeling that natural events and physical processes can be subjected to external control and consequently produced and reproduced under artificial conditions. Many technical achievements, such as the steam locomotive or the automobile, took a detour, undergoing such experimental modeling of natural cause-and-effect relationships before becoming practical action-based knowledge that is available to human beings, independent of natural development. In terms of its practical dimension, every experimental action takes the form of a serviceable construction in which ‘nature’ enters into the dominion of human actions and thus can be made useful for human

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beings. There are two crucial methodological consequences of this knowledge: (i) in experimentally examined processes, the only aspects that can be explained causally are those that can be realized as a causeand-effect relationship between two constants purposively obeying a rule of action, and (ii) the only acknowledged experimental realization of the cause-and-effect relationship is one that can produce the effects by modifying or manipulating exactly one independent constant. In order to study the effect of independent determining factors on a constant of the study object, laboratory experiments make use of so-called ceteris paribus observations. This means that during experimental action, only one individual independent determining factor is varied or manipulated at a time while all other factors are excluded or kept unchanged and constant. The correlation between an independent and a dependent variable of the study object is considered causal if modification of the independent variable has a direct effect on modification of the dependent variable. In order to prove such a direct effect on the study object, experimenters must make sure that the causal effect is indeed a true causal effect that has not been adulterated by uncontrolled determining factors. The ceteris paribus observation thus serves to explain an effect on the study object in its monocausal determinedness. Another strategy of observation is modeling a baseline observation by including a control group in the design of the behavioral experiment. For this purpose, the test subjects are divided into two groups before the experiment, one without manipulation of the independent determining factor (placebo) and one with manipulation of the independent determining factor (treatment). The assignment of the test subjects into the placebo or treatment groups is randomized. This means that there is no pre-selection of test subjects according to specific principles. If a significant difference can be proven between the placebo and the treatment group, the effect of the determining factor is considered verified. Thus, one basic condition for the exclusion of uncontrolled determining factors is a modeling of an experimental setup in the laboratory that is as close to perfect as possible. In that case, the results and findings of the experiment can claim undoubted validity only in the context of this specific methodological order.47 This means that

47

See Janich 1997, 116.

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experimental studies can only ever derive knowledge of the type ‘under the condition xi, xii, xiii . . . xn, y applies’ on a regionally limited level. But individual pieces of knowledge can be combined or successively generalized and expanded with methods of external validation. How, then, can these general insights into the construction principles of experiments be transferred to modeling behavioral experiments? The behavioral setting for the test subjects in the laboratory is mainly determined by the fact that their behavioral options are systematically limited. ‘Limited’ in this context means that the material and communicative conditions for specific interaction processes between the test subjects have been exactly defined and predetermined. Thus, the economic behavioral experiment relies on the creation of a specific type of situation. At the beginning of the experiment, the test subjects are given a description of, or directions for, the situation type48 providing information about the process and the respective behavioral options of the interaction. They are also given a questionnaire with control questions meant to determine whether the test subjects understand the course of action in the experiment. Revealing the experimental method prevents an unclear or unequal level of information between the test subjects from becoming a determining factor in the interaction. Additionally, a behavioral laboratory setting makes it possible to create clearly defined interaction conditions under which the participants are only provided with those options of decision-making and behavior that can be monitored through observation techniques. This is also the reason why there is no free or uncontrolled communication between the test subjects in the laboratory. At the beginning of the experiment, the test subjects are reminded that communication is strictly prohibited during the entire course of the experiment. The information exchange between test subjects necessary for carrying out the experiment always occurs through messages from the experimenter on a computer screen. It is critical for experimental economics’ claim to be able to model human sociality that their experiments model human behavior as 48 Game instructions given to the test subjects are an adjustment of the abstract game description in game theory. But the abstract game description is an important point of reference for all descriptive game instructions, because it serves to prevent possible so-called ‘framing effects’ caused by descriptive variance. In his study of framing effects in public-goods experiments Andreoni 1995 shows that there is a significant difference between the behavior of persons who are prompted to donate for their own benefit and the behavior of persons who are prompted to donate out of selflessness.

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an individual decision-making behavior related to a system of rules and behavior limitations defined by the experimenter. The rules for interactions between test subjects are developed externally, and their abidance is controlled throughout the course of the game. The preformulated rules determine who has to make what kind of decision at what point in the course of the experiment, and what options the other players have in their response. Since the test subjects know about this standardization of their behavior beforehand, their behavior can be referred to as rule-guided decision-making behavior. That means that all the test subjects’ decisions and reactions49 observed in the laboratory are made in relation to formal institutions. 14.2.3

Game Theory and Hypothesis Formation in the Behavioral Experiment Finally, the game-theoretical background of economic laboratory experiments will be examined more closely. At this point, additional information about game theory is needed to clarify the hypotheses guiding the preparation of a laboratory experiment, and determining the subsequent interpretation of the gathered evidence. Economic game theory is a mathematical instrument for analyzing strategic interaction situations. A first descriptive summary was provided by John von Neumann and Oscar Morgenstern in 1944.50 The goal of game theory is to analyze and optimize the decision-making behavior of several individuals in the model of a game situation. It considers the communal game and its rules to be the basic ordering structure of the social world. However, the types of situation that economic game theory considers are different from the role of games in everyday life, sometimes considerably so. The scenarios of game theory are mainly modeled on gambling and parlor games, and thus are characterized by a competitive situation. They are about ultimately winning the game by employing a successful game strategy. Therefore, game theory considers games entirely in terms of their functional rationality. Because of this focus on functional rationality, economic game theory

49 In the case of neuroeconomics, whose object it is to examine the biological determinedness of decisions, it is more appropriate to speak of behavioral reactions instead of free decisions of the economic subjects. 50 The second edition of “Theory of Games and Economic Behavior” is considered seminal in this context because it makes some decisive corrections (Neumann and Morgenstern 21947).

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completely zeroes in on the strategic character of games while ignoring their ‘playful,’ ‘flippant’ and ‘extra-ordinary’ aspects; put briefly, those aspects of the game that are the basis of its special position in the sphere of everyday life, compared to other social activities.51 Game theory operates on the premise that human sociality is best described as a rule-guided interaction. A rule-guided interaction is defined as an ordered sequence of individual strategic decisions in a game.52 According to game theory, it is very important for the analysis of these individual decisions that the players be capable of adjusting their behavior in response to the behavior of others. Thus, players are not only aware of their own game strategies, but also of other players’ strategies, which they accordingly can make use of if benefitial to them. Unlike rational decision-making theory,53 game theory takes into account that social individuals do not make their decisions in isolation, but in relation to a social environment in which other individuals also make decisions, and that it is therefore useful to include these decisions into one’s own decision-making process. However, game theory does not describe social togetherness with others as a phenomenological structure that connects human beings on a pre-reflexive or expressive-corporeal level. Thus, game theory does not describe something like the primary interpersonal relation of the social encounter examined in the first chapter. Instead, it attempts to explain social togetherness as an extension of the rational decision-making behavior of individuals with specific previous knowledge, namely, previous knowledge about the decisions of others. Even though game theory assumes that the result of a decision in an interaction is always dependent on the decisions of others, or rather must be coordinated with them, its modeling of sociality nevertheless fails to include the entire sphere of interaction with other human beings on

51

In his cultural-anthropological study “Homo Ludens” (Huizinga 1970), Dutch historian Johan Huizinga describes the playful or immaterial aspect of the game as its cultural factor. In this way, he decidedly separates the cultural appearance of the game from the so-called biological theory of the game and criticizes the reduction of the game to its biological utility as insufficient. 52 See Goffman 1959, 15, who describes the sociological idea of interaction as “the reciprocal influence of individuals upon one another’s actions.” However, precisely this idea of reciprocity and interpersonal intersubjectivity is absent from the theoretical horizon of economics that is focused on the individual. 53 Rational decision-making theory only represents individual or collective decisions in situations that emerge independently of one’s own behavior in this situation (nature as imagined opponent).

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an emotional and pre-reflexive-corporeal level. It ignores the fact that, aside from the consequences of decisions, the relationships between the players, their mutual behavioral expectations, and perceptions influence the course of the game. This is all the more bewildering when it is taken into account that, when closely examined, even strategic interaction must transcend the consequentialist calculation of one’s own and others’ game success. Every consequentialist calculation first requires an interpretive clarification of the other players’ intentions and behavioral goals to estimate their potential behavior in the game. In the course of this chapter, it will be demonstrated that it is precisely these basic insights into the hermeneutics and phenomenology of human interaction that economics strives to (re)gain by synthesizing its methods with those of neurobiology. In contrast, game theory, which is the primary orientation model of economics, operates on the premise of unconnected individuals who, although they do not think and act in isolation in rational decision-making theory, are nevertheless always seen as singular entities whose ordered interaction must first be realized by mediation through formal institutions (the rules of the game). Thus, the construction of sociality in game theory is very similar to the methodological individualism in contractualist theories of society. It is characteristic of the methodological individualism of game theory to interpret an individual’s decision-making behavior in interactions in terms of its objective utility and target function. This means that it develops a supra-individual model of decision-making that organizes all decisions according to the same rationality principle: the principle of utility maximization. For example, the maximin rule is considered to be a good decision-making rule according to the principle of utility maximization under conditions of uncertainty. The maximin rule states that when individuals are presented with several behavioral options, they should always choose the one that helps them maximize the lowest possible benefit they can gain from this decision in comparison with all other behavioral options. Thus, game theory defines a rational decision in terms of utility maximization as an individual’s behavior that is geared to maximize the individual’s benefits under the given circumstances. In order to apply this model of rational decision-making to concrete situations, it is now necessary to define not only the principles of decision-making, but also the concrete goals of the individual. Game theory accomplishes this by assuming that individuals strive to maximize their benefits in relation to a preferential order. The preferential

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order states how individuals evaluate objectively measurable good or categories of goods. Thus, it provides information about an agent’s objective goals of action and their priorities. For example, if individuals who are scientists at a university have a preference for becoming rich and famous as quickly as possible, they will see the only benefit of an academic exchange with other researchers in co-publishing as many papers as possible in prestigious academic journals. In contrast, if they have a preference for attaining social recognition and acknowledgement within a research group, they will see the benefit of interacting with other researchers in collaborating on projects with them, which will not necessarily only manifest itself in publications and measurable results. Accordingly, the benefits of an interaction can be determined quite differently depending on an individual’s assumed preferential order. Game theory accounts for this fact by viewing the question of what is beneficial about an interaction in a strictly formal manner. It represents the consequence of every possible game decision in a mathematical utility function, and formalizes the result on the basis of the probable outcome of the game. However, it is important to realize that these utility functions are merely mathematical representations of preferential orders and thus do not ‘measure’ benefits as such. This means that they first need to be applied to calculate the real consequences of a decision. The introduction of objective preferential orders ensures the interpersonal comparability of game strategies, even in the face of entirely divergent subjective attitudes and utility expectations. In order to do the same for the analysis of the game outcome, the target functions of individual strategies are indicated by numbers, which means that the consequences related to the players’ decisions can be presented in the form of a ‘payoff matrix.’54 This matrix gives a numerical representation of a game strategy’s success. To determine the optimal result of a decision, a payment matrix takes into account the strategies of all participating players, because the result of an interaction is considered to be the result of the combination of strategies of all players. In

54 The term ‘payoff matrix’ may lead to the assumption that game theory does not differentiate between utility/benefits and payoff/profits. However, this is not the case. In economic theory, the actual goal of human actions is not the maximization of monetary profit, but the maximization of the value-related benefits of a transaction. The distinction between payoff/profit and utility/benefits expresses that human beings are not exclusively materialistic creatures (see Kirchgässner 22000, 15–16).

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order to represent the course of an interaction, all imaginable possible behavioral strategies of the players are put into sequence and summarized in one single payoff matrix (a vector graph or game tree). Here, classical game theory models behavior entirely in terms of possible equilibriums of strategic interaction, i.e., it assumes that the players coordinate their strategies until they have reached a stable symmetrical equilibrium. Simply put, the premise here is that a strategic interaction will only produce a stable coordination of actions once none of the players can derive any more benefit from changing their strategy again (nash equilibrium). Now, the crucial question is how experimental economics connects with game theory. It is clear that it uses game theory to gain hypotheses for its experimental approach, thereby attempting to translate the analytical models of game theory into an experimental design. It does so by turning game theory’s predictions about optimal decisionmaking processes into empirical hypotheses and applying them to interactional situations. This means that economic theory transforms abstract model situations into methods of decision-making under real conditions. Its goal is to examine whether the payoff functions proposed by game theory as ideal types can be proved or disproved in empirically observable behavioral reactions. In economic behavioral experiments, the interaction between two or more test subjects is always modeled as a monetary transaction. In this transaction, a (material) good is transferred back and forth between the test subjects. Here, economics works on the premise that every transaction takes places with reference to rules of reciprocity and fairness. The enforcement of these rules, however, is not monitored and they therefore have an informal status, unlike the rules of a game. A transaction can occur between two to n individual players who meet once (anonymous interaction), between two or more so-called ‘faceless strangers’ (interaction between strangers), between two or more real players and a computer simulation (impersonal interaction), or between two or more partners who meet repeatedly (repeated interaction). However, the main characteristic of experimental modeling of interactions in economics is the economic assumption that a transaction only represents a real situation for the test subjects if a decision for or against the transfer of a good has material consequences. Therefore, the basis of every economic modeling of decision-making behavior is the so-called ‘assumption of false consciousness’:

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chapter two We like to think of ourselves as nice, caring, altruistic beings, but then when put in the appropriate circumstances (when money is at stake), we just cannot help but act as the cynical agents postulated by economic models.55

Based on the assumption that human behavior can ultimately only be explained through material incentive structures, economic laboratory experiments always model social interactions as monetary transactions. This is also the reason why economists only work with empirical instruments that enable them to combine the expenses and consequences of a decision with material costs for the agent (‘costly behavior’). This method is accompanied by a very pejorative attitude toward language (‘Talk is cheap!’) that causes economists to evaluate the verbally articulated attitudes, intentions, and self-assessments of the test subjects as unrealistic. Accordingly, experimental economists claim that their studies, in contrast to those of other social scientists, replicate not the agents’ subjective attitudes or avowed volition, but their revealed preferences.56 Moreover, the modeling of transactions with monetary consequences in economical experimental studies has the side effect of making it possible for the consequences of all dimensions of behavior to be quantitatively examined and represented. Therefore, the result of economic modeling is always a mathematical construct of human behavior that is created with exact scientific methods. In the evaluation of its behavioral experiments, experimental economics makes a connection between the types of situation (games) and the observed behavioral patterns of the test subjects. For example, typical social behavioral patterns can be reciprocal, altruistic, or egoistic, giving and taking in an interaction. Experimental studies examine whether these behavioral patterns can all be modeled in a specific game situation (trust game, ultimatum game, dictator game etc.). In contrast, neuroeconomic experiments go one step further by establishing correlations between the observed behavioral patterns and the neurophysiological experiential structures of an individual. These experiments investigate whether behavioral patterns are dependent on neural activations in the test subjects’ brains. Thus, unlike experimen-

55

Guala 2005, 241. This attitude once more demonstrates the strong distancing of economic social research from its sociological and socio-psychological equivalents, which assign some truth value to surveys and interview studies, and thus to the test subjects’ self-related statements. 56

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tal economics, neuroeconomics examines not only the institutional and social, but also the biological conditions of behavior. 15

The Modeling of Social Preferences

The last section demonstrated that economic game and decisionmaking theory presents the social togetherness of human beings as the coordination of their rational benefit calculations. If these benefit calculations are to be made empirically concrete, statements must be made about which of the agents’ preferences determine what will count as a benefit in an interaction. 15.1 What are Preferences? By modeling preferences, economics construes relations between an agent and various selectable goods. Preferences indicate which good an agent will prefer over other goods if he can choose freely among them. But unlike motives or reasons, preferences cannot justify an agent’s decision for or against a good. Therefore, they must not be mistaken for moral values, principles, or ideals that motivate the decision-making behaviors of a human being. Rather, preferences are to be understood as references to money, food, time resources, living space, or other things that represent human needs. They determine which good received preferential treatment over other goods. Another important factor for the modeling of preferences is that preferred goods can be maximized by the agent’s decision-making behavior. Thus, preferences refer to goods that are characterized by their potential to be quantitatively increased in value. Another factor that distinguishes preferences from human experiential attitudes can be explained by citing an example that highlights the difference between an economic agent’s preference and a person’s self-understanding: Take, for example, a homeowner who rents parts of his home to students. The homeowner believes himself to be neither xenophobic nor sexist. Nevertheless, looking at a period of several years, it can be observed that he never rents student rooms to foreign students, and almost exclusively to female students. The landlord’s self-understanding and his preferences contradict each other.57

57 Quante 2003, 55 (transl. M.S.). However, the situational description presented by Quante ignores the fact that a statistical collection of preferences must also always

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Economics works on the assumption that the preferential behavior of test subjects does not necessarily coincide with their self-perception or their subjective evaluation of a situation. Preference models represent an external perspective on behavior, which does not necessarily diminish their epistemic value. Even though the majority of women would not say that their favorite color is red, it is nevertheless remarkable to learn that a statistical observation of the preferential behavior of women while shopping has shown that they choose a red article of clothing with above-average frequency when presented with the choice between red and blue.58 Thus, preferences are not attitudes that a person is necessarily explicitly aware of, but behavioral goals that are defined by manifesting in the consequences of behavior. Since preferences do not necessarily correlate with conscious behavioral attitudes, their modeling in the behavioral laboratory cannot provide any insights into the personal motivation of the agents. Indeed, the empirical modeling of preferences is actually often used in economics to contrast the test subjects’ attitudes and self-assessments with a different point of view demonstrating that actual behavior is not expressed at all in the test subjects’ motives and attitudes.59 Therefore, the modeling of preferences in economics is accompanied by a critical attitude toward constricting behavior to a subject and his wishes, ideas, and intentions. Experimental economics substitutes the primacy of self-experience on the behavioral level with the primacy of thirdparty observation. Since the agents’ preferences cannot be observed directly in a behavioral experiment, they must be inferred from observed behavior by

take into account the entire set of other applicants among which the landlord makes his selection. The landlord only has a xenophobic preference if he chooses a local student with above-average frequency even though he would have been able to choose a foreign student in every individual case. 58 See Hurlbert and Ling 2007. 59 It has been pointed out time and again in countless economic papers that selfstatements and self-positioning performances can only provide limited information about actual preferences. This is particularly attributed to the fact that cultural preformations of self-statements obscure the view on one’s own preferential behavior. Thus, for example, in a culture in which positive self-statements are not the norm, it is normal that positive assessments of one’s own behavior, such as praise or selfappreciation are made indirectly, i.e., via a detour of third-party statements. Unlike qualitative social research, which works with empirical interviews and actually does value such indirect self-statements, experimental economics represents the view that preferences cannot be modeled via self-statements at all but actually often contradict them.

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measuring a set of indicators. In an experiment, indicators are operationalizable hypotheses about the test subjects’ preference behavior. They indicate whether an agent in an interaction game reacts positively or negatively to a behavioral option offered to him during the game under condition x. Thus, the determination of indicators includes detailed information about when a behavioral reaction can be observed during the game. The previously defined indicators are subsequently evaluated statistically. Thus, the experimental modeling of a behavioral preference is ultimately the product of a systematic data analysis. In the context of preference modeling, experimental economics has put forth the hypothesis that in social dilemma games, a specifically new category of preferences can be observed whose existence has not yet been adequately noted by game theory: the category of social preferences. According to the definition of experimental economics, individuals with social preferences are agents who realize prosocial goals in their behavior. They assess the benefit of an interaction not only in terms of their own interests and needs, but incorporate the interest of other agents into the selection of their behavioral options: “ ‘Social preferences’ refer to how people rank different allocations of material payoffs to themselves and others. We use the term ‘self-interested’ to refer to people who do not care about the outcome of others.”60 The modeling of social preferences is meant to express that social agents who interact with each other include not only their own benefit, but also the benefit that their interaction partners can derive from an interaction in the formation of their behavioral strategies. Agents with social preferences are thus capable of relating their own interests to those of others in their rational evaluation of the game result. The modeling of social preferences therefore assumes that, in addition to the relation between an agent and his material surroundings, there is a social relation to other agents that causes this agent to opt for prosocial decisions and modes of behavior. The studies of experimental economics have shown that the existence of social preferences represents a problem that is not only interesting from a social-scientific perspective, but also relevant for the formation of economic theories and models. By modeling social preferences, researchers can represent the utility functions of agents who interact with each other in situations in which prosocial behavior significantly

60

Camerer and Fehr 2004, 55 (emphasis in the original).

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influences the end result of a monetary transaction. In order to be able to examine these situations, experimental economics has modified and extended some paradigms of classic game theory to make them capable of representing the social benefit of an interaction.61 One of these game paradigms and the corresponding explanatory approach will now be analyzed more closely. 15.2

The Ultimatum Game and Inequity Aversion of Social Agents

In 1999, a publication62 by behavioral economists Ernst Fehr and Klaus M. Schmidt drew attention to the existence of human modes of behavior that, contrary to the assumptions of the homo oeconomicus model, cannot be modeled as rational self-interested preferences. These modes of behavior are characterized by the fact that economic agents do not take the opportunity of maximizing their own benefit because they are placed in situations in which their own benefit could not be maximized without minimizing the benefits of another person. If such an interaction is represented in a monetary payoff matrix, it turns out that benefit maximization according to the self-interest principle would cause the interaction partner’s profit to be less than the agent’s own. In the face of these circumstances, a prosocial agent decides against personal and for social benefit maximization. However, according to Fehr and Schmidt, such a prosocial preference can only be proven in a behavioral experiment if the (negative) decision against maximizing one’s own benefit is correlated with the (positive) decision for a fair payoff function in which both agents receive an equivalent share of the profits. Thus, Fehr and Schmidt model social utility functions in a behavioral experiment according to the equivalence rule. This rule states that only the equitable distribution of profits to both agents represents a fair solution of the game situation (egalitarian principle of profit). In order to find out more about the conditions of a behavioral situation in which utility is represented by an egalitarian principle of profit, Fehr and Schmidt conduct a standardized two-person ultima-

61 A graphic overview of the seven games with which social behavioral preferences are modeled can be found in Camerer and Fehr 2004, 61–63. These games are called: Prisoner’s Dilemma Game, Public Goods Game, Ultimatum Game, Dictator Game, Trust Game, Gift Exchange Game, Third-Party Punishment Game. 62 Fehr and Schmidt 1999.

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tum game.63 The ultimatum game is a highly simplified negotiation situation between two parties. As a situation type, it is defined by the scenario that two players have the option of participating in an interaction revolving around the distribution of a specified amount of money. In the ultimatum game,64 the proposer A has the option of distributing a specified amount, x, between himself and a responder B. Proposer A acts as a monopolist, and his offer is defined as an ultimatum, i.e., it can only be accepted or rejected, but not modified. The game progresses as follows:65 • A and B interact anonymously via computer screen. But they know that the other person really exists.66 • A receives the specified sum x before the beginning of the game.67 Round 1: • A decides which amount s of x he wants to give to B. He must make an offer s ≥ 0.1x. Round 2: • B decides whether he (a) accepts A’s distribution offer or (b) rejects it. Result: • In case (a), A receives a profit g1 with g1= x – s and B a profit of g2 with g2 = s. • In case (b), none of the players receive a profit, and the transaction is classified as a failure.

63

The ultimatum game was first developed and conducted by Güth et al. 1980. Then, the decision of the test subjects to equally distribute the game’s profit was still classified as ‘irrational’ because it could not be explained with economic model rationality. In order to find out whether the equivalence rule is applied by the proposer in the distribution of the money only out of fear of rejection, Forsythe et al. 1994 tried to clarify what happens when a responder does not have the option of rejecting the offer by transforming the ultimatum game into the dictator game (see §17.3). Thus, the development of the ultimatum game raised new questions and problems, and the attempts to address these questions and problems in turn resulted in the modification of the ultimatum game. 64 This description of the ultimatum game is adapted from the statements in Fehr and Schmidt 1999, 825. 65 The following passage describes the variant of the ultimatum game that is presented: ibid., 825. 66 In all experiments that are described in the following passages, the experimental design stipulates that the test subjects do not have visual or verbal contact with each other. They are placed into separate cubicles at the beginning of the experiment, and only see each other before or after the experiment, when leaving the laboratory. 67 In game experiments, the amounts in question are real money that is subsequently paid in cash to the participants.

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In the course of the experiment, a significant number of test subjects displayed a behavioral pattern that can be called ‘fair,’ in the sense of an egalitarian distribution of profits. The evaluation of numerous ultimatum experiments68 showed that (i) Almost no proposer A made an offer of s > 0.5x; (ii) The majority of proposers A made an offer between s = 0.4x and s = 0.5x and thus observed the equivalence rule; (iii) Almost no proposer A made an offer of s < 0.2x; (iv) As a rule, very low offers of proposers A were rejected by players B, and the probability of rejection decreased proportionally to s. In Fehr’s and Schmidt’s article (1999), the results of ultimatum experiments are interpreted as a refutation of the canonical behavioral model of economics. The model of rational self-interest maximization would predict the outcome of an ultimatum game to be that proposer A makes an offer to player B that is as low as possible, in order to keep his own profit in the game as high as possible from the start. As for player B, the self-interest model predicts that he will take any offer, no matter how small, from player A, because this will still be more profitable for him than receiving profit at all. In contrast, the results of the empirical implementation of the ultimatum game show first, that the proposers A tend to make offers that are as fair as possible under the equivalence rule (0.4x or 0.5x) from the start, and second, that the responders B actually do see an advantage in rejecting an unfair offer from the A players, even if they could make a profit, however small, by accepting it. Fehr and Schmidt interpret the decision of proposer A against an unfair distribution result as an aversion to a behavior that results in unequal profits between the agents (inequity aversion). They claim that this aversion is significantly influenced by the fact that proposer A considers the distribution of profits to be unfair (inequality perception).69 They believe that the aversion against unfair behavior can motivate an agent to relinquish the (more rational, from the perspective of game theory) maximization of his own self-interest. In their article, 68

See Fehr and Schmidt 1999, 826. “An individual is inequity averse if he dislikes outcomes that are perceived as inequitable.” (ibid., 820). 69

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Fehr and Schmidt back up their assertion by interpreting quite a few other experimental studies. They suggest explaining the agents’ unselfish behavior with their preference for fairness norms. They define a fairness preference as the preference for a decision that measures the utility of an interaction not by an agent’s own benefit, but by the symmetrical distribution of profits between the interaction partners. Accordingly, a fairness preference can be modeled empirically as the decision for the numerical equity of payoff functions.70 Fehr’s and Schmidt’s model represents a trend reversal in the discussion of social preferences in experimental economics because it measures fairness preferences in a purely consequentialist manner, and thus is capable of indicating their influence on the payoff function of an interaction. This is important to note because there have been, and continue to be, alternative suggestions.71 As early as 1993, economist Matthew Rabin suggested representing the reciprocity of behavioral expectations in an interaction game as ‘fairness equilibria’ in a payoff function.72 He attempted to show that the conclusion of a fair game outcome can be explained by modeling the reciprocal interactions of the participating agents. According to Rabin, a proposer A is significantly more willing to equally share the profit of an interaction with responder B if he ascribes friendly, cooperative, in a word: reciprocal, intentions to him. Accordingly, the proposer’s beliefs about his counterpart play a decisive role in Rabin’s model. Therefore, Rabin’s model attempts to explain the players’ intentions and convictions as well as the payoff function. Fehr and Schmidt, however, reject such modeling for both methodological and practical reasons. Rabin’s modeling, they state, (a) complicates the mathematical manageability and logical simplicity of the model, and (b) limits the applicability of

70 The modeling of an inequity aversion with the help of the equivalence rule does not necessarily have to be evaluated in a positive way, like Fehr und Schmidt (1999) do. It can also turn into the basis for modeling social envy or the desire for social redistribution. This is acceded even by Klaus M. Schmidt himself: “This [the social inequity aversion, R.K.] does not necessarily have to be considered a ‘good’ attitude; an excessive tendency toward equality can also be interpreted as envy that in turn has harmful social and economic consequences.” (Cited in an article of “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”: Plickert 2007, transl. M.S.) 71 See Rabin 1993; Levine 1998; Camerer 2003. Various models of social preferences are tested against each other in experiments by Charness and Rabin 2000. 72 See Rabin 1993.

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the model to two-person games.73 This purely formal rejection of the modeling of intentions with regard to fairness preferences shows that the beginnings of the experimental examination of social preferences were still entirely determined by economic theory’s need for manageable mathematical models. 16

Norms for Cooperative Behavior

The examination of all conceivable forms of social interaction and decision-making behavior quickly became the main focus of interest in recent experimental behavioral studies conducted by economists Ernst Fehr, Urs Fischbacher, Michael Kosfeld, Simon Gächter, Armin Falk, Klaus M. Schmidt, and others. The experimental modelings in these studies are not limited to bilateral types of interaction like the ultimatum game described above. In addition to bilateral interactions, the field of experimental economics also directs its research efforts at the dynamics of group interaction. A crucial instrument for analyzing the functionality and dynamics of group decisions is construing game situations in which agents have the option of disciplining other players for non-cooperative behavior. The basic game theoretical paradigm for the modeling of such situations is interaction games in which agents can cooperate with each other on a voluntary basis and without coercion. 16.1 Sanctions in Public Goods Games The framework of game theory allows for the development of models for situation types that, according to the rationality parameters of game theory, are considered dilemma situations due to their clear illustration of conflict between personal and social benefits in an interaction. A social dilemma can be defined as any situation in which a cooperative or non-cooperative game strategy decides the interactional outcome, and in which agents do not have any additional behavioral options.74 Therefore, it may actually be more appropriate to refer to

73

See Fehr and Schmidt 1999, 820. Aside from the ultimatum game described in the last section, the prisoner’s dilemma game is the most well-known social dilemma game. In the prisoner’s dilemma game, two prisoners have the option of disclosing or withholding information that incriminates both players. There is no way of synchronizing the individual 74

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social dilemma games as evolutionary cooperation games,75 because their modeling is designed to investigate the situational and incentive conditions for the evolution of cooperative behavior. The goal is to find out under what conditions cooperation emerges by itself in a voluntary interaction between players. It is important that cooperative behavior is not coerced or enforced externally in these games. For the design of a social dilemma game, this means that the course of the game must explicitly give the option of cooperation/non-cooperation to the players. Cooperation dilemmas can best be modeled in public goods games that deal with making contributions to a good that is shared by all players. The public goods game is an n-person game, a game with more than two players, in which n persons simultaneously decide which amount x of a specified sum S they want to contribute to a common project P (0 ≤ x ≤ S). After that, they receive a payoff G, which consists of the sum paid to them in the beginning minus the contribution to the common good and their share of the public good that is equally distributed among all players (G = S – x + P/n). The behavior of agents in a public goods game can be either cooperative or non-cooperative. This means that they are free to contribute a very large sum or nothing at all to a project that will benefit all of the players equally in the end. For agents with egoistical preferences, a public goods situation clearly represents a temptation to exploit the other players by keeping decisions with each other. Rationally speaking, both players can achieve the best result if they cooperate with each other and withhold the information. However, on an individual level, it is more rational to disclose the incriminating information at the cost of the other player and thus be exempt from punishment. Thus, in this situation, game theory offers a cooperative and a non-cooperative solution strategy. The sequential implementation of the game shows that it is the best strategy to repeat the decision of the other player from the previous game reciprocally (‘tit for tat’ strategy). A more detailed description of the promising ‘tit for tat’ strategy in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma game is given by Axelrod 2006, 3–24, who tested this strategy in computer tournaments as the most successful strategy to solve the dilemma. 75 The term ‘cooperation games’ is not to be confused with the game-theoretical distinction between cooperative (coalitional ) and non-cooperative games, as this distinction refers to the permissibility of agreements between the players in a gametheoretical modeling. While non-cooperative game theory only permits those agreements that can prevail of their own accord, cooperative or coalitional game theory also takes into account agreements that need an external authority to be enforced (see Curiel 1997). Experimentally modeled cooperation games are counted as noncooperative games. In them, the rule-guided cooperation of several individual players is replicated without them being able to agree to this cooperation beforehand.

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one’s own contribution to the common project as low as possible (or even giving nothing at all), in order to profit all the more from the investments of other players in the end. However, such a strategy is only profitable in the short term. In repeated interactions, such a strategy destroys the willingness of other players to contribute anything to the common project at all.76 Thus, this exploitative behavior obstructs the permanent establishment of cooperative structures in social interaction, and demonstrates that public good is at risk as long as the conflict between egoistical and prosocial agents cannot be decided in favor of the prosocial agents. A field study conducted by political scientist Elinor Ostrom in 1990 first takes on the problem of protecting public goods, the so-called ‘tragedy of the commons,’77 in an explicitly empirical way. Ostrom conducted a comparative study on the local use of common and collective goods (irrigation systems, national parks, high mountain pastures) on several continents. In her study, she was able to show that a long-term successful protection of public goods against over-use cannot be safeguarded by institutional settings (e.g. official laws to protect parks and water reservoirs), and only succeeds if those involved with the commons (residents, users) themselves establish informal rules for protecting their public good, and autonomously monitor the enforcement of these rules. By looking at individual examples, Ostrom demonstrates that commons users can employ cooperative strategies to put a stop to ‘free riders’ who only want to benefit at the expense of the community. Thus, her study suggests the conclusion that an effective protection of public goods is only possible if the individuals in social groups pursue collective strategies to prevent the exploitation of the public good by individuals by sanctioning antisocial behavior. A high degree of cooperation and clearly defined, context-adapted rules for the use of the public good, as well as an autonomous control and monitoring system, are needed, to prevent the so-called ‘tragedy of the commons’ – the inevitable destruction of public goods through the exploitation of natural resources, i.e., pollution, overfishing, overgrazing etc. The local monitoring of usage rules for public goods by the

76 See the results of twelve public goods experiments from all over the world in Fehr and Schmidt 1999, 838 (table 2). In the implementation of public goods games and a total participation of 1041 subjects, 73% of the subjects acted as free riders, i.e., they did not make a contribution to the public good (x = 0). 77 See Ostrom 1990.

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population cannot be replaced by institutional forms of protection, e.g. the monitoring of nature parks by park rangers or police protection. Ostrom’s studies on the use of public goods have drawn attention to the particular characteristic of public goods situations. Namely, whenever individual utility maximization increases, collective utility decreases and vanishes entirely in the long run. Thus, public goods situations are situation types where the choice between a cooperative and a non-cooperative behavioral strategy significantly affects the final outcome of an interaction. In these situations, cooperation is not possible on an individually rational level, but only on a ‘socially rational’ level. In public goods situations, utility can therefore only be generated if the principle of rational self-interest is violated by the majority of players. A public good is only truly profitable if all beneficiaries of the public good, or at least a majority of them, can agree on a cooperative strategy. In public goods situations, a social conflict between cooperative and non-cooperative agents can be represented in a paradigmatic manner. The empirical analysis of public goods situations in Ostrom (1990) has demonstrated that the collective benefit in an interaction is only greater than the individual self-interest if every agent’s willingness to cooperate can be increased by prosocial incentive conditions. In the aftermath of Ostrom’s field studies, attempts were made to model the functionality of such prosocial incentive conditions for cooperative behavior in the experimental laboratory. By implementing them into an experimental design, behavioral economists succeeded in examining the conditions required for the emergence of social cooperation among commons users more closely. They were working on the assumption that cooperation is determined by situational as well as anthropological factors. To be able to model situationally determined cooperation in experiments, the rules of cooperation games that represent the institutional setting were extended by an additional option in which it is possible to punish or reward other players following an interaction.78 Punishment was meted out either symbolically, by deducting points, or effectively, by deducting profit.

78

Fehr et al. 1997 describes the evidence for a game in which it is possible to reciprocally punish or reward other players by determining a transformation vector for their payoff function following the transaction. The reciprocity effects in the punishment and reward of other players were significant.

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A two-phase public goods game consisting of a decision about the amount of an investment in the public good and a punishment option was first conducted by economists Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächter, and is documented in the study “Punishment in Public Goods Experiments” (2000).79 The outcome of the experiment after introducing the punishment option was significant: as soon as the option to punish non-cooperative players was introduced, 80% of individuals cooperated fully and invested the entire sum available to them as a contribution into the common project (x = S). However, this behavior can still be fully explained in terms of the economic standard model of behavior: Since a non-cooperative player can be punished by all other players individually, this behavior can turn out to be quite costly for him. As a rational player, he will decide to behave in a cooperative manner in the face of such an option to avoid the costs of punishment. The purpose of cooperation games with punishment options is to model prosocial incentive conditions in which cooperation can prevail as a game strategy among the players. Here, the punishment option represents a strategic incentive condition for cooperative behavior, i.e., it can be incorporated into the utility calculation of rational agents. In social dilemma games, the modeling of a punishment option constitutes a kind of ‘second-order public good,’80 because it serves to establish a cooperative game strategy as a rational game strategy that helps avoid the costs of punishment. In addition, the results of the experiments show that there are individuals who display a preference toward cooperation of their own accord. They cooperate in the first round and only change their game strategy once they are exploited by other players. They only continue with their cooperative strategy under the condition that a majority of the players also cooperate (conditional cooperation). If this is not the case, they prefer to also behave in a non-cooperative manner. These are also the players who are willing to punish the other players for non-cooperative behavior. 16.2 Social Norms as a Second-Order Public Good? The experimental modeling of public goods games has shown that a sanctioning option significantly increases the agents’ overall willingness to cooperate. While the players in a public goods game without

79 80

See Fehr and Gächter 2000; 2002, and Fehr and Schmidt 1999, 836–839. See Fehr and Gächter 2002, 137.

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a punishment option abandon their cooperative behavior after the first round, the introduction of a punishment option causes players to again contribute to public goods investments. Cooperative behavior becomes a stable game strategy. This demonstrates that not only the agents’ preferences, but also the prosocial incentive conditions of a situation play a role in determining which modes of behavior will prevail in the course of an interaction: cooperative or non-cooperative ones.81 According to this insight, experimental economics models cooperative behavior as the effect of a strategic behavioral setting that gives players the option to sanction non-cooperative behavior and thus to introduce costs for non-cooperation. A new insight discovered by the modeling of public goods games with punishment options is that the emergence of a stable equilibrium of cooperation can mainly be explained by the compliance with informal rules of behavior. Accordingly, from the perspective of experimental economics, the social structure of an interaction consists not only of the agents’ preferences and the institutional incentive conditions of the situation, but also of informal arrangements as can be found in social norms.82 In the wake of its insight into the cooperationincreasing effect of sanctions, experimental economics has attempted to model social norms in its experiments. But the empirical evidence suggesting that the introduction of sanctioning options has a significant impact on the decision-making behavior of rational agents does not yet prove the assertion that agents punish non-cooperative players in order to penalize a violation of social norms.83 This is because the second-order public good created through sanctions can only be made visible in an experimental modeling by the contributions of the agents. But is the social norm of cooperation identical to this behavioral pattern? Have the experiments presented evidence that allows researchers to explicitly speak of an 81

Also see Fehr and Schmidt 1999, 856. See Furubotn and Richter 22005, 19: “In real life, of course, neither the formal rules of society nor individual contracts are perfect, and individuals do not behave completely rationally. Characteristically, gaps in the formal constraints are covered, to some degree, by informal rules. [. . .] From a historical standpoint, we know that informal conventions existed before formal, legally enforceable rules came into being.” 83 Fehr and Fischbacher 2004b, 186, equate the empirical behavioral pattern of cooperation with the norm of cooperation: “To provide evidence for the existence of conditional cooperation, it is first shown that a large percentage of experimental subjects indeed obey the norm. [. . .] Typically, the majority of the subjects behave in a conditionally cooperative manner; that is, they increase their contribution to the public good if the average contribution of the other group members increases.” 82

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agents’ preference for the compliance with social norms and against the violation of norms? In order to pursue this question, we first have to clarify how norms are modeled in behavioral experiments, and second, we must clarify what exactly can be considered a preference for compliance with social norms in economics. The studies of experimental economics assign a key function to the modeling of social norms in the analysis of social preferences and in the ‘refutation’84 of the self-interest hypothesis of economics. This perceived significance is related to the specific understanding of human sociality advanced by experimental economics. According to economics, the essence of social community among human beings is the community’s ability to evolve into a ‘society’ as a social order that encompasses particular group interests. Thus, experimental economics equates human sociality with norm-guided behavior, and views cooperation as a function of compliance with, and enforcement of, social norms. Ernst Fehr and Urs Fischbacher summarized the economic understanding of the relation between cooperation and social norms as follows: Human societies represent a spectacular outlier with respect to all other animal species because they are based on large-scale cooperation among genetically unrelated individuals. In most animal societies, cooperation is either orders of magnitude less developed compared with humans, or it is based on substantial genetic relatedness. Cooperation in human societies is mainly based on social norms, including in modern societies, where a considerable amount of cooperation is due to the legal enforcement of rules. Legal enforcement mechanisms cannot function unless they are based on a broad consensus about the normative legitimacy of the rules – in other words, unless the rules are backed by social norms. Moreover, the very existence of legal enforcement institutions is itself a product of prior norms about what constitutes appropriate behaviour. Thus, it is necessary to explain social norms to explain human cooperation.85

84 In his article on the experimental refutation of the homo oeconomicus, Schlicht 2003 holds forth that the critical attitude of experimental economics toward this model can only be understood as a refutation if it is really able to show that the social preference of norm observance overrides the preference of self-interest. Schlicht doubts that this is possible. Arguing against the experiments, he cites the so-called argument of erosion. This argument states that in the long run, social, norm-guided behavior always adapts to rational self-interest of its own accord because otherwise it could not prevail at all. However, it would be possible to demonstrate that not all social norms are ‘eroded’ by self-interest in this way. For example, it is not the case in the social convention of tipping. 85 Fehr and Fischbacher 2004b, 185.

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This quote shows that experimental economics derives its understanding of social norms mainly from their dissimilarity to legal norms, which is found in the informal character of social norms.86 Social norms are related to legal norms insofar as they can contribute to enforcing compliance with legal norms within society on an informal level, and thus help to ensure the acceptance of norms in society. In addition, the economic understanding of social norms can be characterized by differentiating it from the sociological understanding. In sociology, norms have an ontological status, i.e., they represent social realities whose existence is more presupposed than explained in the description of behavior. In contrast, economics views norms as objective standards of behavior,87 whose existence and genesis in human interaction must first of all be proven and explained. Norms exist as shared convictions of the members of a group and dictate certain behaviors in certain situations.88 Thus, they are also determined by situations. It has already been shown that economic behavioral experiments are based on a third-party observation of the examined agents’ decisionmaking behavior. This observation occurs objectively and independently of what the agents themselves would state as their personal motivation for their behavior during the experiment. Thus, experimental economics observes behavior by reducing it to objective goods relations and their hierarchies (preferences). How, then, does the modeling of norms find its place within this concept of behavior? In order to operationalize norms in a behavioral experiment, they must be representable by indicators that act as quantitatively measurable relations in the agents’ individual behavior. In addition, experimental economics works on the assumption that norms are implicitly obeyed in the behavior of individuals. It is not interested in investigating how norms can be defined, established, or justified to others. Therefore, its studies explicitly refer to social and not moral norms. How social,

86 The footnotes of the article of Fehr and Fischbacher 2004b mainly refer to Elster 1989 and various contributions from Hechter and Opp 2001. Of course, at the time, there was no mention yet of the book “The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Social Norms” by Cristina Bicchieri, which was published in 2006 and has been seminal for all subsequent discussions. 87 Norms are behavioral standards insofar as they indicate the average expectable behavior within a behavioral aggregate, i.e., in a group of agents subject to scientific examination. 88 See Fehr and Fischbacher 2004b, 185: “Social norms are standards of behaviour based on widely shared beliefs of how individual group members ought to behave in a given situation.”

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legal, and moral norms can be distinguished from each other can be briefly demonstrated by outlining some of the characteristics of social norms:89 (i) Social norms as shared and public behavioral expectations: Much like moral and legal norms, social norms are defined as shared and public expectations regarding one’s own and others’ behavior. Unlike moral and legal norms, however, they only persist as long as the majority of a group or society considers them valid. In contrast, the validity of moral norms is based on the individual deliberation of normative reasons that could be cited for or against a certain behavior in a situation and that must be intersubjectively acceptable. This deliberation should occur regardless of whether the majority of society members consider a certain behavior factually necessary or not, for example when it comes to the moral norm to not kill another human being, no matter what the circumstances. The prohibition against killing, regardless of the circumstances, can be reasonably considered as intersubjectively acceptable, even if the majority of society members should factually not comply with it. Thus, moral norms place unconditional demands on behavior toward oneself and others, while social norms are empirically determined. (ii) Social norms and conventions: The differentiation between social norms and conventions is somewhat more blurry than that between social and moral norms. Like conventions, social norms can be understood as empirically determined beliefs about one’s own and others’ behavior. They express an expectation about either the actual or the required behavior in a situation. The social norm can be called a convention only if the expectation is empirically fulfilled, i.e., if it can be descriptively stated that an expectation is fulfilled by all members of a group in this situation.90 (iii) Social norms and sanctions: Since social norms are not necessarily empirically fulfilled expectations, their observance can be monitored and sanctioned. This can occur through positive (rewarding) as well as negative (punishment) sanctions. However, the notion that the observance of norms is necessarily related to a realization or expecta-

89

The following thoughts are my own summary of the differentiations made by Jon Elster and Cristina Bicchieri in their books (see Elster 1989, 97–107; Bicchieri 2006, 8–46). 90 See Bicchieri 2006, 38.

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tion of sanctions can be contested by solid reasons,91 for not every belief that normatively codifies others’ behavior must be connected to the expectation of a corresponding sanction. Otherwise it would be impossible to think of an intrinsic motivation for the observance of norms. (iv) Social norms as shared or universal behavioral expectations: Despite their origin in societal processes of socialization, not all norms have the same status. Therefore, we should differentiate between the communal norms of social groups and the universal norms of society. In Western societies, the norms of fairness and reciprocity that are modeled by experimental economics have the status of universal norms, i.e., they apply to all human beings and accompany all societal interactions between individuals as a behavioral expectation. However, aside from these universal norms, there are particular norms that only have empirical validity within a social group and whose observance is therefore only expected of group members, not of outsiders. How can the modelings of experimental economics be evaluated in the context of this characterization of social norms? We have seen already that economic behavioral models refer to social norms as ‘second-order public goods’ that can be preferred over other behavioral focuses (e.g. focusing on one’s profit) in behavior. Thus, the observance of social norms is represented by modeling a specific preference relation of the agent. Experimental economics treats norms that refer to the agents’ shared behavioral expectations as behavioral goals that agents can select either directly, by behaving in a cooperative manner, or indirectly, by punishing non-cooperative other players. The treatment of norms as selectable goods has already been criticized in relation to a similar process in John Rawls’ theory of justice.92 This criticism was based on the argument that such treatment fails to establish a difference between the normatively given (what is right) and the

91 The explicit differentiation is between the anticipation of a sanctioning of norms and the anticipation of their mere observance (see Bicchieri 2006, 11). Also see “Social norms are, like legal ones, public and shared, but, unlike legal rules, which are supported by formal sanctions, social norms may not be enforced at all.” (ibid., 8). The case is different with Elster 1989, 101, who cites informal sanctions as characteristic of social norms, but does not unfold an idea of social norms that is as differentiated and precise as Bicchieri’s. 92 See Rawls 1971, 132–136. Rawls seeks to explain the choice of the two principles of justice in the original state as the selection of goods in the context of economic decision-making theory.

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desirable (what is good).93 Analogously, this also applies to the modeling of norms in experimental economics. Here, norms are represented as social behavioral preferences that cannot be formally distinguished from an orientation toward personal profit. As we have seen already in the description of public goods experiments, the majority of agents are only willing to observe a norm of cooperation if the cooperative behavior becomes more profitable due to the introduction of costs for non-cooperative behavior. Thus, a majority of agents only observes the norm of cooperation if an institutional setting renders it compatible with the agents’ self-interested preferences. But such a process is not differentiated enough for a more precise understanding of the relationship between social norms and social preferences. This has also been acknowledged in the subsequent research work of experimental economics. Due to the fact that preferences in economic behavioral experiments can only be modeled in a consequentialist manner, i.e., through the payoff function of behavioral decisions, the decision for or against norm-compliant behavior in an experiment can only be declared to be not motivated by self-interest if the sanctioning of other players is costly for the agent displaying the cooperation preference. Only the costs of sanctioning have a negative impact on the payoff function of the agent, while the social norm, as a mere expectation regarding the behavior of others, remains invisible. Thus, the modeling of social norms in experimental economics relies on the characteristic of social norms cited under (iii). In contrast, little attention has been paid in experimental economics to the public dimension of social norms mentioned under (i). There is hardly any research about what kind of common knowledge test subjects have about the underlying norms of a situation. This is made most strikingly apparent by the fact that experimental economics ignores that norms are behavior expectations that also express intersubjective comprehension. Economic modeling is unaware of the social norm as an intersubjectively communicated and stipulated behavior expectation that is valid, regardless of sanctions. It is unable to account for the fact that a norm cannot only be enforced externally, but also be demanded through gestures and words in the interaction itself. Thus, its modelings shortchange not only the consequentialism, but also

93

See Habermas 1995, 115.

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the expressive dimension of behavior.94 The neglect of intersubjective forms of expression demonstrates the reductionism of economic modeling, which puts the observance of norms into alarming proximity to social control and enforced social disciplining. From the perspective of economics, norms can determine an agent’s behavior without first in some way expressing his understanding of the norm or his expectation that it will be observed. Thus, the modeling of sanctions represents the only suitable instrument of economics for the study of social norms. In addition, it would be important to differentiate between cooperation and social norm conformity for a better representation of the character of social norms within the framework of economic decisionmaking theory. Experimental economics views cooperation merely as a function of norm-conformity. But the distinction between cooperative and non-cooperative behavior is not congruent with the differentiation between conformist and non-conformist behavior. The first distinction indicates a difference that can only be constituted as dependent upon the determination of a shared utility (public good) in a situation; the second distinction indicates a difference that can only be modeled as dependent upon the affiliation to a certain social group or society, and the behavior expectations that are stipulated in that group. By tendentially integrating the difference between cooperation and norm conformity into the behavioral studies of Fehr, Fischbacher, and Gächter, the researchers also suppress the range of behavior defined by a distinction between the two. For example, it can be nonconformist within a group or society to help a stranger. And yet, there may be individuals within that group who cooperate with strangers and by doing so, create social utility for the whole group. Precisely the deviations from the norm-conformity of a social group are of crucial importance for the ethical conception of human sociality, as will be demonstrated in more depth in chapters three and four. Regarding the previously asked question about the understanding of norms in experimental economics, it can now be said that the modeling of social norms in economic behavioral experiments shows several deficits. It ignores (i) the intersubjective and expressive dimension of 94

See Honneth 2003. Based on phenomena of social invisibility, Honneth describes the forms and shapes of the social practice of recognition that is dependent on the exchange of expressive gestures, and refuses to extend this exchange, and thus also the recognition, to social outcasts.

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social reciprocity in behavior; (ii) the range of behavior that unfolds in the gap between cooperation and norm-conformity, and it also ignores (iii) the sociological differentiation between particular group norms and universal societal norms. In addition, to justify the assumption that experiments really observe a preference for the observance of social norms in the agents’ decision-making behavior, it would be necessary to clarify the socialization backgrounds of the participating test subjects either sociologically or ethnologically. Because norms rely on context, they cannot be studied in neutral behavioral settings like a laboratory. That means it is not possible to derive an abstraction from the examined test subjects acting as individuals who were socialized either in a pluralist society (Western world) or in a totalitarian political system (Communist bloc) or in a communally limited tribal society (small-scale societies). Precisely this awareness was presented as one of the most important findings of empirical field research in Elinor Ostrom’s seminal study on the examination of social sanctions. In contrast, experimental economics seems to have largely forgotten about the quality of field studies that do not merely strive to implement the artificial world of the laboratory experiment into the lifeworld. 17

From ‘Homo Reciprocans’ to ‘Homo Altruisticus’

As has already shown in the example of the public goods game, an optimal game outcome in social dilemma games, namely, the complete cooperation of all players, cannot be achieved if agents behave selfishly. Social dilemma games are therefore an excellent way of investigating how an optimal game outcome can be achieved through the systematic modification of the institutional setting. Here, experimental economics works on the hypothesis that cooperative behavior in social dilemma games only manifests itself under very specific preconditions. Such behavior is determined by specific empirical incentives for prosocial behavior. Prosocial behavior is behavior that is not cooperative in itself, but leads to the emergence of cooperative game strategies.95 Thus, the game modelings of experimental economics are an attempt to gain empirical knowledge about how incentive structures for social

95

See Henrich and Henrich 2006.

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agents can be constructed in a way that brings about the establishment of cooperative behavior. This is achieved by developing institutional settings that enable agents to create a basis for enforcing cooperation norms through prosocial behavior. The following section will examine the modeling of two prosocial behavioral patterns that, in the opinion of experimental economics, represent an important precondition for the emergence of cooperation (human sociality). The modeling of reciprocity in the ultimatum game and the trust game, the modeling of altruism in the dictator game, and in the punishment of antisocial behavior can show to what extent economic agents behave not only in an individually rational manner, but also in a socially rational manner. Here, the experimentally modeled situation types function as incentive structures that influence the emergence of two fundamental social behavioral patterns: (i) The modeling of negative reciprocity in the ultimatum game plays a role in preventing selfish agents in social interactions from acting unfairly. The modeling of positive reciprocity in the trust game fulfils the function of prompting selfish agents in social interactions to act fairly. (ii) The modeling of altruistic rewarding or punishment by other players fulfils the function of prompting unselfish agents to act in a way that is materially costly to them without causing the maximization of personal or reciprocal utility. The action has the purpose of sanctioning norm-abiding behavior. Thus, in addition to homo oeconomicus, experimental economics has examined two other behavioral types: homo reciprocans and homo altruisticus. Homo reciprocans refers to self-interested agents who act according to the principle of reciprocity (i). Homo altruisticus refers to unselfish agents who either directly advance the material good of others at their own cost, or enforce the observance of social norms at their own cost (ii). Thus, experimental economics has made a first step toward the modeling of a plurality of economic agents in order to replace the singular assumption of the purely egoistic utility maximizer in the form of the homo oeconomicus. This progress is made possible by differentiating between egoistic, reciprocal and altruistic agents.

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As already seen in section 15.2, the ultimatum game is a game in which a fixed amount of money is distributed between two players by the first player. In this game, the players adopt one of two clearly defined positions: only the first player is allowed to make a proposal on how to distribute the money (ultimatum proposal ). In contrast, the second player has the option of either accepting or rejecting the first player’s offer of distribution, but is not allowed to make an offer himself. If the second player rejects the proposal of the first player, the transaction fails, and both players lose their profits. Thus, the ultimatum game only replicates the action of a proposer and the reaction of a respondent, and is therefore not an interaction game. In the ultimatum game, negative reciprocity is understood as the responder’s rejection of an unfair offer. By rejecting the offer, he prevents the proposer from receiving the bigger part of the sum. But he also loses his own profit, allotted to him by the proposer. According to the economic standard behavioral model, such a behavior cannot be considered to be a rational decision, because, regardless of the proposer’s unfair behavior, the responder should be willing to maximize his personal gain even by small sums, and regardless of the other player’s bigger gain. In contrast, the economic model of social preferences can explain rejection of an unfair distribution offer by alleging that the responder has engaged in a deliberation of equivalence, and thus refused the amount allotted by the proposer, finding it unfair. The possibility that the responder might prevent the transaction if the offer is unfair prompts most proposers to make a fair offer that immediately takes into account the interests of the other player. This, too, can be interpreted as a social preference, because the proposer integrates the other player’s interests into his individual utility expectation, classifying them to be equally justified. The modeling of an ultimatum game constitutes an instrument that can be used by fair players for prompting selfish players to act in a cooperative way. It demonstrates that the probability of the players treating each other unfairly decreases as soon as transactions are bound to the mutual agreement of cooperation partners. 17.2 Positive Reciprocity: Trust Game With the modeling of trust games, experimental economics examines under what conditions an agent displays a positive belief regarding

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the cooperative behavior of an interaction partner. In the course of the interaction, such beliefs can turn out to be justified or unjustified. Thus, they always represent a behavioral risk. Since beliefs about other players in economic experiments are always connected to a decision for or against a monetary transaction, they also represent a financial risk. Thus, ‘trust’ in economic experiments refers more precisely to the investment of a material good. In a trust game, an ‘investor’ has the option of transferring part of a fixed amount of money to a ‘trustee’ in order to increase his own capital. The investor A acts without a binding contract (no formal institution), but he can multiply his profit in this game if he informally entrusts the trustee B with an amount of money and if the latter cooperates with A by subsequently returning this amount. The game progresses as follows:96 • A and B interact anonymously via computer screen, but they know that the other person really exists. • At the beginning of the game, A and B receive a sum s of s = 12 MU (money units).97 Round 1: • A decides whether to transfer an amount x of (a) 0 MU; (b) 4 MU; (c) 8 MU or (d) 12 MU to B. • Rule: In the case of a transfer, the amount is tripled and B receives 3x. Round 2: • B is informed about A’s decision and he decides on what amount to transfer back to A. He can transfer any amount between 0 and 48 MU (0 ≤ y ≤ s + 3x). • Rule: In the case of a return transfer, the amount is not tripled. Result: • A receives a payoff g1 of g1 = s – x + y. • B receives a payoff g2 of g2 = s + 3x – y. The trust game models the investment of player A as a type of informal contract agreement. It construes a situation condition in which both 96

The following scenario is a variant of the trust game described in an article about the influence of the hormone Oxytocin on trust: Kosfeld and Heinrichs et al. 2005. 97 The money in the game experiments is real money that is given to the participants after the experiment.

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agents must adhere to the norm of reciprocity to make a transaction happen in the first place. In the trust game, the notion of ‘trust’ only pertains to the investor, because he is risking a transaction without being able to control the trustee’s return transfer. Subsequently, the trustee must prove himself to be trustworthy by showing positive reciprocity, and paying back the entrusted goods. According to the model of rational self-interest, it is not rational to entrust a stranger with money without the institutional protection of a contract. It would make more sense for player A to keep the whole sum s allotted to him (x = 0). However, from a social and economic viewpoint, it can indeed be rational to trust in the positive reciprocity of an interaction partner. Thus, experimental economics views trust as a prosocial behavioral pattern that enables cooperation and cannot be reconciled with the model of individual, rational self-interest. 17.3

Pure Altruism: Dictator Game

With the modeling of reciprocity, experimental economics has provided empirical proof that there are indeed purely altruistic agents whose preferences cannot be represented by any profit orientation whatsoever. Altruistic agents differ from reciprocal agents in that they do not expect their behavior to be reciprocated by the interaction partner. They transfer a part of their capital to others even without gaining reciprocal or reputational benefits. The seminal game for the modeling of purely altruistic behavior is the dictator game. The design of the dictator game is almost analogous to that of the ultimatum game, but with the difference that the second player (recipient) does not have the choice of accepting or rejecting the first player’s (giver’s) distribution offer. Indeed, the recipient does not take any ‘action’ at all in the course of the game, making the position and offer of the giver dictatorial. To exclude expectations of reciprocity or reputation, the experiment is only conducted once. Thus, altruistic cooperation can only manifest itself in one single act of the giver. The game progresses as follows:98

98 The following scenario is a variant of the dictator game described in Fehr and Schmidt 1999, 847–848.

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• A and B interact anonymously via computer screen, but they know that the other person really exists. • At the beginning of the game, A receives a fixed amount s.99 Round 1: • A decides what amount x of s to give to player B. He must make an offer of x ≥ 0.1s. Result: • A receives a profit g1 of g1 = s – x and B receives a profit g2 of g2 = x. In the experimental implementation of this game, there was hardly ever an offer of x > 0.5s. Yet, it is documented that there are indeed players that divide the sum into equal parts even without the expectation of reciprocal utility (x = 0.5s).100 According to the definition of experimental economics, they behave ‘altruistically’ because they refrain from maximizing their personal gain in order to contribute to the material well-being of another player. If it is conducted as a oneshot game, the dictator game represents a form of unconditional cooperation that is not based on expectations of reciprocal utility. Thus, the altruism modeled in the dictator game is not a prosocial behavioral pattern in the sense defined above. The situation of the dictator game is designed as an analogy for an anonymous donation to a charitable organization or something similar, and thus represents an experimental modeling of the ideal of selfless assistance. The dictator game has provided the empirical proof that economic agents can have altruistic preferences. However, the crucial weakness of the dictator game is that it cannot present the societal utility of an altruistic cooperation in a larger sense; it cannot explain the evolution of cooperative behavior beyond individual singular actions just by looking at the fact that some human beings give away a portion of their income to strangers without expecting reciprocal utility. For this reason, experimental economics has begun to relate altruistic behavior to the observance and enforcement of social norms, and to model it in the form of ‘strong reciprocity’ (altruistic punishment and rewarding).

99 The money in the game experiments is real money that is given to the participants after the experiment. 100 In the study Forsythe et al. 1994, 20% of the players distributed the sum equally, and in the study Andreoni and Miller 2002, approx. 40% of players distributed the sum equally.

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chapter two Strong Reciprocity: Altruistic Punishment and Rewarding

The studies on behavioral altruism conducted by Ernst Fehr, Urs Fischbacher, and Simon Gächter model a second type of altruistic behavior different from purely altruistic giving. Fehr, Fischbacher and Gächter refer to this behavioral pattern as ‘strong reciprocity’ and define it as a specific form of prosocial behavior that is completely altruistic. They believe that the modeling of ‘strong reciprocity,’ i.e., of altruistic punishment and rewarding in social interactions, is particularly capable of providing information about how social conflicts between egoists and altruists play out in the framework of an interaction game. According to their definition, altruistic punishment occurs in an interaction game if one player punishes the unfair behavior of his interaction partner at his own cost. In contrast, altruistic rewarding occurs if a player rewards the cooperative behavior of his interaction partner at his own cost. In behavioral experiments, a punishment option can be added to a wide variety of social dilemma games. Therefore, we will now look at an example of the game progression of a trust game in which the investor has the option of punishing the trustee for non-reciprocal behavior. The game progresses as follows:101 • A and B interact anonymously via computer screen, but they know that the other person really exists. • A and B receive 10 MU (money units) each.102 Round 1: • A decides whether to (a) transfer his 10 MU to B or to (b) hold on to his 10 MU. • In case (a), B is not allowed to reject the transaction. • Rule: If A decides for option (a), the transferred amount is quadrupled. Thus, B receives 40 MU. Interim Result: • In case (a), B has 50 MU and A has 0 MU. The game enters its second round. • In case (b), B has 10 MU and A has 10 MU. The game ends.

101

The following scenario is a variant of the trust game described in an article on the neural basis of altruistic punishment: DeQuervain and Fischbacher et al. 2004. 102 The money in the game experiments is real money that is given to the participants after the experiment.

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Round 2: • B decides whether to (a) hold on the 50 MU or (b) to return 25 MU to A. Interim Result: • In case (a), B has 50 MU and A has 0 MU. • In case (b), B has 25 MU and A has 25 MU (‘fair outcome’). Round 3: Punishment Option • In case (a), A is treated unfairly by B. Therefore, A gets the opportunity to punish B for his unfair behavior. • At the beginning of the third round, players A and B each receive an additional 20 MU. Player A can use his 20 MU to punish player B or keep it. • A decides whether to (a) punish B with up to 20 punishment points or (b) not punish B. In the study “The Neural Basis of Altruistic Punishment” (2004),103 player A was presented with one of the following four options in the third round of the above-described game: In addition to the effective punishment (i) of player B at no cost to player A, in which player A had the option of reducing the profit paid to player B at the end of the game by allotting punishment points to him, there was also a punishment condition, (ii) in which player A had the option of punishing player B in a purely symbolic way, also at no cost to himself. There was a further punishment condition (iii), in which the punishment was costly for both players because player A was only able to allot punishment points to player B, and thus diminish the latter’s profits by also diminishing his own profit. A fourth punishment condition (iv) served as a control condition. Here, the decision about the return transfer of the money units in round 2 was not made by player B, but enforced at random by a computer program. In this way, it was possible to check whether player A’s decision was made in direct reaction to the intentional behavior of B or merely manifested the general urge to mete out punishment. Overall, four conditions were tested and compared in the course of the experiment: (i) intentional-costly; (ii) intentional-free; (iii) intentional-symbolic; (iv) nonintentional-costly. In this summary, the first adjective always refers to player B’s behavior in round 2 (intentional,

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nonintentional), and the second adjective refers either to player A’s punishment option (costly or free punishment), or to the consequences of this punishment for the payment of profit to player B (profit reduction or purely symbolic punishment). Of course, the punishment option was only offered in games in which player B (or ‘the computer program’) had decided to withhold the 50 MU. The implementation of the game showed that twelve of fourteen test subjects punished player B effectively, i.e., by reducing B’s profit at their own cost.104 Thus, ‘altruistic punishment’ can be considered a stable empirical behavioral pattern. In the case of the intentionalfree punishment option, all fourteen test subjects used the punishment option. Furthermore, by adding the control condition, the experimental modeling was able to differentiate between a norm violation committed by another player and one that was effected by a computer program. Here, the difference between the two options was significant: in the case of intentional norm violation, the player B’s profit was considerably diminished by player A, whereas in the case of the non-intentional, computer-generated decision, the player B’s profit was significantly less often reduced by player A (only 3 of 14 players punished at all). In addition, the contrast between free and costly punishment in the experimental design served to reveal the agents’ altruistic behavior, i.e., diminishing their own profit for the sake of sanctioning a violation of norms. In the costly punishment condition, the players gave considerably fewer punishment points to the other players, but they punished almost as frequently as in the case of a free punishment option. In the economists’ view, the social utility of the ‘altruistic punishment’ behavioral pattern is also immediately evident: the punishing behavior of player A contributes to the maintenance and stabilization of a social norm of cooperation and reciprocity, and thus serves to increase the cooperation level of (future) transactions between the players.105 This increased cooperation is due to the fact that (i) cooperative norms of behavior can be sanctioned (situational condition), and (ii) that individuals with altruistic preferences make use of this option even when they sustain personal damage (anthropological condition). 104

See ibid., 1256. A significant increase of the cooperation level after the introduction of a punishment option has been proven in the study Fehr and Gächter 2002. 105

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But what is the difference between a purely altruistic mode of behavior and a behavioral pattern of ‘strong reciprocity,’ like altruistic punishment? Unlike pure altruism, altruistic punishment and rewarding are a form of ‘strong reciprocity’ because here, the altruistic behavior is determined by a previous interaction between the individuals, and because the consequences of this behavior do not benefit a single individual, but instead contribute to increasing the cooperation level of the whole group. Modes of behavior that are not cooperative as such, but contribute to the increase of cooperation can be called prosocial, as demonstrated above.106 From the standpoint of experimental economics, the evolution of cooperative behavior in human societies can be largely explained by the existence of the prosocial behavioral pattern of strong reciprocity. This is because the enforcement of negative and positive sanctions in interactions enables the emergence of a stable system of cooperative behavioral norms, whose non-observance would be so costly for egoistic agents that it is more rational for them to act norm-abidingly in societal interactions. The experimental evidence for ‘strong reciprocity,’ and particularly for ‘altruistic punishment,’ are of central importance to the experimental modeling of sociality as cooperation because they provide a possible solution to the conflict between egoistical and prosocial agents through altruistic behavior. 18

The Utility Expectation of Altruistic Agents

Experimental economics has demonstrated that the altruistic punishment of norm violators generates social utility because it contributes to the enforcement of a stable norm system within human societies. But apart from its objective utility for society, altruistic punishment can only be considered fully explained once the agents’ personal utility expectations can be modeled experimentally. In the above-described trust game, however, punishment can only be represented in its negative consequences for the agents’ payoff function. Accordingly, the utility that altruists expect to derive from their behavior must go beyond

106 The distinction between cooperative behavior and prosocial behavior can also be found in Henrich and Henrich 2006, 222.

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purely monetary profit orientation.107 Thus, from an economic perspective, the question must be asked which behavioral goal motivates altruists to incur personal costs in order to punish another player. Are they bent on exacting personal vengeance for the other player’s noncooperative behavior, or do they actually pursue supraindividual, collective goals? 18.1

Psychological, Biological, and Moral Altruism

In the social sciences and in moral philosophy, altruistic behavior can be explained by assuming that the agent has an altruistic motive. A motive can be defined as an intention, a desire or a judgment that functions as the cause for altruistic behavior. We have seen already that the motives of behavior in economic experiments cannot be clarified by interviewing the test subjects. Unlike other disciplines of empirical social research, economics does not hold the view that test subjects’ self-statements about their motives can provide useful information regarding their actual behavior (‘false consciousness assumption’). Therefore, the experiments of economics do not explicitly ask about the test subjects’ selfless motives, thereby preventing economic experiments on altruistic punishment from being related to the psychological idea of altruism, because the modeling of (ultimate) motives of behavior is of central importance to the psychological idea of altruism.108 For this reason, experimental economists have also referred to their understanding of altruism as biological.109 While psychological altruism emphasizes the selflessness of the ultimate motives of a behavior, biological altruism highlights the effective selflessness of

107 See Fehr 2006, 12. In a very differentiated and well-reasoned summary of his research findings to date, presented at the 2006 “Walter Adolf Jöhr Lecture” at St. Gallen University, Ernst Fehr has narrowed down the economic consequences of neuroscientific experimental studies in particular, to the problem of stable preferences, the problem of purely monetarily modeled utility expectations, and the possibility of motivated belief formation in economic subjects. In his opinion, neuroeconomics can use its examination of emotional decision-making processes to show that the economic assumption of permanently stable preferences does not prove correct in every empirical setting. Secondly, neuroeconomics can demonstrate that, besides the monetary utility functions, there are also hedonistic consequences that social agents derive benefits from. And thirdly, neuroeconomics can point out that there may be a motivational connection between preferences and behavioral expectations (beliefs). 108 See Batson 1991, 6. 109 See DeQuervain and Fischbacher et al. 2004, 1257.

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behavior.110 Furthermore, the biological idea of altruism has the advantage of being applicable to all kinds of life. On the downside, however, it cannot explain the particularity of specifically human altruism. In biological terms, every organism can behave ‘altruistically’ by providing an advantage to another organism while reducing its own biological fitness. The assessment of its behavior as ‘altruistic’ is thus neither dependent on selfless motives nor on a personal interest in the well-being of others, as these things can only be attributed to human beings. In biological terms, altruistic behavior is explained as the function of an evolutionary advantage. It was able to prevail as an adaptive behavioral pattern in the evolution process because genetically related organisms were able to increase their biological fitness by adopting this behavior. In addition to the psychological and biological understandings of altruism, there is also an understanding that is, in the narrow sense, moral-philosophical. The starting point of this moral-philosophical understanding of altruism is the question of whether altruistic motives can also be normative reasons for altruistic behavior.111 In his justification of altruism, for example, the philosopher Thomas Nagel assumes that altruistic motives must not necessarily be based on interpersonal feelings like compassion in order to be considered justified.112 Rather, altruistic motives are to be considered justified if they originate from the presence of objective reasons that cause a rational subject to acknowledge the reality of other persons and their interests as equal to the reality of his own interests in his practical deliberations.113 According to Nagel, this form of interpersonal recognition is based on the structure of general rationality.114 Altruistic motives are rationally founded

110

On the difference between biological and psychological altruism see Sober and Wilson 42003. 111 The following thoughts mainly refer to Thomas Nagel’s argument for the possibility of rational altruism (see Nagel 1970). In addition, the book by Christopher Lumer (2000) and the essay collection by Ellen F. Paul (1993) should be considered. 112 The leading representatives of the notion that altruism should be explained on the basis of moral feelings and affections toward fellow human beings were David Hume (“An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals,” 1751) and Joseph Butler (“Sermons,” 1726), who developed their works in opposition to Thomas Hobbes’ theory of ethical egoism. 113 See Nagel 1970, 3. 114 See ibid., 79–146.

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if they help a human being adopt an impersonal position in order to put himself in the shoes of others.115 With this background it becomes clear that there is no direct connection between the understanding of altruism in experimental economics and the moral-philosophical understanding of altruism. Experimental economics can only provide limited and conditional empirical evidence for the rationality of altruism; after all, it does not examine motives and reasons, but the preferences of altruistic agents. Additionally, its altruism experiments cannot represent any rational recognition of other persons, which Nagel considers to be indispensable for the normative validity of altruistic motives. Only the explanatory approach to fairness behavior developed by Fehr and Schmidt (1999) incorporates the rational weighing of one’s own and others’ profits according to the principle of fairness. Fehr and Schmidt claim that the behavior of prosocial agents can best be explained by taking into account that these agents include the interests of other players as equal to their own in their calculations, and thus are particularly averse to an unfair outcome. Thus, the modeling of their inequity aversion is an instrument that could serve to empirically demonstrate the rational recognition of another agent’s equally justified interests. At this point, however, economics does not yet mention altruistic behavior, because this would require evidence that the fair player’s voluntary profit reduction does not occur for reputational reasons or expectations of future reciprocity. Thus, the altruism model of experimental economics is far stricter than that of moral philosophy. As demonstrated above, economic experiments dealing with altruism are most readily compatible with a biological definition of altruistic behavior.116 But economics is unable to represent the long-term, genetically determined utility of altruistic behavior. However, in order to at least be able to examine the so-called “proximate causes”117 of altruistic behavior’s evolution, it has expanded its method in a neuro-

115

See ibid., 82–84. This has also been explicitly confirmed by Dominique de Quervain, Ernst Fehr und Urs Fischbacher in DeQuervain and Fischbacher et al. 2004, 1257. 117 The distinction between ‘proximate cause’ and ‘ultimate cause’ can be traced back to Mayr 1961, 1503: “[P]roximate causes govern the responses of the individual (and his organs) to immediate factors of the environment while ultimate causes are responsible for the evolution of the particular DNA code of information with which every individual of every species is endowed.” 116

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scientific direction, which will be more closely examined in the following section. 18.2

Personal Satisfaction in Altruistic Punishment

In order to clarify the utility expectations of altruistic agents, economics has attempted to examine not the motives, but the psychological motivational structure of altruistic behavior with the help of neurotechnological third-party observation methods. This means that economics has expanded beyond its social-scientific explanatory approach to include a natural-scientific one, and has entered into a methodological synthesis with social neuroscience. Social neuroscience is a relatively young branch of the neurosciences.118 Using invasive and non-invasive stimulation methods, it examines those brain areas that participate in the creation of social cognitive and affective states in its test subjects. In particular, it models those neural processes that influence the social behavior of human beings. In cooperation with social neuroscience, experimental economics has been investigating which neural activations in the test subjects’ brains are responsible for the behavior of altruistic agents. Here, the methods and instruments of social neuroscience enable researchers to observe a test subject’s brain in vivo during a decision-making situation. By attempting to clarify the biological causes of behavior, experimental economics hopes to draw conclusions about the psychological motivation of the agents and also about their utility expectations. Thus, economics as neuroeconomics inquires into the neurobiological microfoundations of prosocial decision-making behavior. As in traditional economic behavioral experiments, test subjects in neuroeconomic experiments participate in interactions within a strategic behavioral setting. But unlike in the experiments described above, they are additionally observed by neurotechnological means during their decision-making process.119 One important insight gained by

118 An overview of the methodology and subject fields of social neuroscience is provided by Lieberman 2007 and Adolphs 2003. 119 For the purpose of neurotechnological observation of rational decision-making behavior, the mentioned studies use imaging methods like PET (Positron Emission Tomography) or FMRT (Functional Magnetic Resonance Tomography), but also inhibitory methods such as TMS (Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation) or invasive methods such as the application of hormones.

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integrating neuroscientific observation into the trust game with punishment option described in the last section (§17.4), is the insight into the motivational basis of altruistic punishment. In order to make statements about the player A’s motivation for punishing player B in the course of a trust game, A’s brain was scanned with neurotechnological instruments. The measuring began when player A learned that player B did not transfer back the money entrusted to him (10 MU or 40 MU), as would be fair, but kept it for himself. Measuring ended after player A had made a decision about whether or not to consequently punish player B. The measuring of player A’s brain was conducted with the help of a positron emission tomography (PET) device, and lasted for one minute. By using PET, it was possible to measure the activation of individual brain areas, and to mark the activation of neural centers in cross-section images of the brain. The study “The Neural Basis of Altruistic Punishment”120 by Dominique de Quervain, Urs Fischbacher, and Ernst Fehr resulted in the following findings for the experimental design described in §17.4: If player A chooses an effective punishment of player B, i.e., a punishment in which allotting punishment points to player B is costly for both himself and player B, the neural reward system of player A’s brain (more precisely, the ‘nucleus caudate’ in the brain’s dorsal striatum) is activated. This means that there is a positive correlation between the activation of player A’s neural reward system and the incurring of costs for punishing player B.121 Neuroeconomics interprets this positive correlation as follows: the anticipation of player B’s punishment stimulates the neural reward system of player A’s brain, causing an activation in the dorsal striatum. Other neuroscientific studies had already linked the activation of this brain region to the anticipation of rewards that are caused by goal-directed behavior. 122 Thus, it is most likely that player A is very satisfied when he anticipates the option of punishing player B’s unfair behavior. According to neuroeconomics, the positive correlation between satisfaction and altruistic punishment can bee seen as an indication of a neural mechanism123 being causally

120

DeQuervain and Fischbacher et al. 2004. See ibid., 1257: “We did indeed find a positive correlation between caudate activation [. . .] and investments in punishment.” 122 Literature on this secondary evidence can be found: ibid., 1258. 123 Neuroeconomics defines ‘mechanism’ as an adaptive behavioral pattern on the organic (and not the genetic) level of an organism (see Mayr 1961, 1503). 121

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responsible for the fact that altruistic preferences were able to prevail against individual rational self-interest over the course of evolutionary history.124 Player A’s decision to punish non-cooperative behavior is therefore influenced by the natural configuration of his neural motivational systems. However, now a ‘chicken and egg’ question arises in the neuroeconomic explanatory approach toward the relationship between satisfaction and altruistic punishment. In other words: is it the anticipation of satisfaction that causes player A to invest his profit into punishing player B, or is it merely the punishment of norm violations itself that is accompanied by the anticipation of satisfaction? The two following interpretations of the experiment’s evidence can be distinguished: (i) The relationship between satisfaction and punishment modeled for player A in the experiment is a purely affect-directed behavioral pattern, in which player A’s brain is stimulated by the anticipation of being able to punish another player who has been non-cooperative. Player A intentionally brings about the hedonistic consequences of his behavior; his punishment of player B is motivated by schadenfreude and vengefulness and not by his preference for a cooperation norm.125 (ii) The relation between satisfaction and punishment modeled for player A in the experiment is a strategic behavior that is only ‘accompanied’ by the feeling of satisfaction. The hedonistic consequences of player A’s behavior are part of his cost-benefit deliberations, informing him that punishment is socially beneficial because it is a retribution for a violation of norms.

124

Neuroeconomics first assumed that the neural mechanism that forms the basis for altruistic punishment represents a universal fixture of human nature and thus also played a decisive role in the evolution of cooperation between genetically unrelated individuals. Since the publication of Bernhard et al. 2006, however, there is evidence for the thesis that this universal fixture does not ‘work’ under the conditions of group interaction. The study of Helen Bernhard and Ernst Fehr documents the implementation of a third-party punishment game that was played within small-scale societies in Papua New Guinea. In the course of the study, it turned out that altruistic punishment was restricted to members of the same social group. This evidence was interpreted as an indicator of parochial altruism. 125 The possibility of attributing the behavior of the altruistic punisher to vindictiveness is also pointed out by Knutson 2004.

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In the view of neuroeconomics, these two possible interpretations126 of the experimental evidence can be distinguished by a precise analysis of neuroscientific indicators. On the basis of two additional observations of the prefrontal cortex and the dorsal striatum of the test subjects, de Quervain, Fischbacher and Fehr chose the second explanation in their article “The Neural Basis of Altruistic Punishment”. (i) Activation at the prefrontal cortex: Neuroscientific findings support the notion that player A’s behavior is not guided by affects, but informed by a rational weighing of various behavioral options. In the case of effective, costly punishment, regions of the prefrontal cortex are activated in addition to the ‘nucleus caudate.’ These regions are responsible for weighing benefits and costs in a decision-making process. If player A is altruistically motivated, he thus weighs the material costs against the hedonistic consequences of his behaviors. If he is altruistic, he will choose the hedonistic consequences. (ii) Activation of the dorsal striatum: Additional evidence against explaining punishment as being a purely affect-guided behavior can be found in the fact that if there were a direct influence, varying degrees127 of punishment would be reflected in the activation level of the neural reward center. However, this positive correlation could not be established. A test subject who decided to punish the other player more harshly did not automatically feel greater satisfaction. Thus, the neural evidence suggests that the motivation for punishment is not purely schadenfreude. There is, however, a problem with the results in “The Neural Basis of Altruistic Punishment.”128 The presented neuroscientific evidence uses secondary evidence from other neuroeconomic studies to produce the interpretation for the current study. Thus, results from various experimental studies are combined to present an interpretation of the current data. At this point, it becomes obvious that the individual result is gained through the systematic accumulation of evidence from rather different studies. This, however, might present a methodological problem. 126 On other possible motives of punishment also see Falk et al. 2005. In the framework of a public goods game, this study models personal vengeance as a main motive for sanctions, along with maliciousness (schadenfreude) and a sense of fairness. However, this study does not use neuroscientific examination methods. The indicators for the motive of behavior are modeled by purely behavioral-scientific means. 127 The experiment allowed for the allotment of 0 to 20 punishment points. 128 DeQuervain and Fischbacher et al. 2004.

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Another critical point is that, although neuroeconomic experiments on altruistic punishment have shown that the decision to sanction a social norm is correlated with neural activation in the agent’s brain, thereby explaining its motivational background, the examination of neural activations can give only very limited information about the intention that preceded the punishment of the non-cooperative player. In the context of a phenomenological evaluation of the experimental findings, which will be conducted in the concluding passages of this section, it is of central importance whether an agent’s act of punishment is really directed at the other player or at himself.129 In order to make such an evaluation, we first must present the phenomenology of the social encounter between the agents in the behavioral experiment. In the described experimental design, player A’s satisfaction is related to the preceding interaction with the other player, an interaction which occurs through media. Player A does not meet the other player in a face-to-face, corporeal interaction, it is not an encounter where both parties are physically present. Instead, the other player’s presence is mediated by the computer screen, which transmits the other player’s reactions. Thus, the trust game is an interactional relationship in which the other player is not present as a corporeal and visible counterpart. Thus, possible expectations regarding his behavior are not formed through a direct perception of, or communication with him, but instead are predetermined by the experimental modeling and thus construed. Therefore, in the trust game player A’s belief about player B is more similar to a projection of his own behavioral goals on the other person. Player A entrusts player B with his money – in the hope of receiving it back from him, and thus profiting from the transaction. If he learns that the entrusted money has not been transferred back, the experience constitutes an offense against his implicitly assumed utility expectations of the other player, expectations which he was unable to reveal or communicate due to the experimental design. Therefore, those test subjects who punish the other player for violating a cooperation norm mostly respond to a violation of the utility expectation that they themselves had projected onto the other. The disturbance or 129

On the difference between self-referential (egoistic) and other-referential (altruistic) intentionality of a social emotion see Klein 2007, 46. On the significance of this differentiation for an evaluation of altruistic punishment see especially §20 of this study.

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destruction of this utility expectation by the other player interrupts their own expectations of reciprocity and symmetry within the interactional relationship. In neuroeconomic experiments, the attempt to compensate for this disturbance with a sanction is represented as a necessary consequence of said disturbance, and is neither justified nor discussed as a behavioral option that can be distinguished from other possible responses to the disturbance. When critically evaluating the neuroeconomic modeling, it must therefore be kept in mind that the violation of norms may be more fittingly described as a disappointed behavioral expectation. Such a violation of one’s own expectations within the social structure cannot be undone simply by punishment. Instead, it provokes a response. Neuroeconomics interprets this response as follows: by exacting punishment, player A commits to a superordinate norm, and thus to the horizon of a universal social order of society, by reinforcing the behavioral principle of cooperation and reciprocity in the give and take of an interaction. However, from a phenomenological perspective, the test subject’s reaction can be described as a reaction in which an ‘excess’ of the interactional relationship is brought to bear. Player A, who punishes player B, above all sees his own beliefs destroyed by the behavior of the other player. The disregard of the social norm that he had assumed to apply at the site of the other, takes on the character of an appeal that cannot be ignored. The punishment of the norm violator mainly serves as an attempt to rebuild player A’s own view of ‘social reality’ at the cost of another’s view. Therein truly lies the social conflict. Player A’s underlying intentions behind the punishment can therefore be called primarily self-referential, regardless of the characterization of his behavior as ‘altruistic’ in neuroeconomics. His intentions are not based on an interactional relationship that can in any way be influenced or affected by the presence of the other player. Instead, the interactional relationship in which these intentions are formed is fully determined by player A’s own beliefs, which are transferred to the other (and if necessary, forced on him). In conclusion, the description presented in this chapter draws attention to the contribution of neuroeconomics to an understanding of human social behavior that transcends rational behavior. This contribution consists of the evidence about the central function and significance of emotions for human social behavior that neuroeconomics has presented in its modelings. A study published in 2000 by Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächter first pointed out the role of negative emo-

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tions in altruistic punishment. However, they only used a point scale to measure test subjects’ emotions in a post-experiment questionnaire. Then, in a 2003 study on altruistic punishment, neuropsychologists Alan Sanfey and James Rilling used an ultimatum game to demonstrate that emotions are of central importance for decision making in situations where test subjects are treated unfairly by another player.130 They define ‘emotion’ as a neural process in which information and environmental stimuli are affectively evaluated in the brain. Thus, unlike what philosophy traditionally called feelings, emotions are not considered to be a subject’s reflexive attitudes, but neural states of activation responsible for the mental evaluation of objects. However, neuroeconomics models these neural activation states as causal determinants for behavior, and explains their functionality in terms of an evolutionary, proximate mechanism.131 This section has made it clear that a phenomenological description of these experiments cannot simply adopt this explanatory approach. Instead, such an explanation works on the premise that emotions observed and measured in experiments are generated in the context of the test subjects’ interactional relationship, and are modulated by this relationship. Thus, emotions are primarily interpersonal phenomena that cannot be examined without also considering how they are related to a shared interactional experience. Therefore, from a phenomenological perspective, the experiments of neuroeconomics mainly provide an indication of the influence that shared interactional experiences can have on human beings’ behavior toward each other. 19

Affective Empathy: The Significance of Social Emotions

This section will present a neuroeconomic study showing that emotions can not only be a cause, but also a consequence of social behavior. A phenomenological evaluation of behavioral experiments has already argued that social behavior should not be explained independently of the interactional relationships that an agent enters into with the other players in the experiment. This also applies to social emotions. In order to examine the influence of an interaction on the formation of a social emotion, in 2006 social neuroscientists conducted a study 130 131

See Sanfey and Rilling et al. 2003. See Fehr and Gächter 2002, 139.

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that sequentialized a game-theoretical interaction paradigm and a neuroscientific empathy paradigm. Published by neuroscientist Tania Singer together with Chris Frith and others, the article “Empathic Neural Responses are Modulated by the Perceived Fairness of Others”132 gives a more detailed description of the neuroeconomic experimental design used in this study. The experiment consisted of a social dilemma game and an experimental modeling of empathy for pain. First, social neuroscience generally defines empathy as the neural representation of another person’s mental state in one’s own brain. Neuroscientific studies mainly examine the perceptive, emotional and cognitive components that contribute to the formation of such a neural representation. The underlying model of empathy used in the above-mentioned experiment is based on the insight that neural representations of another person’s mental state are primarily rooted in an affective evaluation of this state.133 In an experiment dedicated to the study of empathy for pain,134 in which Singer and her team of researchers had already examined the neural reaction to the perception of another person’s pain, it was determined that the empathic reaction activates those neural regions in the so-called ‘pain matrix’ of the brain responsible for the affective evaluation of one’s own physical pain. Thus, the modeling of the neural basis of affective empathy provided evidence for the role played by representing one’s own pain in the perceiving of others’ pain. From a phenomenological perspective, Singer’s pain empathy paradigm formulates a neuroscientific concept for a primacy of selfreference in empathic reaction. The neural representation of another person’s pain is formed through a self-referential sensation of one’s own pain. Thus, in the brain, one’s own body perception becomes the condition for the possibility of empathy for pain. In the neuroeconomic study that will be discussed now, researchers first used a social dilemma game in which player A entrusts player B with an amount of money, and can multiply the invested amount if

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Singer et al. 2006. For a definition of empathy see DeVignemont and Singer 2006, 435: “There is empathy if: (i) a person is in an affective state; (ii) this state is isomorphic to another person’s affective state; (iii) this state is elicited by the observation or imagination of another person’s affective state; (iv) the person knows that the other person is the source of one’s own affective state.” 134 See Singer et al. 2004. 133

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player B transfers the money back.135 This game was conducted in the first part of the study to see which test subjects were cooperative or non-cooperative when acting as player B. The group of B players was then divided into two types (B1 = unfair/B2 = fair). After the social dilemma game, the empathy-for-pain experiment was conducted. At this point, the test subjects were told that this was a separate experiment that had nothing to do with the preceding social dilemma game. The researchers assumed that player A had evaluated the behavior of an unfair player, B1, as negative and the behavior of a fair player, B2, as positive. This assumed evaluation then formed the basis for the analysis of the second part of the study. In the empathy-for-pain experiment, player A’s brain was scanned using functional magnetic resonance tomography (fMRT),136 while player B1 and player B2 sat on either side of the scanner. Electrodes that inflicted painful stimulations on the test subjects were applied to the hands of A, B1, and B2. Because player A was in the scanner, he was unable to see the other players’ hands. For this reason, a red arrow within the scanner indicated what hand was stimulated with a pain impulse. The experimental design modeled three conditions: (i) ‘self condition’: the hand of player A is stimulated; (ii) ‘fair condition’: the hand of player B2 is stimulated; (iii) ‘unfair condition’: the hand of player B1 is stimulated. In addition, two different levels of pain stimulation were applied. The study was conducted with sixteen men and sixteen women. However, the only significant result concerned the contrast between genders. The study found that women in particular showed an empathic reaction toward their interaction partner – regardless of whether he had previously behaved in a fair or an unfair manner. The contrast between ‘fair condition’ and ‘unfair condition’ was only significant for male test subjects. Men did not show empathy if the unfair player was subjected to pain stimulation. Instead, in the case of male test subjects, it was even possible to prove a neural activation in the ‘nucleus caudate,’ the reward center of the brain that – as has been shown above – is responsible for the anticipation of satisfaction. Apparently, the men

135 Unfortunately, the “Supplementary Information” of the study Singer et al. 2006 does not provide a more detailed description of the interaction game. 136 FMRT is an imaging technique that can precisely localize neural activations and their functional consequences in the brain and represent them in a brain cross section image with colored markings.

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interpreted the pain stimulation as a punishment of the unfair player and felt satisfaction. On the basis of this evidence, researchers concluded that men have a natural sense of fairness, and thus might have played a crucial role in the enforcement of social order in human societies throughout evolutionary history.137 However, the researchers conceded that the evidence of the experiment also could have been influenced by the fact that the experiment only used physical pain as a punishment for unfair behavior. In contrast to psychological or financial punishment, this behavioral pattern might be a stronger incentive for men to feel satisfaction. In that case, the assertion that only men have a natural sense of fairness that prevails against empathic reactions would again be up for debate. From a phenomenological perspective, it is now possible to ask about the social quality of the intention manifested in the empathic reaction. Singer’s experiments found that those brain regions responsible for the evaluation of one’s own physical pain are also activated when other people’s states of pain are perceived. But if the perception of other people’s pain is identical to an affective evaluation of one’s own pain, this may suggest that such an affective evaluation is less an act of compassion toward the other person, and more a self-referential projection of one’s own pain onto the other. To provide more information about this, it must be clarified whether the test subjects actually relate their affective evaluation to the pain of the other, or whether they merely toy with the possibility that they might feel pain in the other person’s situation. The conclusion suggested by Singer et al., that self-perception is indispensable for an empathic reaction, is doubtlessly indebted to the mentalist explanatory approach prevalent in neuroscientific research, which assumes a principal separation between one’s own and other people’s mental experiences, and does not model an interpersonal interaction relationship that mediates between the two. Thus, the range of the perception of other people’s pain is always reduced to the notion of a self-contained brain: one brain can understand another brain only insofar as it has already understood itself.

137

See Singer et al. 2006, 468.

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The Phenomenal Excess of Social Interaction

As we have seen, neuroeconomics examines neural processes in the brain that accompany the decision-making behavior of social agents. The declared explanatory goal of its studies is to identify those neural mechanisms that have a direct influence on whether humans will behave in a prosocial or antisocial manner in certain situations. Its main goal is to find experimental strategies that can serve to demonstrate an unequivocal, causal relationship between neural activation and test subject behavior. Neuroeconomics bases its explanatory claim, in contrast to other social-scientific approaches, on the assertion that it is capable of providing a particularly exact empirical description of human social behavior. However, in the previous sections it was shown that, in spite of the intentions of neuroeconomics, it can indeed make sense to interpret an experiment not only in terms of ‘hard’ empirical factors, but to also include ‘soft,’ phenomenological factors of influence on test subject behavior. For example, the distinction between self-referentiality and other-referentiality in test subjects’ intentions is not wholly meaningless in the evaluation of a behavioral pattern. The example of altruistic punishment can once again serve to demonstrate this. The intention with which a punishment is carried out can be decisive in determining its magnitude and its consequences for others. Depending on the underlying intention, the magnitude of a punishment can be either limited or taken to excess. Thus, there are punishments that are justified as such, but are executed far more severely than necessary by the punisher. One possible explanation for this is that punishment can be administered out of schadenfreude (§18.2). This has been confirmed, for example, by the investigation into acts of torture and abuse committed in the U.S. American prison camp Abu Ghraib in 2004 in Baghdad. In this case, a number of military police officers tortured and abused Iraqi detainees and prisoners of war without any regard for restrictive legal norms. Although the military officers put their reputation within the military and the legitimacy of their mission at risk, they accepted these ‘costs’ in order to pursue their obvious pleasure in torturing the detainees. They violated international legal norms restricting the punishment of detainees and protecting them from such degrading forms of castigation. However, the military police officers were able to establish a social norm within their group that defined their behavior in this situation as appropriate, and allowed them to violate the prisoners’ personal integrity.

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The case of Abu Ghraib shows that the punishment of norm violators does not only contribute to the evolution of cooperation, but can also be linked to a disproportional excess of violence.138 The ambivalent nature of punishment has since been confirmed by an economic experimental study on antisocial punishment, i.e., on the punishment of prosocial agents.139 It is all the more misleading, then, that experimental economics refers to punishment as ‘altruistic’ and ‘prosocial’ as soon as it comes at a cost for the punisher. After all, neuroscientific examinations of punishment have shown that the hedonistic motives of altruistic agents can be attributed to their own schadenfreude, vengefulness as well as their interest in enforcing a cooperative norm. Therefore, it is important to distinguish whether the punishers act on self-referential or other-referential intentions. If other-referential intentions are at work, they can be related to both the just retribution for a norm violation, and the well-being of others. In any case, an other-referential orientation prevents punishment from becoming a purpose in and of itself, as is the case with schadenfreude. However, neuroeconomic experiments are unable to identify the difference between a self-referentially and an other-referentially intentioned punishment with absolute certainty. Therein also lie their phenomenological limitation, and need for complementation. It is careless to generalize the individual evidence on the altruism of punishment, or to highlight only the positive, prosocial consequences of punishing norm violators. Of course, the concerns expressed here do not apply to the neuroeconomic modeling of altruistic punishment as a whole; they only address their generalization as an evolutionary model of human society formation. In the case of the modeling of empathy as a consequence of social interaction, it can also be shown that the test subjects’ intentions are not identical to a neurophysiological modeling of their decisionmaking behavior. The mere examination of neural activations cannot

138 See also the results of the so-called Milgram experiment (Milgram 1963), a reenacted prison situation in which the escalation of violence between wardens and prisoners were explained by the wardens’ slavish submission to authority. Similar results were also provided by the so-called ‘Stanford Prison Experiment’ by Philip Zimbardo, which was documented in the film “Quiet Rage: The Standford Prison Experiment” by Ken Musen. 139 See Herrmann et al. 2008. In the meantime, experimental economics has also turned to the examination of antisocial behavior – albeit without being able to provide a plausible explanation for its motivation at this point in time – which it was able to provide for prosocial punishment, at least on a neurobiological basis.

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suffice to draw conclusions about whether the test subjects react empathically out of compassion for the other person, or whether they only feel another person’s pain as their own, and thus marginalize the meaning of the other’s pain. Thus, from a phenomenological perspective, neuroeconomic experiments do not provide a modeling of the test subjects’ intentions and motivations that is differentiated enough to make statements about whether a social agent merely makes the other players into an object for the projection of his own expectations, or if he is genuinely interested in their well-being. Here, the phenomenal excess of the experimental modeling of behavior is manifest. The economic representation of the social conflict between egoists and altruists does not describe the phenomenon of their interactional relationship, and accordingly cannot clarify the phenomenological horizon of the interaction. 21

Conclusion

This chapter provided a critical analysis of the methods of behavioral studies conducted by experimental economics and neuroeconomics. In this analysis, attention was repreatedly drawn to those principles of construction helpful to the modeling of ‘social reality’ in experiments, and it was also shown that the limits of methodological constructability of behavior in the laboratory as well as the limits of a neurotechnological third-party observation of the brain both exhibit gaps in their explanation that cannot be methodologically filled. The gaps in the economic modeling and explanation of behavior are made particularly recognizable due to the fact that a differentiated examination of the test subjects’ intentions has not been factored into the interpretation of the studies. Before the presentation and discussion of a completely different perspective on human sociality, which will occur in the third chapter, the concluding passages of this section will provide a systematic summary of the critical issues concerning the basic anthropological decisions of the behavioral-scientific idea of sociality. 21.1 Critique (i) Naturalization of the social agent: It is the fundamental concern of experimental economics to make the predominant assumptions of theoretical models of the economic agent empirically verifiable, and to question their exclusive validity claim regarding the analysis and representation of human behavior. Its methodological synthesis with

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neuroscience has enabled economics to prove that the social decisionmaking behavior of economic agents in concrete situations is not a purely rational operation, but one determined by empiricism and neurobiology. However, it is questionable whether this proof successfully realizes the desired knowledge objective. Does a neuroscientific naturalization of the economic agent already represent an empirically satisfactory description of human beings preferrable to the homo oeconomicus model? As an objection to this assertion, it can be argued that neuroeconomics is not even aware of the hermeneutical difference between a method-dependent and a phenomenological representation of its study object, and thus squanders an important hermeneutical orientation potential regarding its study object. Neuroeconomics attempts to explain the complex interplay of psychology and physiology in the corporeal creatures that are ‘human beings,’ only in terms of the brain’s functional operations. In the framework of its research approach, all human social modes of behavior are examined in the search for a possible causation by the central organ of the nervous system. However, the neuroeconomic focus on the brain of the social agent contradicts the fact that the brain is an inner organ of the human body that does not appear in the area of phenomenal ‘externality’ of interpersonal perception processes, because it is not intersubjectively accessible. The brain does not directly participate in the human mode of appearance significant for the human being’s natural perception of self and others. In other words: if a human being meets another human being in a concrete encounter, his perception is not geared to neural activities that take place in the brain of the other and must be interpreted by him, but is guided by what the other reveals through body language, facial expressions, language and expression. Beyond the expressive structure of the human body, and the linguistic realm of signs and symbols, the character of social encounters between human beings in the lifeworld is also determined by the institutions of culture. For example, the introduction of written language has led to the emergence of an entire cosmos of symbol and sign systems (in addition to the actual encounters between human beings) that leads a “semiotic-communicative life of its own.”140 The socio-cultural construals of such semiotic processes gradually developed into institutions that determine the life of human

140

Krüger 2004, 189 (transl. M.S.).

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beings independently of their actual encounters. Thus, they transcend the encounter between human beings in interaction, which neuroeconomics assumes to be the decisive basis for studying the social structures of human togetherness. In its replication of social interaction in the laboratory, neuroeconomics also ignores the bodily-corporeal and verbal forms of human expression, as well as the communicative behavioral incentives emerging from the spectrum of the interpersonal range of expression, it creates a standardized behavioral setting without copresent communicative situations.141 Thus, its experimental modelings consciously reduce the interpersonal sphere of behavior to those incentive structures that can function as stimuli in a brain that is situated, along with the whole body, in a neurotechnological apparatus, or that is under the controlled influence of an artificially induced hormonal substance.142 Thus, the description of the social agent that emerges from the neuroeconomic correlation analysis evaluating the results of such a methodological approach, neglects the aspect of natural interdependent action between human beings whose perception and communication are part of their interaction. (ii) Reductionism and method-dependent representation of human beings: The hypotheses of experimental economics are verified in experiments conducted in an artificially created behavioral setting (laboratory world). The question of whether this setting is phenomenologically similar and comparable to the experiences of human beings in their social lifeworld is of minor importance to the researchers. This means that experimental economics hardly ever explicitly deals with hermeneutic-phenomenological perspectives in its own research work because it does not see the hermeneutic, but rather the methodological significance of the difference between a lifeworldly perception situation and a strictly anonymous interaction occurring in front of a computer screen. This indicates that experimental economics interprets the difference between the lifeworld and laboratory world only in terms of how this difference can contribute to a better validation of the study

141 This statement only applies to the field of neuroeconomics, which particularly ignores interpersonal expressive behavior as an influential factor in its modelings. In contrast, the field of social neuroscience increasingly studies the neural correlates of the perception of facial expressions and behavioral gestures. 142 See the neuroeconomic studies (not presented here) on the effect of the hormone Oxytocin on human trust: Kosfeld and Heinrichs et al. 2005.

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findings. A closer look, however, reveals that in order to fully understand its study object, neuroeconomics needs to use a wide variety of hermeneutical understanding practices in the phase of designing behavior modelings. Afterwards, however, neuroeconomics proceeds to ignore its own approach, presenting a purely method-dependent representation of its findings, despite the fact that hermeneutical and phenomenological research practices have also participated in its work. Thus, it assumes that all communication processes relevant to the modeling of behavior can be medially replicated in the laboratory by using computer technology; following this assumption test subjects are set up in single cubicles without visual contact, and their interaction occurs via computer screen. Neuroeconomics also assumes that the test subjects’ decisions can be sufficiently clarified by representing, observing, and analyzing simultaneously occurring brain activations. Thus, the validation of its hypotheses relies exclusively on neuroscientific imaging techniques, and the brain activations observed with this method are not complemented by a phenomenological description of the human interactional relationship. From the perspective of economics, such a ‘soft’ phenomenology of interaction might, in principle, even impair the reliability of the study findings, because scientifically acceptable conclusions must be based on empirical knowledge. The latter statement ultimately proves the reductionism of neuroeconomics, because the field rejects and declares irrelevant an interdisciplinary consideration of its studies that would require it to alternate between various interpretive perspectives. (iii) Behaviorist reduction of the human range of behavior: The field of neuroeconomics has a strictly consequentialist understanding of social behavior. It examines the structure of social interactions using the example of goods transactions, and models the monetary consequences of these transactions using statistical methods. Intent on making its findings on human social behavior quantitatively measurable and mathematically specifiable in a form comparable to the naturalscientific method, neuroeconomics operates on the premise that the social utility of the examined aggregated behavioral patterns can be determined by measuring the profit distribution in the behavior aggregate. This means that it considers the payoff structure of a transaction the (only) empirical indicator for the distinction between prosocial and antisocial behavior. Thus, it judges the decision-making behavior of test subjects to be fair if it is aimed at a (numerically) even profit distribution, and it judges their behavior as unfair if it results in an asymmetrical profit distribution. In addition to analyzing the payoff

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structure, economics in the form of neuroeconomics has been examining neurobiological factors that influence behavior to empirically clarify the anthropological preconditions of prosociality within the framework of monetary transactions. With the help of neurobiological imaging techniques, neuroeconomics has demonstrated that complex neural networks have a significant influence on decision-making behavior. However, the modelings of neuroeconomics only examined the neural correlates of decision-making behavior, neglecting the fact that these neural correlates are influenced by the interactional relationship between test subjects. (iv) Formal typification of social agents by preference models: In addition to the behaviorist distinction between prosocial and antisocial modes of behavior, experimental economics also establishes a typification of altruistic and egoistic agents (or their preferences). As shown above, this typification becomes questionable as soon as the test subjects’ intentions come into play, as these intentions are ignored in experimental modelings. The consequence of such a perspective is that test subject behavior is sometimes described in a counterintuitive manner. For example, while economics considers the punishment of a norm violator to be ‘altruistic’ and ‘selfless,’ the phenomenological viewpoint suggests that punishment does not necessarily aim to protect a behavioral norm, but can be described much more plausibly as a reaction to a previous violation of a self-referential belief projected onto the interaction partner. In this context, it can be assumed that the economic concept of prosociality and altruism has been conceived without the test subjects’ experiential attitudes and intentions in mind. By merely pointing out the occurrence of punishment and its consequences, empirical studies do not address the underlying motivations of another player’s norm-defying behavior, or the reasons why the examined test subject deems this misbehavior worthy of punishment. To answer these questions, neuroeconomics would have to be able to connect the neural activation states that are observed with the help of imaging techniques to a set of circumstances that can be described as having been precisely so intended by the agent. But the agent’s precise intentions cannot be inferred from the visual representation of neural activations in the test subject’s brain, recorded by a scanner at the time of decision-making.143

143 The difference between the neuroscientific third-party observation of an emotion and its phenomenological description goes beyond the difference between a

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These points of criticism may suffice to illustrate that even the transdisciplinary approach of neuroeconomics, which considers itself a comprehensive explanatory approach for the integration of all aspects of human social behavior,144 still leaves many questions regarding the phenomenology of human behavior unanswered. Therefore, the experimental examination of the empiricism of social behavior is in need of being complemented and expanded using the orientation of other perspectives. 21.2 Theses Based on the critical analysis developed in the previous section, the following section will present three theses regarding the exploration of human social behavior: (i)

The anthropological determination of behavioral types, and the naturalization of its neurobiological antecedents alone are not sufficient to explain the defining characteristics of human sociality. (ii) The naturalization of the origins of human cooperation, and the empirical modeling of a neurally controlled culture of punishment and rewarding obscure the fact that social encounters between human beings are also based on political, moral, and religious motivations that cannot be represented by the neuroscience of behavior. (iii) Human interaction is not exclusively determined by the interest of utility maximization, but also by the stipulated mutual agreement in interpersonal difference, i.e., the acknowledgement that no human being is at the disposal of another [Unverfügbarkeit]. Thus, the interaction between human beings is preceded by a specific form of interactional relationship. first-person perspective and a third-person perspective. The difference in perspective does not adequately describe the two approaches’ different modes of access to the explanation or interpretation of the phenomenon of emotion. The experiences of a person are capable of adopting the experiential attitude of a first, second and thirdperson perspective without being able to separate these from each other in principle. Persons can experience themselves and others from a third-person perspective, just as they can experience their own ‘I’ from the second-person perspective as ‘me.’ Neuroscientific third-party observation differs from the phenomenological description of these experiential attitudes and their perspectives insofar as it explains them not as a person’s modes of experience, but as neural reactions in the brain. 144 The comprehensive explanatory claim of neuroeconomics is explicitly stipulated by Herbert Gintis in his paper “A Framework of the Unification of the Behavioral Sciences” (Gintis 2007).

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Explication of the three theses: (ad i) The first thesis challenges the exclusive explanatory claim of experimental economics and neuroeconomics in the field of human sociality. As has been shown above, the economic approach ignores various hermeneutical and phenomenological differences of understanding [Verstehensdifferenzen] by disputing their relevance to a method-guided interpretation of the research findings concerning their study object. The most important among these differences of understanding, is the distinction between self-referential and otherreferential behavioral reactions, which allows for the formulation of far-reaching critical inquiries concerning the economic understanding of altruism and prosociality. To counteract the reductionisms of the economic explanatory approach, the scope of this study needs to be extended to include other perspectives in order to develop an idea of human sociality that is adequate to the humanity of human beings. (ad ii) The second thesis points out that the explanatory approach of economics is not only incomplete, but also systematically ignores and obscures important aspects of human sociality. This is particularly true for the focus of experimental economics on the material incentive structures of human behavior. One argument against this approach is that the wide range of possible social behavioral modes in human interaction should not be reduced to a single behavioral structure exclusively geared toward external incentives and material goods. The one-dimensional focus of experimental economics on material incentive structures, and its neglect of completely different, immaterial value, and behavior orientations must be criticized in this respect. It is true that experimental economics attempts to use their behavior experiments to correct the one-dimensional view of human beings as agents who only care about their own interests in decision-making situations by demonstrating that the fair distribution of profit in a transaction can also be considered a legitimate utility expectation of an economic agent. However, it does not abandon the methodological pre-decision of behavioral economics that, in principle, all human behavioral decisions relevant in the context of economic model formation must be related to a utility expectation. Experimental economics believes that cooperation only arises in interactions between human beings if ‘naturally’ inclined egoists are forced to cooperate by the introduction of costs for unfair behavior. This mechanism allowing for the social disciplining of egoists can only be set into motion if there are ‘naturally’ inclined altruists who enforce a norm at their own cost. From a neurobiological perspective, these individuals must have an

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underlying hedonistic utility expectation that must be satisfied. This notion, however, casts into doubt the selflessness of their behavior. In clarifying the neurobiological foundations of behavior, experimental economics also gains knowledge about the manipulability of human beings. This is because the neural causal factors of decisionmaking cannot only be made visible by non-invasive methods of brain imaging, but they can also be technically controlled by invasive methods of hormonal brain stimulation. Until now, the description does not mention this aspect. In studies with invasive brain stimulation, material foundations of decision-making in the test-subjects’ brains are selectively blocked. This enables researchers to investigate in vivo which neural networks have an influence on the formation of a concrete decision.145 Another variety of invasive brain stimulation is the administering of hormone compounds, in which hormonal substances are introduced to the brain’s blood stream, and can result, for example, in excessively risky behavior (from an economic standpoint).146 The neuroeconomical question of how human beings can be behaviorally and biologically conditioned implies the assumption that human beings always ‘adjust’ their behavior to external conditions and never behave ‘freely.’ Their social behavior toward other human beings is not based on a decision that is made on the grounds of moral, political or religious motivations, but is based either on external circumstances (egoists), or on a neurobiologically controlled decision-making structure in the brain (altruists). Thus, neuroeconomics both meth-

145 Perhaps the most striking example for the tendency within neuroeconomics to become increasingly reliant on neurotechnology is provided by a study of the interruption of brain waves on the right side of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex by transcranial magnetic stimulation, as documented in the article “Diminishing Reciprocal Fairness by Disrupting the Right Prefrontal Cortex” (Knoch et al. 2006). The technical inhibition of the prefrontal cortex has the effect of rendering the test subjects incapable of rejecting an unfair profit distribution offer from their interaction partner. Instead, they follow only their own rational self-interest, and accept any offer that promises a profit greater than zero for them. The researchers interpreted this evidence to mean that the function of the right side of the prefrontal cortex is to block other brain regions that limit an exclusively self-interested decision of the test subjects and would cause the subject to consider the social consequences of their decision. 146 At this point, it is appropriate to mention the much-discussed Oxytocin study by Markus Heinrichs and Michael Kosfeld: Kosfeld and Heinrichs et al. 2005. In this laboratory study, the test subjects were given an intranasal application of a specified dose of the hormone Oxytocin. Afterwards, it could be observed that the test subjects with increased Oxytocin levels could be persuaded to make much riskier offers to their interaction partners.

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odologically and conceptually ignores decisions that are motivated by convictions and beliefs.147 Another problem of the neuroeconomic view of human sociality is that the anthropology underlying this view harmonizes neurobiology and economic thinking from the very start. Tensions that might spring up between the biology and the economics of behavior are systematically ignored. As a result of this, biology merely serves to underpin the economic idea of behavior. (ad iii) Neuroeconomics is looking for the origins of human sociality in human neurobiology. Its modelings have shown that cooperative principles of behavior in interactions involving two, three or more individuals only prevail under conditions in which the social conflict between egoists and altruists in the interaction is pre-stabilized by the introduction of sanctions for the protection of social norms of behavior.148 In this context, neuroeconomics always assumes the existence of universal social norms of cooperation, fairness, and reciprocity. Then, it includes these norms into experimental modeling without examining their status. Three examples can be given for this practice: (i) The pre- of the norm: Experimental economics values the punishment of egoists as an ‘altruistic’ mode of behavior and classifies it as socially positive. However, talking about an altruistic preference in this context only implies that individuals defer their own self-interest for the sake of a ‘higher’ goal, i.e., the maintenance of societal order. Based on this assumption, the economic modeling of altruistic behavior can identify the conditions that enable human beings to prefer the

147 The first signs that neuroeconomics is starting to address this deficit can be found in the lecture “Neuroökonomik,” given by Ernst Fehr at St. Gallen University in August 2006 (Fehr 2006). He states: “For example, economists assume that the belief of an individual about the action of other players is independent from the individual’s preferences. This assumption excludes motivated belief formation, and thus makes it difficult to understand questions concerning religious faith, ideologies, aggression toward members of other groups, or the structure and content of political and economic advertising campaigns appealing to people’s emotions.” (Fehr 2006, 15 [transl. M.S.]). 148 See Fehr and Fischbacher 2004b, 187: “What are the conditions under which the norm of conditional cooperation enables groups to establish high and stable cooperation? The existence of a large minority of selfish individuals who violate cooperation norms suggests the need for credible sanctioning threats. In fact, a large amount of evidence [. . .] indicates that stable cooperation is rarely attained in finitely repeated public-goods experiments with anonymous interactions and stable group membership where the selfish choice is full defection. [. . .] There are, however, several studies indicating that the addition of sanctioning behaviour has a powerful impact on cooperation rates in these experiments.”

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observance of a social norm over their personal interest in profit maximization. However, it is unable to offer any way of determining how human beings can completely relinquish their self-interest for the sake of another person, which would imply an entirely selfless behavior. A modeling that only focuses on the role of norms in interactions ignores that human beings in an interactional relationship are not only confronted with their own beliefs, but above all with the concrete demands of their counterparts. It ignores that, in terms of the lifeworld, the concrete demands of another human being are encountered before the abstract norm.149 The economic modeling of interaction thus runs the risk of assigning a secondary role to test subjects’ interaction partner in the reconstruction of the interaction event. But the idea that an agent perceives his counterpart in interaction situations only in terms of formal behavioral standards completely misses the mark. For to whom or what behavioral standards can be applied, and to which concrete requirements can they measure up, if there is no human demand that has been constitutively included in the equation? (ii) The equality emphasis of the norm: By referring to a universal social norm, e.g. the fairness norm, all types of concrete social demands can be formally made equal to self-interest. At the same time, however, it is important to note that social demands in such a formal equalization cannot be perceived as the demands of others, manifesting something that cannot be compared to one’s own demands, something that cannot be measured with the yardstick of the connecting and the communal. In other words: the measure of equality that is stipulated by the social norms of fairness, cooperation, and reciprocity, always runs the risk of being misunderstood as a homogeneity of social demands, and thus of provoking the resistance of all that which is not accessible on a neutral third-party level (i.e., the norm). This last aspect of an ethically motivated resistance against the norm in the sense of an abstract principle is not included into the modelings of experimental economics. (iii) The legitimation of the norm: The economic modeling of social norms fails to take into account that social behavioral standards in modern societies are not permanently determined. Rather, these standards are subject to constant pressure to prove legitimacy that cannot 149 Also, in the neuroeconomic modeling, the other human being only appears in the role of the interaction partner who is involved and immediately affected by the subject’s decisions. The demands of ‘third’ others who are not participating in the transaction, but are nevertheless affected by it, are not taken into account at all.

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be swept aside by insisting on their natural determination. A responsible examination of norms, and the differentiation between legitimate demands and repressive norms that create degrading circumstances, can only be conducted by linking societal standards to the discourse regarding their legitimacy. Therefore, it cannot simply be assumed that an empirically existing norm is set non-discursively, i.e., the norm cannot be legitimized without justifying it in the face of critical inquiries. Furthermore, neuroeconomics does not pay any attention to the fact that, in modern societies, it is no longer clear which social norms unquestionably apply in which situations. It simply assumes that there are universal norms, and that their application in a concrete interaction does not need to be justified discursively. These critical observations of the status of norms in economic modelings can be reconsidered in a more fundamental way. We have seen that, structurally speaking, social interaction between human beings is dependent on the addition of a third instance. In the economic modeling, this third instance mediates between the agents’ rationally motivated self-interests, and is a social norm. By modeling a social norm in an observation of empirical behavior, an agent’s belief about his interaction partner can be structured in a way that makes it possible to describe it as a belief geared toward objective standards. At this point, it should not be necessary to reiterate the advantages for economics that result from the reduction of sociality to norm-abiding behavior. One remarkable aspect of this reduction is the completely one-dimensional approach used by experimental economics to determine the functionality of a social norm. The norm structures the benefit of a transaction in regard to the interests of the interaction partners, but it does not take into account their individual well-being. Instead, it is only concerned with the overall outcome of an equalized profit distribution. This assessment is clearly confirmed yet again by the example of altruistic punishment, in which the concrete (financial ) well-being of the interaction partner is disregarded by the punishing subject because of the interaction partner’s previous defection from behaving in a norm-abiding manner. The case would be different if the social norm were considered to be an expression of a mutual behavior expectation. But in that case, the norm would not only be allowed to structure an individual’s decision and behavior, but it would also have to encompass the social ‘events’ that occur between individuals, and prepare their decisions. In this sense, the reciprocity of behavior demanded by the norm could be based in the reciprocity of the interactional relationship.

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On the Sense and Nonsense of Talking about Altruism

Because the (neuro-)economic research approach does not relate its scientific observations to the hermeneutical and phenomenological dimensions of its study object, it represents an approach to the explanation of sociality that reduces the manifold possibilities of social behavior toward oneself and others to an exclusively behaviorist dimension. It recognizes only the external, material incentives for behavior, and examines the biological factors that may determine the reactions to these incentives. Furthermore, it employs behavioralscientific terms and concepts whose validity for an understanding of human social everyday experience is disputable. Once again, this can be demonstrated by looking at the question of human altruism. The necessity of experimental verification is characteristic of the empirical imprecision of the concept of altruism as such. Purely altruistic behavior and egoistic behavior cannot be distinguished precisely and unequivocally: it is possible to assume (and upon further investigation reveal) the existence of a hidden egoistical interest, or a hidden, selfish long-term effect motivating every selfless act of assistance and every unselfish deed. Of course, the suspicion of imprecision that arises in regard to the empirical explanatory power of the altruism concept for the lifeworld does not apply to the studies of experimental economics in the first place, because they take place in a controlled laboratory setting in which all situational aspects can be externally manipulated. But at the same time, this only confirms that ‘altruism’ is a social-scientific category of interpretation only able to claim ultimate validity for the evaluation of human behavior under very limited conditions. With the plurality of meanings in the everyday experiential world, every behavior is characterized by indecision, indeterminacy, and multiple levels of subtlety, and thus always remains obscure for the participants to a certain extent. Therefore, what at first glance looks like ‘selfless’ giving is always open to interpretation in the lifeworld. It is always possible to second-guess the motives underlying an act of giving, and the self-referential consequences that a giver pursues with his behavior. It is always possible to give an alternative description of a perceived behavior, which once again points to the varied range of human social behavior ignored by the economic model. The argumentation can now come to an (intermediate) conclusion: the approachs of experimental economics and neuroeconomics remain explanatory, with limited plausibility that provokes a multitude of

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critical inquiries, amendments, and reassessments – and ultimately, the incorporation of other perspectives to ensure continued growth and reorientation. But regardless of the limitations of these approaches, the following question remains: what productive implications of the economic concept of (pro-)sociality and cooperation can be reconsidered, and possibly reassessed from a social-philosophical perspective? Accordingly, the goal of the following chapter is to contrast the basic insights gained from the empirical examination of human sociality with three concepts regarding the interactional relationship between the fields of ethics and social phenomenology. Since such a contrasting comparison necessitates an interdisciplinary change of perspectives, the first step will be to outline the preconditions and tasks of a socialphilosophical discussion of the subject, and to unfold them with regard to the present state of social-philosophical problem consciousness.

CHAPTER THREE

DIFFERENCE IN THE INTERPERSONAL RELATION 22

Three Constellations of the Interpersonal Relation

The second chapter of this study focused on the studies of experimental economics and neuroeconomics as examples for the examination of human sociality in the social sciences. Following an in-depth analysis of the methodology of an experimental modeling, it was demonstrated that this approach to describing social interactions is limited when it comes to representing the dynamics of interactive human relationships and the social agents’ self- and other-referential intentions at work in it. For this reason, the study added phenomenological considerations in order to complement the empirical perspective on human social behavior. The third chapter of this study seeks to establish a dialogue with social-philosophical and ethical approaches that explicitly deal with the question of how the structure of social interaction can be characterized as a structure of interpersonal relations and interpersonal difference. Therefore, the focus of attention will shift from the interaction and its consequences to the phenomenal field of interpersonal sociality.1 To this end, this chapter will discuss theoretical concepts of social philosophy that focus on the potential for conflict in human social relationships (which the economic studies examined on a biological and behavioral level). They take the interpersonal relation as the starting point for their reflections and think about its social, political and ethical consequences. Methodologically speaking, however, the social-philosophical approaches reconstruct the dynamics of social interaction not only at the site of the individual, as experimental economics did in its description of social preferences. Instead, they

1 Thoughts on interpersonal sociality have already been introduced in §§2 and 10. These sections referred to interpersonal sociality as the phenomenal excess of human interaction that eludes measurable empirical description and that denotes the sphere of human behavior in which human beings mutually affect each other and bring about awareness of each other. This can occur through words, gestures, looks, symbols, or also through silence.

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go beyond methodological individualism by first considering the basic phenomenological structure of interpersonal relations. Then, they use the description of this relationship structure as a starting point for developing models of human cooperation or conflict and describe the inner dynamics of this relationship structure in its consequences for the societal coexistence of humanity. The three concepts discussed in this chapter are all based on the assumption of a difference or asymmetry at the root of the interpersonal encounter. On the basis of this difference, they endeavor to comprehend the humane possibility of configuring this encounter politically and ethically. Here, the descriptions from the various perspectives range from interpersonal difference as an antagonistic confrontation, to this very same difference as a site of responsibility for an other, whose presence in the interpersonal encounter remains transcendent and elusive. An intermediate position is adopted by those concepts which deal with the ethics and politics of recognition, in which the conflict potential of the interpersonal relation is to be pacified by the ideal of symmetry and reciprocity. All three concepts deal with the asymmetrical relationship constellations that also served as the starting point in the modelings of experimental economics. There, these constellations were used to represent social conflicts between altruistic and egoistic agents and to examine the causes and conditions that could lead to solving these conflicts. Unlike economics, the socialphilosophical theories discuss new forms of a social conflict that can be understood, not by looking at the consequences of human interaction, but by considering the interactional relationship and the interpersonal difference at work in it. In addition, the solution of social conflicts is not viewed only in terms of the evolution of a cooperative human interaction focused on strong reciprocity. From a social-philosophical perspective, it is questionable whether a pacification of social conflicts that aims to establish a symmetrical synchronization of the interaction partners and their transactions does not misunderstand the nature of these conflicts as such. Another factor that must be taken into account in considering the three possible conceptions of the basic character of interpersonal relation and difference, is the fact that the basic types of antagonism, recognition and alterity can each only describe one aspect of the interpersonal encounter. Unlike the constructions of economic behavioral science, the discourses of social philosophy cannot create a meaningful unified perspective, nor do they aim to do so. Therefore, in order to

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make the social-philosophical approach plausible, we first have to clarify the preconditions and tasks at the heart of a social-philosophical discussion of the subject. 23

Human Nature and its Function for the Legitimation of Political Order

Unlike the strict social sciences, social philosophy does not ask empirically about how the social patterns of order and behavior, which organize the societal cooperation of human beings emerge in interaction. Instead, it inquires philosophically how (social) order is possible at all, how it can be justified, and what basic rational convictions, affective passions and natural drives on the part of the human being support it. Social philosophy, which first established itself as an autonomous philosophical discipline in the 19th and 20th centuries,2 considers human society to be the basic model of social order. It uses the term ‘society’ as an umbrella term for human coexistence in legal, political, economic, religious and cultural constellations. Since the distinction between state and society, between politics, economy and ethics, can only be taken for granted after the advent of the legal philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,3 it is justified to call social philosophy a genuinely modern discipline of philosophy. At the same time, the roots of its questions and topics can be traced back all the way to antiquity.4 Another seminal development for the examination of its object was the connection, established in the 17th and 18th centuries, between the scientific explication of the human being and the philosophical justification of social order in British moral philosophy (Thomas Hobbes, Anthony Shaftesbury, and David Hume).5 Subsequent 2 The establishment of social philosophy as a discipline is connected to the names of Rudolf Stammler (1896), Ludwig Stein (1897) and Georg Simmel (1894). See also Röttgers 1997, 59–71. 3 The thesis that Hegel’s legal philosophy first provided the terminological means to establish social philosophy as a philosophy of human sociability was first presented by Karl Mayer-Moreau in his book “Hegels Socialphilosophie” (Mayer-Moreau 1910). 4 Rhemann 1979, 89–95, locates the origins of social philosophy in the thoughts of Empedocles and Socrates, where currently valid social norms are challenged for the first time. Forschner (1989) begins his introduction into the basic terms of social philosophy with Aristotle’s “Politics” and the determination of human beings to form nations. 5 This methodological and content-related turn for thinking about the social that was heralded by Thomas Hobbes’ theory of the state also leads to the thesis that, in

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to this connection, it has been a continued task of social philosophy to discuss the possibilities and limitations of a description of human beings at the site of their sociality. In engaging with its object, social philosophy can take on a descriptive-analytical as well as a normative-critical function. When proceeding in a descriptive-analytical way, it examines the individual societal spheres of the social, exposing the conflicts between their respective logics and the human way of life. In contrast, when proceeding in a critical manner, it posits the normative standard of the successful life and on that basis diagnoses the limitations and deformations under which human beings must live in society.6 The two approaches are not to be understood as alternatives, but as complementary to each other. Even by looking only at the tasks of social philosophy, it should be clear that it is impossible to examine its object in the same way as the societal practices and procedures that serve to establish factual order in human social interaction. The social-philosophical perspective is thus fundamentally different from the empirical description of human sociality. This chapter will focus on social-philosophical concepts that describe the emergence of social forms of order based on the presentation and analysis of the interpersonal relation structure.7 The argumentation will attempt to demonstrate that without the interpersonal terms of content, modern social philosophy originates in his work. See e.g. Albert 1991, 27. 6 The characterization of the task of social philosophy as ‘critical’ follows Axel Honneth’s remarks regarding the tradition and timeliness of social philosophy (Honneth 1994). In his paper, Honneth develops the task of social philosophy on the basis of its critical intention to diagnose the pathologies of current societal life that emerge whenever social coexistence is evaluated by the standard of individual self-realization. When social philosophy inquires into the irreducible social preconditions for a successful individual life, it is in need of an underlying ethical concept. To this end, it paradigmatically uses either a past ‘original state’ or the expectable future of human beings as a foil for evaluating the current societal status quo, which it examines with both diagnostic and therapeutic interest. Thus, social philosophy validates its standards for a successful social life with the pretext of anthropology. According to Honneth, this transcending perspective is given in all major social-philosophical concepts since Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with the exception of Michel Foucault’s analysis of modern power structures. 7 The understanding of social philosophy represented here follows Burkhard Liebsch’s description of the function of a contemporary social philosophy (see Liebsch 1999, 9). According to Liebsch, who uses a phenomenological approach, social philosophy should no longer base its thought on the abstract opposition of individual vs. society, but on the interpersonal relation structure and the concrete experience of the other human being.

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structures of humanity, the genesis of social order cannot be conveyed from a philosophical perspective. Since Thomas Hobbes, the anthropology underlying the modern discipline of social philosophy can describe human beings both ‘before’ and ‘in’ their sociality.8 This implies a double perspective on human beings that considers them in both their unsocial and social modes of life. The paradigm for this new perspective on human beings is the thought experiment of the natural state and the doctrine of the social contract that is based on it. By making an initially ontological distinction between humanity before sociality (natural state) and humanity in sociality (societal state), this thought experiment introduced a new model to social anthropology in the 17th century. In the following section, this model will be analyzed and retrospectively contrasted with the economic understanding of sociality discussed in the last chapter. 23.1

The Separation of Politics and Nature in the Model of Societal Order

With his philosophical speculation about the natural state of human beings, Hobbes in the 17th century made a radical break from the Aristotelian understanding of human social nature and natural morality.9 In the anthropology underlying Hobbes’ theory of the state in his “Leviathan” (1651),10 human nature is no longer determined, as it was in antiquity, by the telos of communal human interaction. Instead, it is posited as a pre-political ‘given’ of human society. Because Hobbes’ recourse to human nature refers not to the political creature (zoon politikon) but to the natural existence of human beings before any political order, his doctrine of the natural state can be called anti-Aristotelian.11

8 Thomas Hobbes’ anthropology and theory of the natural state is taken as a point of departure here and in the following passages because, unlike any other modern theory of the state, it makes an unsocial human nature the starting point of its reflections on societal order formation. By doing so, it is the first social theory that integrates an opposing moment that places the opposition of nature vs. society at the center of its reflections about the possibilities of peaceful human coexistence. 9 In the 17th century, there were alternative concepts of the natural state, for example the one developed by John Locke in his “Essay Concerning Human Understanding” (1689). Locke argues that the human mind contains a natural basis for a supra-individual consciousness for rules and norms. In contrast to Hobbes’ concept, this consciousness does not have to be ‘produced’ by the violent clash of individuals. 10 See Hobbes 2002, 9–124. 11 This thesis is also put forward by Axel Honneth in his book “The Struggle for Recognition” (Honneth 1996, 9–11). Hobbes himself contrasts his understanding of

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It describes the establishment of political order as a radical break from the natural conditions of human beings. But Hobbes’ doctrine of the natural state considers the natural existence of human beings to be not only apolitical and nonhierarchical, but also atomistic: as individuals, human beings only enter into a relationship with other human beings in a secondary manner, and this relationship is always affected by egoistical impulses and passions.12 The encounter of individual human beings in the natural state is therefore characterized by the three basic conflicts of ‘competition,’ ‘distrust’ and ‘thirst for glory’13 that cause the individuals to assault each other. Hobbes calls this the “war of all against all.”14 Thus, unlike Aristotle, he does not make human nature the integrative element of a conception of human coexistence. Instead, the natural state is developed for the purpose of providing a rational insight into the existence of an artificially created coexistence, a state that holds the monopoly of power and domination.15 In Hobbes’ conception, the social order and coexistence of human beings are for the first time considered to be in need of legitimation because their form is no longer predetermined by nature or God. In the Hobbesian doctrine of the state, the unsocial natural state of human beings thus functions as an extra-societal foundation for the legitimation of a societal order based on the model of a contract in which the various interests of the individuals are represented and mediated by a third party (the sovereign). Methodologically speaking, the description of the natural state precedes the description of society. In this natural state, individuals live in a nonhierarchical space, which, according to Hobbes, causes them to perpetually tumble into life-and-death conflicts with each other. Subsequently, the multitude of conflicts and individual interests expands into a war of all against all, which puts the individuals’ lives in such grave danger that they agree to form a state.16 Thus, Hobbes views the sociability of the individual not as an end in itself, because human

human nature with that of Aristotle by claiming that Aristotle’s talk of a political creature only applies to bees and ants (see Hobbes 2002, 127). 12 See Hobbes 2002, 40–49. 13 See ibid., 94. 14 Ibid., 95. 15 See ibid., 130. 16 See ibid.

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beings require social coexistence not by nature,17 but only as a means of self-preservation. Hobbes’ doctrine of the natural state can be read in two different ways. The first reading forms the basis for the modelings of experimental economics and neuroeconomics. The second reading will be discussed in more detail in the following section. From a historical perspective, Hobbes’ development of the doctrine of the natural state is inextricably linked to the social upheavals of the religious and civil wars at the beginning of the 17th century. Hobbes wrote his “Leviathan” based on his experiences of these conflicts, thereby creating the prototype of a naturalistic justification of society. In Hobbes’ own opinion, the description of human beings he provided in the “Leviathan” was an exact description of human psychology and actual human behavior. He believed that the best foundation for a theory of political order is an anthropology that is as true to reality as possible. However, his representation of human beings is not supported by empirical studies or observations of human beings, but refers only to his personal life experiences. Accordingly, his doctrine of the natural state constructs an image of human beings that represents them as creatures bent on self-preservation and pleasure, whose behavior is mainly motivated by material desires and passions. The political motive underlying Hobbes’ conception of the doctrine of the natural state is the question of how to bring about the transition from war to peace, or of how peace can emerge from a state of war. In his imagined situation of the war of all against all, i.e., in a situation of multi-polar conflict, the transition18 from war to peace is always made by establishing an order (the foundation of a state). Only the authority and general power given to the state by all individuals can ensure the peaceful coexistence of human beings under a central ruling entity.19 However, individuals enter the societal state as a state of governance only due to fear of a violent death in the struggle of all

17

See ibid., 94–95. The following quote makes clear that Hobbes’ understanding of war does not refer to war-time hostilities, but to a conflict situation that is independent of time and space: “For War consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known. [. . .] [S]o the nature of actual war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is Peace.” (ibid., 95). 19 See ibid., 130. 18

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against all. Thus, their motivation is deeply rooted in an egoistic urge for self-preservation and is devoid of any moral or political motive beyond the protection of their own lives.20 Hobbes develops the fiction of the natural state underlying the political and legal order in his social contract theory on the basis of a description of a natural human essence. With this description, Hobbes sets the course for a new social-philosophical model of thought. Based on an objective and (apparently) impartial examination of human beings and their natural abilities, it is possible to determine and politically secure the possibilities and limitations of human coexistence. In the 18th and 19th century, this model of thought becomes the basis for the endeavor to examine human beings with the exact methods of the natural sciences. In this way, the basis for the justification of human society becomes even more strictly objectified. From this process emerges the idea of a natural-scientific foundation of human social orders as postulated by August Comte.21 But social philosophy has used the theory of the natural state not just for justifying society, but also for criticizing it. For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke or Anthony Shaftesbury, among others, the natural state no longer serves to legitimize social order, but becomes the argumentative basis for the challenge and critical assessment of societal order structures. With the emergence of historicism in the 19th and 20th centuries, this model of thought was cast into doubt. The notion began to prevail that human ‘nature’ itself cannot be an objective point of reference outside of social order patterns and institutional frameworks of society, but rather became historical along with them. Thus, the function of human nature for the justification of social order was put into question, because a human nature that is always described in dependence on the historical conditions of society cannot function as an extrasocietal given. It is historically determined itself, and its validity is not timeless. The insight into the historical determinacy and relativity of the concept of natural human abilities subsequently called into question recourse to that concept for justifying anything.

20 See ibid., 97: “The passions that incline men to peace are fear of death, desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living, and a hope by their industry to obtain them.” 21 Here, it is useful to refer to Comte’s “Cours de philosophie positive” (Comte 1990). This idea of a scientific-rational foundation of society is taken up again by Ernst Cassirer in his book “The Myth of the State” (see Cassirer 2007, 289).

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In contrast, the modelings of experimental economics and neuroeconomics draw on the philosophical thought experiment of a natural state preceding the societal integration of human beings into a lawbased state of governance. Their work is based on the assumption of a nonhierarchical interaction between single individuals. But economics seeks to use its experimental modelings to support the argument that the purely speculative understanding of human beings underlying Hobbes’ philosophical thought experiment should be replaced with a scientifically verified concept of human beings. Furthermore, it seeks to show that Hobbes’ premise of an unsocial human nature can be disproved by verifying the natural prosociality of human beings. Social coexistence is already possible under the conditions of the natural state if the conflict between human egoism and altruism can be won by the latter. While Hobbes describes human beings before the societal state as pure egoists, the economic modelings were able to show how the natural altruism of human beings can become the motor for enforcing societal norms of behavior. Therefore, instead of assuming a generally unsocial human nature, economic modelings describe a conflict between antisocial and prosocial agents in social interaction. The question remains whether economics has already tapped the full reflective potential of this philosophical thought experiment, just by providing the positivist description of human beings espoused by it with empirical underpinnings, corrections and expansions. 23.2

The Genesis of Order from Contingence

The previous section showed that Thomas Hobbes’ construction of the natural state is rooted in the genuinely modern idea that social and political patterns of order are not naturally given, but rather are constituted by an artificial break from human nature. According to Gerhard Gamm,22 the theory of the social contract has thus not only (as shown above) provided a new social-anthropological model of thought for the justification of the formation of political order, but it was also the first concept to point out that this formation of order is contingent on historical occurrences. In order to understand the implications of this second argument, it is necessary to disclose the strategy of

22

See Gamm 2001, 7–27.

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justification underlying the theory of the social contract in its dynamics beyond Hobbes’ original model. Hobbes develops the theory of the social contract from a seemingly extra-historical a priori concept, the natural state of human beings. In this way, the theory reduces the complexity of society’s underlying social structures to an ideal type, the singularity of a conflict or war between human egoisms.23 But by methodologically extracting human nature from the formation of order within society, the theory of the social contract also takes recourse to an ultimate foundation of social order formation and derives from it the principle of necessary dominion to legitimize the order formation. In its dependence on a seemingly ahistoric natural state, the theory of the social contract attempts to defuse the radical contingency and lack of origin of the social and political genesis of order and to provide it with a seemingly timeless justification. But Hobbes’ construction, which strives to provide society with a foundation based on a timelessly valid anthropology, has failed to stand the test of time in the societal dynamics of modernity. However, the insight that the natural state is by no means ahistoric and eternally valid did not cause social contract theory to be dismissed, but to be corrected, re-determined and consolidated. It was possible to reinterpret the theory of the social contract as a paradigm for a reflexive theory of the genesis of social order. This theory is aware of the contingent provisions of every social order formation and remains transparent through the construction of a natural or original state.24 In the course of the further development of Hobbes’ social contract theory, two things have become clear: first, the construction of an extra-societal natural state is always based on the premises of the present state of society. The pre-societal state referred to as ‘natural state’ describes that which, from a regulative perspective, is to be excluded from the present societal order as a non-rational living option for human beings, which destroys and suspends the societal order. Second, on the basis of this insight, the social contract is no longer a neutral regulator; instead, its establishment is made possible by a hegemonic strategy that is supposed to establish a very specific idea of society as the only necessary and legitimate possibility of order formation.

23

See ibid., 15–16. See e.g. the reformulation of the classical contract theories with the help of rational decision theory in Rawls 1971, 102–168. 24

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These observations form the basis for a new potential for reflection. From this perspective, the analytical and heuristic significance of the social contract theory is not to be found in the fact that it knows and assumes a definitive natural state of human beings; rather, the more interesting aspect is that it acknowledges a ‘constitutive exteriority’ of the identity and totality of social and political forms of order and maintains it for the reflection on the emergence of order. Another function of this ‘constitutive exteriority’ is to point out that the predominance of a very specific form of order (namely, the order of the social contract) is impossible without the exclusion of alternative forms of order. If the conflict between these forms were to be maintained indefinitely, human coexistence would be impossible (Hobbes’ state of nature). For this reason, the conflict can only be pacified by the hegemonic predominance of one regulative power. Therefore, the conflict of egoisms in the natural state as a ‘constitutive exteriority’ is not only a condition for the possibility of society, but also a constitutive part of it. This insight, which is central to the reflexive understanding of the possibilities and limitations of the modern idea of society, can now in turn be applied to the modeling of sociality in economics, which assumes a dual social nature of human beings (prosocial/antisocial). Experimental economics attempts to draw a picture of human society that posits the biological ‘nature’ of human beings as the condition for the emergence of social regulative patterns. Its explanatory claim and the associated experimental modelings, however, are based on a grave methodological self-misunderstanding. This has been demonstrated already: the representations and interpretations of experimental economics always ignore the constructedness of its own methodology and the associated consequences of technologically mastering its human object of study.25 The understanding of nature that underlies its interpretations thus contradicts its own constructive treatment of this ‘nature’ in experiment. While experimental economics claims to provide a better description of human nature than philosophical theory and to present it as it is, it ignores the crucial insight resulting from the critical understanding of the social contract theory, and at the same time reconfirms the relevance and significance of social contract theory for social-philosophical thought. Precisely because experimental economics as neuroeconomics attempts to give its findings the form of

25

This thesis has been developed and justified in the first chapter in §14.2.

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a naturalistic a priori conception of social reality, and because it nurtures the prejudice that the political theory of the natural state is nothing more than an inadequate philosophical speculation about human nature that can be empirically corrected, it squanders the potential for philosophical reflection contained in the distinction between a natural and societal state, and with it the chance to understand human nature as a ‘constitutive exteriority’, i.e., as a factor that eludes societal regulatives. Instead, its modelings turn the biological nature of human beings into an artifact that can be manipulated with social techniques and whose biological consciousness correlates can be conditioned and manipulated in a way that makes it possible to enforce a very specific idea of society, namely that which rests on the universal principles of fairness and justice, as the norm of social interaction patterns. Thus, the model of the natural and empirical origins of the human societal form of life developed in experimental economics and neuroeconomics is by no means an unbiased depiction of reality that could be uncritically taken as ‘fact’ to support philosophical considerations. Rather, neuroeconomic experiments model not only empirical evidence, but a practical method to draw on human biology for the establishment of a very specific form of human coexistence. By systematically investigating the possibility of establishing a social framework that leads to a specific behavioral type in the examined behavior aggregate, it creates the pragmatic conditions for the societal appropriation and disciplining of human beings and their egoism. 24

Antagonism: The Irreducibility of Difference

From the perspective of the Hobbesian social contract, the natural state constitutes a legal and political vacuum that is primarily determined by individual antagonisms. According to Hobbes, the momentum of these antagonisms results from the natural human drives and passions that cause individuals to engage each other in a life-and-death struggle. The scarcity of available goods also contributes to hostile relationships among individuals. The individuals’ egoisms and the scarcity of goods in the natural state lead to a situation where no individual is safe from the others. In Hobbes’ perspective, society – understood as an objective order brought about by the establishment of a legal relationship among the individuals – puts an absolute stop to this situation by ending the anthropologically determined antagonisms with the help of a

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rational agreement, i.e., the social contract. Thus, the social contract is meant to permanently and irrevocably overcome these antagonisms by transferring the liberties of the individual to an ‘impartial’ sovereign. Hobbes explains the necessity of such a transfer by claiming (i) that the individual can accept, for rational reasons, that hostile antagonisms can be overcome by appointing a central ruling power, and (ii) that the sovereign’s power permanently keeps them in check and directs them toward a common good. The highest purpose of appointing a sovereign is thus to arrest the conflicts between human beings before they escalate into hostile antagonism. 24.1

Laclau and Mouffe: Antagonism and Democracy

Hobbes’ theory of the social contract is based on the premise that societal order begins where hostile antagonisms can be permanently resolved and overcome. From this perspective, human sociability is the result of a centralization and monopolization of power. But not only the natural state as such, but also its transition into a social contract is a precarious premise full of preconditions. In the following sections, this premise will be critically examined by reintroducing antagonism into the social-philosophical concept of society. The idea that conflicts and antagonisms between human beings can simply be excised from a description of social reality, whisked away by unanimous, rational consensus, is a political vision that, just like the speculation about the natural state, must be examined in terms of its justification and preconditions. What this means exactly can be demonstrated with the example of the deconstruction of those societal concepts that propose a liberal reading of the social contract theory. In contemporary social philosophy, a universal, contract-theoretical foundation of society is appreciated mainly in the liberal theoretical approaches. Thus, the conviction that societal orders are primarily based on a rational agreement between human beings has been accepted as a key principle of societal theory. Its proponents include the contractualist, linguist and discourse-theoretical approaches in 20th century social philosophy (John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas etc.). It is connected to a number of cosmopolitan ideas about human coexistence (human rights, universality of the liberal democracy model etc.). The situation is different on the side of leftist and post-Marxist social theories. It is precisely the universal idea of the necessity of a societal consensus championed by the liberal approaches that is presently

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being challenged by deconstructivist social theories of the political left. In order to describe this idea, the following sections will discuss as an example the theory of discourse and democracy developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe.26 Laclau’s and Mouffe’s theory of discourse and democracy rejects the political logic of the rationally necessary associated with the social contract theory and replaces it with a political logic that emphasizes the presence of a specific form of contingency in societal order formation. For Laclau and Mouffe, contingency manifests itself primarily in the hegemonic and antagonistic structures of the political discourse practices in society. In their jointly authored work “Hegemony and Socialist Strategy”27 (published in English in 1985), they criticize the rational idealization of society espoused by liberal societal theories. In opposition to these theories, they develop an alternative understanding of societal order formation. For Laclau and Mouffe, the constitutive structure of society is not (as in the Hobbesian paradigm) a contract or unanimous agreement, but the conflict or antagonism of political identities that Hobbes had relegated to his description of the natural state. Laclau and Mouffe view social conflicts within society as antagonistic since they manifest the impossibility of an ultimate and definitive consolidation of societal order.28 Thus, the irreducibility of these conflicts represents an immanent limit to the formation of order. In this context, Laclau and Mouffe do not understand antagonistic conflict as an objective discrepancy between different options of societal order, but as a dynamic process of differentiation that brings forth all of these options in the first place.29 Laclau’s and Mouffe’s approach is based on the thesis that the liberal conception of society aims at an objective and self-contained ordering structure of the social. In their view, this goal is not compatible with the reality of political life in a world of pluralist democracies. Therefore, the starting point for Laclau’s and Mouffe’s argumentation is the observation that precisely the antagonisms that the social contract theory locates ‘outside’ of society are constitutive of the political 26

See Laclau 1990; Laclau and Mouffe 22001; Mouffe 1993; 2000; 2005. Laclau and Mouffe 22001. 28 See the definition of antagonism in the book “Hegemony and Socialist Strategy”: “[A]ntagonism, as a witness of the impossibility of a final structure, is the ‘experience’ of the limit of the social. Strictly speaking, antagonisms are not internal but external to society; or rather, they constitute the limit of society.” (ibid., 125). 29 See ibid., 122–127. 27

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decision-making process and of the pluralism of political options in a democratic society. For this reason, they attempt to reclaim the term ‘antagonism’ for their theory of society. In their view, societal discourse is always about a political conflict between different parties and about taking a point of view that can be distinguished from other points of view (us/them difference). According to Laclau and Mouffe, this discourse can never be about the dissolution of partisan positions through the parties’ unanimous rational agreement on a common position. Instead, these different positions should be provided with a symbolic space of legitimate confrontation and articulation. According to Laclau and Mouffe, the efforts to rid society of potential antagonisms through consensus-oriented, democratic methods are fueled by the suspension and negation of the basic political dimension of society. Consequently, they posit ‘the political’ as a counterprinciple to that which liberal societal theory thinks of as ‘the social.’30 The political is defined by power conflicts and is always determined by the confrontational emergence of a hegemonic position. Power conflicts cannot be reconciled in democratic discourses, but they can be transitioned into legitimate forms of articulation (radical democratic approach). According to Mouffe, such legitimate forms of articulation are established by channeling conflicts agonistically, i.e., by articulating conflicts on the level of adversarial politics (agonism) and not on the level of militant hostility (antagonism).31 Thus, a constitutive factor for the articulation of conflicts in post-Marxist societal theory is the formation of clearly differentiated political options that, by confronting each other, enable the individual political forces to represent themselves and to set themselves apart from each other.32 Accordingly, the formation of political fronts (left, right) is not something that precedes political practice and must be overcome by it, but is indeed one of its core tasks. Unlike the liberal understanding of society, the post-Marxist understanding of society assumes that political conflicts as political conflicts should never be solved or suspended with rational means. Rather, they are irreducible as conflicts, and their agonistic articulation in political practice has a constitutive relevance for the functionality of human

30 31 32

This thought is again pointedly expressed in Mouffe 2005, 17–18. See ibid., 29–31, and Mouffe 2000, 80–107. See Mouffe 2005, 29–34.

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societies. Laclau and Mouffe justify this argument in two ways.33 First, they point out that the reality of antagonistic power structures must not be obscured or impaired in societal discourse by creating the illusion that differences could be harmonized or ultimately made to disappear by making everyone agree on the same rational methodological principles, as is the case in the discourse theory of Jürgen Habermas, among others.34 For there is the risk that that which is excluded as irrational by a societal order turns against it in a subversive manner. In order to prevent this from happening, the dynamics of collective identification must be laid open and the conflict between them must be acknowledged as an influential force in political discourse. Furthermore, the reference to political anthropology is a crucial constitutive element of the post-Marxist understanding of society. Mouffe explains the constitutive importance of antagonism for political discourse by pointing out that political conflict in a democracy is rooted in human affective bonding that not only allows, but downright demands passionate partisanship and collective identification. These affective identifications are a basic anthropological condition of sociability in general. The inner dynamics of every political discourse is rooted in a conflict between individual and collective patterns of identification, which due to its foundation in human affects, cannot be solved with rationality, but only fought out in a reasonable manner. These thoughts point to a possible connection between post-Marxist political theory and psychoanalysis, and suggest a willingness to adopt insights and reflections from this discipline.35 Looking at some reflections by Jacques Lacan, this idea comes into sharper focus. Drawing on Sigmund Freud’s work, Lacan endeavored to interpret the affects of human beings as passions of collective desires [desir] or enjoyment [ jouissance].36 Here, ‘desire’ and ‘enjoyment’ are to be understood as two modes of forming collective identities. While desire is focused on an imaginary object that can only be desired as a non-identity, i.e., in an actual lack of identification, enjoyment organizes itself through the construction of real, symbolic instances that represent one’s own identity as distinct from someone else’s. The point of both modes is

33

The twofold justification strategy presented here can be found: ibid., 17–19.25–29. See Habermas 1983/1987. 35 This integration occurs by way of Slavoj Žižek’s work on psychoanalysis and political theory in Mouffe 2005, 25–29 (see Žižek 1989; 1991; 1998). 36 See the introduction to Lacan by Peter Widmer (2007). 34

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that the formation of identity occurs against the foil of a ‘constitutive exteriority,’ a counterpart to one’s own identity. But this counterpart is either unavailable for identification (desire) or, as a symbolic construct (enjoyment), is the site of identity formation that occurs by setting itself apart from others. These reflections are congruent with Laclau’s and Mouffe’s thoughts.37 By attributing the formation of a collective political identity to a passion of desire and enjoyment that always eludes human beings themselves, it is now possible to also lay open its antagonistic escalation potential for society. As soon as a group perceives the identity of another group as a real threat to the enjoyment of its own identity constructs, there is the risk that a friend-enemy-relationship emerges in which the others become the object of hate and disdain. Thus, the search for political identification in the collective enjoyment of an object also contains an aggressive and destructive potential that – according to Mouffe – can only be kept from escalating by the democratic process of confrontational articulation and disarticulation of political identities.38 Psychoanalytical theory can thus serve to highlight the ambiguity of human beings as social creatures: the desiring and enjoying human being is just as capable of hate and hostility as of fraternization and social reciprocity. A complete elimination of this ambiguity will always remain an illusion and, Mouffe states, bears a great risk for the democratic structure of society. In order to account for the ambiguous social nature of human beings, political conflicts in social-philosophical theory must therefore have conceptual status. In her book “On the Political,” Mouffe argues39 that the affective passions of human beings in a democracy cannot simply be subordinated to rational methodological and regulative principles; rather, their constitutive role in the emergence of democratic political options must be acknowledged. Only then can these passions be prevented from turning into subversive

37 According to the poststructuralist discourse theory of society (Laclau and Mouffe), the political identity can only be established via an empty (or emptied) signifier (signifier without signified), which allows for a dimension of unknown meaning in the discourse and in this way can come to symbolize the equivalence of very different discursive moments. In Laclau’s and Mouffe’s terms, the empty signifier can also be referred to as the horizon or boundary of a perspective (see Stäheli 2001, 201). It is both a site of the discourse’s imaginary closure and part of the discourse itself. 38 See Mouffe 2005, 17–19. 39 See ibid., 25–29.

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dynamics that threaten the democratic order from within. Nationalist ideologies and terrorism are the key factors Mouffe has in mind when she discusses the subversive risk potentials of antagonistic structures repressed by society.40 24.2

Critical Assessment of the Liberal, Deliberative Model of Society

The previous reflections, based on the deconstruction of the liberal societal model’s political visions, have added new insights to the understanding of human sociality. In this section, these insights will be systematically summarized. Once again, the approach developed by Laclau and Mouffe will serve as a point of reference. In their books, they both formulate a radical criticism of the liberal model of society, observing that the deliberative understanding of societal discourse practices presents itself as a decidedly apolitical understanding of society, which abandons crucial insights of social anthropology in favor of an unequivocally optimistic and positive conception of human beings. Therefore, Laclau and Mouffe call for a (re)politicization of the understanding of human beings and society. On the basis of their reflections on the political as an articulation of antagonistic conflict, they challenge the idea of sociality as an objective order of human life.41 In her book “On the Political,” Mouffe in particular has demonstrated ways of differentiating between politics, understood as a societal institution and method, and the political,42 which she uses as a category of reflection on the limits of human sociality. Accordingly, the political aspect of politics is not its empirical method, but that which makes it a discursive practice of society. According to Mouffe, a discursive practice is defined by the fact that the structures of its organization must always be contingently produced within it. The political and everything that belong to politics as a discursive practice thus eludes stabilization by an extra-discursive foundation (e.g., the construction of a timeless natural state). Thus, in Laclau’s and Mouffe’s concept, the ability to politicize society is no longer bound by the limits of natural law. In their view, every

40

See ibid., 27–28.76–83. See Laclau’s apt formulation: “The political is not an internal moment of the social but, on the contrary, that which shows the impossibility of establishing the social as an objective order” (Laclau 1990, 160). 42 See Mouffe 2005, 8–9. 41

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formation of societal order can be called ‘political’ in the sense that it can be attributed to a form of hegemony.43 This hegemony is based on the contingent exclusion of alternative possibilities of societal order formation. Laclau’s and Mouffe’s criticism of the liberal-democratic understanding of politics, and thus the liberal perspective on human sociality, can be summarized in the following four theses: (i)

The individualism of the liberal model of politics fails to recognize the nature and existence of collective identifications constituted with the help of an us/them distinction. (ii) The anthropology of the liberal model of politics ignores the role of human passions that manifest themselves in collective identifications. (iii) The liberal model represents a moralizing understanding of politics insofar as it describes the antagonism, which is constitutive of the political, with moral categories (right, wrong) instead of political categories (left, right) and thus provides a distorted image of the democratic decision-making processes. (iv) The liberal model of politics is based on the image of a consensus-oriented, ‘reconciled’ society that does not take serious the irreducibly hegemonic nature of every establishment of order, i.e., the creation of contingent power structures through the temporary exclusion of other, alternative possibilities.

Laclau’s and Mouffe’s theses point to structural aspects of human sociality that cannot be comprehended in the context of the liberal understanding of human beings and society. The liberal model of society ignores various structural aspects of the human social relationship, which runs the risk that particularly the antagonistic social structure will manifest itself in other forms than those of democratically legitimate conflict and discourse. The theory of discourse and society, with its premise of antagonism as a basic structure of human sociality, thus argues for a rigorous acknowledgment of the antagonistic dimensions of human coexistence, and accuses the liberal theory of society of reducing society’s political dimension to a rational balance of interests which moves between moral demands and economic profits. In this dialectic of morals and economics, the political has only an instrumental

43 According to Laclau and Mouffe, hegemony includes the exclusion of alternative possibilities of identity and order formation within societal practice. But this exclusion is not presented as an irreducibly determined form of identity and order formation, but as one that has become contingent and thus in turn ‘surmountable.’ Laclau and Mouffe take up the moment of exclusion following the political theory of Carl Schmitt (see Schmitt 1922, and others).

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value. Its own momentum and its constitutively associated sociopolitical anthropology of antagonistic confrontation are ignored. Critical assessments of Laclau’s and Mouffe’s theory of society show both the strengths and weaknesses of their understanding of social relationship patterns.44 A strong point of their conception is the emphasis on the dynamic and unfinished formation of political and social identity, which enables them to demonstrate how human interests can also be articulated in the form of conflict and opposition and transitioned into hegemonic positions. However, Laclau and Mouffe neglect or ignore the question of how institutional arrangements and stable social formations nevertheless managed to emerge in societal life – a question which had been of particular interest to economic behavioral research. 25

Recognition: The Pacification of Difference

An entirely different approach to the conflict potential of interpersonal encounters presents itself in the debate over the ethics and politics of recognition. In the following passages, this debate will be discussed as a second example for a social-philosophical theory inspired by the social ambiguity of human cooperation and conflict. While some deconstructivist social theories unreservedly affirm the antagonistic confrontation contained in interpersonal difference, other socialphilosophical approaches attempt to base their reflections on the sociability and sociality of human beings on a social phenomenology that identifies a moral motive at the very root of interpersonal relations: the desire for receiving recognition from the other. The term ‘recognition,’ which shall now be the focus of our attention, is considered to be one of the most central terms of contemporary social philosophy. It can serve as the basis for a phenomenological analysis of the anthropological preconditions of societal morals, laws and politics, as well as for a hermeneutical reflection on the deep structure of human social practices and forms of life. Often, recognition by others is prematurely and unthinkingly elevated to the rank of a universal basic human need, while disregard by others, non-recognition, is given the status of a morally reprehensible violation of the other.45 44 45

See Stäheli 2001, 217. E.g. in Taylor 1994, 60.

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Additionally, critical social theory understands the relation of recognition as a normative regulator and interprets it as a condition for the ability of society to experience moral progress. Thus, recognition by others has been made a conditio sine qua non for normative theories of society.46 Taking stock of how social philosophy uses the term ‘recognition,’ it becomes clear that the terminology of recognition has been an incomparably successful concept in social and political theory. In his book47 on the subject-theoretical premises of the term ‘recognition,’ political scientist and philosopher Markus Verweyst gives a very apt analysis: If we take a look around in contemporary social philosophy, we cannot help but get the impression that, like a magnet, the term ‘recognition’ attracts the attention of all kinds of theoretical positions. This category seems to be capable of pooling the power of practical philosophical thoughts just as well as it is capable of enriching the legitimacy potential of communitarian positions. It can be just as easily related to difference as to identity. [. . .] Recognition aligns itself with both subversion and tradition, with the particular and the general [. . .]. In this debate about recognition, which can easily be read as a socialphilosophical reaction to the social processes of change in the Western industrial nations, [. . .] unity apparently can only be achieved regarding the basic subject-theoretical premise. This premise states that the positive experience of recognition is indispensable for the development of a successful self-relationship. In such basal terms, this sentence can hardly be disputed. But confusion arises from the fact that it is not even attempted to venture beyond this basic and somewhat vague question. Merely pointing out the importance of positive recognition for a successful self-relation seems to exhaust its problem potential. After the subject became normative prematurely, the only remaining questions are about who or what deserves recognition, how practical power arises from withholding recognition, or what preconditions must be fulfilled to make the ‘struggle for recognition’ seem legitimate.48

The awareness of the problem which Verweyst calls for regarding the partly unexamined positive evaluation of recognition, mostly applies to those approaches that unreservedly affirm the term ‘recognition.’ However, awareness of a problem regarding recognition is not as

46

One paradigmatic example for such an interest in the term ‘recognition’ is Honneth 1996. 47 Verweyst 2000. 48 Ibid., 11–12 (transl. M.S.).

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absent from the debate as Verweyst claims.49 Indeed, there is some reflection on the fact that recognition as a demand on the other person can also contain an element of asserting ownership, of construction and appropriation of the other, that turns recognition into an ethically inacceptable and unjustifiable demand. At the same time, this insight does not challenge or invalidate the close connection between identity and recognition that was first pointed out by the idealistic philosophy of consciousness. Instead, it gains a different meaning: Insofar as human self-relation cannot be conceived of without the relation of recognition that relates the human self to others, the relation of recognition can only be lived on the borderline between the appropriation of and dependence on the other. Therefore, it is just as important to analyze the ethical ambiguity of recognition as it is to affirm its indispensability for the emergence of a positive self-relation. 25.1

Recognition: Normative Demand or Real-Life Practice?

The following section will provide a basic outline of two entirely different models for the relation of recognition. The first model endeavors to understand recognition in the context of a critical social theory of intersubjectivity, while the second model regards recognition as a symbolic practice or gesture that resists the reciprocal logic of the intersubjective model (‘If you recognize me, I shall recognize you in turn’). For the purpose of comparing the two models, the relation of recognition will be considered as a social configuration in which human beings engage with each other according to the notion that ‘one cannot be without the other.’ The following two attempts at interpretation will establish an ideal-typical comparison between what is recognized in a relation of recognition and where recognition is located. (i) Post-Hegelian (Axel Honneth, Charles Taylor): Drawing on the understanding of intersubjectivity in Hegel’s early works, the term

49 See the passages on García Düttmann and Ricœur in this section. For further discussion of the problem of ethical illegitimacy of recognition, it is useful to look into Patchen Markell’s provocative critical analysis of the political term of recognition (Markell 2003). In his book “Bound by Recognition,” Markell develops a terminology of acknowledgment as an alternative to the terminology of recognition. He wants to show that the focus on the identity of the other recognized does not prevent the recognizer from closing himself off against the other and imposing his own will. This constitutes recognition as an act of social injustice in itself. In order to counter this appropriating movement of recognition, an alternative register of social reference is necessary, which Markell finds in ‘acknowledgement.’

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‘recognition’ can serve as a key for examining the original close connection between a subject’s relation to himself and his relation to others. Human beings are incapable of developing self-understanding without identifying themselves at the site of another self. Thus, recognition is based on a duplification of subjectivity at the site of the other. Drawing on Hegel’s terminology, the theory of philosophical intersubjectivity thus presents a terminological framework for the exploration of societal reality within the horizon of recognition. (ii) Hermeneutical (Paul Ricœur): By focusing on describing how the relation of recognition is performed, recognition can be examined as a practiced social act and not merely as formal intersubjectivity. Drawing on a hermeneutical examination of aspects of life in which recognition is realized, it can therefore be demonstrated that recognition does not suspend the asymmetry in the relationship between self and others, but transcends it with the element of mutuality. Therefore, recognition should not be considered primarily a human desire or demand, but a liveable opportunity that emerges in the relationship between human beings through the use of symbols and gestures of recognition. Looking at these two perspectives, which present recognition in the contexts of intersubjectivity and mutuality between human beings, opens up paths for exploring the anthropological character of recognition in greater depth. We therefore return once more to the thoughts of Markus Verweyst. In his subject-theoretical analyses of recognition, which follow in the footsteps of Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, Verweyst has shown that the human desire for recognition is rooted in a craving that decentralizes the subject of recognition, i.e., it does not allow the direction of the subject’s individual longing to find closure or consummation.50 Subjects who are in need of recognition are thus unable to give direction to their own individual longing. Even within themselves, the desire for recognition already comes up against the limit of an elusive other, which not only constitutes the desire for recognition, but above all continues it. This means that the premise of a desire for recognition makes it necessary to acknowledge a momentum in the demand for recognition that is beyond one’s own control, and to think of recognition not as a demand, but as a subject’s need. But this need also

50

See Verweyst 2000, 409.

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provokes the desire to enjoy being recognized by others again and again through symbolic instances. Thus, the fact that the desire for recognition remains elusive, beyond the control of the subject of recognition himself, turns out to be the real driving force of his conflicted attempts to satisfy the desire for recognition, at least temporarily, in the symbolic orders of life. Drawing on Verweyst’s thoughts, the following section will critically examine the two different approaches to the understanding of recognition. 25.2

Post-Hegelian Perspectives on Recognition

Among the voices in the social-philosophical discourse on recognition that draw on and distinguish themselves from the Hegelian term, a prominent position is held by Axel Honneth, who has made the term productive for his moral-philosophical conception of a critical and normative theory of society.51 In a similar vein, Charles Taylor has developed a political understanding of recognition in the context of the discourse on the universalism and particularism of ethical values.52 In contrast, Alexander García Düttmann argues against a ‘restorative’ interpretation of the political term of recognition and strives to reappropriate it for a theory of interculturality that also takes into account demands for recognition, which in principle cannot be integrated into societal coexistence.53 25.2.1 Honneth: Recognition and Its Negative Forms In his book “The Struggle for Recognition”54 (first published in 1992), Axel Honneth adopts the figure of recognition from a systematical rereading of Hegel’s early Jena writings and fragments. Thus, Honneth’s initial approach to the terminology of recognition consists in critically reviewing the textual fragments of a theory of recognition, which must first be reconstructed from the writings of Hegel’s Jena period (1802– 1807).55 Here Honneth’s interest mainly centers on Hegel’s treatment of Fichte’s reinterpretation of the natural state doctrine, “System der

51

See Honneth 1996. See Taylor 1994. 53 See García Düttmann 2000. 54 The debate that was triggered by the book is documented in the following publications: Halbig and Quante 2004; Fraser and Honneth 2003. 55 See Honneth 1996, 31–140. 52

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Sittlichkeit”56 (“System of Ethical Life”) from 1802/03, and the first draft of the “Jenaer Realphilosophie”57 from 1803/04.58 The thrust of the two writings is read as an example of the significant shift in Hegel’s early thought, in which Hegel gradually abandons Aristotelianism in favor of a theory of the subject rooted in the philosophy of consciousness. Honneth is particularly interested in precisely that which Hegel himself (in Honneth’s reading) is slowly discarding: a model for the process of human society formation that ‘has always been’ characterized by “elementary forms of intersubjective coexistence.”59 According to Honneth, the ‘natural morality’ of human beings favored in Hegel’s early writings60 represents an alternative concept to Hobbes’ artificial doctrine of the natural state, which constructs a state of human beings before sociality. Unlike Hobbes, Hegel considers the nature of human beings to be their moral potential, which develops into a universal principle in the course of the history of the human spirit – or, as the young Hegel refers to it, in the ‘becoming of morality’ [Werden der Sittlichkeit]. This development occurs through a process of repeated negations, which Hegel also applies in his later system. According to Honneth’s interpretation, Hegel, by “using a theory of conflict to make Fichte’s model of recognition more dynamic,”61 takes an (albeit speculative) step toward a concrete realization of that which Johann Gottlieb Fichte had referred to as the ‘mutuality’ at the heart of the human legal relationship.62 Subsequently, however, this attempt at concretization leads to a definition of recognition that is entirely unlike what Fichte had in mind. In Honneth’s view, the point of Hegel’s intersubjective theory of recognition is the reinterpretation of the Hobbesian motif of struggle as a moral medium and an ethical dynamic. Understood as a practical conflict between individuals, struggle is the social medium for progressing into the moral wholeness of individual existence. In Honneth’s words, “[i]ndividuals only can

56

Hegel 2002. Hegel 1974. 58 In this aspect, he is followed by Ricœur, who expands these analyses to Hegel’s law philosophy (see Ricœur 2005, 171–218). 59 Honneth 1996, 14. 60 In addition to Hegel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke should also be mentioned in this context. 61 Honneth 1996, 17. 62 Specifically, Honneth refers to Fichte’s work “The Foundations of Natural Law”/“Grundlage des Naturrechts” (see ibid., 16). 57

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completely identify with themselves to the degree to which their peculiarities and traits meet with the approval and support of their partners in interaction.”63 If this fails to happen, individuals feel impelled to enter into social conflict. Honneth does not find much to criticize about the early Hegelian theory of recognition; he only notes that Hegel’s later philosophy of subjectivity and the spirit abandons the precedence of intersubjectivity and thus a strong understanding of intersubjectivity.64 Instead of criticizing this, Honneth attempts to continue and validate Hegel’s early speculative-philosophical idea of recognition by confronting it with an empirical-sociological model of intersubjectivity (George Herbert Mead) and by analyzing the phenomenological structures of recognition in the human lifeworld. Honneth’s understanding of recognition can thus be regarded as a post-Hegelian perspective. Honneth bases his interpretation of the term ‘recognition’ on a theory of intersubjectivity, and understands intersubjectivity as a doubling of subjectivity, i.e., as an original connection between self-reflection and orientation toward the other. In his critical theory of society, he accordingly defines the specifically modern pattern of social interaction as a network consisting of different relations of recognition, which in their formal structure also provide an interpretative context for a normative social-philosophical assessment of the processes of societal development.65 Honneth specifically identifies love, law, and solidarity as fundamental prerequisites for this development. As idealtypical forms of recognition, they enable the human subject to tap into new forms of positive self-relation (self-confidence, self-respect, selfesteem). Additionally, they can be used to reconstruct a moral logic of the subject’s social conflicts (physical abuse, social exclusion, collective degradation). Honneth’s heuristics of social phenomena also complements every successful form of recognition with a negative form, i.e., an experience of disrespect that makes recognition structurally impossible. Here, however, the social conflict with its underlying moral motivation is always geared toward the same goal: to create the intersubjective prerequisites and basic conditions of a successful life that are the sine qua non of individualization and personal integrity. 63 64 65

Ibid., 22. See ibid., 29–30. See ibid., 175.

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What is the social-phenomenological range of Honneth’s concept of recognition? Honneth emphatically characterizes the desire for recognition as a moral feeling and shows that its articulation in the social conflict is the expression of a moral motive. However, he states, the individual’s desire to experience recognition by others always culminates in a subject-related moral demand on others. The claim for recognition is thus rooted in a claim for the successful formation of identity and not in the other’s claim on the subject which he answers by giving recognition to this other. Thus, Honneth’s concept of recognition, which focuses on the subject’s identity with himself that can only be produced through recognition by others, obscures the phenomenal excess of the social relationship that emerges from the encounter between human beings. This is due to the fact that Honneth’s approach is based on a theory of intersubjectivity which conceives of social mutuality as a doubling of subjectivity. Honneth does not explicitly discuss the extent to which the self-assertion underlying recognition can or cannot be related to another person’s demand for recognition, because he discusses neither the alterity of the self in the desire for recognition as described by Verweyst, nor the transcendence of the other (which will be treated in §26) in the relation of intersubjectivity. Honneth is not aware of the other as a constitutive element in evoking the subject’s desire for recognition (alterity of the self), nor does he acknowledge the other that continues to elude the demand for recognition and thereby intensifies it into a desire that can never be fully satisfied (transcendence of the other). Hence, his positive assessment of conflict as the moral medium of societal progress must be taken with a grain of salt. He does not take conflict seriously in terms of its fundamental antagonistic structure; instead, he formulates criteria for the moral legitimation of social conflict and claims that by meeting these criteria, social conflict can ultimately be settled and overcome. Adopting an ideal-typical perspective, he only considers those conflicts to be legitimate which are concerned with realizing a horizon of moral values for society as a whole. Thus, Honneth’s concept bestows societal legitimacy upon social conflict by developing a model of recognition that is based on the assumption that all individuals share a common goal of societal interaction, which is represented as the moral motive of recognition. This motive consists in the realization of human freedom through the individual’s self-realization in his individuality. However, Honneth is not capable of answering

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the question of whether this individuality provides space for human pluralism and interpersonal difference. 25.2.2 Taylor: Recognition and the Risk of Homogenizing Difference In contrast to Axel Honneth, but with similar intentions, Charles Taylor has adopted and critically discussed the term ‘recognition’ in the context of a political theory of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is a normative theory of ethical pluralism developed in opposition to particularism (e.g. nationalism, minority politics). It conceives of the demand for recognition as a form of identity politics. In this context, the dynamics of identity politics are defined as the demands of social groups that create collective identities and, based on these identities, rally for the representation of their demands and interests in political discourse. The theory of multiculturalism, with regard to the identity politics of these groups, provides normative criteria that can serve to integrate the demands of different collective identities within the framework of a publicly accepted definition of the good life. Unlike Honneth, whose arguments are mostly moral-philosophical, Taylor thus emphasizes the emergence of collective identities relevant to social and political discourse. Also unlike Honneth, Taylor shows in his essay “The Politics of Recognition”66 (from 1994) the extent to which the present prominence of the recognition debate can be explained historically. In Taylor’s view, the conflict potential of the demand for recognition is primarily the result of the cultural invention of an ethical ideal that did not exist before the age of modernity: the ideal of an authentic identity. This ideal assumes that identity must articulate itself as a form of interiority, as an authentic human self-understanding that initially emerges without any external references. Whereas human identity in pre-modern times was largely determined by social status in a more or less hierarchical societal order, it became the object of autonomous self-determination in modernity. According to Taylor, however, the fact that identity is not formed monologically, but always in dialogue with others, and is thus dependent on intersubjective relationships, only becomes problematic in the 18th century with the invention of a particular form of morality. He therefore calls that century the ‘era

66

Taylor 1994.

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of authenticity.’67 With its implicit demand for an internally produced and authentically responsible identity, modern thinking provides the kindling that fuels conflicts of recognition. This is connected with the fact that whatever the subject’s interior perspective considers authentic and right does not necessarily coincide with others’ social perception; therefore, it must first defend itself in the context of human social existence. By focusing on the importance of relations of recognition, and, even more importantly, by becoming aware of their vulnerability, the modern ‘aberration’68 of the understanding of identity in contemporary social philosophy can now be corrected, since the individual event of discovering one’s own identity is reconstructed as a fundamentally intersubjective process. In addition to placing the discourse of recognition in a historical context, Taylor’s analyses are geared toward finding answers to the following questions: to what extent can recognition as the recognition of the equality of different cultural identities be seen as a legitimate political demand? And to what extent can or must the fulfillment of this demand for recognition take on the form of an equal recognition that evens out differences? According to Taylor, an affirmative answer to the second question would be linked to an inacceptable form of recognition, which would disqualify the demand for recognition on a moral level.69 If recognition leads to a homogenization of cultural differences, its value for a theory of multiculturalism is called into question. Taylor thus turns the politics of recognition into a question of reflective moral judgment: is it legitimate to recognize this or that demand for recognition? And which criteria are at play if this or that demand is accepted? Taylor thus engages completely in an argumentative conflict between a justification and a refutation of demands for recognition. But this conflict is implicitly regulated by his understanding of political discourse as a means of reaching consensus. Society can only dispute the legitimacy of demands for recognition if universal value standards for the comparison of cultures are applied. This, however, does not mean that Taylor declares every difference between cultures to be irrelevant or ultimately resolvable. Much to the contrary, he sharply denounces a politics of recognition that generalizes various demands, 67

Taylor relates this development above all to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s discovery of a human moral self-understanding that he refers to as ‘le sentiment de l’existence.’ 68 However, Taylor himself does not use this term. 69 See Taylor 1994, 71.

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a politics that “implicitly invoke[s] our standards to judge all civilizations and cultures,”70 finds those standards confirmed and thus fails to acknowledge the authentic identity of these cultures.71 In Taylor’s view, the search for universal standards of recognition can therefore only be concerned with the attribution of relative values because it is impossible to reach an ultimate, final verdict about the equal value of human cultures.72 Taylor thus attempts to keep the political discourse of demands for recognition open, but does not completely abandon the project of forming universal value judgments:73 the identity of others, or of other cultures, can only be recognized if they can be encountered in an attitude of openness based on the assumption of equal value and geared toward a “fused horizon of standards.”74 According to Taylor, this fused horizon of standards not only forms the context for the comparison with others as to whether ‘They’ correspond to ‘Us’, but also for self-modification in which ‘We’ may develop new criteria which acknowledge and integrate the identity of others. Thus, Taylor (also) intends to demonstrate that any judgment of the recognition or non-recognition of identities must be connected with (a) the recognition of a fundamental cultural difference and (b) the insight that ‘We’ do not possess universal criteria of judgment and thus can only ever make relative comparisons between ‘Us’ and others. It is a strong point of Taylor’s approach that he names the preservation of difference as a criterion of recognition and explicitly rejects the emphasis on equality in the comparison of cultures. This position is also connected with his insight that the neutrality of value standards by which others are recognized and judged is an illusion. Unlike Honneth, Taylor is aware of the fact that the implicit or explicit demand for equality within the demand for recognition itself represents a moral problem. He discusses recognition as a problem insofar 70

Ibid. Taylor always refers to such a value judgment as ‘ethnocentric.’ 72 Among other things, Taylor here takes recourse to Herder’s idea that the ultimate harmony of coexistence of different cultures is hidden as a secret in divine providence that human beings can only assume and not know (see Taylor 1994, 71). 73 See the following quote: “But what the presumption [of equal value] requires of us is not only peremptory and inauthentic judgments of equal value, but a willingness to be open to comparative cultural study [. . .]. What it requires above all is an admission that we are very far away from that ultimate horizon from which the relative worth of different cultures might be evident.” (ibid., 73). 74 Ibid., 70. 71

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as it is manifested as a homogenizing equal treatment of individual or collective identity claims. But by linking recognition to a value judgment that presents itself, hermeneutically moderated, as an attitude of openness toward the other, Taylor ignores the fact that the desire for recognition carries within itself the demand for reciprocity, which prevents one party from approaching the other in a distanced and neutral manner, and from estimating their equal value; instead, this demand is always determined by the desire that one’s recognition of the other should be reciprocated by the other’s recognition of oneself. Furthermore, Taylor ignores the alterity of the subject of recognition, as Honneth did, and fails to acknowledge that the desire for recognition articulates itself as an existential human longing that cannot be controlled, rejected or rationally dissolved. A fundamental difficulty of the concept of recognition, introduced by Honneth and Taylor to the social-philosophical debate, is that it latently aims for the ideal of an identity which is formed by finding self-confirmation in the other, and which consequently does not sufficiently honor the alterity of the self and the other’s unavailability to the self. 25.2.3

García Düttmann: A Critical Assessment of Restorative Recognition “One must therefore wrest the concept of recognition from restoration, one must reinvent it and use it against the restoration’s apologists, in cultures, between cultures.”75 With these words, Alexander García Düttmann begins his response to the interpretation of the concept of recognition in the context of identity politics and multiculturalism. Unlike those theorists who understand recognition by the other as an element of successful identity formation, García Düttmann, in his book “Between Cultures” (first published in 1997), does not want to focus on the search for and confirmation of identity, but on the fractures and the tension in the interpersonal relation that show in the struggle for recognition. Thus, García Düttmann attempts to develop an alternative terminological register for the relation of recognition, based not on the identity of the subject, but on the double difference between the participants in the relation of recognition.76 García Düttmann rejects the ‘restorative’ interpretation, which understands

75 76

García Düttmann 2000, 1. See ibid., 3–6.

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recognition as the formation of identity through constant confirmation of the other’s connection and belonging to oneself. Against this appropriating movement of restoration, García Düttmann wants to develop an understanding of recognition that allows for acknowledging the double character of recognition, its rootedness in the heterogeneity and ambiguity of the interpersonal relation.77 In order to open up a new theoretical horizon, García Düttmann presents a detailed analysis of the inner dynamics of the relation of recognition that is based on interpersonal difference.78 Unlike other theoretical concepts, he thus approaches the demand for recognition by examining the excessiveness that lies in the act of recognition even before any possible or impossible fulfillment of recognition. In order to point out that there is a significant difference between wanting to be recognized and actually being recognized, García Düttmann differentiates between ‘that which is to be recognized’ and ‘that which is recognized.’ On the basis of this difference, he locates an excess in the relation of recognition that undermines the identity of demand and fulfillment.79 That which wants to be recognized by the other, and that which is ultimately recognized by the other, are not identical. The demand for recognition does not proceed with the certainty that that which is to be recognized will always end up as that which is recognized, because the act of recognition cannot yet draw on its anticipated result, the affirmation and confirmation of the recognized. Instead, it must completely give in to the insecurity and uncertainty that opens up between the demand on the one side and the response to it on the other. In García Düttmann’s words: “The performative act of recognition remains ‘not-one’ with itself, thereby keeping the demand for recognition open.”80 García Düttmann once again reformulates the ‘recognition difference’ as the difference between the confirmation and the establishment of that which is to be recognized.81 At first glance, the two seem to be identical, because that which is to be recognized, which seeks to be confirmed by recognition, specifies what it wants to be recognized as. But García Düttmann rejects this notion: As that which is to be recognized, i.e., in the mode of the demand, it is not yet recognized,

77 78 79 80 81

See ibid., 46. See ibid., 3–6.46–69. See ibid., 4. Ibid. See ibid., 46–47.

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and thus still remains fully in the uncertainty of its fulfillment. It is not yet clear whether the call for recognition will be answered at all. The hermeneutical circle of recognizing ‘something as something’ has not yet closed through the mention of that which is to be recognized, i.e., at the site in which the demand and the claim occur. The demand to be recognized as this or that does not yet establish the identity of that which is to be recognized, and may not be established at all if the demand for recognition is not met. García Düttmann insists on the impossibility of establishing identity, which is contained in the action of recognition. Thus, he views the demand articulated in the desire for recognition not as an expression of self-assertion, but of self-deviation;82 because that which demands to be recognized steps out of itself in its claim on the other and thereby deviates from itself. It must first assert itself as this or that. Otherwise, it would be able to rest in itself and to conceal its need to be recognized. But that which recognizes, that which responds to the demand to be recognized, also deviates from itself in the act of recognition; because in the act of recognition, the confirmation of that which is to be recognized is already anticipated, but at the same time, it is first being established in that moment. That which the recognizer ultimately encounters as the recognized, is uncertain, and will bring the recognizer with it into a state of being ‘not-one’ [Uneinigkeit], just as it has done to that which is to be recognized, which issued the demand for recognition. This notion constitutes a point of contact between García Düttmann’s and Verweyst’s ideas. But unlike Verweyst’s subjecttheoretical conception, García Düttmann’s perspective describes the action of recognition on both sides of the recognition relation as an excessive action in which the self does not experience an individualizing “Ver-Ichlichung, a change which produces [an] identity;” rather, it experiences a “Ver-Änderung, a change which effects otherness.”83 The self experiences this uncertainty and change because it responds to the hole that opens up within the double difference (the ‘to-berecognized’/the ‘recognized’; the ‘recognizer’/the ‘recognized’). Furthermore, García Düttmann points out the unforeseeable nature of the change that occurs in the act of recognizing. He shows that this unexpected change cannot be arrested or stabilized by a (continued)

82 83

See ibid., 7. Ibid., 48.

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repetition of the act of recognition with identical participants, because every one of these repetitions produces a difference that must be recognized and confirmed again as such. Thus, the act of recognition never finds ultimate closure, but continues to be put to the test. In his argumentation, García Düttmann now turns against a usage of the terminology of recognition in the sense of (re-)cognition. In his opinion, the concept of recognition that he establishes in contrast to the restoration of identities uses the irreducible tension between the confirmation and the establishment of that which is to be recognized to close itself off against a mere re-identification of that which is to be recognized. García Düttmann holds that such an understanding guides the consensual discourse theory of recognition (Axel Honneth, Jürgen Habermas).84 With reference to Taylor as well, he accuses this theory of “a conceptual simplification [of the terminology of recognition] with far-reaching political consequences.”85 In his opinion, Honneth’s and Habermas’ terminology of recognition, which aims at ‘recognizing oneself in the other,’ describes an ideological circle of recognition in which the desire for recognition cannot really be universalized, because its own contradictory tension is not recognized. The consequence of this self-misperception of recognition is that the politics of recognition pave the way for a societal conformism that strives to establish a pre-constituted symmetry between that which recognizes and that which is to be recognized. This symmetry then becomes the a priori precondition for a reconciled and peaceful society, which is to be ultimately realized through the struggles for recognition. The ultimate or final recognition of all by all that is heralded in the struggle for recognition, can thus only ever be anticipated and is, García Düttmann states, the instrument of a manipulative understanding of politics, which holds out the prospect of something that is unable to be the issue at stake: the ultimate overall prevalence of societal anticipatory beliefs. According to García Düttmann, the post-Hegelian theories of recognition emerging from the philosophy of identity are thus based on a misperception of the recognition event’s inner dynamics: for even though they use the demand for recognition heuristically in order to analyze and evaluate real societal conflicts in normative terms, they

84 85

See ibid., 140–162. Ibid., 146.

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fail to acknowledge the difference and tension at the site of the act of recognition itself. 25.3

Ricœur’s Concept of Mutual Symbolic Recognition

In closing, this chapter will now discuss a second model of recognition that draws on Paul Ricœur and is based on the premise of the elusiveness and transcendence of the other in the mutual relation of recognition. The understanding of recognition developed by Ricœur represents an autonomous model, because it expressly distances itself from the normativity of the term ‘recognition’ posited by the postHegelian perspective, and takes up the dialogue with this perspective from a decidedly hermeneutical standpoint. Additionally, Ricœur’s approach is much more conciliatory than García Düttmann’s, whose position can really only be defined in terms of its refutation of Honneth and Taylor. In contrast, Ricœur unfolds new and heretofore unnoticed aspects of recognition by constructively confronting other social theorists. Furthermore, his remarks on recognition connect the term to the discourses of contemporary French philosophy, thereby reshaping the understanding of recognition by placing it into a new theoretical horizon. Ricœur’s description of the relation of recognition focuses on presenting recognition as an experience that we can indeed have, but in which we cannot overcome the interpersonal difference and asymmetry. Ricœur therefore contemplates whether recognition is an ability of the capable human being [homme capable]. Ricœur’s conception of a capable human being is characterized by the fact that it always imbues the descriptive portrayal of basal human capabilities – speaking, acting, narrating, being accountable for actions – with a normative meaning. Capable human beings are individuals that are potentially capable of always becoming better than they are now. Thus, they are not at odds with their fallibility [home faillible]; rather, the tension between success and failure is a basic condition of human existence that cannot be overcome.86 In his book “The Course of Recognition”87 from 2005, Ricœur decidedly positions himself against Hobbes’ social-philosophical concept, which fails to acknowledge the moral motives underlying the beginnings of human community. He takes a stand against attempts 86 87

See Ricœur 1986. Ricœur 2005.

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to naturalize human sociality, insisting that the problem of human interaction and coexistence, which the term ‘recognition’ denotes, is a problem of fundamentally political nature.88 Much like Arendt, he therefore insists on the primacy of the political when it comes to the representation and description of human coexistence. Unlike Arendt, however, he does not believe that the present social existence of human beings is conditioned by a societal structure that destroys the uniqueness of human ‘being-together.’ Instead, Ricœur’s understanding of the interpersonal relation is motivated by a critical reading of the philosophical works of Emmanuel Levinas. In Ricœur’s view, Levinas’ understanding of human ‘being-together’ is informed by an original asymmetry between self and other. On the basis of his dialogue with Levinas’ work, Ricœur manages to establish a perspective on interpersonal relations that is based on asymmetry and popularizes it in the discourses about recognition. 25.3.1 The Critique of Reciprocity In the wider context of his study on the semantic field of the term ‘recognition,’ Ricœur examines the interpersonal relation of recognition by complementing the vernacular ambiguity of the word ‘recognition’ in that he points out three philosophical dimensions of its meaning: identification, self-recognition and mutual recognition. Thus, recognition can represent a capability to think, a capability to act, and a human capability for social mutuality. In his conversations with countless other positions and authors (including Axel Honneth, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Taminiaux, Laurent Thévenot, Marcel Henaff and Marcel Mauss), Ricœur identifies two primary aspects that he considers to be in need of correction and worthy of a more detailed discussion: (i) The anti-economic aspect of recognition: Even though the relation of recognition is based on mutuality, this mutuality is not identical with the reciprocity of a relationship of exchange. (ii) The anti-legalistic aspect of recognition: The asymmetry of the relation of recognition, which recognition is supposed to overcome by equalizing the unequal, cannot be erased in an understanding of recognition as an actual life practice.

88

See ibid., 207.

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Ricœur thus casts recognition into profile by delineating it against two other forms of relationship. The first aspect aims at differentiating recognition from the relation of economic exchange, in which the interaction partners are interested in an exchange of goods. But that which is exchanged can only have the status of an exchangeable thing. A ‘priceless’ good – a gift or a present that asks for nothing in return – does not figure into the reciprocal logic of the exchange relation and is excluded from it. But precisely those goods that cannot be bought are of particular importance to Ricœur when he inquires about the mutuality of the relation of recognition. For him, the reciprocity demanded by the economic exchange relation is a transcendental assumption that artificially imposes the symmetrical reciprocity of giving and taking. Ricœur rejects this notion of reciprocity and argues for looking into an actual, practiced mutuality ‘between’ the protagonists of the relation of recognition, a mutuality that is actually open to the heterogeneity of the participants’ mutual demands on each other. Hence, he suggests that the model of mutuality in recognition should not be the give and take of exchange, but two separate acts of giving (a first and a second giving). In these individual acts, that which is given is to be recognized as a gift, and thus per se not something that needs to be responded to and returned. Recognition thus means recognizing the given gift’s unavailability. What characterizes the structure of recognition is not the economy of giving and taking, but the exchange of gifts, i.e., a mutuality in which there is no more giving and taking, but only the triad of giving, receiving and responding. Here, Ricœur’s addition of an act of receiving can be understood as analogous to García Düttmann’s emphasis on the range of meanings that opens up between that which recognizes and that which is to be recognized. Only in being received does the gift attain a symbolic dimension of significance and thus an increase in significance that can neither be measured nor calculated. 25.3.2 The Critique of Equal Recognition Ricœur clarifies the second point of criticism mentioned above, regarding the traditional understanding of recognition, by emphasizing that recognition emerges from an original asymmetry between the protagonists of the relation of recognition. Time and again, Ricœur uses this notion in his argument to point out the aspect of twofold alterity in the relation of recognition. The alterity of this relation is expressed in the fact that ‘the one is not the other,’ as Ricœur puts

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it. This means that the agents’ asymmetrical position in the lifeworld cannot be reduced even within the relation of mutual recognition, e.g. by making them mere carriers of a formal relation of recognition and thus rendering them ‘equal.’ Ricœur’s main interest here is to delineate the relation of recognition against the legal relation, which he links to this formal interpretation of the ethical standard of justice. The legal understanding of justice interprets the equality of the recognition relation’s protagonists as a relation of formal equivalence. Thus, it is intent on organizing the exchange of those recognizing each other in a symmetrical manner. Ricœur views this as an attempt at ‘comparing the incomparable’ – i.e., the heterogeneous claims of the agents in the relation of recognition. In his opinion, however, this attempt results in the loss of that dimension of significance in the recognition relationship which goes far beyond the recognition of equal rights among free legal entities. Here, Ricœur refers to an alterity that is constitutive of the relation of recognition, an otherness that enables the protagonists of this relation not only to commune with each other, but also to become and remain singularities. Due to the “irreplaceable character of each of the partners,”89 which is at risk of being lost in the formally equalizing relation of recognition, it becomes possible that “a just distance is maintained at the heart of mutuality [of recognition], a just distance that integrates respect into intimacy.”90 And according to Ricœur, the latter is absolutely indispensable for the ethical form of recognition. 25.3.3 Symbolic Recognition The understanding of recognition that Ricœur develops, on the basis of the two main aspects of an interpersonal relation of recognition relies mentioned above, on the insight that recognition as a real experience can only unfold in the mode of symbolic communication. Drawing on some thoughts by Marcel Henaff, Ricœur therefore points out that the ceremonial reciprocity of the exchange of gifts is that preferred site in which practiced mutuality can occur in a way that maintains the uniqueness and elusiveness of the protagonists in the relation of recognition; for the reciprocity of the exchange of gifts implies a recognition that does not (reflexively) recognize itself but is absorbed into the

89 90

Ibid., 263. Ibid.

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gesture or the symbolization of recognition.91 The exchange of gifts makes use of the symbolic order of societal relationships, but at the same time, it leaves behind its immanent logic in order to give shape to an experience in which the giver’s generosity on the one hand and the recipient’s lack of expectation on the other can manifest themselves. Ricœur describes both, generosity and lack of expectation, as modalities of recognition in which recognition can be experienced without a transgression against or appropriation of the other. Here, the attitude of receiving with which the gift is accepted ensures that it not be misunderstood as a gift that must be reciprocated and connected to the expectation of a gift in return. On the other hand, the gratitude with which the gift is accepted also creates the distance through which the act of giving can be separated from the expectation of a reciprocal gift. In this gesture of receiving, which can also be a ‘wordless’ gesture, Ricœur sees the expression of the essential nature of a practiced relation of recognition. 25.3.4 States of Peace: Recognition and Religious Agape In order to distinguish his own perspective of a practiced, performative relation of recognition from those models which posit a demand for recognition without looking at its actual practical forms, Ricœur concludes his reflections by describing various symbolic forms in which gestures and symbols of recognition can be analyzed phenomenologically. He calls these symbolic forms states of peace. But with his description of these states of peace, he explicitly does not intend to question or revise the conflict potential of the human desire for recognition that had been so central in the normative understanding of recognition. Instead, he wants to point out that, beside the conflict potential of the desire for recognition, our culture also harbors stores of tradition concerning the practiced relation of recognition. Among these traditional elements are the symbolic forms of recognition found in religion. Here, Ricœur chooses to focus on agape or the gift of love, which he characterizes as unilateral generosity as opposed to the reciprocal relation of the exchange of gifts. The remarkable aspect of agape as a form of religious ethos is that it is free from all desire for

91 See ibid., 236: “I would add that we can take this relationship of mutuality as a kind of recognition that does not recognize itself, to the extent that it is more invested in the gesture than in the words that accompany it.”

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mutuality and gives without any expectation of receiving a gift in return. The gift of love thus may seem peculiarly lost in this world. Because its giving is one-sided, it cannot be linked with the reciprocity of the justice relation or the mutuality of the relation of recognition. Thus, its giving eludes both legal relations, focused on the symmetry of giver and recipient, and economic relations that are focused on the reciprocity of giving. For Ricœur, the practice of agape is connected to a special form of communication: the gift of love cannot be claimed; it expresses itself in a poetical use of the imperative, in the metaphor and in praise. In the peculiar symbolic form of agape, Ricœur sees a model of how the normative reciprocity of recognition at the site of giving and taking can be interrupted and opened up to a different experience. The description of this experience enables us to regain our trust in the openness of recognition and its capability of doing justice to the mutual alterity of those that recognize each other. The above considerations of Ricœur’s understanding of recognition can now be summarized. According to Ricœur, recognition can only be adequately understood if the ‘inter-personal’ mutuality of the recognition relation manages to integrate the aspect of a (twofold) alterity. Accordingly, Ricœur states, the relation of recognition cannot be understood as a doubling of subjectivity, but as a doubling of alterity. Thus, the central aspect of his perspective is not the subject’s recognition, which is in danger of turning into self-assertion by means of the other (instrumental). Instead, it is recognition by the other in the sense of a mutual recognition of elusiveness. But above all, recognition does not remain for Ricœur a moral demand that is articulated with regard to a universalist development of social relationships into an ethical totality; instead, it is conceived as a possibility for capable human beings, and thus as a possibility for human beings who can become better than they are. In Ricœur’s perspective, human beings are capable of actually experiencing recognition, albeit in an indirect and symbolic way. His understanding of recognition thus goes beyond the normative approach of recognition theory and attempts to counter the unrealizable demand and the struggle for recognition with the description of practiced recognition (‘peaceful states of recognition’). Beyond that, Ricœur points out that the religious ethos harbors untapped potentials for thinking about the ethical challenge that is connected with the original asymmetry in the relation of recognition. He shares this notion with a thinker who has made the transcendence

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and alterity of the other the very center of his reflections on the social phenomenology of human existence. 26

Alterity: Difference as the Source of Responsibility

In conclusion, this chapter will turn to Emmanuel Levinas and his attempt to combine reflections on the interpersonal relation with a phenomenological and ethical reconception of humanity on the basis of the ethos of religion. Levinas’ theory is situated, as it were, between social philosophy, ethics, and the philosophy of religion; it is impossible to categorize it as wholly belonging to one of these three modes of thought. Discussing his arguments thus already offers a transition to the reflections of the next chapter, which will deal with the theological understanding of sociality and humanity. At the same time, Levinas explicitly takes up the basic question of this study – how to find a description of human sociality that is adequate for the phenomenon of human humanity – by locating the humanity of the interpersonal relation in the transcendence of the other.92 Thus, Levinas radicalizes the question about social humanity by narrowing it down to a (purely) ethical question, and he focuses more deeply on the question of the phenomenal excess contained in the interpersonal relation than any of the other approaches introduced in this study. He does so by showing how this excess can be revealed and discussed through a phenomenological description. The most significant insight into the relationship between humanity and sociality that Levinas develops in the course of his social-phenomenological studies, is his discovery of an ethical dimension of meaning within the interpersonal encounter: the protagonists of this encounter become indispensable to one another and aware of a non-negotiable responsibility of each for the other. This concrete and unique relationship of responsibility is lost as soon as the interpersonal encounter is included in the immanence of social orders. It must therefore be discussed and considered separately. Levinas’ thoughts center on the term ‘alterity,’ which denotes an otherness, or transcendence of the other, in the interpersonal encounter.

92 In the secondary literature on Levinas, it has become a common practice to capitalize the word ‘other.’ However, this will not be done here in order to maintain a consistency of terms in all chapters.

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Levinas uses this term to refer to a social encounter that culminates neither in conflict nor in recognition, but in responsibility. Thus, he attempts to step beyond the basic Hobbesian paradigm of antagonism in modern political anthropology in an entirely different way than do the theories of recognition. He does not conceive of the interpersonal difference with its conflict potentials as a transitional phase on the way to a reconciled and egalitarian societal order in which mutual relationships of recognition determine social togetherness and coexistence. Instead, he posits the difference, and not the normative ideal of its reconciliation as the insurmountable starting point for describing the interpersonal relation. On the other hand, Levinas’ concept also gives an entirely different meaning to the insurmountable and thus permanent difference among human beings than do the theories of political antagonism. For him, the difference of one from the other is not primarily a source of conflict, struggle and antagonism among human beings. Rather, it causes a transcendence of the other, an (intersubjective) withdrawal and elusiveness of the other that in turn calls the subject to responsibility. However, Levinas’ positive, ethical appraisal of the interpersonal difference comes at a price. He does not give adequate thought to the social ambivalence of this difference, its potential to lead to becoming the enemy of the other as well as becoming responsible for the other. His thoughts thus remain indebted to a new conception of social humanity that does not pay as much attention to its dark side – social inhumanity – as it does to the responsible approach to the other occurring in interpersonal difference.93 The following presentation of selected theses and arguments of Levinas’ social philosophy does not proceed in a chronological or reconstructive manner; instead, it will point out those aspects and consequences of Levinas’ thought that are relevant for profiling his emphatically ethical view on the social structure of human coexistence.

93

Levinas’ neglect of the possibility of inhumanity, which he declares to be an impossibility of being human (see §26.2), is criticized by Slavoj Žižek (see Žižek 2005, 158). The inhuman eludes the subject’s relationship to the other’s face, and it is precisely there that it unfolds its violence against humanity.

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Levinas’ Ethical Reconception of Humanity

Levinas thinks of the sociality of human beings as the site of taking responsibility, a responsibility that is rooted not in a contractually agreed upon bond and thus a one-sided obligation, but in the proximity of another human being that shows his infinite withdrawal and elusiveness for the subject.94 Since the withdrawal of the other in this encounter extends to infinity, so that it does not allow for giving a measure to responsibility, the subject’s act of taking responsibility that responds to the other’s withdrawal must also be thought of as infinite and unlimited. For Levinas, encountering the other to his face (visage)95 is the basic phenomenological datum for this act of taking responsibility. This encounter with the other’s face denotes an experience of radical distance within the experience of interpersonal proximity.96 He calls the encounter of a stranger’s human face, which is not simply identical to another person’s visible countenance, the experience of a ‘trace.’ With this metaphor of the trace, he expresses that the dimension of elusiveness manifested in the other’s face is a dimension of meaning that cannot be comprehended through any form of social intentionality – be it other-referential or self-referential. Rather, to do it justice, it must be conceptualized phenomenologically as a disruption or disturbance affecting the subject within the relation of intentionality. Levinas provides the following argument for the phenomenological adequacy of his assertion that a specific significance of the human face is the key to understanding the interpersonal encounter: precisely the non-appearance of one’s own subjectivity at the site of the other, which is (negatively) denoted by the other’s human face, expresses the experience of abstraction and disruption that can enforce the reversal 94

See Levinas 1998, XI–XV. The term ‘face’ expresses a transgression of the intersubjective dimensions of understanding: “The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name face.” (Levinas 1979, 50 [emphasis in the original]). 96 Levinas’ remarks show that for him, the proximity of the other human being has neither a hermeneutical nor an empirical significance. His understanding of interpersonal proximity is based in a phenomenology of the human being’s passion and passivity, since it ethically places the social interplay between proximity and distance under the primacy of an unconscious and immediate affection by the other. See the following passage from “Otherwise than Being”: “The relationship of proximity cannot be reduced to any modality of distance or geometrical contiguity, nor to a simple ‘representation’ of a neighbor [. . .] the subject is affected without the source of affection becoming a theme of representation.” (Levinas 1981, 100–101). 95

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of the egological perspective and the adoption of a concrete responsibility toward others’ hardship and suffering not limited by the context of the social encounter. In the encounter with the other’s face, whose transcendence can suspend the ‘I’ of intentional reference, a different kind of interpersonal encounter is thus manifested; it goes beyond that which has been discussed as the basis for the connection between human beings in the phenomenological theories of intersubjectivity and social intentionality. Another significant aspect of Levinas’ thought is that the encounter with the other’s face represents an experience in which a human being is no longer reduced to the significance that has been assigned to him due to communally, religiously, culturally or economically determined references of the shared life. To the contrary: the context-free significance of the other’s face in the interpersonal encounter always – and that is Levinas’ point – precedes the social references that are based on an initiative of the ‘I’ toward the other human being. The other’s presence in the strangeness and transcendence of his face can thus never be an object of experience.97 With his face, the other does not enter into a relationship with the subject on his own terms; instead, his ‘entering-into-withdrawal’ actually disrupts the experience of the manifold forms of his concreteness. For the concrete experience of such a disruption of every intentional reference to others, Levinas points, among other things, to the other’s act of speaking: “Speaking is first and foremost this way of coming from behind one’s appearance, behind one’s form; an opening in the opening.”98 On the subject’s side, speaking corresponds to hearing – a performance that, unlike imagining and seeing the other, is in no way formative, but purely perceptive. Thus, in the moment of speaking, or rather, of expressing oneself, the other’s presence, just as in the visual exposure of the countenance in the face, remains elusive for the subject, because the other evades the controlling reference and social initiative of the ‘I,’ not only in a partial, limited way, but absolutely, and incorporates this ‘I’ into hearing and perceiving. Thus, in the face of the manifold forms of intersubjective understanding, Levinas insists on a specific significance of the other’s tran97

See the juxtaposition of infinity and transcendence against concreteness in Levinas: “To think the infinite, the transcendent, the Stranger, is hence not to think an object.” (Levinas 1979, 49). 98 Levinas 2003, 31.

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scendence, a presence of the other human being that cannot be reduced to the dialectics of concealment and exposure of meaning. The withdrawal denoted by the other’s face is not an expression of complete concealment99 that can be taken in an entirely negative way. Instead, it represents an expression of unconcealed absence that always enters in a precise relation to the present, and hence to that which is present as the other in social relationships. As long as the other’s absence in the strange face does not become concrete but remains abstract and is not appropriated in a meaningful way, it can maintain its significance in social relationships by appearing as an excess of these references. However, if the significance of the other’s face, and thus the trace of its transcendence, is disregarded by the immediate classification of the other into the social world’s orders of meaning and significance, the other is mistaken for something he is not. Therefore, it is important that the transcendence of the face, the trace of its meaning, is accepted as a trace and is not turned into something other than it is.100 For only as a trace does it elude the intentional correlation, the mutual determination of the relationship’s participants that generates meaning within the framework of the sign’s semiotic and symbolic orders. Therefore, the appropriate way to encounter the other’s face is to let oneself be informed by its “unique actuality”101 in the interpersonal encounter. Beyond that which has already been said, Levinas’ theses can be further narrowed down. Levinas claims that the way in which interpersonal encounters occur can only be adequately understood if it is clear that the other always eludes the subject’s attributive denotation (‘my’ friend, ‘my’ father, ‘my’ teacher, ‘my’ enemy etc.) – that is, to the extent that he is experienced in the transcendence of his strange face. Phenomenologically speaking, this implies that, for a critical understanding of the dynamics of social interactions, it is not only necessary to point toward their constitutive and contextual conditions, but also to the invasion of another type of significance, to an excess that is always produced by the social encounter as an event between human beings. This dimension of the interpersonal encounter, which Levinas calls its ‘ethical modality,’ can be examined once it becomes

99

“A face does not function in proximity as a sign of a hidden God who would impose the neighbor on me.” (Levinas 1981, 93–94). 100 See Levinas 2003, 43–44. 101 Levinas 1979, 69.

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clear that it bears witness to a ‘constitutive exteriority’102 of the social orders of meaning and relationships, and thus cannot be understood and unveiled within the immanence of these orders of meaning. The meaning of that which Levinas calls ‘face’ thus manifests itself only as the concrete trace of meaning of an absence which is present in the face, which, as an ‘elusive entity,’ enters into the social orders of meaning of interpersonal presence, and through its withdrawal, makes it possible for the social order patterns of reference to be undermined in the interpersonal encounter. The ‘epiphany’ of the face Levinas talks about is thus the site of a non-original social genesis of meaning, which enables the other’s alterity to forestall the definitive power of social patterns of order and orientation in a diachronic sense. The ‘belatedness’ of every response of the ‘I’ to the other’s presence thereby opens up the temporal experiential horizon of a “future without content,”103 an absence in the modality of time, through which in turn the arrival of the other can be marked. The unique non-intentionality of the interpersonal encounter thus guides the philosophical analysis of the human social relationship in Levinas’ work. The interesting aspect for us is that he comprehends the connection between humanity and sociality, not as a philosophical connection of justification (see §23), but as a phenomenological connection of discovery for the social humanity of human beings. This approach implies that Levinas identifies humanity with a specific description of the interpersonal encounter. But how does his phenomenological rediscovery of this encounter relate to the phenomenon of social inhumanity? 26.2

The Impossibility of Social Inhumanity

Just like the social-philosophical concepts described earlier in this chapter, Levinas paints a picture of the interpersonal encounter that draws on the modern paradigm of the warlike natural state of human beings by paying attention to its conflict potential. In his presentation of sociality, he thus takes up experiences of social conflict, as it occurs in extreme form: war, murder, struggle and violence. Particularly

102

Levinas first identifies the ‘constitutive exteriority’ of the social relationship as an ‘idea of the infinite;’ subsequently, he calls the transcendence of the human face an exteriority and illeity, an indirectness, or simply a detour of the encounter. 103 Levinas 1987, 89.

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his major works “Totality and Infinity” and “Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence,” first published in 1961 and 1974, show how the Hobbesian scenario of a war among human egoisms both informs his thinking and provokes him to talk philosophically about peace and to develop an alternative concept to this scenario.104 But unlike Hobbes, Levinas does not think of war as an inevitable natural condition of human existence.105 Instead, he understands ‘war’ and ‘peace’ as two different phenomenologies of humanity and its relationship to the world. War is characterized by the fact that the world and the subject enter into an extensive process of isolation against an other (totality of being). In war, the world is characterized by antagonistic conflicts of interest that are imbued with the dignity of objective necessity. Hence, war is a totalitarian phenomenology of the world. It is the nature of war that it implements an order of being that does not know or permit any ‘exteriority.’ The structure of objective necessity, which is imposed upon all decisions and actions of the individual, stands in contrast to the fact that war also overrides the uniqueness of the individual. In war, the individual becomes merely the carrier of an ultimate meaning that is determined and assigned in a totalitarian manner. The totality of being, the objective order, makes his interests as determinable as objects. In this sense, war only permits a life that is inhuman. In the face of war’s reality, Levinas inquires into a phenomenology of peace and understands this as a perspective on the world and the subject that is above all characterized by an understanding of the interpersonal encounter. In order to characterize this interpersonal encounter, Levinas explicitly distances himself from the idea of a “peace in which reason [. . .] reigns;”106 because for him, this rational peace would once again be a totalization of the world under a principle and thus merely a variation of war’s basic structure. In Levinas’ opinion, rational peace merely reduces and limits the conflict of interest by weakening it into a relationship of commerce and exchange without shattering the underlying structure of the ego’s dominion over the other. In contrast, the peace Levinas is talking about is understood as a point of view that eludes the rational strategies of suppressing antagonisms – the

104 105 106

See Levinas 1981, 4–5; Levinas 1979, 21–30. See the remarks on Levinas’ understanding of war in Stegmaier 2002, 150–151. Levinas 1981, 4.

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calculation of mutual advantages, diplomatic mediation and the politics of equilibrium. Levinas attempts to think about peace by promoting a messianic, prophetic eschatology, i.e., a changed understanding of the temporality of subjectivity and the world. With this notion, he ultimately also abandons an ontological determination of being. The eschatological-messianic reality of subject and world introduced by Levinas subjects the understanding of time to an ‘infinitization,’ which shatters the omnipresent telos of time as history and thus the totality of being. Instead, the experience of time is reconceptualized as an experience with an absolutely other – the infinite – and thus as a non-synchronism with existence in ontological terms. Thus, Levinas’ new approach toward a phenomenology of peace does not simply posit peace in contrast to the phenomenology of war. Instead, it attempts to undermine the totalitarian structure of war by introducing the ‘constitutive exteriority’ of time (the idea of the infinite) for the description of the temporality of the interpersonal relation.107 The idea of the infinite can remove the foundation from the evidence of totalitarian social structures. Therefore, says Levinas, to escape the experiences of inhumanity, murder and cruelty – i.e., to suspend their seemingly immediate evidence – means to break with the objective ontological order of the world that is reflected in the phenomenology of war. How does Levinas conceive of the relationship between the humanity and inhumanity of human beings? He is of the opinion that an antagonistic confrontation of human egoisms, which is characteristic of the inhumanity of war, cannot emerge from the interpersonal encounter, but only from the objective ontological order of the world. His description of a human cooperation thus takes its starting point from an irreducible claim of the other on the ‘I’ (“You will not kill!”108). However, he believes that this claim must be answered not just on the level of politics, law and morals, but on the level of the interpersonal encounter itself. It manifests the impossibility of a total annihilation of the other (murder), thereby establishing the possibility of one person taking responsibility for the other. Thus, the description of the interpersonal encounter as a relationship of responsibility caused by

107 See Levinas’ linking of infinity and exteriority: “What remains ever exterior to thought is thought in the idea of infinity.” (Levinas 1979, 25). 108 Levinas 1983, 34.

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the impossibility of murder is enough to make the social humanity of this encounter plausible. Accordingly, for Levinas, the interpersonal encounter always remains the affectively and diachronically constituted event of an encounter between elusive others. This event must be understood as a form of diachronic creation of meaning, because it absolutely eludes being tracked within a temporal pattern; on the other hand, it is not completely closed off from temporal experience, either. Thus, in order to comprehend the point of Levinas’ reflections, both aspects of the creation of meaning must stay present: the withdrawal into an origin of the interpersonal encounter which has no beginning and the reference of this encounter to the constitution of human responsibility and thereby to a new understanding of social humanity. Therefore, says Levinas, the framework for the discovery of humanity is the transcendence and alterity of the other human being, which is expressed in the event of questioning the subject and his ethical caring for the other. 26.3

The Relationship to the Other as the Third and the Standards of Justice

Levinas’ reflections on the diachronic temporality of the interpersonal encounter have as their background an ethical demand for the perception of the other’s proximity and the acknowledgment of his hardship and need. In terms of moral philosophy, such a demand could simply be formulated as a guiding principle (e.g. ‘You shall not kill’). In Levinas’ view, such a commandment form of ethics, which uses universal values and norms to regulate the relationship toward the other human being once and for all, and thus creates a form of justice among human beings that is time-transcending, only prevents individuals from taking concrete responsibility. Nevertheless, he does not entirely reject the legal, political, economic and moral categories of knowledge about the other; instead, he wants his argumentation to serve as a warning that these categories can prevent proximity to another human being if they subordinate his presence to a linguistic rule; because in this way, concrete attention to the other becomes dependent on the appearance of a third (a rule, institution, or standard of comparison) beside the other. In Levinas’ phenomenological description, the proximity to the human other precedes social attributions as well as moral and legal norms that seek to regulate the relationship to the other through a

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relationship to a third. But this does not make the relationship to the third entirely irrelevant for Levinas. He writes: “There must be justice among incomparable ones.”109 The interpersonal encounter that he describes is thus not only a relationship between a ‘You’ and an ‘I.’ Instead, it is based on the distinction between the other and the third. For Levinas, this is a distinction that can only be made from a very specific perspective. In an interview from 1975, he says: But in reality, the relationship with another is never uniquely the relationship with the other: from this moment on, the third is represented in the other; that is, in the very appearance of the other the third already regards me. And this, nevertheless, makes the relation between justice and the responsibility with regard to the other extremely narrow.110

The responsibility to the other and the justice that I owe him in relation to a third (rule, norm) and as a third (legal subject, cooperation partner) thus stand side by side at the site of the interpersonal encounter. For Levinas, ‘being with the other’ also means ‘being in relation to a third’ in a twofold sense: first, because the other human being also presents himself to ethical subjectivity as a socially determined third, namely, as his friend, his father, his teacher, his judge, his business partner etc. These forms of presentation cannot be switched off – they are present in every interpersonal encounter: But being must be understood on the basis of being’s other. To be on the ground of the signification of an approach is to be with another for or against a third party, with the other and the third party against oneself, in justice.111

But the forms of the other human’s presence within a social relationship must be distinguished from that relationship to the third which is encountered at the site of the other in his face. Levinas’ description of the interpersonal encounter thus already implies a perception of the elusive other who is the third, albeit a third that cannot be seen as a third which is presented through the social order (TR). Levinas calls this the ‘illeity’ of the other human being. ‘Illeity’ means an interruption or reversal of the relationship to the other human being in which the other turns out to be a strange other (TI ) as well. In Levinas’ words: in the encounter with the other, there remains an ‘It’ at the root of the 109 110 111

Levinas 1981, 16. Levinas 1998, 82. Levinas 1981, 16 (emphasis in the original).

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‘You,’ which does not signify the ‘You’ of an ‘I.’112 ‘Illeity’ thus denotes a form of the other’s strangeness that always precedes the forms of his (social) presence for the fellow human. In addition to the ‘face’ and to ‘illeity,’ Levinas establishes the term ‘non-indifference’ for describing the ethical significance of the interpersonal encounter. ‘Non-indifference’ denotes a difference between self and other that cannot be discussed via an interrelationship of elements which would make self and other indifferent to each other, but only via a ‘constitutive exteriority’ of all relationality (the infinite). Thus, ‘non-indifference’ refers to a relationship between human beings that allows them to maintain the distinction of the third, the distinction between TR and TI, at the site of the other human being; and from there, it also prevents his presence from being dissolved into the totality of social relations. 26.4

Beyond the Symmetry of Egalitarian Relationships

In the first chapter, it was shown that the understanding of human sociality in economic behavioral experiments is always oriented toward the ideal of a symmetrical and egalitarian social relationship. The concrete relationship to another human being is based on an analogizing transfer of the subject’s self-understanding to the other: the ‘I’ transfers his own idea of a good and right coexistence, which he sees realized in the observance of universal norms of fairness and justice, to the other human being and attempts to enforce his own interest in cooperation – if necessary, even against the resistance of his interaction partner. In this model, sociality can only be thought of as the initiative of an individual acting self-referentially. The passions, emotions, affects, and passivity of a subject who lets himself be affected by an other are taken into account only as far as they can be modeled as neural mechanisms in the brain that lead to the agent’s rational decision-making behavior. In the end, experimental economics only takes into account the social humanity of the interpersonal encounter insofar as it can be integrated into and made compatible with its concept of a rational agent. In Levinas’ work – but also elsewhere – an entirely different attribution of justice and sociality can be found. He rejects the rationalistic model of justice which acts on the assumption that there is a reciprocal

112

See a similar phrase in Levinas’ text “God and Philosophy” (Levinas 1998, 69).

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balance of interests. He criticizes this model as a figure based on an ontological totality of the social. His reflections arrive at the conclusion that the focus on the reciprocity of human interests excludes any form of selfless responsibility for the other.113 For Levinas, responsibility is a relationship to the other’s need and suffering that is genuinely free of interest or hierarchy. Thus, it does not manifest itself in a concern of the formal equality of contributions and earnings in human cooperation. Levinas’ concept is, therefore, not about human being-with-each-other, but is rather concerned with the structure of a concrete responsibility of the one for the other that provides a space for human uniqueness within the social relation. Levinas posits the “departure without return”114 that includes the subject in the need and suffering of the other, in contrast to the reciprocity of balanced interests. For Levinas, the relationship to the elusive other necessarily remains without a common measure.115 The relation of responsibility thus is not simply rooted in a different rationality than the antagonism of egoisms; rather, it can only be thought of as decidedly non-rational, as being affected by the other’s transcendence and alterity. Levinas argues for a better116 conception of human sociality that is capable of preserving the relationship to another human being as a third, a social counterpart, not only due to the demand of the norm, but due to ethical proximity. Accordingly, the norm of justice is not fulfilled through the mutual recognition of identity claims, but in that the desire of being noticed by the other first takes a detour via the other’s proximity in his elusiveness. Without interpersonal proximity, states Levinas, the demand for justice would remain devoid of concrete responsibility and thus ethically empty. 26.5

God’s Invisibility

Levinas demands that we think about social humanity in a way that is not only different from, but utterly alien to the conventional understanding of human sociality. He distances himself from the philo-

113 Levinas in turn emphasizes in an interview in 1975: “[T]o make possible a disinterested responsibility for another excludes reciprocity” (Levinas 1998, 82). 114 Levinas 1986, 349. 115 See Levinas 2001, 80: “It is a relationship not with what is inordinate with respect to a theme but with what is incommensurable with it.” 116 See e.g. Levinas 1998, 118–119.

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sophically posited “norms of intelligibility and of sense.”117 Instead, he attempts to think beyond the ontological totality of the real which they create, and to describe an encounter in which the other’s transcendence is maintained by the subject. In order to make plausible his demand for an awareness of this transcendence of the other, Levinas continuously draws on religious philosophical thought that allows him to develop his argument for the ethical excess of meaning in the interpersonal encounter. In distinction to his own approach, he labels any thought as ‘atheism,’ which is incapable of conceiving of anything other than that which is equal to it and complies with its own standards.118 This can be taken as evidence for what guides his own understanding of religion and phenomenology. His thinking understands the divine as the center of religion and regards it as a philosophical idea that has the function of reserving mental space for the ‘non-rational,’ ‘non-concrete,’ ‘non-presentable,’ and thereby, for all that is not comprehensible about reality within orders of signification. This is necessarily connected with the idea of God’s invisibility. Beyond its immanent function for thinking, the idea of the divine also has the function of permitting a genesis of positive meaning that originates from this negative limit of the comprehensible, presentable and thinkable. The idea of the divine that Levinas unfolds therefore does not enable us to raise the ontological problem of God’s existence or non-existence, which underlies philosophical theism. Levinas conceives of the idea of the divine ‘outside’ of being and non-being, as a non-ontological modality.119 The negation of the ontological question of being paves the way for combining Levinas’ idea of the divine with his thoughts about interpersonal humanity. In his conception, God’s invisibility does not have any significance for the selfhood of human beings, but it can be used to construct the interpersonal for-relation, the reference to the other. Levinas wants to positively concretize the negativity of the divine, its non-presentability, in the other’s proximity and distance in the interpersonal encounter. In this encounter, the divine becomes an origin without a beginning for the genesis of the phenomenon of social humanity, i.e., for the meaning and significance which one can

117 118 119

Levinas 1981, 95. See Levinas 1998, 160. See Levinas 1993.

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obtain for the other in his singularity. Levinas therefore also calls this idea of the divine an ‘an-archy,’ i.e., an “idea signifying with a significance prior to presence [. . .].”120 The tautology of ‘significance’ and ‘signifying’ at this point is to be interpreted as the precedence of the idea of the divine before all philosophical attempts to posit a first cause of meaning. All meanings receive their significance not from a common origin, but from their lack of origin, which, as a precise absence of the divine in the world, differs from the omnipresence of the One God. But God’s absence is more radical than the absence of the strange human face121 that gains meaning at the site of the other human being in the midst of the world’s presence. It can therefore – taken by itself – only be thought of as negative, whereas for the human being, it can only obtain significance positively, i.e., as the proximity in the interpersonal encounter. Levinas does not impose a dialectical structure on the tension between God’s negativity in invisibility and God’s positivity in the interpersonal encounter. Instead, he illuminates this tension by taking up the relation of the elusive other to God in the way that he sees it as present in religious experience. If God becomes the subject matter in religious experience, then the relationship to him is determined by a diachronicity, i.e., by an interruption, by asynchronicity and exorbitance, so that strictly speaking it is an experience that is unbearable for the human ‘I,’ but which can affect it all the more at the site of the other human being. Thus, Levinas also describes the ethical relationship as a religious relationship. This occurs when a human being encounters God’s absence and invisibility at the site of the other. Thus, for Levinas, human sociality in its authentic form is religious, and as a religious experience it is also ethical. This undifferentiated amalgamation may be considered a weakness of Levinas’ approach, which makes the religious-philosophical horizon of his social-philosophical reflections less than completely persuasive. On the other hand, it is a major strength of his concept that the ethical dimension of relationships is not thought of as particular, i.e., added to the social event wihtin a specific

120

Levinas 1998, 64. See the distinction between God and neighbor in Levinas: “And it is from the analysis just carried out that God is not simply the ‘first other,’ or the ‘other par excellence,’ or the ‘absolutely other,’ but other than the other, other otherwise, and other with an alterity prior to the ethical obligation to the other and different from every neighbor [. . .].” (ibid., 69). 121

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perspective, but rather as being always present in the social event in a non-original sense. With this concept, every interpersonal encounter becomes the (potential) site of a relation of responsibility without having to be explicitly driven by a moral motive. In this regard, Levinas’ contribution shows that the alternative of affirmation vs. reversal of social conflict in interpersonal encounters, as discussed in the other social-philosophical concepts in this chapter, can be undermined by a new interpretation of the interpersonal encounter in a phenomenological perspective. 27

Conclusion

This chapter has discussed the question of an adequate interpretation of the social relationship which precedes the concrete interaction of human beings and determines the success or failure of this interaction. The argumentation of this chapter has shown that it is possible to think beyond the individualistic perspective on sociality which focuses on the intentions and motivations of individuals entering into the interaction relation (see the discussion in the last chapter). It did so by inquiring into the consequences for societal interaction not by looking at individuals, but at their relationship to each other. Here, the individuals’ relationship to each other was viewed as a relationship of difference of one from the other, whose existence Hannah Arendt considered the basic condition for the maintenance of humanity. However, unlike in Arendt’s work, the interpersonal difference was not a priori considered indispensable for a description of the phenomenon of social humanity; instead, other possible interpretations of this relation of difference were explored. Based on an analysis of Thomas Hobbes’ anthropology, it was shown that the interpersonal difference, in social-philosophical theory, can also be regarded as the starting point for antagonistic confrontation, conflict and murder among human beings and thus should not be identified uncritically with the phenomenon of social humanity. A social-phenomenological description of human interaction must therefore pay attention to the difference between humanity and inhumanity at the site of the interpersonal relation itself. Additionally, this chapter combined considerations of the phenomenology of the interpersonal relation with the modern theory of political order formation. The separation of nature and society and the elusiveness of the human being in society are essential to this theory.

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In the course of the discussion, however, the elusiveness of the human being was not taken to denote a collective singular that serves to establish a norm of humanity based on natural law. Instead, it was understood as the interpersonal relation that precedes the genesis of social order, and whose dynamics are at work even in a social relationship that is ordered by politics, laws, or morals. This interpersonal relation can be explained and interpreted phenomenologically, which makes it a good starting point for describing the positive and negative consequences of human sociality in terms of politics, law, or morals. All descriptions of the interpersonal relation that have been introduced in this chapter were based on either a positive or a negative view of the basic social situation of human beings: (i) The perspective of a negative anthropology (conflict of human egoisms) popularized by Hobbes’ doctrine of the natural state, is maintained in several social-philosophical concepts, which make antagonistic confrontation the basic structure of political and societal relationship constellations, and present a corresponding concept of the possibilities and limits of human society. (ii) In contrast, other concepts both distance themselves from and draw on Hobbes’ perspective in an attempt to establish a positive anthropology. They do so by revealing the desire for the recognition of one’s own identity by others in the midst of social and political conflicts. This desire for recognition is the real moral motive at the heart of social conflicts; for it reveals that the protagonists of social conflicts always remain dependent on each other even in their difference. (iii) The Hobbesian paradigm of antagonistic confrontation is completely overcome in Levinas’ social-philosophical concept of humanity, which no longer makes the interpersonal relation the starting point for conflict with the other, a conflict that is rooted in the subject’s self-assertion and can ultimately be pacified, overcome and reconciled. Instead, he makes this relation of difference the starting point for an ethical excess of meaning in the interpersonal encounter in which the social humanity of human beings shows itself as a phenomenon. According to Levinas, the encounter between human beings thus becomes the site of a non-negotiable responsibility of the one for the other, even before the perception of the other is determined and regulated through societal order by politics, laws and morals. In this way, Levinas attempts to point out that the interpersonal difference is not to be interpreted egologically in a Hobbesian sense and should not be understood as isolation and enmity among human beings. This difference does not necessarily have negative social consequences, but

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rather can become the starting point for taking responsibility for the other. Hobbes’ negative anthropology represents the provocative insight that human beings can be social, but do not have to be. His anthropological provocation, made it necessary to justify the philosophical claim that human beings are social creatures by nature. Human sociality thus is no longer an integral element of the human condition. In the attempts to honor the impact of Hobbes’ insight within the horizon of the social-philosophical theory of societal interaction, a twofold approach to his negative anthropology has emerged: on one side, Hobbes’ negative anthropology is confirmed in order to find socially acceptable forms for the articulation and settling of conflicts within society, based on the basic constellation of an antagonistic confrontation (theories of antagonism); on the other side, it is merely viewed as a necessary transitional stage on the way to a positive anthropology, i.e., a peaceful coexistence of human beings (theories of recognition). Following in Hobbes’ footsteps, the social-philosophical concepts still debate which of the two anthropologies should be preferred for the description of human sociality; or rather, how the way from one to the other can be established. In contrast, the economic studies on sociality presented in the last chapter model the dynamics of a simultaneousness of positive and negative anthropology, and ask what empirical conditions and biological causes can make the positive anthropology prevail. The potential of social-philosophical reflection to go beyond the empirical studies can be seen where a phenomenological description of the interpersonal encounter commences before the state of ordered interaction. In such a phenomenological description, the social dynamic of the interpersonal encounter is not simply reduced to the juxtaposition of behavioral types (altruists, egoists), as it is in empirical studies; instead, the difference of the one from the other is revealed as the cause of the negative and positive social consequences of the interpersonal encounter. But this also means that the interpersonal encounter is an ambiguous starting point for the description of human sociality. For example, it remained uncertain in the argument of this chapter whether the transcendence of the other in this encounter provokes an act of taking responsibility (Levinas), or whether the other’s strangeness and distance rather triggers aversion and aggression against him (Hobbes). If it can’t be made clear in the course of social-philosophical argument how the difference of one from the other is to be interpreted

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in the interpersonal relation, then it is also impossible for social philosophy to give a definitive interpretation of human sociality or an unequivocal phenomenological description of the phenomenon of social humanity. Likewise, the question of whether human interaction is based on a positive or a negative anthropology is not a question that social-philosophical reflection can answer conclusively. And even empirical studies can only examine what conditions cause a negative or a positive reaction to the other. The orders of politics, law and morals are also unable to permanently resolve the ambiguity between social humanity and inhumanity manifested at the site of the interpersonal encounter. Therefore, human pluralism, which, according to Hannah Arendt, constitutes the human condition of sociality, can be a guideline for the social-philosophical conceptions of sociality, but only on the condition that its anthropological implications and social consequences are reflected upon and examined comprehensively. For the criterion of maintaining and preserving difference alone – i.e., positing pluralism instead of plurality, and singularity instead of human diversity – is not enough to validate the ambiguous social meaning that takes shape at the site of the interpersonal encounter. Therefore, we have to look for a perspective of description that can define the ambiguity of interpersonal difference in distinct anthropological terms and that can also explicitly differentiate that difference terminologically in terms of its twofold consequence for social interaction. Only in this way can anthropological reflection prevent an indifference to the phenomena of social inhumanity (violence, murder, war, disrespect etc.) in the description of social humanity. The thesis of this study, which shall be developed further in the final chapter, is that theological social anthropology with its conception of God’s neighbor, who is situated in the tension between old and new existence, contains an understanding of humanity that can live up to this demand.

CHAPTER FOUR

HUMANITY AND INHUMANITY IN THE LOVE OF NEIGHBOR 28

Theological Reservations against an Immanence of the Social

“The object of theology is the development of an entity that can neither be anthropologized nor politicized: God is nobody’s friend and nobody’s enemy.”1 In this chapter, the Christian ethos of the love of neighbor will be interpreted as a contribution to an interdisciplinary approach to human sociality. This chapter thus adds yet another perspective to the interpretations and representations of human sociality that have been discussed in the previous chapters. At the same time, it is important to note that these theological reflections on humanity and sociality are not meant to present an internal discussion of the ethics and dogmatics of Christian theology that is isolated from the other perspectives. Rather, the same questions that guided the examination of the other two perspectives will be approached in the context of theological concepts. The key questions were: what understanding of human beings and human sociality is developed in the respective perspectives? To what extent does anthropology function as a regulator for the description of social structures and for a theory or modeling of human sociability? Can the dichotomy of humanity and society be undermined by a phenomenological description of the interpersonal encounter that demonstrates an excess of meaning when compared to the subject-based reconstruction of human sociality? If the questions of this study are examined from the perspective of Protestant theology, the description of human beings cannot begin by simply presenting specific characteristics such as human nature or reason. According to theological anthropology, there are two reasons why these positive characteristics can no longer describe the human condition: first, theological anthropology works on the premise that

1

Blumenberg 2000, 348 (emphasis in the original; transl. M.S.).

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humanity after the fall of Adam, lives in a condition of sinfulness; therefore, the human condition is determined by a corruption of their natural existence.2 Second, theological anthropology works on the premise that in Gods’ becoming human, a new foundation for human existence was established. Human beings are now able to see the difference, caused and initiated by God’s presence, between their old and new existence. This human self-differentiation becomes the hermeneutical key to a theological description of human beings. By making them aware of the corruption of their existence and offering a revision of this corruption, this ability to self-differentiate allows human beings to see what constitutes the humanity of their existence. Therefore, the theological perspective on human beings does not simply add another positive or negative description of human beings to those of the nontheological anthropologies. Rather, it always sees human existence as a state of tension which subjects the old existence to a critical revision in the light of the new existence. One task of theological anthropology is therefore to point out the immanent limits of anthropological discourse in the other perspectives, and to revise their descriptions of the phenomenon of interpersonal sociality from a theological perspective.3 Discussion of an old and a new human existence offers a vocabulary for the social-phenomenological distinction between various aspects of interpersonal sociality. This theological vocabulary enables us to keep the description of social phenomena open to the difference of human and inhuman sociality and to initiate a revision of the inhuman realities of life. Based on these premises of the theological perspective, it follows that their contribution to the discussion of human existence and sociality would be underdetermined in terms of both methods and content, if its descriptions were to be reduced to another reconstruction of the factors ‘the human being’ and ‘society’ or any intermediate figures between the two. However, the method of the theological perspective is characterized by the discussion of human beings and their social life

2 For example, the idea of sinfulness as the basic condition of human existence takes up a very central position in Pannenberg’s presentation of theological anthropology (see Pannenberg 2004, 80–153). 3 In his study on “Anthropology in Theological Perspective,” Pannenberg describes how anthropology took on a central position in 19th century Protestant theology, which in the 20th century gave way to a tendency of criticizing this so-called anthropocentrism. Here, he mainly thinks of Karl Barth’s theology (see ibid., 11–23).

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structures always in light of a third factor, namely, God’s presence in this world.4 In its evaluation of the understandings of God articulated by human beings, it thus always refers to an entity (‘God’) that is not appropriated by empirical, religious, (social-)anthropological or moral distinctions; i.e., an entity that cannot be comprehended positively or negatively in the sense of an either-or. Here, ‘God’ is distinct from all references to his presence insofar as he cannot be appropriated in theological representations, neither subjectively nor objectively. Thus, ‘God’ is not a hermeneutical object of representation, but guides the direction of interpretation (‘from God’) in which all the world’s objects can be described theologically.5 Therefore, the theological perspective interprets human beings and their sociality to the extent that God’s presence is manifest in them. ‘God’ thus does not refer to a specific object of the world as opposed to other objects.6 Instead, the theological reference to ‘God’ offers a mode of concreteness, or rather, the experience of concreteness in the world, whose representation makes it possible to distinguish a religious view of reality from other points of view. It is characteristic of the Christian understanding of God’s presence that human beings and the world can be described as the object of divine devotion in Jesus Christ. ‘Jesus Christ’ thus refers to that object in the world in which God has revealed his presence, such that it can be identified as God’s self-presence for human beings and experienced as God’s devotion to human beings.7 In Jesus Christ, God showed his devotion by defining his relationship to human beings as a relationship

4 For this reason, Ingolf U. Dalferth has talked about ‘God’ as an indexical means of aligning our perception whose guiding function cannot be replaced by other indicators, because ‘God’ “reveals the fundamental contingence [of the overall context in which we live and orient ourselves; R.K.]” (Dalferth 2003, 466–474, here 468 [emphasis in the original; transl. M.S.]). Also see Pannenberg 1976 who differentiates between God as an object and theological statements about him. Drawing on Schleiermacher (Schleiermacher 1999, §§4–5, 12–26), he also makes God’s co-presence [Mitgesetztsein] in our experience of reality a fundamental topic of theology. However, Pannenberg does not discuss how the difference between God and ‘God,’ i.e., God’s concreteness in its elusiveness can be approached theologically. 5 See Dalferth 2003. 6 Also see Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenological study, in which he attempts to think of a God who stands outside the existence of things (see Marion 1991, 61–83). 7 The Christian church reminds us of this experience of God’s self-presence in the testimony of the Holy Scripture and the sacraments of the worship service.

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of proximity 8 to the bodily, concrete and thus visible existence of human beings. Therefore, at the site of God incarnate, God himself creates and actualizes the self-understanding of a new human being,9 who lives due to the actuality of God’s devotion. Thus, the Christian understanding of the human being is rooted in God’s act of devotion, whereby God was made tangible in Jesus Christ’s bodily presence, and in the cross and the resurrection unmistakably anticipated all human initiatives that refer to this presence. This Christian understanding differs from other religious understandings of human beings in that it allows ‘God’ and ‘human beings’ to become very close in this world, thereby expressing the special proximity between human beings and God that is rooted in God’s devotion to human beings. God’s proximity in Jesus Christ is the mode of presence of a God who has become a human being himself. By becoming human, he has (i) enabled human beings to have a precise understanding of his presence and (ii) made an unmistakable commitment to human beings to maintain this mode of his presence in the world. This Christian understanding of human beings differs from nonreligious understandings of human beings insofar as it is based on a different experience. Its description of humanity is not based on human self-experience,10 but on an experience that was able to occur with the human being Jesus Christ, in that he is the manifestation of God’s humanity and not the humanity of a human being. From a theological perspective, the experience of Jesus’ humanity was thus possible neither

8

The fact that the Christian idea of God specifically discusses a God that is ‘close’ to human beings is also made clear in the Lord’s Prayer, which connects all Christians. In this prayer (Mt 6:9–13 and Lk 11:2–4), God is addressed as ‘Father,’ which denotes special familiarity and proximity. In his exegetic interpretation of the Lord’s Prayer, Jean Zumstein writes: “By taking such an expression [Father] and applying it to God, Jesus makes a very momentous theological decision: he wants to emphasize that God is not far away, but that he is close by. He wants to bear witness to a God who is defined by the love and care that he bestows on his people.” (Zumstein 2002, 29 [transl. M.S.; emphasis added R.K.]). Precisely because the prayer does not make a statement about Jesus as a person, it can be considered authentic (see ibid., 14). 9 From a theological perspective, the question about the (historical) person of Jesus and his relationship to God is always also a question about Jesus’ salvific meaning for us (see Dalferth 1994, 124–135.82–84). 10 See Eberhard Jüngel’s distinction between self-experience and the experience of faith: “The theological discourse on the eschatologically new human being [. . .] necessarily goes beyond the self-experience of human beings by expecting them to have another experience with their self-experience.” (Jüngel 1980, 291 [transl. M.S.]).

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as a self-experience nor as an experience among human beings alone. It can therefore only be accessed in the experience of a new humanity that exists because of God’s devotion to human beings, which has anticipated and preceded their own self-experience. On the basis of the new humanity of one human being (Jesus), who became real and alive due to God’s presence, and thereby enabled all human beings to experience a new self-presence of their humanity, the whole experiential horizon of life can be transformed into a new experiential horizon for those who believe in this actuality. And this is precisely what is meant by Jesus’ soteriological significance for humanity. In the new experiential horizon of those who believe in Jesus Christ, the understanding of humanity – just like the experience of all other worldly objects – is initiated by and rooted in God’s devotion to human beings. It is not determined by the human being’s own initiatives or those of other human beings. The same thing can now be shown regarding a theological understanding of human sociality. The theological description of human beings and their sociality transcends the immanence of human experience in two ways. First, its premise is based on the new experience of humanity made possible in the encounter with Jesus Christ. And second, it discusses this new experience as an excess of experience that is not merely added to the old experiences, but instead transforms them in light of the new experience. Theologically speaking, the new experience of humanity cannot be described based on the experience of the self or the other, but only based on God’s devotion to human beings. Since God’s devotion appears significantly in Jesus Christ as God’s proximity to human beings, it can always be described as a God-given excess of humanity, in contrast to the self-understanding developed by human beings in the immanence of their togetherness, both with themselves and other human beings. This excess of humanity, which was brought into the world through Jesus Christ, and in which once again God newly demonstrated his devotion to human beings and creation, can therefore be characterized theologically through a representation of human beings as neighbors of God. This last thought will be pursued in the following section. If human beings are presented as God’s neighbors not only with regard to God, but also to their fellow humans, there are several hermeneutical implications. For if the human being not as a generic human being, but as a fellow human being is God’s neighbor, this

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means that, from a theological perspective, the fellow human not only makes it possible to experience God’s proximity to humanity, but also that interpersonal proximity gains a new significance and a different meaning in the actuality of God’s proximity. This presumes, however, that God’s proximity is experienced in such a way that human beings can correspond to it simply through loving devotion to their neighbors. Of course, from a Christian perspective, the divine excess that shows itself in the human being as God’s neighbors cannot simply be described through the other’s transcendence in the interpersonal encounter, as could the excess of alterity in social encounters that was discussed in the third chapter (see §26). Instead, it emerges from a social experience that is guided by God’s effective presence in the interpersonal encounter. This presence of God became concrete in Jesus Christ, but at the same time, it retains its intangible significance that transcends the concreteness of the world. Therefore, it can only be comprehended as the immanent limit of all human references to ‘God.’ This limit of God’s presence for human beings can be conveyed by pointing out that Jesus Christ himself was a symbol, not only for the successful experience of God’s presence, but also for the failure of human efforts to relate to the divine self-presence in him in a such way that it could remain in the world as a complete and wholly concrete presence (cross). After Jesus’ death and resurrection, God’s presence can therefore only be experienced through the representation of Jesus’ concreteness in the sacraments of the Christian worship service. After Christ’s resurrection and the subsequent disappearance of his bodily self-presence, God’s humanity can now be manifested as spiritual actuality, which cannot be represented by repeating the experience, but only by bearing testimony to it. The theological testimony to the spiritual actuality of Jesus’ humanity is not a testimony that alienates human beings from the reality of human life; it is rather a testimony that is to be understood as a re-description of this reality from a Christian perspective. Precisely because it is guided by a (new) description of the world, the Christian understanding of humanity does not refer to a humanity that conceals itself from the world, but includes all experiences of humanity in its Christian interpretation. In the horizon of the world, it appears when human self-experiences are transcended into the new experience of humanity in Jesus Christ, and are revised in its light.

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This perspective, which transcends and revises the immanence of the human experiential horizon, is linked to the theological hermeneutics of humanity. Unlike non-theological concepts, the theological point of view cannot relate the two factors of ‘humanity’ and ‘sociality’ to each other without also referring to a third, namely, ‘God’s presence,’ as another mode of the world’s concreteness. But this third factor is not simply added to the two others: it redefines the constellation between the two and, most importantly, reveals their immanent limit. Thus, although being a believer redefines and recreates a human being in his humanity, he can only ever experience his newness as a tension between old and new existence in the life reality of the world. Therefore, he cannot bring forth this new humanity from within himself, but can only experience it as a revision of his old existence. The same is true in the relationship to the fellow human. In one sense, the human being here acts as God’s neighbor who has experienced God’s merciful attention and passes it on to other human beings; but at the same time, his relationship to the other human being is part of the interpersonal reality in which they both live and whose ambiguous social dynamics can never be completely evaded, not even by neighbors of God. Thus, the description of the human situation from the perspective of Christian faith is always informed by a tension that cannot be resolved under the circumstances of the human condition, i.e., within the framework of a temporally and spatially limited human existence. Therefore, in theology, human beings are always described in a twofold perspective, which contrasts their newness with their old modes of existence, reveals these old modes in their reversal of newness, and thus allows human beings to step out of the previously undiscovered ambiguity of their life reality. This anthropological approach can now be used for a theological description of human sociality guided by the idea of a tense coexistence of old and new human existence. The aim of this chapter is to show the implications of the Christian perspective on human beings for an understanding of the phenomena of interpersonal sociality. This will be done by interpreting Christian love and mercy as basic forms of the relation to and behavior toward the fellow human.

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Biblical Usage and Hermeneutical Function of the Word ‘Neighbor’

In the Christian social ethos,11 love of neighbor traditionally takes up a key role in guiding behavior toward fellow humans.12 It is understood as a selfless readiness to help, which goes beyond social reciprocity13 and is characteristic of the Christian way of life. The central position of loving one’s neighbor in the Christian social ethos cannot be deduced historically or exegetically.14 Nevertheless, the theological perspective explores the term ‘love of neighbor’ by interpreting the biblicaltheological testimony about the neighbor. When we look at the way in which biblical texts talk about the love of neighbor, the contemporary discourse on love of neighbor must always be newly located and made clear in terms of its points of reference. The following examination of biblical passages featuring the theological discussion of the neighbor will mainly focus on texts from the

11 In the following passages, the word ‘ethos’ is used synonymously with ‘life orientation.’ Thus, it does not necessarily refer to a decidedly ethical life orientation that, in the words of Trutz Rendtorff, always represents a “superlative form” of human beings’ natural experience of reality (see Rendtorff 1980, I, 11 [transl. M.S.]). 12 The fact that the Christian social ethos is by no means uniform but quite heterogeneous can be demonstrated by the ‘Golden Rule’ (Mt 7:12; Lk 6:31), which will not be discussed here. Unlike love of neighbor and mercy, the golden rule is a behavioral guideline calling for strict reciprocity in the interaction with other human beings (‘So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.’). The focus on love of neighbor in this study is not a result of ignoring this heterogeneity of the Christian social ethos and the multitude of its biblical and after-biblical orientations. Rather, it posits that love of neighbor is particularly well-suited for examining the anthropological implications of Christian sociality. 13 The notion that love of neighbor retains a fundamentally reciprocal orientation has most recently been suggested by Eva Harasta in a systematic-theological interpretation of love of neighbor in Augustine and Karl Barth (see Harasta 2006). However, Harasta does not differentiate between reciprocity and mutuality, as this study did in the last chapter following Ricœur. 14 Michael Ebersohn is one of the voices arguing against a homogenization of the Christian social ethos under the concept of love of neighbor (see Ebersohn 1993, 2). He points out at least four aspects of behavioral guidance that are characteristic for the Christian ethos: love of neighbor, mercy, love of enemies, and the Golden Rule. The differences between the four aspects can be demonstrated simply by looking at their different levels of prominence in the traditions of the Old and the New Testament: while the commandment to love one’s neighbor does not yet take up a central position in the Old Testament, mercy and charity can be considered almost universal values of Judaism. The commandment to love one’s enemies can only be found in the synoptic tradition of the New Testament while the Golden Rule is a guideline shared by nearly all cultures.

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New Testament, because in its context of the message of Christ’s gospel, the call to love one’s neighbor is considered to be the most important commandment of Jesus’ teachings.15 Overall, love of neighbor is mentioned nine times in the New Testament (Mt 5:43; 19:19; 22:39; Mk 12:31.33; Lk 10:27; Rom 13:9; Gal 5:14; Jas 2:8). However, its great significance for the testimony of the New Testament is not just based on the number of passages, but above all on the fact that in the New Testament, loving one’s neighbor is considered to be the central social directive for the human life.16 Together with the commandment to love God (Mk 12:28–34 parr.), it is called the summary of all commandments. Paul even regards it as the fulfillment of the Torah, for whoever loves his fellow humans has fulfilled the entire law (Rom 13:8). The elements of the so-called twofold commandment of love can already be found in Deut 6:5 and Lev 19:18 in the Old Testament. ‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’ it says in Lev 19:18, and Deut 6:5 urges to ‘[l]ove the LORD your God with all your heart.’ But love of neighbor is only mentioned once explicitly (Lev 19:18). However, the command to show hospitality to the alien coming to Israel from abroad (Lev 19:34; Deut 10:19)17 already anticipates the expansion of loving one’s neighbor into loving one’s enemies in the New Testament (Mt 5:43). These passages from the Old Testament show that the command to love one’s neighbor as a whole is not an invention of the Christian Gospel, but can be traced back to the tradition of the Old Testament. However, the combination of loving God and loving one’s neighbor in the New Testament does not have a direct equivalent in the Old Testament. In any case, it is also important for the Christiantheological interpretation of love of neighbor that the commandment to love one’s neighbor is an element of Jewish tradition and continues to be interpreted within that tradition to this day.18 The twofold commandment of love, as a key commandment of the Judaism of his time, is included in the teachings of Jesus; its historical genesis is therefore to be understood in the horizon of a dispute about the understanding and meaning of the Torah.19 15

See Mathys 21990, 160. See ibid., 159. 17 See Meisinger 1996, 10–12. 18 In recent times, this has again been pointed out in several publications written by both Christian and Jewish scholars (see Moenikes 2007; Goodman 2008). 19 In his article on the exegesis of the Sermon on the Mount, Heinz-Wolfgang Kuhn decided to emphasize the close association of loving one’s neighbor with the Jewish 16

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chapter four The Biblical Contexts of Caring for the Other Human Being

The formulations and narrative contexts in which the neighbor is mentioned in the New Testament vary considerably from case to case.20 This is also relevant for the theological interpretation of the understanding of Christian love of neighbor because the various formulations of the commandment to love one’s neighbor found in the New Testament display a significant “semantic breadth”21 and thus only receive their concrete meaning from the respective contexts of their usage. An individual exegesis of the New Testament passages on loving one’s neighbor cannot be undertaken in the context of this study.22 In the face of the various theologies and epistemological horizons of the biblical texts, it is evident that it would be impossible to find a unified perspective that could serve as a basis for the systematic development of the topic in this study. However, it is useful to make some systematic observations on the concept of loving one’s neighbor in the New Testament, which will show the extent to which the mention of the neighbor differs in the individual theological testimonies. In the parallel passages of the synoptic Gospels (Mt 22:39; Mk 12:31; Lk 10:27),23 the commandment to love one’s neighbor is directly linked to the commandment to love God. In other passages, this link is indirectly addressed by way of the exegetic tradition, but not explicitly mentioned in the texts themselves (Mt 5:43; 19:19; Rom 13:9; Gal 5:14; Jas 2:8). Exegetically, the combination of love of neighbor and love of God can be traced back to a development in Hellenistic, not Rabbinical

understanding of the Torah (see Kuhn 1989). Kuhn attempts to understand the commandment to love one’s neighbor in the Gospel of Matthew in terms of its divergence and convergence with the Torah. 20 See Ebersohn 1993, 1–15. 21 Ibid., 2 (transl. M.S.). 22 Hubert Meisinger makes an attempt to give a complete overview of the New Testament research on the commandment of love in the first part of his study on the significance of the Christian commandment of love for sociobiological altruism research (see Meisinger 1996, 7–185). A detailed examination of Old Testament text passages on the commandment of love is provided by Mathys 21990, and a view on the commandment to love one’s neighbor in the Old Testament that integrates the synoptic tradition of the New Testament can be found in Ebersohn 1993. The understanding of the commandment of love in the epistles of Paul is investigated by Söding 1995, and Augenstein 1993 examines the Gospel of John and the Johannine scriptures with regard to their inherent understanding of the commandment of love. There have thus been recent exegetic studies on all the relevant traditions of the commandment of love in the New Testament, but they will not be discussed here at length. 23 See the detailed exegesis in Ebersohn 1993, 143–247.

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Judaism.24 Theologically, this development implies that wherever love of neighbor is mentioned, this act of loving one’s neighbor only attains its significance for guiding Christian life within the horizon of loving God. Therefore, Christian theology always discusses the twofold commandment of love, whenever the biblical testimony to neighbor-love is reconstructed. A common factor in all references to the neighbor in the New Testament is the fact that the word ‘neighbor’ is never used as an abstract category that merely schematizes a concrete reference to another human being. Rather, in those passages in which the word ‘neighbor’ does not appear in the form of a commandment (‘love your neighbor as yourself ’), it always receives a narrative significance. Thus, the neighbor is not only discussed in a generically formulated sentence, but is also introduced in images and stories that describe a concrete encounter between human beings. Important examples include the parable of the Good Samaritan (Lk 10:25–37) and the account of the final judgment (Mt 25:42–43). In these passages, the respective encounters with the neighbor are reported in a way that highlights their relevance for the new humanity of Christians, which also promises a fundamental reorientation in the social coexistence with other human beings. Accordingly, the texts portray the loving attention to the other, which human beings as neighbors of God display not simply as a norm that must be obeyed in the face of the other’s need and hardship.25 Instead, they present it as a challenge of faith in which human beings rectify their own relationship to God in and through their relationship to their fellow man. This becomes particularly clear in the story about the visit of the hungry man, the thirsty man, the stranger, the sick man and the prisoner, within the account of the final judgment (Mt 25:43).

24 Drawing on the works of Christoph Burchard (see Burchard 1970, 56–58), Klaus Berger (see Berger 1972, 142–176) and Michael Ebersohn (see Ebersohn 1993, 181), Meisinger argues for a Hellenistic origin of the twofold commandment (see Meisinger 1996, 28). Likewise, the summation of the commandments that is intended in the commandment of loving one’s neighbor refers to a Hellenistic context, as Becker 1981, 15, points out, since in Rabbinic Judaism, all 613 commandments and prohibitions had the same rank. 25 The emphasis of the social-diaconal character of loving one’s neighbor as caring for the weak and the poor obscures the fact that love of neighbor is about an orientation of faith that completely redefines humanity and is not only manifested in individual actions guided by a general norm. A similar thought can be found in Fischer 2002, 97–104, who rejects the reduction of the Christian social ethos to action as a mistake of modern ethics.

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The people in need, introduced one after the other, are to experience hospitality and loving care insofar as they are acknowledged as the neighbors of Christ. According to Mt 25:40, the hospitable person, who cares for the needy and the poor that come to him, already receives, in the present, the eternal life newly promised in Jesus Christ. 29.2

Who is my Neighbor – the Wrong Question?

In the gospel of Matthew, the stories about the encounter with the hungry man, the thirsty man, the stranger, the sick man and the prisoner accompany the imperative to ‘Love your neighbor as yourself ’ (Mt 22:39), in which the love of neighbor is phrased as a commandment or rule of social coexistence that determines the life of the new human being in faith. In these instances, it often seems very clear and obvious who this neighbor is: as an object of Christian care, the neighbor is characterized by need and hardship, and all the Christian must do is to react to him. Or as Wolfgang Trillhaas states quite matter-offactly in his “Ethik”: “Whoever needs us is our neighbor.”26 But how self-evident is caring for one’s neighbor, really? And to what degree must it first be demanded within a theological perspective, and thus in the horizon of the new humanity? This question is linked to the question of the proportional balance between the love of neighbor as a narrative element and as a normative rule, and also to the question of how abstract or concrete the biblical neighbor is.27 The biblical question ‘And who is my neighbor?’ in Lk 10:29 is not the first to express skepticism about the obviousness with which Christian social hermeneutics and the Christian diaconal service build on the figure of the neighbor – but skepticism begins in this question. The scribe asks who is his neighbor shortly after he has learned that the twofold commandment of love promises the possibility of attaining eternal life through practical action: ‘Do this and you will live’ (Lk 10:28), Jesus answers, making it clear that the normative version of the commandment of love in the Torah represents only the first answer

26

Trillhaas 21965, 263 (transl. M.S.). In this context, Jürgen Becker has talked about an interpretation of the commandment that is both lawlessly flexible and at the same time concrete and that is made possible by the form of the commandment of love of neighbor in the New Testament (see Becker 1981, 9). 27

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to the scribe’s question.28 This turn from commandment to action is typical for the Gospel of Luke, which emphasizes the close connection between hearing the Gospel and acting in accordance with. This connection is also evident when we look at the pericopes Lk 19:25–37 (action) and Lk 10:38–42 (hearing), which Luke inserts as a unique material [Sondergut] in his telling of the story of Jesus.29 Unlike other textual witnesses, the Lukan narrative therefore once again indicates the need for clarifying something that apparently had been clarified elsewhere with the normative form of love of neighbor. In Lk 10:25–37, Jesus speaks about behavior that is commensurate to the promise of the new life and that makes the commandment of to love one’s neighbor concrete: ‘Do this and you will live.’ This formulation of the Lukan Jesus makes it clear that the mercy that springs from love for the neighbor is not only an attitude toward the other human being, but also an action on his behalf, an action whose consequences and practical implications must always be acknowledged when considering the theological understanding of love of neighbor. Only if we are aware of these consequences and implications does the scribe’s question concerning a phenomenal discrimination of the neighbor become interesting. If everybody can be a neighbor, there is no need to distinguish between different neighbors. The scribe has a different point of view.30 The question ‘And who is my neighbor?’ indicates that for him, the implementation of the command to love one’s neighbor has considerable room for interpretation. From his point of

28 Jesus confronts the scribe with the “discrepancy between a correct answer and real action” (see Bormann 2001, 272 [transl. M.S.]). 29 See Müller 1984, 109–111. Paul-Gerhard Müller interprets the emphasis on action in the Gospel of Luke as a criticism of Israel’s cultic-liturgical worship service. 30 It cannot be deduced from the text whether the scribe means the question seriously or whether he asks it with the intention of proving the impossibility of fulfilling the commandment to love one’s neighbor. An answer to this question can only be attempted through the interpretation of its context (according to Müller 1984, 109). Therefore, my reflections do not understand the scribe’s question instrumentally, as if it aims at something else rhetorically, but evaluate it according to its direct and immediate content. Another loose interpretation of the context is the notion that the scribe’s question already concedes the difference between the active and the normative form of loving one’s neighbor that Jesus demands (see Bormann 2001, 272). This idea probably originates in the practice of applying the categories of law and Gospel to the biblical text. Zeindler 1996, for example, prominently uses this categorization and interprets the answer given by Jesus as a change in perspective from the hardship of the other to the experience of a good deed performed by the other (see Zeindler 1996, 581).

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view, in order to unfold the demand’s real-life significance, the neighbor must be defined in concrete terms. This means that, even if it is clear that loving one’s neighbor springs from a true understanding of loving God, and that consequently, the true mode of love is to practice mercy toward one’s fellow humans, the practical application of the figure of the neighbor in a concrete situation still contains considerable hermeneutical difficulties. The scribe’s question could therefore be reformulated as ‘How should I apply the term “neighbor” to real life?’ This reformulation also indicates a fundamental hermeneutical problem regarding the actualization of the biblical commandment to love one’s neighbor: in the light of the fact that God has promised his proximity to all human beings in Jesus Christ and has thus made all of them his neighbors, how is it possible to identify one neighbor? 29.3

Terminological Delineations

In the reflections on the biblical contexts of the neighbor, it has become clear that, from a Christian perspective, the relationship of a human being to his fellow humans is always preceded by the question of his proper relationship to God. The previous section (§28) has briefly outlined the ways in which this relationship to God determines the social relationship of Christians as a relation of proximity. But what God’s presence as proximity means for human beings and how the neighbor and his nearness should therefore be characterized has yet to be shown. To this end, it is useful to distinguish various usages of the term ‘neighbor.’ First of all, the relationship to the neighbor can be contrasted with the terms brotherhood and sisterhood, which characterize the community among Christians.31 The relation to the neighbor differs from this sense of community in that it does not emerge through commonly shared beliefs or through participation in the Christian community. Accordingly, loving and caring for the neighbor is not a matter of a communal kind of proximity to other human beings constituted by a common ground between them, such as belonging to an ethnicity, a biological species or a shared religious denomination. Furthermore, the relation to the neighbor must also be distinguished from belonging to humankind,32 which denotes the universal unity and shared identity 31 32

Also see Becker 1981, 9–11. See Trillhaas 21965, 262.

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of all human beings, as manifested in the attribution of sameness to single individuals who typify humankind. In contrast, discussion of the neighbor is geared toward a similar commonality as is the discussion of God’s creatures. God’s creatures are characterized by their difference from the creator and not by some kind of common feature or identity. Theologically speaking, a human being is a creature of God just like any other living being. But unlike discussion of God’s creatures, reference to human beings as neighbors clearly refers to fellow human beings and not fellow creatures, which thereby somewhat reduces the universal scope of reference to the creature, without completely abandoning the framework of creation theology. But the Christological horizon again refocuses the discussion of human beings as creatures and images of God by talking about human beings as new creatures. Human beings are those of God’s creatures who, through Adam, have completely lost their likeness to God and who have been promised to regain it in Christ.33 Therefore, the renewal of human beings in Christ also implies a renewal of the relationship to fellow humans, which, through God’s proximity to humanity, can be actively lived as loving care for others. 29.4

Hermeneutical Analysis of the Word ‘Neighbor’

The word ‘neighbor,’ which contains the same root as ‘nigh’, meaning ‘near,’ is an expression accommodating the spatial situatedness of biblical usage: its literal translation means ‘the one nearest’ (gr. plesion). Thus, in the usage of the Bible, this word is not a predicate that defines or classifies, but one that locates.34 In referring to the neighbor, however, a human being does not locate himself. Instead, the point of reference that guides the experiences of oneself and the world is the human being standing nearest to them. What does this mean? First of all, the idea of a nearest human being refers to the way in which human beings encounter each other. They do so by perceiving each other within a sphere or range of social proximity and distance. This notion can be made clearer by drawing an analogy to the spatial perception of a nearby object. Spatial perception is a system of orientation that organizes itself through relations of something’s

33 See Books I,1–5 and II,1–6 of Jean Calvin’s “Institutio Christianae Religionis” (Calvin 2001, 38–63.221–298). 34 See Dalferth 2002, 41.

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proximity to and distance from the observer’s standpoint.35 In spatial perception, that which is ‘near’ regulates and organizes the distance to other things. Thus, the object of perception can only be perceived in terms of its relative proximity and distance to the nearest object that is accessible from the observer’s viewpoint. In this way, the nearest object takes precedence above everything else because it enables the observer to experience proximity and distance and thus to determine what distance is. The perception of proximity thus always includes an element of distance as well, and it always contains a concrete distinction between proximity and distance determined by the nearest object. In hermeneutical terms, if we talk about something that is ‘nearest,’ we mean the object which provides the key to perceiving distance and thus regulates how everything else fits together. This notion, that proximity cannot be discussed without distance and that distance cannot be discussed without the nearest object, can now be applied in contrast to a hermeneutically truncated understanding of love of neighbor. If we understand the word ‘neighbor’ as analogous to the function of the ‘nearest’ object for spatial perception just described, then the neighbor can be understood as a hermeneutical point of reference for social orientation. This function also clarifies the neighbor’s significance for the social perception of fellow humans. In social terms, the neighbor is a fellow human whose function is to make us aware of the range of social proximity and distance between human beings. Thus, as long as the neighbor guides social perception, the view is opened up to those dimensions of proximity that can arise out of interpersonal encounters. This in turn has implications for the theological appropriation of the neighbor as the nearest fellow human being. 29.5

Proximity and Distance in the Love of Neighbor

In terms of the interpersonal encounter that makes one person the neighbor of the other, Christian proximity to the fellow human is not limited to social relations of proximity. Social relations are only about a ‘being-nearer-than-the-other’ among human beings. In the Christian sense, the word ‘neighbor’ also refers to a relationship to another person that places this person in a relation of proximity and distance that characterizes him in a certain way. But in the Christian relationship 35 The following thoughts on the range of proximity and distance are indebted to the hermeneutical discussion of this problem in Figal 2006, 159–164.

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of proximity, this does not mean that a human being is closer to the fellow human because they are connected by a personal relationship (friendship, family, partnership). Instead, the Christian relationship of proximity to the fellow human is only characterized through its reference to God. Thus, it can perceive interpersonal proximity and distance in a way that would be impossible within the immanence of social orientation: in the Christian relationship of proximity, a human being can care for another even if this other human being has not (yet) been defined by structures of social order, or if this definition does not recognize the other as a fellow human. From the perspective of theology, the mention of the neighbor and his hermeneutical function for social orientation already includes the entire range of interpersonal proximity and distance, which allows for the perception of social differences in human coexistence in the first place. Thus, the starting point of Christian social hermeneutics is not the irreducibility of the interpersonal difference or asymmetry, but the relative range of proximity and distance between human beings. The function of the neighbor as a reference point for social orientation is also reflected in biblical usage. Sometimes, the neighbor is described as a geographical neighbor, friend, or countryman, at other times, he is portrayed as an enemy, outcast or stranger. Thus, social proximity and distance are equally present in the mention of the neighbor. It can now be observed that the biblical linguistic usage of the New Testament radicalizes the discourse of the other human being’s proximity and distance. In the life of Jesus as portrayed in the New Testament, it is more important to care for the poor stranger who stands outside the social group than to care for fellow believers and countrymen. This is not just a special situation that applies to Jesus’ living with his disciples, but is an indispensable part of Jesus and his disciples’s way of life. Particularly in the Gospel of Mark, embracing society’s outcasts, the outsiders, therefore becomes the touchstone for a true orientation toward the coming kingdom of God proclaimed by Jesus. But what is the significance of this radicalization for a socialhermeneutical understanding of the function of the neighbor? When it comes to the neighbor at the margins of human society, social proximity denotes a completely different form of belonging than it does in social relationships which emerge from human community: here, the word ‘neighbor’ does not stand for any affiliation represented by interpersonal distances in measurable space (people living next door, roommates), corporeal co-presence (people who can be touched, who

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are within reach), history (one’s people, nation, generation) or biology (familial relationship, belonging to the same species). Instead, it stands for a belonging that shows itself most strikingly where social relationships do not exist and social differences are insurmountable. This may seem paradoxical at first glance. But this form of proximity is not in itself paradoxical; it is merely at odds with the conventional understanding of social proximity. It stands in sharp contrast to a way of looking at interpersonal relations in which proximity is produced through personal, social or societal patterns of identification. At the same time, Christian proximity also offers an identification with another human being, in that it points to that person’s humanity as a humanity that first came into world through God’s loving care for human beings in Jesus Christ. By adopting the vocabulary of the neighbor, the theological perspective therefore does not aim to develop a social hermeneutics that is exclusively focused on other human beings who are personally close (family, friends, partner etc.) or who are all equally distant (citizens, anonymous fellow humans). But neither does the Christian discourse of the neighbor imply that the structures of social proximity and distance that manifest difference between human beings are no longer significant or relevant to the interpersonal encounter. In fact, these structures continue to exist in their function as organizers of the social space of experience, and the forms of interpersonal proximity and distance it contains. But in the changed experiential horizon of Christians as new human beings, whose humanity has been newly unveiled in the relationship to God, these social structures are used in a different way. Because the reference to God interrupts the social regulations of affiliation and reorganizes the interpersonal relation, the excess of Christian proximity in the interpersonal encounter can be seen with particular clarity wherever this encounter was previously disturbed or broken. Through the loving care given to social outcasts, social conflict between human beings, which is accompanied by the separation and exclusion of the other from the human community, is most clearly revealed. The social conflict is exposed in its own reversal, and can at the same time be disrupted and revised by a new life reality through the act of love for the neighbor. Thus, the love of neighbor does not disrupt the social life reality by eliminating or negating social separations, but by enabling human beings to live in interpersonal proximity despite a social negation of the other. At the same time, this reveals the extent to which the sepa-

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ration between human beings that can accompany social conflicts is an inversion of the interpersonal relation. This inversion can only be revised through a new understanding of human existence, a new paradigm of social humanity. In this respect, love of neighbor is also independent of social order patterns. In the relation to the neighbor, who can be identified through the relation to God, neighbor-love is free to abstain from disregarding the presence of another human being in the interpersonal encounter, and to turn toward him and care for him instead – even when this other person is perceived as a violator of norms and a troublemaker within the social structures of society. 30

Social Criticism Instead of Morality

The Christian social ethos always develops its orientation for the behavior toward fellow humans by referring to God: human beings are the neighbors of God and can thus also become the neighbors of their fellow humans (Lk 10:36).36 These two perspectives are mediated by the redefinition of all human ideas about humanity in the reality of the human being Jesus Christ. The Christian social ethos can be understood to be the comprehensive orientation of all behavior a Christian displays toward another person – an orientation that relates to the Christian’s becoming a neighbor of this fellow human being. As demonstrated above, the fact that the human being is called the neighbor of God within the Christian social ethos, is rooted in the experience of a new reality of himself, in which he learns to gain a new understanding of his own humanity through God’s loving care for and proximity to human beings. Consequently, he begins to distance himself from his old self-experiences and self-understandings, which enables him to revise them wherever they oppose his new humanity. Therefore, a theological representation of anthropology must always establish a tense contrast between the new understanding of humanity, and the perspectives on the human being that describe his selfunderstanding in a non-Christian manner, which can now be

36 As Martin Luther established in his “Treatise on Christian Liberty”/“Abhandlung über die christliche Freiheit” (see Luther 2006, 174–175), love of neighbor is not to be understood primarily as an imperative, but as a statement of identity of the Christian human being: as long as he maintains his life orientation of loving God and the neighbor, he is a neighbor of God (and of his fellow human beings).

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re-described in a Christian manner. This is important because these non-Christian descriptions of the human being represent an indispensable pre-understanding of his new self-understanding. It is all the more important, then, for theological anthropology to describe the tense juxtaposition of old and new existence in terms of social phenomena. It does this primarily, not by developing a special Christian morality, but by developing a socially critical anthropology. For if the new existence were to be identified with the moral understanding of the good and righteous life, its tense relationship to the old existence would have to be abandoned, or at least subordinated to the normative description of the good and righteous life. And it has just been shown that this normative description of human life is most decidedly not the purpose of Christian anthropology. Christian anthropology works on the premise that human life is ambiguous. By differentiating between an old and a new existence, it enables us to deal with this ambiguity as a difference between old and new existence, without having to overcome or abandon it for the sake of a better, unequivocally good perspective of life. In this respect, the theological perspective on humanity is also guided by the empirical principle that human beings should be perceived as they are and not just as they should be. From a Christian perspective, the ambiguity of the phenomena of human life can be used to give this life a new orientation. Accordingly, this ambiguity cannot be subordinated or neglected, but needs to remain as the starting point for the theological perspective on human beings. The following are the arguments in support of a theological approach to socially critical anthropology: (i) The Christian social ethos cannot be represented and analyzed from the outset as a moral guideline of human life, because this would require an inappropriate reduction of religious life to one single aspect. The Christian religion as a system of thought and life is forged by social practices containing not only moral, but also political, legal and economic constellations. Accordingly, narrowing down the theological perspective to the morals of Christian religion would unnecessarily reduce the multiplicity of the social constellations of religion. Moreover, as shown above, the Christian religion develops not only norms and rules for human coexistence, but also narrative and symbolic patterns of orientation in order to regulate human coexistence wherever it is not already organized by moral standards of the good and righteous life. Christian religion thus not only contributes to the normative orientation of human coexistence; it also provides guidance where normative standards of orientation do not apply at all. Further-

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more, it points out the limits of human coexistence and transcends the immanence of its structure of social order through a socially critical orientation. Therefore, it is crucial to Christian religion that the occurrence of social conflicts is more than just a failure of orientation toward the ethically good and right. (ii) If the theological representation were to focus only on what is ethically good and right, one would have to question the added value of the theological reference to ‘God’ in the horizon of the question of humanity and sociality. Should we understand the reference to ‘God’ as a reference to an entity that is redundant for the orientation toward the good, i.e., that merely provides a factual affirmation and repetition of this orientation? If so, the reference to ‘God’ in a theological description of human social life would be close to superfluous or could easily be replaced by a moral standard of good or righteous living. If this is not the case, it must be demonstrated how the reference to ‘God’ can show a phenomenal excess in the theological perspective, even in a non-theological description of human sociality. This study suggests that the phenomenal excess of the theological reference to ‘God’ can be found in the added value of a perspective on human sociality that transcends the immanence of social patterns of orientation without abandoning them. The following passages will therefore present a hermeneutical and phenomenological attempt to reveal the socially critical potential of the Christian ethos, and to profile the third perspective presented in this study as a critical perspective of evaluation for human sociality. The presentation of the empirical and philosophical perspectives in the previous chapters has demonstrated how the relationship of humanity and sociality must be conceived of in the conflict between egoism and altruism, between antagonistic confrontation and responsibility for the other. Now the intention of the theological perspective is to show the immanent limits of this discourse by referring to a third entity, rather than by presenting a third material approach. (iii) The love of neighbor in its radical form consists in caring for the social outcasts of society, the outsiders and rejects of social life. This fact has encouraged theological anthropology to distinguish the understanding of love of neighbor from a social hermeneutics that is merely redundant within the general structures of philanthropy.37 The Christian social ethos contains its own hermeneutics of humanity’s

37

See Trillhaas 21965, 262.

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social form of life that cannot be equated with other social guidance systems, but it can offer a guideline for the patterns of interpersonal relations. Within this perspective, Christian love of neighbor is characterized by a particular care for the weak, sick, poor and needy, who stood completely outside of society in Jesus’ time. At the time, the guideline of love of neighbor brought care and attention to a very specific group of people, who were forced to live without any kind of social proximity to their fellow humans, while today such people are simply considered to be socially disadvantaged. Further, in order to show the uniqueness of the love of neighbor, it is also useful to draw attention to the politically radical program in Jesus’ teachings (in addition to the socially radical program) that is expressed in his appeal to love one’s enemies (Mt 5:43–45). Here, too, the love of neighbor turns out to be a form of proximity to those people whose basic rights are protected today (prisoners of war, terrorists), but whose existence in Jesus’ time was entirely outside of social perception, in the sense that community with these people was impossible. At this point, some may take issue with the understanding of the love of neighbor presented here. It could be argued that the theological understanding of human social life should decidedly not refer only to a special form of the social relationship. Against this possible objection, I would like to refer to an argument presented in section 29.4, which states that in principle, discussion of the neighbor is not based on a special relationship that differs from the general basic structure of social proximity among human beings. Instead, the love of neighbor reinterprets this basic structure by identifying the fellow human as the neighbor of God. As a neighbor of God, the neighbor is a person who, on the one hand, has experienced God’s proximity in Jesus Christ, and who, on the other hand, can become the nearest person for his fellow human beings due to God’s proximity. If we transfer this insight to the social radicalization of the love of neighbor in the teachings and the life of Jesus, we can see that Jesus assumed the social position of the neighbor by making himself accessible to the stranger, the alien, to the visibly outcast and socially invisible human beings. Defying the patterns of social order of his time, he put himself in the neighbor’s position and enabled these outcast human beings to partake of a life with social proximity (see e.g. Mk 2:13–17 parr; Mk 10:46–52 parr).

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Meisinger: Anthropological Awareness of Difference

On the basis of these reflections on the hermeneutical function of the neighbor, we can now proceed to discuss other structural features that characterize the understanding of the fellow human in the context of love of neighbor. Here, it is useful to refer to a study which has already attempted to find structural anthropological features of love of neighbor. In his book “Liebesgebot und Altruismusforschung” (1996), Hubert Meisinger pursues a systematic inquiry into the commandment of love by developing three key anthropological figures for each of the various discussions of the commandment in the New Testament. He calls them the awareness of extension [Erweiterungsbewusstsein], the awareness of being overburdened [Überforderungsbewusstsein], and the awareness of the threshold [Schwellenbewusstsein] in the love of neighbor.38 In its systematic focus of the exegetical debate, Meisinger’s study attempts to bridge the gap with the social-scientific discussion about the possibility of human altruism. The results of his study will be taken up here for further analysis of the hermeneutical structure of love of neighbor. This implies that they are to be mediated by the understanding of the figure of the neighbor that has been established in the framework of this study. Meisinger analyzes the anthropology of love of neighbor by examining the communicative structure of the commandment of love in the New Testament as a structure that places the human being at odds with himself. According to Meisinger, the commandment of love not only pertains to the neighbor as the intended recipient of love, but also to a person whose basic situation does not (yet) correspond to the commandment of love directed at him, because he cannot fulfill this commandment all by himself. Within this perspective, a gap opens up between the orientation of human beings to the commandment of love and the actual fulfillment of this commandment, a gap that points to the twofold nature of the commandment as both encouragement and command. Meisinger explains this difference in anthropological terms as an awareness of expansion, of being overburdened and of crossing a threshold. This means that he mainly focuses on those anthropological aspects of human consciousness associated with a normative accentuation of the commandment of loving one’s neighbor. The

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See Meisinger 1996, 4–5.27–185, here 183–185.

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following overview attempts to establish a hermeneutical classification of the aspects of anthropological overburdening identified by Meisinger: (i) According to Meisinger, the ‘awareness of expansion’ denotes the question of how to determine the circle of recipients of neighborly love “beyond the nearest of neighbors.”39 Here, it becomes clear that Meisinger uses the term ‘neighbor’ not in the sense of a hermeneutical point of reference, as described above, but in a literal sense. Accordingly, he asks the question about the reach of love of neighbor as if it were about overcoming the nearest person in favor of the more remote ones. However, if it is – as has been demonstrated already – the basic hermeneutical function of the nearest object to refer to the remote distance, the question about the range of love of neighbor can be approached in a different way. We can speak of an expansion of its range insofar as the specific constellations of proximity and distance which determine a social space are either suspended, or transcended toward a remote and yet undiscovered distance. But in that case, neither suspension nor transcendence can be described as ignoring the neighbor or as overcoming the neighbor’s proximity, but only as redefining his proximity in a way that allows us to perceive the relational system of the social experiential space as a whole from a new point of view. How this change in perception can occur through the adoption of a description of the social life reality of human beings which revises previous conceptions, has already been shown. (ii) Meisinger uses the ‘awareness of being overburdened’ by loving one’s neighbor to represent the question of whether in the commandment to love one’s neighbor, human beings reach the limits of their possibilities and thus may also fail at fulfilling it. However, Meisinger does not explicitly present the possibility of failure as a consequence of being overburdened. In his exegesis, he locates the awareness of being overburdened in the Gospel of Matthew, where it is accompanied by the possibility of forgiveness, which makes the ultimate failure to fulfill the commandment to love one’s neighbor an impossibility.40 We can now transfer the notion of being overburdened by the task of loving one’s neighbor into the context of social-hermeneutical reflections by asking what happens when the hermeneutical guidance represented by the commandment of loving one’s neighbor is misunderstood or not

39 40

Ibid., 4 (transl. M.S.). See ibid., 183.

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understood at all. The neighbor’s significance cannot be understood if the commandment to love one’s neighbor is not read within the horizon of the commandment to love God; i.e., when its reference to ‘God’ is ignored. In that case, human beings cannot be aware of how this possibility for love is connected to their life reality as new human beings, and how they can live up to it. Thus, an overburdening can only occur where the theological horizon of the commandment to love one’s neighbor is not taken into account. (iii) According to Meisinger, the ‘awareness of the threshold’ of love of neighbor denotes the question of whether the site of love of neighbor is the site of change toward a new understanding of humanity. Hermeneutically speaking, such an awareness of change can be described as the transformation of the old experiential horizon into a new one. This transformation occurs in neighborly love because the fellow human is identified with reference to God. If the neighbor, as the social point of reference, is redefined in reference to God, i.e., by God showing his love in making himself present in Jesus Christ as a neighbor of human beings, a new experience becomes possible. It is an experience that shows people possibilities of their self-understanding that they would have been unable to recognize by themselves. And yet, this new experience in (earthly) human existence always remains embedded in those experiential patterns of social proximity and distance that are already familiar to them, and by whose transformation and revision they move toward the threshold of the new humanity. These characteristic anthropological dynamics of understanding neighborly love do not, however, yet reflect the fact that the relationship to the neighbor is a relationship that finds the archetype of its new humanity in Jesus Christ. Meisinger’s exegetical reflections are guided by the basic situation of how the commandment of love is communicated in the texts of the New Testament. He reflects on the statements about the commandment of love in these texts in terms of their consequences for human consciousness and/or understanding. A different perspective emerges if we describe, not the communication of the commandment of love as a demand made on human beings from an external source; but the hermeneutical structure of its performance in light of the new humanity. A description of the performance of love of neighbor in the horizon of the new humanity must adopt the connection between loving God and loving one’s neighbor as its organizing principle, and place it at the center of its description. Based on the connection between loving God and loving one’s

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neighbor, God’s love does not approach human beings primarily as a demand that may overburden them, but as an encouragement that they can live up to through the comprehension of new humanity in Jesus Christ, who was a human being through and through. The description of God’s love that has already been manifested in a human being – in Jesus Christ – can then be used as a criterion for the (re-)description of interpersonal encounters. This definition of love that God has shown to human beings in Jesus Christ determines the character of loving care and merciful actions toward the neighbor. With his focus on the communication situation of the commandment of love in the New Testament, Meisinger excludes the inner unity of loving God and loving one’s neighbor from his approach. For description of the performance of love of neighbor that is attempted here, this methodological exclusion must be reversed. This does not mean that this study aims to refute or push aside Meisinger’s correctly identified problem of love of neighbor as an experience of difference, particularly in the awareness of being overburdened. Indeed, a description of love of neighbor that merely idealizes interpersonal love by imbuing it with the experience of God in Jesus Christ could contain great risk in an anthropological sense. However, as it is necessary to distinguish between false overburdening and beneficial challenge, the following thoughts aim to emphasize the act of crossing the threshold that is embodied in loving one’s neighbor as a new life reality of human beings which is testified in faith. Accordingly, the question that was asked in §29.2 must be transformed into a new question at this point. As the Lukan Jesus makes clear in his story of the Good Samaritan in Lk 10:30–35, the idea is not to identify the one neighbor, among all fellow humans, that Christ has put next to me, but to become the nearest human being to every fellow human through one’s actions as expressed in Lk 10:36. Thus, love of neighbor signifies a form of interpersonal relation that is not about the identification of its protagonists or the consequences of their actions, but about becoming the new human being, which precedes this relationship and is only expressed in it. Thus, the question of how to identify the neighbor in the sense of a phenomenal discrimination of the object of the loving relation is misguided, because the neighbor is defined not by his exalted position or his difference from other human beings, but by his potential to realize a new experience of humanity with reference to ‘God.’ Thus, love for the neighbor always remains different from all other interpersonal relations. The assessment of

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the relation between Christian love and interpersonal relations now demands a more precise description of its phenomenal significance in human life reality, which it claims in the reference to the neighbor as another concrete human being. 32

Kierkegaard: Humanity as the Phenomenal Excess of God’s Love

Søren Kierkegaard’s study of Christian love provides an interpretation of love of neighbor that is particularly suited for combination with social-hermeneutical reflections, because it pays special attention to the socially critical implications of the new humanity for a Christian’s concrete relationship of love toward the fellow human. Therefore, it is useful to examine his interpretation of love of neighbor in terms of its similarities and differences to the reflections of the previous section. In his book “Works of Love”41 (1847), Kierkegaard analyzes neighborly love in its basic form as a dyadic relationship of love. Here, the lovers do not interact primarily with each other, but each of them first interacts with God in order to turn to the other from their respective relationship with God.42 The relationship of love between neighbors therefore becomes dynamic: the lovers identify themselves first as neighbors of God in their relationship to God and then implement, in their relationship to each other, the determinedness that their existence has received in their relationship to God. Thus, love of neighbor is a three-figure relationship. It is a relationship of the human self to God, which is made concrete in the interpersonal relation of love for another self, but without ever coming into view out of this relationship itself. 32.1

Kierkegaard’s Method of Analysis

The description of the basic structure of love of neighbor chosen by Kierkegaard develops its understanding of love based exclusively on the relationship to God. The advantage of this clear reference to God is that it prevents the description of neighborly love from becoming

41 Kierkegaard 1962. For a commentary see Ferreira 2001 and the contributions in “Kierkegaard Studies” (1998). 42 See Kierkegaard 1962, 117.

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redundant to non-theological understandings of interpersonal love. It characterizes the Christian relationship of love from the outset as a reality of faith that can only be described within the horizon of theological reference to the authority of ‘God.’ Thus, love of neighbor is not a secondary definition of interpersonal relations of love, but possesses its own determinedness that is exhibited phenomenally in the experiential space of interpersonal relations. This clarity and originality is the strong point of Kierkegaard’s analysis of the love of neighbor. It is an excellent example for the argument postulated in this study, namely, that the Christian perspective on human beings, with its tension between old and new existence, represents an autonomous anthropological perspective that does not build on the key differences of non-theological anthropologies. However, Kierkegaard’s radical break from the basic forms of human love may have been an (apparent) disadvantage for his analysis of love of neighbor with regard to its relevance for social hermeneutics and ethics in general. At first glance, it seems as if the love he has in mind is so transcendental and unwordly that it is impossible to relate it to the earthly, mundane circumstances of love. Kierkegaard himself states that it appears “as if this love for one’s neighbor did not fit properly within the relationships of earthly existence.”43 This and other statements44 have earned him the accusation that his description of neighborly love is unsocial and useless for theological ethics.45 Of course, in the context of this study, which has at no point abstracted the possibility of an unsocial human nature, such an accusation gains a wholly different meaning than Kierkegaard’s critics intended. From the beginning, this study’s premise has been that the egoism of the individual, his inability to have a social relationship, and the antagonistic confrontation as a basic pattern of social interaction, must be included in the description of sociality. Thus, in the framework of an interpretation of the socially critical anthropology of Christian love of neighbor, as has been attempted here, the accusation that Kierkegaard gives an unsocial description of love does not speak against, but very

43

Ibid., 90. Also see Ferreira 2001, 43–98. See e.g. the discussion of the “equality of eternity” in love of neighbor (Kierkegaard 1962, 90). However, Kierkegaard emphasizes at the same time that Christian love can never take away the characteristics of earthly love (see ibid., 59). 45 See Adorno 2003; Barth 2009, 117–228; Løgstrup 1968; 1997. For an opposing opinion: Ferreira 2001. 44

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clearly for his concept. However, it is yet to be demonstrated in which sense this applies. For this reason, the following passages will attempt to understand Kierkegaard’s description of love as a theological perspective in the above-stated sense – namely, as a theological perspective on the interpersonal relation that is not redundant to the moral, political and legal descriptions of this relationship, but that develops an autonomous religious view on social life reality that is guided by the difference between social humanity and inhumanity. Such an attempt must also include a critical evaluation of those theological interpretations of Kierkegaard that are only interested in the moral significance of his description of love of neighbor. Any attempt to interpret Kierkegaard’s analyses of Christian love as if they could simply be understood as a project of agapeist ethics, or an ethics of alterity in the vein of Levinas, fails to comprehend the theological, phenomenological and socialanthropological significance of Kierkegaard’s description, which goes far beyond a positive description of human sociality.46 In his analyses of Christian love, Kierkegaard observes human sociality from the perspective of its phenomenal excess: God’s love, which at the same time signifies the possibility of social humanity for human beings. However, in Kierkegaard’s analyses, human beings are shown not only the possibility of social humanity, but also its permanent reversal in the interpersonal relations they live in. 32.2

The Negative Definition of the Neighbor

For Kierkegaard, the figure of the neighbor is a figure that can only be meaningfully discussed in the context of a Christian description of love. He begins his analysis of the neighbor with ‘God’ in order to profile the neighbor’s position within the relationality of the interpersonal relation, thereby preventing the presence of the other person from being (completely) absorbed into this relationality. By emphasizing that in principle, the recipient of neighborly love can be everyone,47 Kierkegaard makes clear that this possibility for all human beings to be neighbors of God also signifies equality (before God).48 Thus, in a relationship of Christian love, the neighbor is at the same

46 47 48

See Ferreira 2001 and Welz 2008. See Kierkegaard 1962, 63. See ibid., 64–65.

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time both unique and equal to all fellow human beings, because the human being and the fellow human being as neighbors of God are represented within their relation of love only through the reference to ‘God.’ This means that their concrete social identity is not included in this relationship. According to Kierkegaard, the love of neighbor can be equally understood in the sense of a subjective genitive and an objective genitive, because both the lover and the beloved can only be distinguished by the love of God occurring between them. Apart from that, their sameness is emphasized. Thus, Kierkegaard’s description of the love of neighbor places particular importance on its nonpreferential character.49 The biggest risk that lies in preferring one over the other and in loving one person more than all others is the failure to recognize this other person as the neighbor of God.50 Thus, Christian love replaces the diversity of interpersonal relations in which human beings interact and behave toward each other, with a relation among equals that, unlike egalitarian relationships forged by politics, law or morals, is based on “every individual’s equal kinship with and relationship to God.”51 In the love of neighbor, no human being is more to the other than he is in his function of referring to the relationship to God. Thus, the neighbor negatively signifies what the other human being can never be in the relationship of preference. This correlates with another observation that can be made about Kierkegaard’s analysis of neighborly love. The central thesis of Kierkegaard’s analysis is the thesis of the invisibility of (God’s) love in the lovers’ relationship. Drawing on the biblical parable of recognizing the tree by its fruits (Lk 6:44), Kierkegaard argues52 that the essential aspect of Christian love of neighbor lies in its function of referring to the invisible third in the relationship of the lovers.53 This invisible third is its reference to God. Kierkegaard’s description of the relationship of love as a relationship to God, also defines the limits for a description of neighborly love as a love among human beings. The first limit is that in Christian love, unlike in interpersonal love, it is impossible to discover either the consequences or

49 50 51 52 53

See ibid., 36.58–66. See Ferreira 2001, 50–52. Kierkegaard 1962, 80. See ibid., 23–33. Kierkegaard calls this “love’s hidden life” (ibid., 23).

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the motives of love.54 Thus, according to Kierkegaard, the structure of love of neighbor cannot be explained by describing the abilities of human beings or the structure of their will. This fundamentally sets neighborly love apart from all forms of interpersonal love, and this is also what Kierkegaard means when he says that its presence among human beings remains invisible as long as its whence (‘God’) is not reflected on, and as long as God’s love is not made the criterion for describing interpersonal love.55 Accordingly, Christian love and care for the neighbor is not characterized by a particular motivation (affective or rational) or particular motives (inclination, intention, purpose). Instead, its nature is precisely that it does not have any motivation or motive for acting that could be named or perceived by human judgment. The impossibility of describing it in terms of a human action or mode of behavior is the very reason for its significance in the horizon of the reference to God. The second limit that Kierkegaard defines in his description of love of neighbor is the impossibility of describing it as any kind of human self-love.56 The love of human beings for themselves can be extended to other people who are related to or associated with them, but it can never apply to all human beings equally. Therefore, interpersonal love that emerges from self-love is not a social relationship that can be generalized. It can recognize another self, a variant of one’s own, in the other human being, but not a neighbor of God, whom Kierkegaard calls the “other-you.”57 Thus, his description of love of neighbor aims at a new understanding of interpersonal love in the horizon of the Christian understanding of love. It examines an interpersonal relation that is established ‘between’ human beings through the reference to God, and that does not put the mutual references between the human participants into effect in the relationship. In order to further distinguish the nature of Christian love from interpersonal love, Kierkegaard additionally describes three characteristic

54 Kierkegaard’s discussion of love being recognized by its fruits (ibid.) is to be understood in the sense of a question about the essential (characteristic) of Christian love, and not in a consequentialist sense (see Ferreira 2001, 24–26). 55 Kierkegaard expresses this by writing that “like is known only by like” (Kierkegaard 1962, 33). In interpersonal encounters, love of neighbor can only be recognized by knowing about love of God. 56 See ibid., 34–40. 57 Ibid., 66.

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modalities of love. They refer to the temporal, the receptive and the intentional aspect of love:58 (i) Temporal: constancy and mutability of love in time; (ii) Receptive: equality and difference of the objects of love; (iii) Intentional: the lovers’ obligations and needs.

In his analyses of Christian love, Kierkegaard shows that the presence of this love imbues every relationship between human beings with a meaning that can be expressed by contrasting Christian love with interpersonal love. First of all, Christian love is constant because it is not only permanent, but also remains true to itself throughout the changes of time.59 Second, in Christian love, all human beings can be objects of love equally, while interpersonal love sees the difference between people that suggests the preference of one particular human being.60 Third, interpersonal love is fuelled by the lover’s need to be loved in return by the beloved. In contrast, Christian love is independent of this self-centered need, which makes it the only reliable form of love.61 These three characteristics of Christian love clearly show that Kierkegaard’s description of love is motivated by the idea of developing Christian love in opposition to its counterpart: the deficiencies of interpersonal love. In this juxtaposition, the counterpoints to his description of Christian love are the despair about the beloved’s infidelity or love’s slow transformation into hate, jealousy and habit.62 His reflections are driven by the insight that by letting themselves be guided by God’s love, human beings can love their fellow humans without falling victim to the deficiencies of interpersonal love. According to Kierkegaard, the object of love must therefore be necessarily contingent, i.e., it is crucial that our love can refer to any fellow human we encounter.63 If the object of love is contingent, it follows that (i) every human being is included in the Christian relationship of love without any evaluating distinction (lovable – unlovable); and that (ii) the object of love can only be defined negatively because it cannot

58 These three distinctions refer to the second chapter of “Works of Love” (see ibid., 34–98). 59 Kierkegaard describes this as love’s changing and being changed through time (see ibid., 46–52). 60 See ibid., 58–66. 61 See ibid., 40–57. 62 See ibid., 49–52. 63 See ibid., 58.

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be described by any particularity that distinguishes one human being from another. This thesis that the neighbor is contingent in the relationship of love represents the culmination of Kierkegaard’s argument.64 However, the contingency of the neighbor and its negative determination in interpersonal relations is not equivalent to the neighbor’s abstractness or invisibility. Instead, Kierkegaard develops the contrast between the visible other and the invisible neighbor in order to show that the neighbor can be found in every human being.65 The neighbor is abstract in the sense that he cannot be recognized in the fellow human being, i.e., in his idiosyncratic particularity;66 for the object of neighborly love is only defined by the reference to God, which remains invisible.67 Therefore, Kierkegaard can say that loving one’s neighbor should make human beings blind to the visible differences between human beings.68 This means that the lover does not look at the object of love in a way that is visible to the human eye, namely, by making a distinction between lovable and unlovable. Instead, his perception is determined by the object’s concreteness in Jesus’ actions toward his fellow humans.69 Thus, the real-life concreteness of the other person is not negated, and the true object of love, the neighbor, is not an entity that is located outside of the fellow human. Instead, the fellow human is perceived in his concrete form as another person, and at the same time recognized in his function as a neighbor of God through the reference to Jesus Christ. This tension is the only way to provide a phenomenological description of the excess of God’s love in the interpersonal relation. The abstractness of the neighbor of God thus only signifies his absence in the world. At the same time, it positively defines that which is impossible to attain in interpersonal love: a love that is not determined by the concreteness of the other person. Based on Kierkegaard’s reflections, it is possible to state: God’s love for human beings, revealed to them in Jesus Christ is a characteristic of that life reality which enables a human being to do what he cannot do through his own strength: to show his fellow humans a

64

See ibid., 67–70.77–79. See Ferreira 2001, 43–52. 66 See Kierkegaard 1962, 73. 67 See ibid., 70. 68 See ibid., 79. 69 As an example, Kierkegaard refers to the Lucan story (Lk 14:7–14) of Jesus’ invitation of outcasts (the poor, blind and lame) to the banquet (see ibid., 90–91). 65

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kind of love that is not absorbed in self-reference. One problematic point of Kierkegaard’s theological interpretation is that it defines the humanity of interpersonal love through God’s love and at the same time emphasizes its transcendence of time. This exaggeration of the perfection of Christian love puts his interpretation at risk of squandering the anthropological awareness of difference that is characteristic of theological anthropology. This risk can be found in Kierkegaard’s reflections wherever he continuously points out that Christian love is solely driven by the “very perfection of the eternal.”70 In addition, Kierkegaard’s assertion that Christian love only manifests itself in eternity, in the transcendence of temporal life, is associated with a radical critique of the finiteness and imperfection of interpersonal love. He expresses this critique by reducing the discussion of the neighbor to the discussion of the “only object”71 of love, in which the relationship of love can apparently be carried out while completely detached from the diverse human range of loving and being loved. But such a separation of love of neighbor from the circumstances of human beings in the social world is not compatible with the biblical sources of the commandment to love one’s neighbor.72 In Lk 10:25–37, for example, the story of the Good Samaritan, the (economic) order of everyday life is by no means suspended or completely invalidated by the Samaritan’s unusual act of helping: in the inn, the wounded man only receives help because the Samaritan pays the innkeeper for it. Thus, Kierkegaard seems to be interested in a description of love of neighbor that goes beyond the biblical testimony and overcomes its narrative indifference to the real-life circumstances of love. Therefore, in order to forestall the objection that Kierkegaard’s description of neighborly love removes it too far from the basic social conditions of human life, we have to be aware that he defines neighborly love not only through God’s love, but also through the humanity of God’s love embodied in Jesus Christ.73 Thus, the love of neighbor is

70

Ibid., 76. Ibid., 67. Also see the discussion of God as the “only loved object” in Christian love (ibid., 124). 72 On this story, see Bormann 2001, 272: “The detailed description of the correct and binding agreement between innkeeper and helper [Samaritan] shows that singular situation and charismatic behavior are not violently opposed to the orders of everyday life (Lk 10:35).” (transl. M.S.). 73 See Kierkegaard’s statements on the kinship of human beings to God in Jesus Christ (Kierkegard 1962, 80–81) and the numerous parables that he uses for his analyses in “Works of Love.” 71

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that phenomenon which can connect the perspectives of the eternity and temporality of human existence; this insight also guides Kierkegaard’s nuanced description of interpersonal life reality from a Christian perspective.74 32.3

Self-Love and the Deficiencies of Interpersonal Love

If we understand Kierkegaard’s description of the love of neighbor not as a description of an exalted ideal of love that is completely detached from life on earth, but as a description of the deficiencies of interpersonal love in light of Christian love, then the most important and central point is his critique of the self-love that dominates interpersonal love relationships. In the following passages, this critique will be discussed in the context of the biblical testimony of love of neighbor. The biblical demand to ‘love your neighbor as yourself ’ indicates that the language of the Bible by no means discusses love for the neighbor without taking reference to the human self and to self-love. Instead, the intensity of love for the neighbor is defined by comparing it with self-love: the neighbor should be as near to the human being as he is to himself. But at the same time, he should not to be any nearer or be loved more dearly than a human being can love himself. In that respect, the biblical formulation of the command to love one’s neighbor also contains a limitation of the overburdening of human beings. Moreover, the phrasing indicates that the neighbor is not loved out of an expectation of reciprocity. Otherwise, as Sigmund Freud correctly remarked, the demand would be to “love thy neighbor as thy neighbor loves thee.”75 Moreover, it is important to note that, originally, the biblical commandment of love was not reduced to a social ethos describing patterns of private interpersonal relations. In his monograph on the commandment of love in the Old Testament, Hans-Peter Mathys points out that in both the Old Testament and the Old Orient, the word ‘love’ [ahava] was not only used for an intimate relationship between close relatives and friends, but very often also applied in public and political contexts.76 Here, it had the meaning of ‘making a common cause’ or ‘signing a contract.’ The term could apply to persons but also to states

74 75 76

See ibid., 7–8. Freud 2002, 47. See Mathys 21990, 24–25.

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or other impersonal entities. Thus, according to Mathys, the phrase ‘as yourself ” [kamoka] following the demand for love of neighbor does not refer to the neighbor’s similarity, but provides a point of reference for the strength and intensity of caring for him: the neighbor is to be treated in the very same way in which human beings naturally treat themselves.77 In contrast to the wide range of semantic meaning for the word ‘love’ in the Old Testament, the New Testament, especially the Gospel texts, concentrates on the personal care for a fellow human who is in need. Here, the care for lepers and the sick in the life of Jesus serves as an example that sets new standards. The New Testament not only narrows down the context of the discussion of love of neighbor, from the wide field of political and socio-economical relationship constellations, to the area of interpersonal proximity and personal contacts between human beings, but also dispenses with the association with contracts, laws and agreements that had characterized ‘love’ as a political term in the Old Orient. In the context of this semantic change, there arises a specifically modern question that nevertheless is also connected to the texts of the New Testament: How does the human self relate to itself and to others in love of neighbor? The phrase ‘as yourself ’ indicates that the demand of loving one’s neighbor does not simply stand in opposition to self-love. In the biblical directive, neighbor-love and self-love are not presented as mutually exclusive forms of love. Caring for one’s neighbor thus does not require the elimination or repression of one’s self-love; indeed, the relation to oneself is presented as the archetype of interpersonal love. The neighbor shall be as close to the person as the person is to itself. Kierkegaard’s analysis of love of neighbor must be credited with providing a more nuanced account of the relationship between love of neighbor and love of self. For Kierkegaard, between the ‘as yourself ’ and the ‘love your neighbor’ lies the difference between the temporary and the eternal, between the old and new existence of human beings, and it is precisely the contrast between self-love and neighborlove at the site of caring for the other human being that Kierkegaard wants to emphasize in his analyses.78 Of course, Kierkegaard does not

77 78

See ibid., 19. See ibid., 34.

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deny that human self-love exists and is justified.79 But he makes it clear beyond all doubt that caring for another human being as a neighbor of God cannot be a self-interested act of love, in which a human being would be incapable of loving the other and himself in the right way.80 But according to Kierkegaard, to love oneself and also the other in the right way, i.e., in the sense of neighborly love, means to renounce and deny oneself in one’s love for the other. In order to clarify what this means, Kierkegaard’s description examines all those phenomena of caring for the other that seem to contain the beginnings of an indifference between self-interested love and true love of self and neighbor. He demonstrates that selfish love, in caring for the other, can take on such a subtle form that it appears to be identical with love of neighbor and is actually mistaken for it. But in fact, it is “secretly selflove”81 that remains undiscovered from an external view in this act of caring for the other. In order to demonstrate the subtleness of self-interested love, Kierkegaard distinguishes between self-sacrifice, which only appears to be an act of sacrificing oneself for the other, and self-renunciation, which is characteristic of love of neighbor and in which self-love is truly overcome.82 In his opinion, love of neighbor cannot be described as sacrificing or giving up one’s own self for the sake of another self, because it is precisely the passion at the heart of such a sacrifice that, according to Kierkegaard, represents a particularly self-interested form of caring for another human being. Self-sacrifice for the sake of the other is selfish love because it conceals the wish to merge with the other into a new unity. In contrast, the lover’s self-renunciation in love is a criterion for testing the love of neighbor.83 The lover’s selfrenunciation in love signifies that the arbitrariness of his choice of love in his relationship to the other is interrupted by the middle term of the neighbor.84 In this way, the lover does not love the other human being just as he pleases, but by looking for aspects of God and not for himself in the fellow human.

79 80 81 82 83 84

See ibid., 39. See ibid. Ibid., 36. See ibid., 67. See ibid., 68. See ibid., 70.

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This means that the selfish search for aspects of oneself in the other human being can be expressed either in the total devotion of oneself to another human being (“devoted self-love”) or in the denial of any connection to him (“faithless self-love”).85 Thus, it is impossible to find out about the true nature of love for the other merely by observing external behavior, and even the apparently selfless loving care for the other is not a guarantee that it expresses neighborly love in the Christian sense. Instead, Kierkegaard recommends paying attention to the behavior of human subjectivity in the devotion to the other. If the other is only an object of passions and penchants of the self, which are satisfied by caring or not caring for him, it cannot be true love of self and neighbor, because that would involve the renunciation of any self-referential references to the other. Self-renunciation, according to Kierkegaard, is not selflessness in the sense that people lose themselves or overcome their own volition completely in their devotion to the other. Here, it becomes clear that love of neighbor does not abandon self-love, but transforms it. Because self-love is put to the test and limited by self-renunciation in love of neighbor, human beings can first experience how Christian self-love is possible. Only on the basis of this experience can they recognize other forms of their self-love in the inversion of that first experience. In the self-renunciation of loving one’s neighbor, it also becomes clear whether the selfish care for the other is only an extension of one’s own self-love and not true love of neighbor.86 This differentiated critique of self-love from the perspective of Christian love shows that Kierkegaard’s description does not abstract from human life reality in any way. If anything, it gives more concreteness and subtle detail to the socially ambiguous and conflicting aspects of this reality. Self-love in the interpersonal relation can be both a selfinterested passion for the other and self-denying devotion to the other. Kierkegaard’s thoughts on the issue are guided by the impossibility of completely overcoming this ambiguity of interpersonal love. By no means does he assume that interpersonal love could ever be set free from the tension of this ambiguity. But by interpreting it in the horizon of Christian love of self and neighbor, he opens up a perspective on social phenomena that permits us to identify in them the differ-

85 86

Ibid., 68. See Ferreira 2001, 35.

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ence between human and inhuman social life reality. In this way, the description of interpersonal sociality can remain open to the possibility of becoming more aware of the perversions of self-love at the site of the other, and of revising them within one’s own perception through the love for the neighbor. Therefore, Kierkegaard’s analysis of Christian love does not propagate love of neighbor as an ethical ideal or normative demand. Instead, it uses a description of the deficiencies of interpersonal love to show the kind of life reality in which love of neighbor is possible at all. The description of love of neighbor is therefore always connected with a critical revision of those forms of interpersonal love that stand in tense opposition to the ethos of love of neighbor. In this way, his description of human sociality always remains concrete and related to human life reality. 33

Beyond Kierkegaard: The Love of Neighbor and Inhumanity

According to Kierkegaard, the starting point of the interpersonal encounter in love of neighbor is not the social proximity and distance between human beings, but their equality before God. Thus, the neighbor can be found in every other human being (Kierkegaard’s thesis of contingency). Moreover, the reference, within love, to the neighbor implies a form of intersubjectivity that interrupts and eliminates selfish personal preferences for particular human beings. Every human being can experience loving care in the same way if he is loved as a neighbor of God and is perceived in this function in the social encounter.87 The description of interpersonal love as the love of neighbor thus provides a perception of the fellow human that is not obstructed by social preconceptions. Herein lies an essential socially critical implication of the love of neighbor: the sympathy or antipathy for one particular other human being does not determine how we treat that person, but rather the fact that he and the self both stand in relation to God, and, transcending all social similarities and differences, are joined together by that relation to God.

87 “The next human being – he is one’s neighbor – this [sic] the next human being in the sense that the next human being is every other human being.” (Kierkegaard 1962, 70).

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The interpretation of Kierkegaard’s thoughts presented here sees them as a phenomenologically differentiating description of the possibility of interpersonal humanity and its actual inversions. This seemingly unproblematic perspective on Kierkegaard’s analyses of love has been questioned by various authors. They assert that his discussion of the neighbor is ambivalent, and that, where the discussion appears to indicate the possibility of human humanity, it in fact indicates its impossibility. 33.1 Adorno: The Dead Neighbor Without a doubt, Kierkegaard’s argumentation displays a tendency to juxtapose the definition of the neighbor as an indication of eternity in time, against the historical mutability of earthly life88 that can only bring forth difference between human beings, and thus determines the mutability of their love relationships. For Kierkegaard, then, the neighbor is characterized by his abstractness in the world and by his contingency before God. Theodor W. Adorno has claimed that Kierkegaard’s analyses of love present a description of the neighbor that empties the discussion of the neighbor of all empirical significance.89 However, it should be obvious by now that for Kierkegaard’s phenomenological analysis of interpersonal love, Adorno’s accusation is untenable. Nevertheless, it warrants further attention insofar as it supports the interpretation of the love of neighbor as a socially critical orientation that has been presented here. In his article “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love”90 (first published in 1939), Adorno critically remarks that Kierkegaard’s description of love of neighbor necessarily leads to the conclusion that only the dead human being, whose earthly difference from other human beings is eliminated once and for all, could be this ideal neighbor that

88 On the critique of Kierkegaard’s understanding of temporality that ignores historicity see Adorno 2003, 229. 89 See ibid., 228. 90 This article has been translated into English by Adorno himself and published for the first time in 1939/40 in the “Zeitschrift für Socialforschung” (Adorno 1939/40; see also Adorno 2003, 265). The new edition of his habilitation, “Kierkegaard: Constructions of the Aesthetic” (1933, republished in German 1962), includes a new and very different German version that is referred to here: Adorno 2003, 217–236.

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Kierkegaard91 allegedly had in mind.92 It is possible to care for such a dead neighbor without being trapped by false preferential love. Adorno also accuses Kierkegaard of turning love of neighbor into an unsocial attitude that does not relate to the other human being. On the one hand, Kierkegaard views love as a wholly internal quality of human beings, and on the other, he makes the object of love almost arbitrary for the lover.93 The consequence of this division of inwardness and outwardness, argues Adorno, is that Kierkegaard’s understanding of love is highly abstract, and is permeated by an “ascetic rigorousness”94 that combines “oppression of the drive [. . .] and oppression of the mind.”95 In the end, he says, Kierkegaard’s understanding of love only expresses his “misanthropy”96 and hinders rather than helps an understanding of interpersonal relations. This tendentious interpretation of Kierkegaard’s writings on love has been challenged by several scholars,97 by showing, among other things, that Kierkegaard’s argumentation is not – as Adorno alleges – guided by the interest of asserting the empirical recognizability or irrecognizability of the neighbor, but in fact aims to trace the humanity of interpersonal love as a renewal of human beings in and through their relationship to God. Nevertheless, apart from this theological correction, it should not be ignored that Adorno himself found another, more positive meaning in Kierkegaard’s description of love of neighbor, by reading it not as an ethical, but as a socially critical concept. Adorno emphasizes that Kierkegaard talks about a neighbor who would be better dead than alive, and about a mercy toward him that is without effect or power in the outwardness of the world. Adorno calls this a ‘demonic’ consequence of Kierkegaard’s doctrine of love that he himself was unaware of: it leaves the world to the ‘devil’ (instead of to

91

Kierkegaard himself does not explicitly support this thesis, but various statements like “death erases all distinctions” (Kierkegaard 1962, 74) can be interpreted to say as much. Also see the tract “The Work of Love in Remembering One Dead” in the second part of “Works of Love” (ibid., 317–329), where Kierkegaard states that remembering a dead person is the most selfless form of love (see ibid., 320). 92 See Adorno 2003, 233–236. 93 See ibid., 219. 94 Ibid., 228. 95 Ibid. 96 Ibid. 97 See the section on the lack of outwardness of neighborly love and Kierkegaard’s alleged ‘escapism’ in Ferreira 2001, 89–98.

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God’s love).98 Adorno formulates his critical assessment of this consequence from a decidedly social-philosophical viewpoint. He asserts that the Christian doctrine of love is not exempt from being held accountable to the social life reality of human beings.99 Even though Kierkegaard himself ‘rebuffed,’100 as Adorno puts it, such an interpretation, his texts must therefore be read as a confrontation with the social reality of his time. In this sense, they do not unfold a positive and in this case utopian idea of love, but develop a negative social ontology and engage in social and societal criticism.101 According to Adorno, this social criticism is not to be formulated from the standpoint of religious transcendence in contrast to the concrete life reality of human beings, but must be located in this life reality itself. According to Adorno, the neighbor Kierkegaard is talking about can only be identified in relation to God and not within the earthly conditions of interpersonal coexistence, because in the present societal order, the other person can only be perceived in an objectified and dehumanized form (see §8.3). Human sociality no longer has a place in societal interactions, and thus human beings are forced to live in inhuman coexistence with each other. One characteristic of this situation is the purely negative definition of love of neighbor: its phenomenality can only be articulated as social criticism. In this sense, Kierkegaard’s thoughts are a testimony to the annihilation of social humanity in the society of his time, whereby social humanity can only be defined by a description of its absence that locates the neighbor outside of societal interaction.102 We have seen already that it is not the intention of Kierkegaard’s phenomenological analysis of interpersonal love to locate the neighbor outside of human society. Rather, his description of love of neighbor is interested in a subtle revision of interpersonal love, a revision that points beyond its indefinable excess, which only reveals itself in the phenomena of interpersonal love when seen in the light of experiencing God’s love for human beings. Based on this excess of the phenomenon of interpersonal love, Kierkegaard then develops a socially critical portrait of the perversions and deficiencies of the interpersonal

98 99 100 101 102

See Adorno 2003, 236. See ibid., 226. See ibid. See ibid., 229–230. See ibid., 230.

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relation: the new possibility of loving the neighbor in the other human being can only be perceived in terms of its contrast to the old possibility of loving oneself in the other human being. Therefore, according to Kierkegaard, the description of Christian love serves above all to open our eyes to the ambiguities of the phenomenon of love. Adorno’s interpretation thus misses the core of Kierkegaard’s reflections; however, it also offers a key to extending Kierkegaard’s rather subtle interpretative approach into the field of social philosophy. The idea of using the category of the neighbor as a key figure for a socially critical analysis of societal interaction has been further developed in the debate about a political theology of the neighbor. 33.2

Žižek, Santner, Reinhard: The Neighbor as a Figure of Inhumanity

In their jointly published book “The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology” (2005), Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner and Kenneth Reinhard take the radicalization of love of neighbor that results from Kierkegaard’s opposition against all human forms of love, as an opportunity to redefine the figure of the neighbor as a category of political theology.103 In their view – and here, they take up Adorno’s suggestion – the neighbor is an indispensable category of political theology, not in his presence, but rather in his much more precisely definable absence in modern society. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s “The Politics of Friendship”104 (1994), Žižek, Santner and Reinhard inquire into the possibility of using the neighbor as a key figure for an alternative description of the origin of ‘the political.’ Adopting a Hobbesian view, Carl Schmitt has argued that the origin of the political lies in a social conflict that can be stabilized by the authority of a sovereign power standing outside of the law, who establishes the social order and makes provisions for a state of exception in which this order is suspended. But according to Schmitt, this stabilization actually depends on this state of exception, which is represented within political order as a distinction between friend 103 Following Carl Schmitt, the term ‘political theology’ will be understood here as an approach that uses concepts and theorems of theology for the legitimation of power. As a theory, political theology works mostly with the term ‘sovereignty’ and analyzes it in order to show the instability of political distinctions, such as the friendenemy-distinction and the power structures associated with them. 104 Derrida 2005 (french original published in 1994).

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and enemy. It is the state of exception (not law and order) that establishes and stabilizes order. According to this logic, the political order and community of human beings become unstable and break down wherever the antagonistic confrontation with the enemy within society is no longer possible. Based on this diagnosis, Derrida, but also Žižek, Santner and Reinhard, seek an alternative or complementing105 register of the political and the underlying conflict between human beings. Žižek, Santner and Reinhold believe that they have found this register in the figure of the neighbor. In their approach, they describe a political potential in the Judeo-Christian commandment of love of neighbor, that had been at risk of being lost in its (modern) reduction to the privacy of interpersonal sociality.106 According to Adorno’s diagnosis, Kierkegaard’s description of the neighbor can no longer apply to a real fellow human being in modernity because the discussion of the neighbor has entered a kind of deadlock in modern society. Today, the neighbor can only be defined by a deadlock within society, because the range of social proximity and distance in the interpersonal relation has been curtailed by the social regulatives of modern mass society, and because society as the last organizational unit of the social tends to become totalitarian.107 There is no longer room for interpersonal proximity, and the relationship to the other human being is therefore determined by relationships of anonymity and distance. Societal rules of behavior that represent a higher unity of legal, economic and universal moral aspects determine the relationships among human beings.108 Two excellent examples for the power of these structures are the multiculturalist idea of universal tolerance, which ultimately only serves to keep the other at a safe distance instead of confronting with him; and the idea of human rights, which can be abused as an ideological justification of military interventions against the other. With the establishment of these structures, the behavior of one human being toward a fellow human is no longer rooted in an interpersonal relation, but is conditioned by the societal mechanisms of solidarity and social integration, and controlled according 105

See Reinhard 2005, 22. See the interpretation of Derrida by Reinhard (ibid., 19), who no longer wants to reduce the relation of loving one’s neighbor to an area of the social that stands before or outside of the political. 107 See ibid., 23–26. 108 Kenneth Reinhard also points out a link to the analyses of Hannah Arendt (see ibid., 24–26). 106

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to a politics of friend-enemy-distinction. Another consequence of the spread of societally regulated behavior patterns is that everybody can be replaced, which has a pathological effect on the subject.109 Žižek, Santner and Reinhard propose to interpret the neighbor as a supplementary figure110 to the figure of the sovereign that dominated the political theology of Carl Schmitt. The sovereign stands outside of law and order by deciding on the state of exception. The neighbor, in contrast, functions within the configurations of political theology as a figure representing the ostracized, outcast and negated aspects of humanity in society. Precisely in his, as Adorno calls it, ‘demonic’ form, the neighbor is a figure in which the seriously misguided developments of modern society solidify and thus can be exposed. Therefore, according to Žižek, Santner and Reinhard, the epitome of the neighbor in modern society is the so-called ‘Muselmann,’ the ‘living dead’ of the Nazi concentration camps.111 Suspended between his symbolic and his real biological death, the Muselmann represents a social existence at the zero point.112 He is considered undead, a human being without a ‘face,’113 whose ethical claim to society’s responsibility for him has been left unanswered in the most radical way: he has been cast out of society into a zone of social non-existence. The encounter with him, indeed, his very existence in the midst of human society signals the absolute limit of social humanity, the line that, according to the universal moral definitions of human dignity, must never be crossed, and yet is crossed every day in so many ways. The neighbor thus succinctly manifests an impossibility of fulfilling the commandment to love one’s neighbor and to identify the neighbor in the other human being. According to Žižek, Santner and Reinhard, the genuinely political potential of the Judeo-Christian commandment to love one’s neighbor in modernity lies in its ability to reveal the inhumanity of human coexistence in terms of the figure of the neighbor. The neighbor is the outcast from the political order and community of human beings, whose presence can no longer be represented in the symbolic orders of

109 Here, Kenneth Reinhard refers above all to Lacan’s analyses of autism and Freud’s analyses of paranoia (see ibid., 27–29). 110 See ibid., 22. 111 See Žižek et al. 2005, 3. 112 See Santner 2005, 100. 113 See Žižek 2005, 162.

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the social, but who nevertheless exists in the midst of the human community.114 Here, in contrast to Kierkegaard’s theological interpretation, the figure of the neighbor does not show the new humanity in tension with the reality of the old human existence. Instead, it points out an immanent limitation of humanity at the site of the human being himself. Thus, it allows the two perspectives on humanity that Kierkegaard distinguished phenomenologically to coincide in the description of the phenomenon of social inhumanity. The neighbor defines the fellow human as a social void of human interaction. The analyses of Žižek, Santner and Reinhard show that the figure of the neighbor not only provides a hermeneutical key for understanding the status quo of human sociality and community, but also – in Adorno’s sense – a key for describing the limits of the project of treating human beings like social animals by submitting them to the total control of the structures of social order in society. According to Žižek, Santner and Reinhard, there is not only a human, but also an ‘inhuman excess’115 of interpersonal sociality that provokes the discussion of the neighbor as a social absence of law and political order at the site of the human being. This phenomenal absence denotes that form of social inhumanity, which is possible and real within the human community. The provoking discussion of the neighbor as an existence at the social zero point of human community, is connected with a new interpretation of the Judeo-Christian commandment to love one’s neighbor within the horizon of political theology and psychoanalysis. This new interpretation cannot be found in any theological exegesis of this commandment. Therefore, in concluding, this chapter will take up the suggestion of inquiring into inhumanity as a phenomenal absence of interpersonal sociality, and investigate whether the theological perspective, too, can describe inhumanity not only as the perversion of interpersonal humanity, from the perspective of a phenomenal excess of love of God in interpersonal love, but also in a positive way. This will be attempted with a theological description of interpersonal love as an action done for the neighbor. In the Christian understanding, the

114 Particularly Žižek and Santner thus link the figure of the neighbor to Giorgio Agamben’s paradoxical figure of the homo sacer, which stands for a human being who can be killed without retribution if society is in a state of exception (see Agamben 2002). 115 See Žižek 2005, 169.

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work of love is characterized by mercy, whose phenomenality can only be described through the impossibilities of human actions. But these impossibilities are at the same time indicators of the God-given possibility for human beings to have mercy on the neighbor. In the paradox of the impossible possibility of mercy, the theological perspective thus talks about the reality of merciful acts by explaining their phenomenal excess as divine presence. 34

Humanity and Inhumanity as Reflected by Mercy

The Christian social ethos has always emphasized that love of neighbor can and should also find expression in forms of prosocial behavior. Therefore, one possible consequence of love of neighbor is the act of mercy, i.e., helping a fellow human in need. The act of mercy in the interpersonal relation has a deeply anti-economic meaning, because unlike a transaction of goods, it is not focused on mutual giving and taking. But in the horizon of the eschatologically promised new humanity, it is not an act of giving that is entirely free of expectations, either, according to the biblical understanding. This creates a certain tension in the description of the phenomenon of mercy that will be discussed in the following passages. In addition, we will also revisit Kierkegaard’s analysis of the love of neighbor, which defines acts of mercy not as visible gifts or as devotion, but as “sympathy for others”116 which can be present even in the most ineffective and inconsequential actions, indeed even in the failure of human actions. 34.1

Lack of Consequences and Resources

In his description of Christian mercy, Kierkegaard focuses not on giving or helping as an ethical act of neighborly love, but on the human being’s inner attitude, which prompts the act of giving and helping.117 For Kierkegaard, practicing mercy is an act of love, “even if it can give nothing and is capable of doing nothing.”118 It is thus defined as an excess of human practices and actions through two main characteristics: as a priceless gift and as powerless giving. This excess can 116

Kierkegaard 1962, 301. See Kierkegaard’s thoughts on mercy (ibid., 292–305). Also see Ferreira 2001, 188–199. 118 Kierkegaard 1962, 292. 117

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therefore be phenomenally described as (i) the absence of a visible gift, and (ii) as the absence of the resources or assets that would be needed to help the other. (i) According to Kierkegaard, merciful acts are characterized by the fact that their interpersonal efficacy cannot be measured by their consequences. In his remarks on mercy, he insists that human beings can practice mercy regardless of whether their actions are effective or not. The gift the merciful person gives to the neighbor remains invisible to the world, and yet, it is revealed in his actions. Thus, merciful acts do not have to benefit the neighbor in the sense of bringing an advantage or of improving his situation. The merciful gift cannot be measured by the generosity of alms or of how much money is given. According to Kierkegaard, mercy must be distinguished from “generosity and charity,”119 which he associates with money and wealth. Mercy can therefore best be described phenomenally through the absence of a charitable consequence or effect. In order to clarify this point, Kierkegaard construes a new version of the biblical story of the poor widow’s offering (Mk 12:41–44). In this story, a poor woman puts two small coins into the temple treasury for charitable purposes. Jesus observes this behavior and considers it a great gift, because relative to her own possessions, the poor woman has put more into the treasury than other, wealthier people. In order to highlight the phenomenal excess of mercy in the woman’s deed, Kierkegaard offers a slightly different version of this story: what if the woman really had not put anything into the treasury because someone cheated her by switching the cloth into which she had wrapped the two small coins with an empty one? Would her donation have been worthless because it did not have any monetary value anymore? Of course not. Because a large sum of money that astonishes the world can obscure the mercy of the donation and the “offering of the heart”120 that gives it. (ii) Secondly, Kierkegaard emphasizes that mercy does not depend on the resources a person possesses, which he would be able to pass on to ease the hardship of the poor. Being able to be merciful is not identical with being able to do something, but rather goes far beyond

119 120

Ibid. Ibid., 297.

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it: “Mercifulness is able to do nothing.”121 Kierkegaard’s description of mercy once again is the expression of his twofold analysis of interpersonal life reality. It points out that the question of what merciful actions are cannot be answered by describing the human capability of helping. What Christian mercy is thus shows itself in the description of an action that springs from the incapability of the giver. In order to clarify this point, Kierkegaard constructs a new version of the story of the Good Samaritan (Lk 10:25–37). In his opinion, by merely describing the contrast between the helpful Samaritan and the unhelpful priest and Levite, the biblical story fails to capture the significance of Christian mercy as an action for the neighbor. In the story, it seems as if the act of helping is itself mercy. But what if the Samaritan had been on foot and without money and did not have any means of saving the wounded man from bleeding to death? Would his attempt to save the other have been less merciful if he had not succeeded? Of course not. Because the attempt alone of helping the other is an expression of the fact that “he is not stupefied by his own suffering and has thereby lost sympathy for the other.”122 In that case, this sympathy for the hardship of others, this suffering along with them, would have been an act of mercy whose incapability of saving the other would have been the excess of caring for the neighbor, in contrast to purely economic or medical help. Going beyond Kierkegaard, the study will now seek to show that in mercy, there can also be an excess of the temporal life orientation of human beings which is significant for social behavior: the excess of Christian hope that accompanies merciful deeds. In the following sections, this excess will be demonstrated in the context of a phenomenology of humanity’s eschatological experience of time. 34.2

Lack of Expectations

In the context of the economy of giving and taking in social interactions, as presented in the second chapter of this study, it has been shown that human beings are creatures whose behavior toward and relationships with others are influenced not only by the forms of presence of these other human beings (co-presence), but also by a temporal horizon of expectations. Regardless of whether one’s own horizon 121 122

Ibid., 299. Ibid., 301.

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of expectations is interrupted by the presence of others or not, a temporal structure is a constitutive factor for it: the expectation of possible and impossible behavioral options that lie in the future affects a person’s present behavior toward others. Thus, the distinction between the present and the future permits human beings to orient themselves not only in relation to present realities, but also to the future possibilities of their behavior. They align their social behavior not only with an interpersonal, but also a temporal matrix of meaning. By once more returning to the narrative of the Good Samaritan in Lk 10:25–37, we can see that the temporal structure of human expectations is also relevant for the theological description of mercifull acts. The scribe’s initial question in Lk 10:25, which provides the context for the question about practicing neighborly love, is this: ‘What must I do to inherit eternal life?’ The scribe thus links the question about loving one’s neighbor to an expectation about his inheritance of the eternal life promised by God. In his answer to the scribe’s question, the Lukan Jesus explicitly responds to this expectation by taking up the scribe’s reference to eternal life. He tells him: ‘Do this and you will live’ (Lk 10:28). The wording ‘Do this and you will live’ makes it clear that the Jewish scribe is interested in the commandment of love and the prescribed behavior toward others for two very specific reasons. He understands the commandment to love God and one’s neighbor as both the summary of the Torah and connects its observance with the assurance of its divine promises. He identifies the ‘inheritance’ of an eternal life with the promise of the future life possibilities that result from a person’s belonging to God, a promise whose acceptance according to Jewish understanding, is made concrete in the commandments of the Torah. In light of the context in which the story of the Good Samaritan is situated in the Lukan pericope, the commandment to love one’s neighbor draws on the notion, common at that time, that a person’s social position is always determined by his affiliation with an ethnic or social group.123 Analogously, the affiliation of human beings with God in Judaism is determined by the Torah and its promises. In Christianity, the Torah as a reference point for affiliation is replaced by Jesus

123 In his commentary on Luke, Wolfgang Wiefel points out that the reasons why the attacked man was denied help are not mentioned in the text itself (see Wiefel 1988, 20).

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Christ, who proves to be a sovereign interpreter of the commandments of the Torah.124 In him, God’s action for the human being is revealed, which becomes the new criterion for human hope and expectation. Therefore, practicing mercy toward one’s neighbor is no longer only connected with the expectation of fulfilling God’s law. The merciful act toward one’s neighbor thus does not occur, in the Christian perspective, in the firm expectation of fulfilling a divine law, and achieving eternal life as a ‘reward.’ Rather, the merciful act occurs in the eschatological hope that human action that has been commanded can be transcended through ‘God’s’ action. Eschatological hope thus expects a transcendence of the horizon of human action through ‘God’s’ action in human beings, and makes this the point of departure for its understanding of the future. The eschatological experience of time, which characterizes Christian action and Christian hope, is thus expressed in awaiting an anticipation of God in behavior towards one’s fellow human. For awaiting an anticipation of God in human action is more promising than the fulfillment of all expectations for oneself or others ever could be. Based on an analysis of the human eschatological experience of time, then, we can again address the question of the expectation of eternal life implied in acts of mercy. 34.3

Unpredictability: The Phenomenal Abundance of Practicing Mercy

As we have seen already, from a theological perspective, the orientation of human life toward the future finds its genuine performance in waiting for the possibilities that emerge from the alignment of the life horizon with ‘God.’ Waiting for God’s effective presence in time is thus not to be confused with an attitude of expectation about the consequences of one’s own or others’ actions. The human attitude of expectation sees the future as something that can only turn out to be an extention, i.e., an improvement or deterioration, of that which already exists. Human beings orient themselves within time through a context of meaning time that continuously determines the future within the horizon of the past and the present. In contrast, waiting for the future possibilities in human life promised by God – which first gain their form in light of the perspective of God’s presence – does not

124

See Kuhn 1989, 210–222.

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mean expecting something in terms of waiting for something specific. Instead, human beings are waiting for something to happen that they themselves cannot initiate or authorize and that thus always preempts human initiative. The unpredictability that can emerge from waiting for God’s anticipation in human life presents itself as an interruption of the temporal context of meaning and creates an intermediate time in which strange and unpredictable things can happen, without it being clear from the outset what these strange and unpredictable things may be.125 Within the eschatological temporal horizon, human waiting thus stands in expectation of life possibilities that approach the life reality of human beings from outside themselves, and that transcend their own possibilities and realities. They have the power to suspend and overcome human initiatives. They burst the circular structure of selfinitiated expectations that turn the future into the present. Thus, in Christian hope, the future is not predetermined by past and present events, but defined by an excess of the temporal context of meaning (God’s time). In faith, human beings, by waiting for this excess of time, are free to give themselves over to the effects of that which cannot be controlled or achieved through their own actions: For no form of human expectation or lack of expectation can measure up to that which God’s initiative has in store for the future life of human beings. These considerations can now be brought to bear on a theological description of mercy. Mercy, in its temporal dimension, is a gift or helping act that is bestowed on an individual because a person has given himself over to God’s anticipation in his actions, trusting that this anticipation exceeds the expectable potential of human initiatives, and provides the person with possibilities that he cannot overlook. Thus, in the horizon of faith, the cooperation and conflict in human interaction is once again intensified by the contrast between human and divine initiatives. Within the horizon of human expectations, the divine initiative is perceived as doubly asymmetrical: neither one’s own initiatives nor those of others can anticipate or predetermine the future.

125 The reflections on the unpredictable and unforeseeable in this passage draw on the motif of anticipation that has been discussed by Bernhard Waldenfels (see Waldenfels 2004, 88–94). For a theological exploration of God’s unforeseeable future see also Caputo 2006.

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With regard to the temporal horizon of mercy, this means that precisely the attitude of waiting for God’s future life possibilities enables the merciful person to care for his fellow human in a way that does not have to be effective according to human standards, but is free to be inefficient and excessive. For human standards cannot begin to expect what mercy will bring about: the beginning of God’s initiatives for human beings, which they can only encounter by waiting and trusting. In this respect, the temporal horizon of practicing mercy is not sufficiently identified by the negation of the expected as such, but only by describing the trusting attitude of waiting for God’s effective presence in time. Thus, the horizon of expectations in which mercy is performed as a gift or action for the sake of the neighbor, is not linked to a radical lack of expectations, but always stands in expectation of God’s future actions for human beings. The theological description of human actions for the sake of the neighbor thus cannot be purely negative at this point; rather, it must refer to the phenomenal abundance of practicing mercy, of its freedom to use resources excessively and inefficiently. Therefore, another characteristic of the socially critical anthropology of neighborly love is that it reminds human beings of that which they are incapable of doing by themselves, in order to show them, through the ‘God’-given abundance of their actions, what they are nevertheless allowed to do in the reality of their new existence. 34.4

Inhuman Mercilessness

In his description of Christian mercy, Kierkegaard insists that a human being can give another his merciful sympathy even when he has nothing to give because he himself has nothing, and even when he can do nothing because the help that is needed exceeds his personal abilities. Mercy is more than a successful intervention by a powerful donor or rescuer. In this sense, everyone can practice mercy toward the neighbor – even a person who lacks strength or financial means. Moreover, Kierkegaard uses the description of mercy as a phenomenal excess of human actions to characterize the phenomenal absence of mercy in human encounters. In contrast to mercy, merciless behavior shows itself where people refuse to sympathize with others’ suffering, no matter how small. As an example, Kierkegaard refers to the biblical story of the rich man and poor Lazarus (Lk 16:19–31). The story tells about the poor, sick Lazarus, who is begging for food, lying in front of a rich man’s door. Even though he does not receive

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anything from the rich man, not even sympathy for his suffering, the rich man’s dogs come to him and lick his sores. Then, Lazarus dies. According to Kierkegaard, this incident is so remarkable because here, unlike in the story of the Good Samaritan, the contrast is not made between the behaviors of different people, but between that of a rich man and his dogs. Even though the rich man would have had all the power in the world at his disposal to help Lazarus, it is the dogs that care for him. Kierkegaard thus describes the rich man’s behavior toward Lazarus not just as merciless, but as “inhuman mercilessness.”126 He emphasizes that “[i]n order to shine a light on mercilessness, one can also use a merciful person placed at his side.”127 Instead, the rich man’s behavior is contrasted with that of the dogs, because the man has “abandoned mercy.”128 Therefore, according to Kierkegaard, a complete absence of concern and sensitivity to the suffering of others, in the human community signifies the social inhumanity. The biblical story thus uses the difference between the behavior of a human being and that of an animal in order to provide a phenomenological description of this phenomenal void of mercilessness that cannot be revealed in human actions, but only in their complete absence. Paradoxically, the animal’s behavior displays the mercy actually expected of the human being, which is juxtaposed with the factual non-existence of mercy at the site of the human being. These considerations can now be summarized. According to Kierkegaard, mercy in interpersonal encounters is manifested in the possibility of sharing in the suffering of others, even though one has nothing to give and cannot do anything to help. For Kierkegaard, this possibility is at the same time an impossibility, because its character in human action can only be unambiguously demonstrated through a description of the human inability to make a difference in trying to help. In Kierkegaard’s conception, the social humanity of human beings is thus expressed in an impossible possibility of human actions, which only becomes obvious as a possibility of human action in the perspective of ‘God,’ at the boundaries of human possibility. In contrast, social inhumanity is expressed in the human potential to reject participation in the suffering of others and to withhold any help from

126 127 128

Ibid., 299. Ibid. Ibid.

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them. It can only be clearly revealed in contrast to the description of merciful human behavior at the site of the non-human creature. In the description of the phenomena of mercifulness and mercilessness, the phenomenal excess and the phenomenal void of interpersonal sociality become visible. 35

Conclusion

This chapter has argued that the Christian understanding of human sociality can only become a meaningful independent perspective on the basis of a theological reference to the entitiy of ‘God.’ Three elements fundamental to the Christian understanding of neighborly love have been developed: the analysis of the neighbor as a hermeneutical figure of reference in the Christian social ethos, the analysis of the relation between neighbors as a relation of love; and the analysis of mercy as a human practice that exists in an eschatological temporal horizon, and thus enables human beings to give their resources, no matter how meager, freely and excessively to the neighbor. The reflections in this chapter further sought to develop an understanding of the neighbor that comprehends the neighbor as a category that, from a theological perspective, can be turned into a universally valid guideline for the social orientation of human beings. The word ‘neighbor’ attains its contour first within the interpersonal life reality’s reference to God and second within the confrontationality of this life reality. Both of these aspects show that, from a theological perspective, the usage of the word ‘neighbor’ is a continuation and expansion of the vernacular usage of the word. This expansion occurs in three steps: (i) Emphasis of the neighbor’s hermeutical function: Social reality in terms of proximity and distance of other human beings is developed through the neighbor’s presence; (ii) Definition of this social function by the reference to God: Being a neighbor does not mean being close to one’s fellow humans, but being close to God; (iii) Reversal of the direction of the relation to the fellow human: The other does not become the neighbor through his neediness, but a person becomes a neighbor to his fellow human by perceiving him with reference to God.

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In the understanding that has been suggested here, the neighbor takes up a purely functional position within the social structures of human coexistence that does not necessarily need to be assigned a substantial significance. Accordingly, the Christian commandment to love one’s neighbor does not mean that a person must choose the profession of nurse or become a rescuer in order to be the neighbor of his fellow human. Rather, the functional position of the neighbor in the description of social relationships and interactions is to be defined by the humanity of God that has revealed itself in Jesus Christ. Adopting a functional understanding of the neighbor also enables us to refute the objection that the religious commandment to love one’s neighbor is of a purely private nature, and that its claim to public and political relevance breaks down in view of the requirements of solidarity and integration in complex modern societies.129 According to this argument, there is only a contradiction between love of neighbor and societal social integration because Christian love of neighbor does not create social ties that can be universalized.130 But, as has been shown in the course of this chapter, a primary characteristic of Christian love of neighbor is that it does not in fact denote a form of special biological or social affiliation of human beings, but a form of affiliation among human beings that transcends the particularities of social relationships. In a Christian perspective, if we talk about the other human being as a neighbor and about the relationship to him as the love of neighbor, we do not mean a particular form of a universal love of humanity in which humanity is respected in the person of every human. Rather, the commandment of neighbor-love demands a relationship with the fellow human that knows, beside and beyond the social particular ties of family, religion and nation, an interpersonal relation that is interrupted and redefined by God as a ‘middle term,’ as Kierkegaard calls it. Thus, unlike the ties of the religious, ethnic and biological spheres of human social life, the relation to the neighbor is not regulated by

129 This can also be seen in Brunkhorst 1997, 72–75. Here, Brunkhorst draws on Sigmund Freud’s critique of the Christian commandment of love in “Civilization and Its Discontents” (Freud 2002) and confirms Freud’s diagnosis that the Christian commandment of love – even if it can be expanded into ‘love of the most distant’ [Fernstenliebe] – cannot be used to establish a solidarity that reaches beyond the close range of social human relationships. On the problematic aspects of a psychoanalytical interpretation of the Christian commandment of love see Miss 1976, particularly 30–93. 130 As an example, see the discussion in Brunkhorst 1997, 72–75.

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superordinate common elements. Therefore, it is neither universal (in the sense of a recognition of all human beings equally) nor particular (in the sense of a recognition of a particular other human being by virtue of his affiliation to a universal aspect of humanity). Instead, the relationship to the neighbor can be called a ‘transparticularizing’131 reference to the other human being. In the midst of the social ties that are mediated by common factors, it establishes an awareness of crossing a threshold which turns the outer limits of community and society into inner limits. This becomes particularly clear in Mt 5:43–44, where the commandment to love one’s neighbor is introduced as a new commandment: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you [. . .].” In Mt 5:43–44, the jurisdiction of the commandment of love is not only extended from socially near persons to strangers. Rather, the category of the neighbor is explicitly applied to the politically extreme figures of the enemy and the persecutor, who not only stand on the margin, but outside of human society. This represents an interpretation of the commandment to love one’s neighbor that explicitly establishes its function as a socially critical norm, a norm which demands that the social ties and relationships of affiliation are transcended and which thus supports the thesis of a transparticularizing threshold character of the commandment to love one’s neighbor. You shall love your neighbor, even if the social or political status of your fellow humans does not condone or even prohibits dealing with them. It is hard to imagine a more powerful socially integrative mobilization for interpersonal relations and a more far-reaching expansion of the horizon of societal solidarity.

131

On the term ‘transparticularization’ [Transpartikularisieren] see Dabrock 2000, 19. The term is used as a substitute for ‘universalization’ because it points out the threshold of responsibility toward the other that cannot be shown in a conception of universal responsibility.

FINAL THOUGHTS 36

Multiperspectivity Instead of Transdisciplinarity

This study has compared several methods and forms of representation from various academic disciplines to examine the social relationship and interaction between human beings. Thus, in contrast to the interdisciplinary paradigm of transdisciplinarity, this study attempted to define interdisciplinarity through multiperspectivity. To this end, three perspectives were developed in which human sociality could be examined as a phenomenon of the humanity of human beings. The representation of each of the individual perspectives limited the description of human sociality to one specific point of view. But at the same time, the combination of the individual perspectives dissolved this limitation, in that it showed each perspective’s own limitations by contrasting the specific aspects of each perspective with those of another perspective. The interaction of the three perspectives was mediated by the prevalent role of philosophical anthropology and its hermeneutical and phenomenological practice of human self-inquiry. Thus, the study did not rely on the scientific representation of its object alone but aimed at a description of the concrete phenomenality of sociality and humanity. The basic task of this study was to deal with the question of how to gain an understanding of human sociality that takes into account, in the description of social phenomena, the phenomenological difference between the humanity and inhumanity of human beings. The focus of observation was on the difference between social humanity and inhumanity because in phenomenological terms, it denotes those phenomena that split open the question about humanity in human coexistence itself. Using this key difference as an orientation for its descriptions, the study thus did not justify the humanity of human beings in a normative manner, but made it plausible by undertaking an anthropological examination of its difference from inhumanity. The examination of the behavioral-scientific modelings of sociality in experimental economics demonstrated that the humanity of human beings cannot be defined by merely contrasting human with animal behavior, but that it reveals itself in how a human being treats himself and his fellow humans. The

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efforts of interpreting and describing the essential phenomenological aspects of humanity cannot thus be resolved by simply referring to an empirical correlative of the term ‘human being.’ The human being is and remains an object of interpretation. The approach to the subject of humanity and sociality in this study was based on philosophical hermeneutics and phenomenology. These approaches imply that the object of this study could not simply be identical with the subject matter of each individual theoretical examination or experimental modeling. As a hermeneutical object, it actually functioned as a prerequisite to these individual perspectives. In this way, its description also enabled a critical assessment of those perspectives. In the course of the study, three perspectives of experimental modelings and interpretations of the human being were examined in order to exemplify those aspects of a description of human sociality that are crucial in a philosophical anthropological context. Here, actual social interactions and relationships of human beings turned out to be a site that could be interpreted with different concepts: as the site of conflict between egoists and altruists in human interaction; as the site of an interpersonal difference that can produce different kinds of social relationships, from antagonistic confrontation to the act of taking responsibility, and as a site of tense coexistence between the old and new social existence of human beings that is expressed in the loving care for the fellow human as a neighbor of God. The examination of the individual perspectives did not, however, simply assume that human beings are social creatures, but also inquired into the possibility of their unsocial nature or their social inhumanity. Inhumanity is manifest in the behavior of the egoist who in social interactions maximizes his own profit, indifferent to the behavior of his interaction partners. It is present in human violence, as manifest in the murder of another human being out of greed. And finally, it can be found in the merciless refusal to acknowledge the suffering of those human beings who stand at the margins of the human community. Looking at these widely varied perspectives together resulted in the insight that the characteristics of human sociality cannot be clarified solely by anthropologically determining behavioral types and naturalizing its psychological preconditions. That which has been constructed, tested and concluded in the empirical, socioeconomic and neuroscientific perspective, must enter an interdisciplinary dialogue with the insights of other perspectives, and be supplemented and expanded by them, in order to gain an authority that goes beyond field-

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specific questions and interests. Empirical social anthropology thus cannot take on the function it claims for itself, namely, a fundamental anthropology for all other perspectives of anthropology. The biological nature of human beings cannot be reasonably considered to have any influence on human behavior independently of the phenomenality of human self-understanding. The claim of behavioral scientists, that they engage in an interdisciplinary exchange of knowledge by unifying and synthesizing knowledge about human beings in transdisciplinary models, has therefore been refuted. The transdisciplinary way of gaining knowledge is rooted in the false premise that there is only one correct interpretation of human behavior, and that the best way to find this interpretation is to unify scientific methods and models. Where there are aspects of the human life that have not (yet) been integrated into scientific explanation and representation of that life, they must be adjusted, in their concreteness, to the range of scientific methods. Adapting and adjusting objects and their phenomenality to the range of scientific empirical methods, however, systematically negates their additional function to enable a critical assessment and discussion of the field-specific interpretations and representations of the human being. Each perspective and each model for describing human sociality has thus been subjected to the question of how it maintains the difference between a description of the phenomenon and its method of examination. 37

Result of this Study

This study inquired into the possibilities of finding an understanding of human sociality that is open to an empirically and phenomenologically correct description of human social life, while being able to account for the phenomena of humanity and inhumanity in hermeneutical and phenomenological terms. In an interdisciplinary perspective, the study examined (i) experimental modelings and interpretations of human social behavior, (ii) social-philosophical conceptions of the interpersonal difference in social relationships, and (iii) theological conceptions that reflect on the socially critical focus of Christian anthropology which is exhibited in the commandment to love one’s neighbor. As a result of this multiperspectival presentation of widely divergent descriptions of human sociality, the specific character of each perspective was made visible, as well as its need to be

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complemented by other perspectives. In this way, the study succeeded in gaining clear and distinctive insights about the object of human sociality while avoiding field-specific limitations in its representation. In addition to the study’s methodological yield, it also made significant progress in terms of content. In the course of its examinations, the study succeeded in developing several possible approaches to answering the initial anthropological question about the conditio humana of a human, or even humane, sociality. The study argued that the answer to this question cannot be found by differentiating between human and animal sociality. Rather, it can be tackled by discussing how humanity reveals itself in the concrete interaction and relation of human beings. As demonstrated above, the statement that the sociality of human beings counts among the conditions that determine their being-human, i.e., their humanity, is not undisputed in philosophical and theological social anthropology. The one-sided focus on a positive description of the humanity of human beings may close off the perspective of anthropology against the phenomena of inhumanity that are manifest in human social life. Thus, in order to provide an answer to the initial question in the context of this study, the statement that sociality is the condition of humanity was reversed heuristically and turned into the more open question of how sociality can become a site where the humanity of human beings reveals itself, without being indifferent to inhumanity. In this way, it was possible to outline several answers to the initial question. Working on the premise of conflict and the fragility of human coexistence, the contrast between egoists and altruists, which characterizes different types of behavior in experimental economics, provided a first hint about how human sociality can become the site of human humanity. But only the resolution of this rigid contrast of behavior types could provide information about where the humanity of humans has its genuine origin. Dislocating the phenomenon of conflict from the perspective of an interaction of individual subjects, and shifting it to the perspective of a relationship structure ‘between’ human beings, which precedes interaction, helped to see that the basic structure of the human relationship, the indissoluble difference of self and other, is the origin of conflict in human coexistence. The interpersonal relation is characterized by singularity: one is not like the other, and this rupture, this distance between human beings cannot be overcome, bypassed or reconciled without abandoning the basic phenomenological feature of human interpersonal life and starting to argue in a non-anthropological

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way. Thus, the interaction relationship between human beings is rooted in an unstable and precarious encounter. This turns the social relationship into a relationship of indissoluble difference. Therefore, the phenomenon of human plurality and singularity is indispensable for any meaningful social-phenomenological conception of sociality. Based on this analysis, the basic phenomenological element of social interaction was constantly be sought after, in a description of human sociality that does not leave out its ambivalence (altruism/egoism, reconciliation/hostility, recognition/disrespect, responsibility for/negation of the other). From a theological perspective, this ambivalence in the categories of human sociality could be traced back to a phenomenal ambiguity of human sociality, which can be explicitly named by describing Christian love of neighbor in its contrast to human love relationships. The Christian description of the human being is rooted in the anthropological tension between the old and new existence. In the perspective of God’s effective presence in this world, the old existence of the human being is revised in light of his new existence. This new existence means that the human being becomes a neighbor, a ‘next one’ to God, and this also enables him to acknowledge the difference between humanity and inhumanity in his interpersonal relations. Therein also lies the socially critical function of theological anthropology: the neighbor of God, who eludes social attributions and who reorganizes the sphere of interpersonal proximity and distance through this elusiveness, indicates both the phenomenal excess and the social void of interpersonal relations. Thus, the difference between the humanity and inhumanity of human social life can always be made explicit by referring to the fellow human as God’s neighbor. At the same time, this difference is enforced by distinguishing God’s neighbor from the human being as it is approached in a mere interpersonal encounter, without reference to God’s presence. In this way, it is possible for theological anthropology to avoid an indifference in the description of humanity to the phenomenon of social inhumanity.

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INDEX OF NAMES Adorno, Theodor W. 5, 24, 51, 63–67, 76, 87, 272, 284–290 Agamben, Giorgio 5, 50f, 56–67, 76, 290 Arendt, Hannah 7–9, 57, 70–76, 86f, 222, 241, 244, 288 Axelrod, Robert 137 Barth, Karl 246, 252, 272 Barthes, Roland 68–70 Batson, C. Daniel 158 Bicchieri, Cristina 143–145 Blumenberg, Hans 28, 43–47, 49, 58, 245 Bowles, Samuel 37 Boyd, Robert 37 Calvin, John 33–34, 259 Camerer, Colin 37, 95, 108, 131f, 135 Cassirer, Ernst 47, 194 Charness, Gary 135 Coase, Ronald 107 Comte, Auguste 194 Dalferth, Ingolf U. 21, 23, 28, 247f, 259 Derrida, Jacques 287f Descartes 45, 48

García Düttmann, Alexander 208, 210, 217–221, 223 Gehlen, Arnold 6, 49 Gintis, Herbert 36f, 99, 110, 178 Glimcher, Paul W. 95–97 Goodall, Jane 48 Guala, Francesco 100, 114, 118f, 128 Güth, Werner 93f, 114, 116, 133 Habermas, Jürgen 71, 146, 199, 202, 220 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 18, 64, 76, 189, 208–212, 220f Heidegger, Martin 9, 50–58, 63, 66f, 77f, 209 Henrich, Joseph 10, 36f, 97, 110, 115, 148, 157 Hobbes, Thomas 5, 15, 17, 19, 35, 159, 189, 191–200, 211, 221, 228, 233, 241–243, 287 Honneth, Axel 18, 147, 190f, 207f, 210–214, 216f, 220–222 Horkheimer, Max 5 Hume, David 159, 189 Husserl, Edmund 77 Jüngel, Eberhard

Elster, Jon

248

143–145

Falk, Armin 104, 136, 164 Fehr, Ernst 11, 36–42, 96, 110, 131–136, 138–143, 147, 152, 154, 156, 158, 160, 162–164, 166f, 181 Ferreira, Jamie 271–275, 277, 282, 285, 291 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 210f Figal, Günter 88f, 260 Fischbacher, Urs 11, 36, 38–42, 95f, 136, 141–143, 147, 154f, 158, 160, 162, 164, 181 Foucault, Michel 57, 190 Freud, Sigmund 202, 209, 279, 289, 300 Frey, Bruno S. 36, 106 Frith, Chris 168 Gächter, Simon 1, 36, 136, 140, 147, 154, 166f Gadamer, Hans-Georg 89

Kant, Immanuel 6, 8, 46 Kierkegaard, Søren 22–25, 271–288, 290–293, 297f, 300 Kliemt, Hartmut 93f, 114, 116 Kosfeld, Michael 11, 36, 136, 151, 175, 180 Lacan, Jacques 202, 209, 289 Laclau, Ernesto 17, 199–206 Levinas, Emmanuel 5, 19f, 222, 227–243, 273 Lindenberg, Siegwart 103 Linnaeus, Carl 44, 59f Locke, John 15, 191, 194, 211 Løgstrup, Knud Ejler 272 Lumer, Christopher 159 Luther, Martin 33, 263 Markell, Patchen 208 Marx, Karl 17, 35, 72, 107, 199, 201f

322

index of names

Mauss, Marcel 222 Mayr, Ernst 160, 162 Meisinger, Hubert 253–255, 267–270 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 88 Milgram, Stanley 172 Morgenstern, Oskar 11, 123 Mouffe, Chantal 17, 199–206 Nagel, Thomas 159f Neumann, John von 11, 123 Nowak, Karl 40 Ostrom, Elinor

138f, 148

Pannenberg, Wolfhart 4, 35, 246f Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni 60f Plessner, Helmuth 6, 28, 35, 47, 49, 77–89 Rabin, Matthew 135 Rawls, John 145, 196, 199 Reinhard, Kenneth 24, 287–290 Ricœur, Paul 18, 208f, 211, 221–226, 252

Santner, Eric L. 5, 24, 287–290 Schleiermacher, Friedrich D.E. 247 Schmidt, Klaus M. 132–136, 138, 140f, 152, 160 Schmitt, Carl 205, 287, 289 Sigmund, Martin A. 40 Singer, Tania 11, 36, 168–170 Smith, Adam 106f Sober, Elliot 159 Taylor, Charles 18, 206, 208, 210, 214–217, 220f Trivers, Robert 40 Verweyst, Markus

207–210, 213, 219

Waal, Frans de 48f Waldenfels, Bernhard 296 Wilson, David Sloan 159 Zimbardo, Philip 172 Žižek, Slavoj 5f, 24f, 202, 228, 287–290

INDEX OF SUBJECTS Alterity 16f, 19, 188, 213, 217, 223–227, 232, 235, 238, 240, 250, 273 Altruism 1, 11, 15, 23, 35f, 37, 39–41, 91, 95f, 105, 109f, 128, 148, 152–154, 157–160, 163, 172, 177, 179, 184, 195, 254, 265, 267, 307 Animal 4–6, 8f, 14, 30, 34, 38–41, 47–51, 53–63, 65–67, 74, 76, 81–83, 91f, 109, 142, 290, 298, 303, 306 Antagonism 17, 19, 188, 198–202, 205, 228, 233, 238, 243 Body 42, 49, 77–83, 85, 87, 92, 168, 174f Brain 14, 38, 95, 97, 113, 128, 161–180, 237 Conflict 1, 12, 15–19, 57, 69, 83–87, 136, 138f, 154, 157, 166, 173, 181, 187f, 190, 192–206, 210–215, 220, 225, 228, 232f, 241f, 262–265, 287f, 296, 304, 306 Cooperation 35–40, 75, 97, 110, 119, 137–142, 146–157, 163, 165, 172, 178–182, 185, 188f, 206, 234, 236–238, 296 Creation 32f, 47, 60, 249, 259 Egoism 12, 15, 23, 35, 37, 102f, 128, 137f, 149, 157, 159, 165, 177, 184, 188, 192, 194–198, 233f, 238, 242, 265, 272, 307 Emotion 38, 98, 100, 103, 105, 125, 158, 165–168, 177f, 181, 237 Empathy 1, 96, 167–169, 172 Ethics 5, 9, 15, 29, 185, 188f, 206, 227, 235, 245, 255, 272f Ethos 24, 225–227, 245, 252, 255, 263–265, 279, 283, 291, 299 Equality 75, 134f, 182, 215f, 224, 238, 272f, 276, 283 Evolution 9f, 14, 40, 48f, 95, 97, 110, 137, 153, 160, 163, 167, 170, 172, 188 Fairness 12, 37, 96, 110, 127, 135f, 145, 160, 164, 168, 170, 180–182, 198, 237 Future 40, 96, 156, 160, 190, 232, 294–297

Game Theory 11, 35, 96, 108f, 118, 122–127, 131–137 – Dictator Game 128, 132f, 149, 152f – Prisoner’s Dilemma Game 132, 136f – Public Goods Game 132, 136–138, 140f, 148, 164 – Social Dilemma Game 131, 136f, 140, 148, 154, 168f – Ultimatum Game 128, 132–136, 149–152, 167 – Trust Game 128, 132, 149–152, 154, 157, 162, 165 Gift 18, 33, 61, 132, 223–226, 291f, 296f God 4f, 13, 20–23, 29, 33, 53, 60, 192, 231, 238–240, 244–255, 258f, 261–263, 265f, 269–278, 281–286, 290f, 294–300, 304, 307 Helping 22, 40, 147, 252, 278, 285, 291–298 Homo oeconomicus 12, 35f, 101–107, 132, 142, 149, 174 Hope 293–296 Hostility 5, 201, 203, 307 Human Condition 7–9, 27, 57, 67–76, 86, 243–246, 251 Humanism 4, 9, 50, 52–58, 60 Humanity 2–9, 16, 20–25, 27–35, 42, 48–67, 70–73, 76–79, 84, 86f, 90–92, 179, 188, 191, 227–229, 232, 251, 255f, 259, 262–265, 269–273, 278, 284–286, 289–293, 298, 300–307 Inhumanity 2–9, 20, 24f, 54, 61–66, 76, 91, 228, 232, 234, 241, 244, 273, 289f, 298, 303–307 Intentionality 21, 165, 229–232 Justice 31, 42, 94, 110, 145, 198, 208, 224, 226, 229, 235–238 Love 21–25, 212, 225f, 245, 248, 251–291, 294, 297, 299–301, 305 Mercy 33, 251f, 257f, 285, 291–293, 295–299

324

index of subjects

Motivation 14, 38, 96, 105, 116, 120, 130, 143, 145, 158, 161–165, 172f, 177f, 180, 194, 212, 241, 275 Nature 1, 4–15, 27–37, 42–62, 66–71, 74–79, 83–88, 91f, 120, 124, 139, 163, 191–198, 203, 211, 241, 243, 245, 267, 272, 304f Naturalism 92, 110 Neighbor 20–25, 29, 229, 231, 240, 244, 249–301, 304–307 Norm 10–12, 36, 39f, 64f, 70, 74, 92, 96, 103, 105, 130, 135, 141–149, 152f, 156f, 163, 165f, 171f, 177, 179, 181–183, 189, 191, 195, 198, 235–239, 242, 255, 263f, 301 Phenomenal Excess 2, 21, 29, 89f, 93, 171–173, 187, 213, 227, 265, 271, 273, 290–292, 297, 299, 307 Politics 9, 18, 57, 70, 76, 87, 107, 188f, 201, 204–206, 214–217, 220, 234, 242, 244, 274, 287, 289 Preference 12, 16, 29, 36–38, 95f, 99, 102f, 126, 128–132, 135–137, 140–153, 156–160, 163, 177, 181, 187, 274, 276, 283 Public Good 122, 132, 136–141, 145–148, 164, 181 Punishment 12, 36, 41, 96, 132, 137, 139–141, 144, 149, 153–158, 161–167, 170–172, 177f, 181, 183 Reciprocity 24, 37, 39–41, 109, 124, 127, 135, 139, 145, 148–157, 160, 166, 181–183, 188, 203, 217, 222–226, 238, 252, 279

Recognition 17–19, 75, 116, 126, 147, 159f, 188, 191, 206–228, 238, 242f, 301, 307 Religion 18, 107, 225, 227, 239, 264f, 300 Responsibility 3, 19, 86, 188, 227–230, 234–238, 241–243, 265, 289, 301, 304, 307 Sacrifice 23, 281 Salvation 32f Sin 25, 32, 35, 246 Sociality 1–3, 6, 8–16, 19–25, 27–30, 35, 37, 42, 48, 74, 76, 83–85, 91f, 97, 101, 110f, 122, 124f, 142, 147, 149, 157, 173, 177–185, 187, 190f, 185, 197, 204–206, 211, 222, 227, 229, 232, 237–252, 265, 272f, 283, 286, 288, 290, 299, 303–307 Society 8, 13–18, 25, 30f, 34f, 40, 51, 63, 65f, 72–76, 86f, 106f, 125, 141–148, 157, 166, 172, 189–207, 210–215, 220, 241–243, 245f, 261, 263, 265f, 286–290, 301 Transcendence 19, 213, 221, 226–228, 230–232, 235, 238f, 243, 250, 268, 278, 286, 295 Utility 132, 135, 139f, 147, 149f, 153, 156–158, 160f, 165f, 176, 178–180 Visibility/In274, 277

28, 80, 147, 238–240,