Philosophical Anthropology Revisited

The social sciences have never been able to make up their minds whether they are scientific or moral enterprises. Yet there is something problematic in either category. The notion

that the social scientist can be objective and value-free, treating crime or poverty with the same detachment as a biologist treats caterpillars, seems especially naïve when knowledge has been so often used as power. Social science's pursuit of pure knowledge along the lines of the physical sciences may go down as one of the great false steps in modern intellectual history. Knowledge can be gained, data analyzed, and findings confirmed, but these activities are part of social science, not the whole. Because the social sciences study human behavior, their use of scientific procedures must reflect the characteristics of human subjects.

Yet it is equally unsatisfactory to argue that social inquiry cannot be grounded in anything at all. All too often, critics of the scientific turn in social science seem to believe that the mere assertion of an idea is sufficient to establish its validity. With the decline of the scientific model, social science becomes advocacy for this position or that, as if volume or vehemence could be a substitute for knowledge. Under conditions such as these, social science not only loses whatever legitimacy it may have won, but its practice becomes indistinguishable from rhetoric. To the degree that they replace their belief in science with a belief in the impossibility of science, social scientists have no special claims to make or particular insights to offer. Once again, the possibility of understanding something about humans and how they act is lost.

In all likelihood, a satisfactory solution to the conflict inherent in social science will never be found. Because they concern themselves with human beings, social scientists will always have to deal with such contentious topics as meaning, morality, and purpose. But because they must aspire to something more than rhetoric, the social sciences will have to find ways to ground their conclusions in something real. The discussion of an institution as debated as the family indicates why social science is both scientific and evaluative: as social scientists, we need to understand and predict what will happen to families; but as human beings, we need to be concerned with what they do and how they do it. Moreover, the scientific and evaluative tasks are linked: those who do not understand what families are for, and who therefore fail to appreciate that families have moral

and meaningful tasks, are less prepared to understand and predict their future; those who insist that they know what families must be for, but refuse to look at real families in the real world, become hectoring moralists without understanding the institution whose moral behavior they would regulate.

The scientific and evaluative aspects of social science are linked because human beings are both the subjects and the objects of social research. The laws that govern their behavior must include the possibility that they can change the laws that govern their behavior, even as those who try to formulate such laws are themselves part of the whole process. In the face of all these difficulties, the concerns of the classic thinkers in social theory with the unique characteristics of the human species—concerns that many contemporary observers consider old-fashioned and quaint, best left in the Victorian attic where they have been stored for a century—are not so peculiar after all. Philosophical anthropology was important to the founders of modern social theory because it enabled them to be scientists and moralists simultaneously.

Late-nineteenth-century social theorists understood the distinctions between humans and other species as scientific fact. Biology could provide some grounding for the social sciences because it could establish the features of human life that were not shared by others. The reliance on evolutionary models, the use of biological categories such as organic and mechanical solidarity, and the development of ecological models of cities were all efforts to establish uncontested truths about the human condition. That hope, of course, was unfounded. All too often, the moral values came first, and the search to find support in natural science followed, as the intellectual history of social Darwinism shows. Moreover, we now know that science, which itself has become an essentially contested notion, does not constitute the grounding it once did. Nonetheless, classical social theorists were struggling to find a way to be faithful both to science and to the moral features of human beings.

At the same time, reminding oneself of the distinct qualities of the human species was a way of refusing to go all the way in modeling the social sciences on the natural sciences; philosophical anthropology was a last refuge of the humanist lin-

gering within the social scientist, expressing the realization "Wait a minute; this subject is different." If they could show that certain values are particularly associated with humans—that as a species we are rational or inherently equal or productive—then, these earlier social theorists hoped, maximizing those values would bring about social improvement. These theorists, then, were concerned not with society per se but, instead, with a vision of the good society.^[31] Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, because they speculated freely about the unique qualities of humans, were moral theorists as much as they were social scientists.

Of course, a better understanding of what makes humans different from other animal species or machines will not enable us to resolve once and for all the inherent conflict in social science between understanding the world and making it better. At the same time, we have to understand the special nature of human beings if we are to develop a social science appropriate to its human subject. The more we know about the human species—especially its capacity to interpret the environment and bring meaning to the world—the more likely we will be to avoid the pitfalls of both excessive scientism and excessive moralism. What we need, and what a modified philosophical anthropology can provide, are provisional answers to the question of how we act and what we act for.

The post-modern challenge to scientific epistemology makes it difficult ever again to believe that reality, including social reality, is completely uncontested terrain. The quest for scientific certainty has surely been affected by considerations of gender and power. The rhetorical tools used to present scientific findings cannot be divorced from the findings themselves. Science is a human enterprise, influenced by all the peculiarities of the way humans carry out their affairs. But none of these things should lead us to conclude that there can never be any grounding for our observations of the social world. There are differences between humans and other animal species, and these differences can be understood by scientific observation. When we make claims for human capacities, evidence can be examined, experiments can be interpreted, and conclusions can be drawn. The study of other animal species

and the possibilities and limitations of artificial intelligence are real, and they tell us things about human uniqueness that we need to know. In spite of the pretensions of earlier sociology, the grounding we achieve by comparing ourselves to other species is minimal: such a comparison does not provide universal knowledge about behavior applicable to anything that behaves; it only provides insights about modern humans, and these insights, because they apply to humans, are understood to be transient, contingent, socially constructed, and capable of change. We can have a certain security in what we are talking about, even while recognizing that what is secure can also change.

At the same time, to call attention to the meaning-producing abilities of human beings is to make an evaluative decision about what is important in the world. Good societies are those that enhance the capacity of human beings to attribute meaning to the things around them; bad societies are those that do not. Modern societies, if the United States is any indication, are not especially confident with respect to meaning. The lack of an appropriate language for discussing meaning is felt in a wide variety of contemporary institutions: schools, which are unsure what to teach; legal systems, which look more at procedure than substance; politics, which increasingly focuses on winning office rather than governing; and families, which flourish in diverse forms but are uncertain about their purpose. Social scientists need not feel helpless in the face of institutions that seem to have lost their way. To be sure, there is always the danger—warned about so eloquently by Max Weber—of seeking ultimate values along the avenues of politics.^[32] But the quest for meaning need not be a quest for ultimate meaning. Just as an appreciation of the meaning-producing capacities of humans contributed to a minimal, but real, epistemology, it also contributes to a minimal, but real, morality. Social science can play a role in enhancing the capacity of social institutions to enrich what is human about human beings, without necessarily deciding what particular set of values any institution, such as the family, ought to maximize. Since human beings are meaning-producing creatures, they can figure out for them-

selves what their most important values ought to be. The social scientist's task is to help them by protecting and appreciating what makes it possible for them to be more fully human.

Theory and society habitually mirror each other. Throughout most of the post-World War II period, stability in both were assumed. An ever-progressing, gradualist, and increasingly better society found its match in a similarly gradualist understanding of social science, in which the patient accumulation of facts would contribute to knowledge, just as the patient accumulation of knowledge contributed to social stability. Neither understanding remains. A sense that society is in chaos is matched by a feeling that all efforts to describe and categorize social reality are problematic, that knowledge itself is little more than a tool in the hands of groups struggling to achieve mastery over other groups. It would be a shame if the excessive optimism of earlier versions of social science were to result in the excessive pessimism and nihilism of those who question any groundings for knowledge. Rather, we should appreciate that there is room both for those who once argued that social science can solve society's problems and for those who now argue that social science cannot exist. Social science is made possible not when science is divorced from values but when the links between the two are found.

Whatever the future of social science, it is unlikely to be pursued with the optimistic spirit and imperialistic pretensions of the nineteenth-century theorists. Animal ethology, artificial intelligence, ecology, post-modernism, and other trends in contemporary thought teach a certain humility toward the human species and a respect for subjects once considered so inferior to ourselves that little attention was paid to them. But the various components of the antihumanistic cosmology that seem popular in many disciplines finally add up to a greater, if more circumspect, appreciation of human capacities, rather than to a rejection of humanism. Because we can interpret the world around us, we can build societies that enable us to search after the good. The existence of these interpretative capacities is not a universal constant: at one time in our history, they were undeveloped; and at some future time in our history,

perhaps they will be again. Precisely because human subjects and human societies are modern, important, fragile, and contested, we owe it to ourselves to keep humanism alive; and the social sciences, properly understood as a distinctive way of knowing for a distinct subject, remain one of our most important ways of doing so.