The Interpreting Self and the Meaningful Society
However awkward they may seem from a late-twentieth-century vantage point, reflections on the uniqueness of the human species were not just obiter dicta in the writings of nineteenth-century social theorists. Marx and Engels built their entire theory on the assumption that "men . . . begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence."[34] Max Weber regarded culture as "man's emancipation from the organically prescribed cycle of natural life."[35] For Durkheim, as we have seen, civilization constituted the fundamental difference between the human and the animal world, while George Herbert Mead's reflections on mind and self began with a distinction between the gestures of other animal species and the "significant symbols" used by humans.[36] What the Germans call philosophical anthropology—the effort to deal with fundamental ontological questions not by arguing from first premises but by empirically contrasting the responses of human and nonhuman species to different environmental challenges—was crucial to the development of all modern social thought.[37] So close is the link between the classical tradition in sociology and philosophical
anthropology that one perhaps could not exist without the other.
But it is not just the classical tradition in sociology that premises its investigations on a distinction between the world of nature and the world of culture. The same distinction has been made by leading anthropologists, such as A. L. Kroeber ("The essential difference between animal and man . . . is not that the latter has finer grain or the chaster quality of material; it is that his structure and nature and texture are such that he is inscribable, and that the animal is not"); Leslie White ("Without the symbol there would be no culture, and man would be merely an animal, not a human being"); and Marshall Sahlins ("The 'distinctive quality of man' is not that he must live in a material world, circumstances he shares with all organisms, but that he does so according to a meaningful scheme of his own devising, in which capacity mankind is unique").[38] Contemporary sociological theory has also insisted on a certain anthropocentrism: "We can call men and women, children and adults, ministers and bus conductors 'rational,' but not animals or lilac bushes, mountains, streets, or chairs," Jürgen Habermas has written; "Man occupies a peculiar position in the animal kingdom. Unlike the other higher mammals, he has no species-specific environment, no environment firmly structured by his own instinctual organization," argue Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann; "Human beings make their own history in cognizance of that history, that is, as reflexive beings cognitively appropriating time rather than merely 'living' it," suggests Anthony Giddens.[39] Assumptions about special and distinct human characteristics are not, in short, a nineteenth-century artifact.
Even those who seem to reject the notion of human distinctiveness in favor of functionalism and structuralism—theorists such as Talcott Parsons, Robert Merton, and Niklas Luhmann—argue at times for such distinctiveness. The inspiration for much of Parsons's theorizing came not only from Durkheim and Weber but also from biologists like L. T. Henderson, who had published important work in physiology and biology before reading Pareto's General Sociology in the late 1920s. (The book was recommended by William Morton
Wheeler, who would become a leading American exponent of Herbert Spencer's theories and whose own work on insect societies would later be revamped by Edward O. Wilson.)[40] Yet although Parsons recognized the importance of biology, he also noted "the much discussed 'plasticity' of the human organism, its capacity to learn any one of a large number of alternative patterns of behavior instead of being bound by its generic constitution to a very limited range of alternatives," as well as "the accessibility of the human individual to influence by the attitudes of others in the social interaction process, and the resulting dependence on receiving relatively particular and specific reactions."[41] Merton's functionalism, also inspired by his wide reading in biology, was influenced as well by the love of irony and paradox associated with literary critics (and humanists) such as Lionel Trilling and historians like Richard Hofstadter.[42] In more recent years, Parsons's structuralism has undergone a rebirth in the theories of Niklas Luhmann, this time aided by developments in ecology, cybernetics, and computers unknown to Parsons.[43] Yet although Luhmann's work is premised on a frank antihumanism and a search for self-reproducing models—indeed, as we shall see in chapter 5, he presents an exemplary version of antihumanistic social science—he too notes at one point that "the decisive advantage of human interaction over animal interaction stems from this elemental achievement of language."[44] Macro or micro, classical or contemporary, structuralist or functionalist, humanistic or scientific, American or European, social theory without some element of anthropocentrism seems to be impossible.[45]
Although reflections on the distinctiveness of the human species are a constant in the history of sociological (and anthropological) thought, the features believed to constitute the human difference have varied. Some theorists—including not only Marx but also eighteenth-century political economists and the early Durkheim, in his analysis of the division of labor—regarded the human difference as a producing difference: we are what we make, and what we usually make is culture. Yet these notions of homo faber no longer seem to provide the best way to understand the potential, as opposed to the actuality, of the human condition. Other animal species make
tools. They also, depending on how the term is defined, possess culture. As I will argue in the next chapter, a recent revolution in ethology—which provides far more closely grained accounts of how animals actually live in the world—renders a good deal of nineteenth-century philosophical anthropology obsolete. We share more with the world of nature than we were once prepared to admit.
Even Marx recognized that an emphasis on homo faber was not enough. "A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells," he wrote in Capital . "But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of the bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality."[46] Although this passage introduces qualities of mind and anticipates a good deal of twentieth-century social theory, Hannah Arendt is correct to point out that "the apparently all-important element of 'imagination' plays no role whatsoever in [Marx's] labor theory."[47] What was left out can, however, be put in. Nineteenth-century social theory, in seeking the features of human distinctiveness, added culture to nature. The twentieth-century version of the same quest will have to add mind to culture. For human thought processes are different not only from those of other animal species, which lack powers of interpretation and imagination, but also from the minds—if minds they be—of computers, which, for all their powers of calculation, also cannot imagine worlds other than the ones for which they have been programmed. Contemporary theories of human distinctiveness, in short, ought to stress interpretation rather than production: we are what we imagine ourselves capable of being. As Charles Taylor's work in particular demonstrates, any contemporary theory of the human difference is much more likely to emphasize our narrative capacities, our abilities to tell stories that make sense out of the situations in which we find ourselves.[48] We are, in Taylor's phrase, "self-interpreting animals," in the sense that what we are is indistinguishable from how we understand ourselves.[49]
Once the focus shifts to interpretation, social psychology, and not economics, becomes the grounding for social theory. Whether imagined as structured by social class, embedded in
materialist realities, governed by laws, obligated by morality, enlightened by literary texts, or made sacred by religion, interpreting selves possess the capability of self-understanding. Yet this shift from production to interpretation in no way stands in conflict with the principle that distinct human features of the self make necessary a distinct social science. From the interpretative point of view, human beings are different from other species not just because their culture is more complex but because their development is not preprogrammed by their genetic structures. They can bend the instructions given to them in ways that the giver of instructions could not have anticipated; therefore, the rules they follow and the programs that guide their actions are their own. They can alter and shape the rules that govern them because they add mind to culture, in addition to adding culture to nature. Self-understanding makes self-governance possible.
Interpreting selves can create meaningful societies. That is, a species capable of understanding the rules that govern its behavior can direct its social organization to the accomplishment of goals defined by the members of that species as meaningful. As long as sociologists focused disproportionately on the technical skill with which vast forms of social cooperation are organized, as Durkheim did in his Division of Labor in Society, they developed a remarkably coherent theory—for ants. Indeed, if we examine Edward O. Wilson's later work on ant societies, we might conclude that Durkheim's awareness of social complexity and interdependence was insufficient for ants, whatever its relevance to humans.[50] But Durkheim's relevance for ants extends only up to a point. For he was not only interested in understanding the dynamics of social organization; he was also a moralist with a vision of the good.[51] In his Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim turned away from a mechanistic theory of the division of labor in favor of a perspective emphasizing the cognitive and symbolic powers of human beings. That change in perspective marks a crucial moment in the intellectual history of sociology, linking, as it does, a theory of the distinctiveness of the human self to a theory of the meaningfulness of human society.
Humans add to the profane worlds they share with other
animal species a sacred world in which meaning, and not just behavior, becomes emblematic. Human society is distinct from all other forms of social organization because, in the well-known words of Clifford Geertz, "man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun."[52] An interpreting self imagines possibilities beyond the sensate world. A meaningful society realizes such possibilities. Drop the anthropo-centrism of social theory, and one can still discuss individuals and groups. But having dropped it, one can no longer discuss who we are, how we came to be that way, and how we might be in the future. Durkheim called sociology a moral science, and that is why it was different from biology.
Sociology, for all these reasons, remains a distinct science for a distinct subject. In positing sociology as a science, its founders were distinguishing it from literature and the humanities. But in asserting the existence of a unique human self that made possible a meaningful form of human society, they were also distinguishing it from the existing natural sciences, such as biology. Sociology was Geisteswissenschaft , not Naturwissenschaft . It required a methodology that stressed the need to enter into the minds of its subjects, and this alone made it different from biology; for, as Isaiah Berlin has commented, "one cannot enter into the hopes and fears of bees and beavers."[53] Although sociological theorists borrowed Darwin's concept of evolution, they did not borrow his belief that the evolution of man is continuous with that of other animals species. To be sure, there were exceptions, from Herbert Spencer to contemporary sociologists influenced by sociobiology, as Degler's recent account emphasizes.[54] But the creed of the field could be summarized in one fairly typical account, from Charles W. Ellwood in 1918: "If we follow the clue which modern anthropologists are giving us," he wrote, "we shall reach a 'human'—one might also say a 'humanistic'—sociology rather than the biological or mechanistic one which obtains among some social thinkers."[55] Distinctive subject suggested distinctive method: if there were nothing unique called the social, biology would be a perfectly appropriate science of human affairs. Because there is, sociology had to be invented.
Despite an emerging cosmology that questions any account
which privileges human beings and their affairs, this is no time to give up the quest for a special and unique social science. It is not because we have liberated ourselves completely from biology that we need special tools to understand and realize our potential; we remain biological beings, we live in nature, and some aspects of what we do (although increasingly fewer and fewer) can be understood on the basis of biological laws. Nor is it because—as nineteenth-century social theorists believed—we have added the realm of culture to the realm of nature that a distinct social science is justified. To be sure, we have added a realm of culture, one that has dynamics that are different from biological imperatives and that consequently demand a different science. The classic thinkers in the tradition of social theory were trying to develop that science, proposing theories—often highly structural theories—that sought laws of the cultural realm to supplement the laws of the biological realm.
The more modern people become, the more their affairs are governed by something other than both biology and culture. That something else is mind. Unlike our biological destiny, it enables us to have a say in the rules that govern how we reproduce ourselves. Unlike our cultural destiny, it confronts the way we usually have done things with an imagined capacity to do things in other ways. We cannot, nor should we ever, rule out the biological and cultural sciences as ways of understanding some of what we do. But if we want to understand some of the most interesting things about us, we need to add the interpretative sciences to them. Most animal species are governed only by their genes. Some, at least according to contemporary ethologists, have the rudiments of culture. But only one is subject to the dynamics of three different imperatives —nature, culture, and mind. And that species requires a specific social science that can elevate mind to the status of nature and culture.