Being Humans: Anthropological Universality and Particularity in Transdisciplinary Perspectives [Reprint 2012 ed.] 9783110822809, 9783110169744

Table of contents :
Preface
On Being Humans. An Introduction
I Conceptualising the Human
Anthropological Universality. On the Validity of Generalisations about Human Nature
“World-Openness” and the Question of Anthropological Universalism. Comments on Justin Stagl’s Paper
A Reply to Neil Roughley
Human Nature, Human Variety, Human Freedom
A Cultural-Historical View of Human Nature
Human Diversity and Human Nature. The Life and Times of a False Dichotomy
II Contexts of the Human
Encountering the Other through Grammar
A Grammar of Human Life? Comments on Rom Harré’s Paper
A Reply to Thomas Luckmann
Human Beings and “An Absolute Conception”
Human Universals and their Implications
Are Women Human?
III Anthropology, Literature and the Aesthetic
Redefining the Human. A Survey of Approaches to Literary Anthropology
Approaching Literary Anthropology. Comments on Aleida Assmann’s Paper
A Reply to Gottfried Seebass
Understanding Homer: Literature, History and Ideal Anthropology
The Implications of Human Picture Making: The Articulation of Visual Space
Universality and Cultural Particularity in Visual Aesthetics
IV Humanity, Morality and Politics
Learning to be Natural
Emotion, Moral Value and Being Human. Comments on Ronald de Sousa’s Paper
A Reply to Wolfgang Friedlmeier
Politics and the Unnatural Infirmity of Being Human
Rationality, Autonomy and Basic Needs
Hedgehogs, Foxes, and Persons: Resistance and Moral Creativity in East Germany and South India
Afterword: “Human Nature”. A Conceptual Matrix
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors

Citation preview

Being Humans

W G DE

Being Humans Anthropological Universality and Particularity in Transdisciplinary Perspectives

Edited by Neil Roughley

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

2000

© Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Being humans : anthropological universality and particularity in transdisciplinary perspectives / edited by Neil Roughley. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 3-11-016974-6 1. Philosophical anthropology. I. Roughley, Neil. BD450 .B415 2000 128-dc21 00-047493

Die Deutsche Bibliothek — Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Being humans : anthropological universality and particularity in transdisciplinary perspectives / ed. by Neil Roughley. - Berlin ; New York : de Gruyter, 2000 ISBN 3-11-016974-6

© Copyright 2000 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. N o part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Disk conversion: Readymade, Berlin. Printing and Binding: Hubert & Co., Göttingen. Cover design: Christopher Schneider, Berlin. Printed in Germany.

Preface

Kant claimed that the central topics of philosophy all converge on the one question: „Was ist der Mensch?" The contributions to this volume take that claim seriously. They set themselves the task of investigating the roles that conceptions of the human play in varying disciplinary contexts both within philosophy and in other human and social sciences. The hypothesis behind the collection is that in many such contexts - whether purely theoretical, more strongly hermeneutic or axiological — conceptions of the human play a significant structuring role in the construction of theoretical models. As these roles are often unacknowledged or implicit, the investigations collected here aim to uncover them in the presuppositions of extant theories or to establish positions which incorporate such conceptions explicitly. Moreover, once their central theoretical status has been established, there is a further question of considerable importance that has to be addressed: How can conceptions of the human themselves be legitimately justified? The central importance of conceptions of the human in differing disciplinary contexts makes it appear highly plausible that the conceptions thus employed and justified within those varying contexts are going to be of considerable significance for each other. In order to show this, Being Humans brings together contributions from authors working within a representative selection of the relevant disciplines: philosophy, sociology, anthropology, literature and psychology. All of the contributors fulfil a dual condition: not only are they the authors of accomplished work on understanding the human; they are also experienced in transcending the boundaries of their own disciplines. As a result, the interdisciplinary character of the relationships between the papers is reinforced by what one can call the transdisciplinary content of the contributions themselves. Furthermore, the collection's dialogical character has been strengthened by the device of comments plus replies from the perspective of another discipline, with which each part of the book begins. Heartfelt thanks are due to all the contributors to this volume for their willingness to engage with what are at times strongly differing approaches - from the point of view both of disciplinary standpoints and of theoretical traditions. I am also indebted to the University of Constance Special Research Forum ("Sonderforschungsbereich") Literature and Anthropology, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and to the Constance Philosophy Department for financial and other forms of support. Thanks are also due to Andrea Gruschwitz and Christopher Möllmann for their technical assistance, and in particular to my colleagues Wolfgang Friedlmeier, Dunja Jaber, Gottfried Seebass and Holmer Steinfath for ex-

vi

Preface

tensive discussions of the issues at stake here. Finally, I am grateful to Routledge for permission to reproduce sections 3 and 4 of Mary Midgley's contribution. They originally appeared as sections 5 and 6 in chapter 10 of her Beast and Man (revised ed., Routledge 1995). Neil Roughley

September 2000

Contents

Preface

ν

On Being Humans. An Introduction

1

I

Conceptualising the Human

23

Justin Stagi Anthropological Universality. On the Validity of Generalisations about Human Nature

25

Neil Roughley "World-Openness" and the Question of Anthropological Universalism. Comments on Justin Stagl's Paper

37

Justin Stagi A Reply to Neil Roughley

45

Mary Midgley Human Nature, Human Variety, Human Freedom

47

Michael Cole and Karl Levitin A Cultural-Historical View of Human Nature

64

Bradd Shore Human Diversity and Human Nature. The Life and Times of a False Dichotomy

81

II

Contexts of the Human

105

Rom Harré Encountering the Other through Grammar

107

Thomas Luckmann A Grammar of Human Life? Comments on Rom Harré's Paper

131

Rom Harré A Reply to Thomas Luckmann

138

vili

Contents

David Cockburn Human Beings and "An Absolute Conception"

140

Donald E. Brown Human Universale and their Implications

156

Helen Haste Are Women Human?

175

III

197

Anthropology, Literature and the Aesthetic

Aleida Assmann Redefining the Human. A Survey of Approaches to Literary Anthropology 199 Gottfried Seebass Approaching Literary Anthropology. Comments on Aleida Assmann's Paper

216

Aleida Assmann A Reply to Gottfried Seebass

221

Bernard Williams Understanding Homer: Literature, History and Ideal Anthropology

224

Andrew Harrison The Implications of Human Picture Making: The Articulation of Visual Space

233

Wilfried van Damme Universality and Cultural Particularity in Visual Aesthetics

258

IV

285

H u m a n i t y , M o r a l i t y a n d Politics

Ronald de Sousa Learning to be Natural

287

Wolfgang Friedlmeier Emotion, Moral Value and Being Human. Comments on Ronald de Sousa's Paper

308

Ronald de Sousa A Reply to Wolfgang Friedlmeier

313

Contents

IX

Christopher ]. Berry Politics and the Unnatural Infirmity of Being Human

317

David Copp Rationality, Autonomy and Basic Needs

334

Michael Carrithers Hedgehogs, Foxes, and Persons: Resistance and Moral Creativity in East Germany and South India

356

Afterword: "Human Nature". A Conceptual Matrix

379

Bibliography

391

Notes on Contributors

422

On Being Humans. An Introduction

W h a t then did I formerly think I was? U n d o u b t e d l y I judged that I was a m a n . But what is a man? Shall I say a rational animal? Assuredly not; for it would be necessary forthwith to inquire into what is m e a n t by animal, and what by rational, and thus, f r o m a single question, I should insensibly glide into others, and these more difficult than the first; nor do I n o w possess enough of leisure to warrant m e in wasting m y time amid subtleties of this sort. (Descartes, Meditations on the First Philosophy, 86f.)

Michel Foucault and Niklas Luhmann both shared Descartes' conviction that the concept of the human has no role to play within scientific discourse. For both social theorists, conceptions of the human are the mere by-product of social systemic developments in early modernity. Ethnology for example, in Foucault's view, not only has no need of the concept; it needs systematically to avoid it, at pain of blinding itself to the constitutive properties of its own objects (Foucault 1966, 385ff.; cf. Luhmann 1980, 172ff.). Related views have dominated many debates within the human and social sciences over the last three decades. However, an increasing number of voices have been raised which resist such conclusions. In a highly influential paper, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz called for "a more viable concept of man, one in which culture, and the variability of culture, would be taken into account rather than written off as caprice and prejudice, and yet, at the same time, one in which the governing principle of the field, 'the basic unity of mankind', would not be turned into an empty phrase" (Geertz 1973, 36). For the psychologist Jerome Bruner, the success of particular versions of the cognitive sciences since the 1950s means that psychology is urgently faced with the task of justifying the form that "the proper study of man" has to take (Bruner 1990, Iff.). Finally, under the rubric "Philosophy as Anthropology", Hilary Putnam has suggested that philosophy's central topic is "the human situation" and that Kant was right to argue that all the important philosophical questions are in some sense grounded in the one question "Was ist der Mensch?" (Putnam 1987, 62; 1989, 40ff.) Kant himself had gone as far as to claim that the key philosophical disciplines can all be seen belonging to "anthropology" (Logic A 25).

Empirical and Philosophical Anthropology Anthropo-logia is a discourse on humans. The term first appears (in its verbal form) in the Nicomachian Ethics, where Aristotle tells us that holding such a

2

O n Being Humans

discourse is one of the things that the "great-souled man" certainly does not do (NE 1125 a 5). The kind of discourse he is referring to is evaluative talk aimed at provoking condemnation or compliments, and the humans who are the objects of such talk are those with whom the speaker is in everyday contact. In short, Aristotle's anthropologist was a gossip. Since Aristotle, the objects of "anthropological" discourse have typically become far-removed from everyday contacts. T h e two strands of research which have gone under the rubric "anthropology" in the English- and German-speaking cultural contexts established the distance of their objects from those of day-to-day interaction in two different ways. In the one case, the distance is geographical and cultural, access to those objects being attained by means of participatory observation; in the other, the distance is logical, established through a process of abstraction from particulars. The former usage, that more familiar in the English-speaking context, is historically more recent. It stands for the study of human life-forms other than those of the researcher. This usage was institutionalised with the founding of the European and American anthropological societies in the 1860s and 1870s after the model of the Société d'anthropologie de Paris (founded 1859) and monumentalised with the publication οίΎγίοτ s Anthropology in 1881. Of course, the comparative study of the mores of "other" cultures and societies was not inaugurated with this terminological step. The 1830s and 1840s had already seen a series of European and American "ethnological" societies come into being. The American Ethnological Society, founded 1842, had itself grown out of the American Antiquarian Society, which had been founded in 1812 for the study of indigenous American peoples. The terms "ethnology" and "ethnography" were coined between 1772 and 1787 in the German universities of Göttingen and Halle, along with the German parallel terms "Völkerkunde" and "Volkskunde" (Stagi 1981, 125). The theoretical impulses behind the systematic study associated with these terms were formulated in Humboldt's Plan einer vergleichenden Anthropologie oí 1795 or 1797, itself inspired by Herder's call for an "anthropological map of the earth" in the sixth book of his Reflections on the Philosophy of History of Mankind (1784). The type of material which raised the possibility of such an ethnographic project had been gathered by voyagers since the Renaissance, and had been first set in a comparative, i.e. genuinely ethnological perspective by the Jesuit missionary J.F. Lafitau in his Moeurs des sauvages Amériquains comparés aux moeurs des premiers temps (1724) (Mühlmann 1984, 40ff.). Although "ethnology" and "anthropology" are widely used as synonyms today, the latter being understood as a short form for (American) "cultural anthropology" or (British) "social anthropology", that was by no means the case when the term "anthropology" was institutionalised in the English-speaking world. In his plan for a syllabus of the newly established subject of anthropology at the University of Oxford (1906), Tylor subdivided the course into seven sections,

An Introduction

3

only two of which were the province of ethnology, the others being dealt with by "zoological", "palaeontological", "archaeological", "sociological" and "technological" branches of the "science of man" (Reed 1906, 56f.). The subsequent slide of meaning from whole to part corresponds to the abandonment of the idea of a comprehensive science of the human capable of integrating evidence of cultural, social and technological diversity with the findings of the biological and physical sciences. Under the ideological conditions of 19th-century scholarship, it had appeared that the concept of "race" could fulfil this function. With the rejection of social evolutionism and positivism and with the discipline's distancing from the legitimation of colonialism, the idea that both the problems of human diversity and of the relationship between the material and the cultural spheres could be solved by focusing on this concept was, salutorily, abandoned. As a result, "anthropological" research has come to focus almost exclusively on "culture" and, although the results of what is still known as "biological anthropology" are generally taught to students of the discipline, their relevance for specific research projects has often tended to be seen as obscure or even non-existent. Whereas in the context of racial theory the interest in biological aspects of human life-forms concerned features thought to explain cultural differences, the disciplines of human ethology, sociobiology and evolutionary psychology - the core of what is now taught as "biological anthropology" - all concern themselves primarily with universalisable claims about the human animal. The comparison of the human with other species - the methodological centre of human ethology (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1967, 11) - is a procedure which, of course, goes back to the beginnings of western thought. It is systematically carried out in Aristotle's Parts of Animals (640 a 25ff; 643 a Iff.; 645 a 25ff; esp. 686 a 30ff.) and illustrated by the myth of the creation attributed by Plato to Protagoras (Prot. 320 c ff.). The latter narrative, which tells how Epimetheus forgot to assign to the human animal a specifically type of food, means of self-defence or covering against the elements, is one of the first recorded attempts in the western tradition to characterise the specifically human life-form. It is thus one of the founding texts of philosophical anthropology, understood as the philosophical analysis of what it means to be human, the answer to Kant's question "Was ist der Mensch?" Aristotle gave at least four answers to this question, naming reason (NE 1166 a 17; cf. Protrept. Β 59-62), life in community (Pol. 1253 a; Hist. An. 488 a 7ff.), a sense of justice (Pol. 1252 b) and the drive to mimesis (Poet. 1448 b). The attempt to provide a systematic answer of this form was first termed "anthropology" in the 16th Century in Magnus Hundt's Anthropologium de hominis dignitate, natura etproprietatibus (1501). In the German tradition inaugurated here, which blossomed above all in the 18th Century (producing a large number of philosophically insignificant tracts), the results of physiological research (and speculation) were placed alongside discussions of those questions of psychology dealt

4

On Being Humans

with in the writings of "philosophes" such as La Mettrie (L'homme machine, 1748) and Helvétius {De l'homme, 1773) and treated most profoundly in the psychologies of the British Empiricists, particularly Hume's Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40). In German-speaking philosophy, "anthropology", understood as a philosophical psychology systematically related to the results of empirical usually biological - research and conceived as foundational for other forms of philosophical investigation, has been hotly debated for the last two centuries. In particular, there has been a repeated oscillation between such anthropological conceptions, as advanced by Kant, Feuerbach ([1842], 42) and Scheler ([1928], 5ff.), and their historically oriented critique at the hands of such philosophers as Hegel (Encycl. §§388-390, 339ff.), Marx ([1846], 6) and Horkheimer ([1935], 200ff.). The history of this second sense of the term "anthropology" was particularly shaped by the emergence in the 1920s of a style of thought explicitly calling itself "Philosophical Anthropology" and whose principle representatives, Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner and Arnold Gehlen, were both philosophers and sociologists, as well as having extensive knowledge of human biology. They repeated the Kantian claim of the foundational character of conceptions of the human, now relating it not just to the various philosophical disciplines, but also to the human and social sciences which had been developed in the intervening years. The past two decades have seen the emergence within English-speaking philosophy of conceptions characterised by the same structure and calling themselves "philosophical anthropology". The prime examples are the ambitious philosophical undertakings of Charles Taylor (1985, 1) and Rom Harré (1993, Iff.). Both types of "discourse on the human" were practised prior to their designation as "anthropology". It is, however, perhaps not insignificant that the first terminological usage of the word, on the threshold between Enlightenment and Romanticism in Germany, vacillated between the two meanings. Herder's protoethnological call for a "gallery" of the divergent forms of human life (Reflections, VI, 7) follows his discussion of what he sees as the specific difference of human from other animals, namely their delayed maturation, weakness and corresponding dependence on formation through culture (IV, 4). Kant's Anthropology from a pragmatic Point of View (1798) contains discussions of the psychological capacities central to his epistemology (Anthr. I, 1) and ethics (I, 3), and a characterisation of the human being as an "animal rationabile" (II, E), alongside a discussion of what he sees as the "ethnic characteristics" of certain peoples, namely of various European nations (II, C). Moreover, the founding years of American ethnology are marked by repeated reflections on the significance of cultural diversity for an understanding of the human life-form. This not only so in Boas' "Psychological Problems in Anthropology" of 1910, in which he struggles to disentangle a notion of culture from social evolutionist assumptions (cf. Shore 1996, 19f£). It also remains the case in those classical texts by Boas' students who, on behaviourist

An Introduction

5

assumptions, most systematically argued for thoroughgoing cultural relativism. Both Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead state explicitly that the epistemic gain to be had from ethnological research lies in coming to distinguish between those psychological claims which are true relative to a particular cultural context and those whose applicability to all humans proves resistant to falsification and thus plausibly names a dimension of "human nature" (Mead [1930], 212ff.; Benedict [1934], 16ÍF.). Systematically, one might think it fairly obvious that neither kind of "anthropology" can be sensibly carried out without taking the other into account. This assumption is certainly shared by the two authors mentioned above as examples of contemporary philosophical anthropology: Charles Taylor, who draws on the work of Clifford Geertz (1989, 80; 113), and Rom Harré, who makes extensive use of a variety of ethnological findings in order to illustrate his formal conception of human sociality (1993, 98ff.). Similarly, much research in empirical psychology is now guided by the insight emphasised by Margaret Mead that there can be no plausible pretensions to universal validity without cross-cultural investigations (Bruner/Haste 1987, Iff.; Harré 1993, llff.; Cole 1996, 98ff.). The pioneering work in developmental psychology by Mike Cole (Cole et al. 1971) demonstrated, for instance, that the attempt to apply Piaget's model of development to non-western children raises telling methodological and theoretical difficulties for the approach. On the other hand, there is widespread agreement among many ethnologists that research into non-western cultures has to go beyond mere ethnographic description and the tracing of internal cultural patterns, and should encompass an explanatory dimension, in order to clarify why it is that human beings both diverge from and resemble each other in the ways they do (Brown 1991, 98ff., I42ff.; Carrithers 1992, 34ff.; Stagi 1992, 150; Shore 1996, 18ff.; Van Damme 1996, 6f.). Whether the focus is on cross-cultural commonality or diversity, it is a central theoretical task to provide insight into what it is about humans that makes the relevant cultural facts possible. Where that task is not broached, there is likely to be an unformulated and thus unjustified conception of the human behind both the research and its interpretation. All in all, one might say that the characterisation with which Bradd Shore introduces his contribution to this volume is correct for both senses of "anthropology": that it is "the study of human nature in light of human variation".

Understanding, Evaluation and the Human Incommensurabilities Certain forms of pure ethnography may be possible without presupposing any general features of the bearers of the cultural patterns thus recorded. There cer-

6

On Being Humans

tainly are theoretical paradigms within sociology, history and literary studies which claim to have disentangled their subject matter entirely from any such presuppositions. Systems theory, discourse analysis and poststructuralism are such theories. Two kinds of consideration may indeed seem to support the complete expulsion of the "the human" from the human sciences, both of which are based in convictions about incommensurability. The first is that the development of the various academic disciplines has led to different sub-components of the human sphere being so strongly differentiated that one can no longer give any specific, non-vacuous sense to the phrase "the human". Psychological processes, social systems, literary mechanisms and cultural dynamics are seen as mutually irreducible and inherently resistant to amalgamation in any one overarching perspective. The second consideration has been given particular currency in the wake of modern ethnological research, although it dates back to historicism. It is rooted in the idea that there are forms of incommensurability which result not from the conceptual tools applied in differing types of analysis, but from the culturally varying systems of practices and categories that are analysed. The radical claim here is that genuine understanding is entirely internal to holistic cultural systems, whose concepts only gain their sense through their internal relations to other elements of the same system. Where this is strictly true, there is clearly no possibility of applying concepts to all members of the species. Even if one were to accept the claims for both types of incommensurability, there would still be one substantial question about "the human": the question as to what it is about this species which explains it being the bearer of these forms of explanatory irreducibility and hermeneutic incomparability. To my knowledge, nobody has so far argued that the ethology of any other species has to take similar principles into account. A first, basic "anthropological" question for the human and social sciences thus concerns those properties of human nature which ground the plausibility of such forms of conceptual and epistemic relativism — independently of whether, and to what extent, some version of relativism can be shown to be true. A second question is then whether there aren't some concepts whose applicability to all humans needs to be assumed in order to even make sense of any version of the thesis of cultural relativism. If someone claims that people in different cultures act for reasons which allow of no common standard of comparison, they appear to be presupposing that people everywhere act for reasons. And if it is argued that the modern western self is structured in a way that is radically different from the forms taken on by the self for the ancient Greeks (Feyerabend 1988, 191ff.) or members of contemporary non-western cultures (Geertz 1983, 59), then it appears that there is some sort of common entity which can be identified in the various cultures under scrutiny, in order to show how it differs in each case. Of course, what is common may be of such a formal nature that talk of the "same

An Introduction

7

thing" is apt to be misleading. Nevertheless, there real and far-reaching questions here, questions whose importance and detail are easily lost from view in the face of simple proclamations of "relativist" or "universalist" positions. Ethics Such proclamations have themselves generally been the result of a specific cultural or historical context. Significantly, the incommensurability thus proclaimed has more often than not been no purely theoretical matter, but has centrally concerned evaluative and normative issues. This is as obvious in the liberal pleas of Ruth Benedict ([1934], lOff.) as it is in the anarchist agenda of Feyerabend (1988, 9ff.; 243ff.). A significant difference between the two is that, whereas Benedict's arguments concern only what she saw as the relativity of values to a particular context, Feyerabend supports his axiological relativism with arguments for conceptual incommensurability. It is, however, far from clear that the former can be supported by the latter at all: if it cannot be shown that the claims made by members of a certain culture are about the same subject as the claims raised within another culture, then it is difficult to see what sense could be made of the argument that there is an incompatibility between their values (cf. Brandt 1959, 273ff.). T h e object of ethnological research here has, of course, largely been the extent to which descriptive relativism - i.e. the thesis that in different cultures there are genuinely conflicting evaluations of the same facts - is true. The normative question of whether there are rational grounds for deciding between such competing evaluations is, however, a further matter. A number of cultural anthropologists in the first half of the 20th century either confounded the two questions or else thought that a decision on the descriptive issue enabled the derivation of a position on the normative issue. Interestingly, two sorts of pseudoderivation are to be found in such contexts, corresponding to the two senses of "anthropology" distinguished above. T h e first, most widespread pseudo-derivation consists in concluding from the cultural diversity of normative systems that all are equally valid. This position, stated explicitly by Ruth Benedict, is given an interesting variation in the 1947 Declaration on H u m a n Rights of the American Anthropological Association. The document's authors argue, like Benedict, that "scientific knowledge of Man" justifies the claim that "standards and values are relative to the culture from which they derive" (1947, 542f.). It is, however, of the essence of a normative declaration which is to apply to "mankind as a whole" that it proclaim principles with transcontextual validity. The document's authors appear to assume that such a proclamation is legitimate because the principle of tolerance can be derived from the recognition of normative pluralism. Clearly, neither step - from descriptive to normative relativism; from the latter to a general norm of tolerance — can count

8

On Being Humans

as a derivation. In fact, whereas the first step marks merely an illegitimate move between two claims which are at least logically compatible, the second step attempts to justify one claim by means of another which actually invalidates it. In any case, ascertaining the true extent of normative diversity between cultures - i.e. of descriptive relativism - is not as easy as it may appear, as it requires a methodologically stable combination of empirical fieldwork and conceptual analysis. Indeed, a number of anthropologists, such as Kluckhohn (1955, 671 ff.) and Linton (1954, 152ff.), have argued for the opposite conclusion: that the constraints of the general human life-form - survival, reproduction, social organisation - result in genuinely transcontextual adherence to certain values. The second type of pseudo-derivation sees such putative universal givens as themselves justifying universal ethical principles. This is of course the type of move which within philosophical ethics has more usually been a criticised as a "naturalistic fallacy". It is particularly interesting in this context that ostensibly relativist documents often contain a substratum of universalist assumptions which play a significant, if unacknowledged role in the justification of the normative conclusions drawn. The Statement on Human Rights presupposes that self-realisation is a universal goal; and Margaret Mead's description of the sexual practices of Samoan adolescents in their difference from those of her American contemporaries transports the assumption that humans in any cultural context are likely to benefit from a certain amount of freedom in these matters (cf. Pocock 1986, 9). The debates about both descriptive and normative relativism tend, moreover, to make presuppositions about conceptual issues. On the one hand, these are of the kind dealt with in general debates about conceptual incommensurability and concern the ontologies of the cultures to be compared. On the other hand, they concern specifically ethical concepts, particularly that of morality itself, but also notions that are candidates for central justificatory roles within ethics, concepts such as well-being, freedom, rights and needs. Here again, the questions as to whether other cultures have these concepts, different versions of the same concepts or no equivalents at all can only be answered by a combination of empirical and conceptual work. Aesthetics The axiological questions repeatedly raised, with varying degrees of explicitness, in such ethical contexts are also relevant within another dimension of human existence, although there they have not been discussed with quite the same fervour. This is the sphere of art and the aesthetic. The study of non-western aesthetic products, like that of the norms of non-western cultures, took place at first under the shadow of colonialism and sought confirmation of the "primitiveness" of its objects. The evaluative transformation which then took place - from explicit or implicit deni-

An Introduction

9

gration to admiration - was brought about not by ethnologists, but by artists, in particular from 1905 onwards the Fauves and the Cubists (Firth 1992, 19ff.). The first systematic attempt to tackle both the conceptual and evaluative issues thus raised was Boas' Primitive Art of 1927. In this respect, Boas' text retains a paradigmatic status today. He firstly advances definitions of the aesthetic and of art, secondly proposes criteria for aesthetic value and then goes on to argue empirically for the presence of the relevant phenomena in "primitive" cultures ([1927], 9ff.). Whatever one may think of his specific proposals, Boas was clearly correct to seek clarification of his subject-matter before providing his survey of the relevant empirical findings at the time. In doing so, he found himself asking the central questions of philosophical aesthetics in a context in which the prioritising of western artistic solutions had been abandoned. However, Boas' methodological rigour reveals a problem of circularity. On the one hand, as he saw, no answer to the question "How universal is art?" can be given without first determining the criteria for calling something "art"; on the other hand, the definition of art is going to depend on the extension one thinks is appropriate to the concept, i.e. which empirical phenomena one thinks ought to be subsumed under it. In a sense, this is purely a verbal problem. However, more tends to be at stake because of the interweaving of descriptive and axiological considerations in the everyday concept of art. This is of course entirely unhelpful, as it confuses the question of what falls under the concept with the question of whether particular examples of phenomena thus classified are good or bad as phenomena of this kind. A plausible solution might consist in seeking purely sociological criteria for distinguishing the institution of art from religious or cultic institutions, before going on to ask evaluative questions. Boas' own criterion, however, is of a different sort, deriving from considerations that belong to ^philosophicalanthropology. For Boas, it seems that art-works are those human products conducive to aesthetic experience. And aesthetic experience is in turn conceived as pleasure in the form of objects, a type of pleasure which Boas plausibly claims is "in one way or another ... felt by all members of mankind" ([1927], 9). In this way, Boas' concept of art grounds in a claim about a specifically human capacity or, as Kant put it, a specific form of "receptivity" (CJ §5, BA 8-9). Conceptions of specifically human capacities necessary for a kind of experience foregrounded in dealings with art have played a significant role in philosophical art theory from Baumgarten to Dewey and have resurfaced recently within cultural anthropology in the work of Jacques Macquet (Introduction to Aesthetic Anthropology, 1979, 12ffi). However, as the precise form of Boas' own argument shows, the grounding of artistic practices in a philosophical anthropology requires more than the specification of purely hedonic propensities. On the one hand, Boas differentiates his formalist criterion, arguing that the relevant kind of hedonic susceptibility can be activated by one of two sorts of

10

On Being Humans

cause: either by products which manifest a high level of control of culturally specific techniques or by certain formal properties, in particular symmetry ([1927], 32ff.), which have universal appeal. Aesthetic value is thus far seen to be in part universal, and in part culturally specific, although based on a universal susceptibility. On the other hand, his formalist argument is complicated by the recognition that there are also forms of"representative art", which derive their value from semiotic mechanisms that transcend the purely formal. Here, artistic value appears to be a kind of cognitive value and thus grounds in capacities of the understanding. On the level of a philosophical anthropology, this raises the central question of the relationship between humans' hedonic and hermeneutic capacities. Where, however, we are concerned with evaluating particular cultural products, we require criteria of successful or accurate representation. Here, the discussion of aesthetic products leads back to the general hermeneutic problem of transcultural understanding and its anthropological preconditions. Whether it is the ethical or the aesthetic sphere which is the focus of study, there are three central types of question the answers to which are likely to bear the traces of some conception of the human. The conceptual questions - what is morality, or what is the ethical? what is art, or what is the aesthetic? - are generally answered in the light of convictions about the universal or non-universal applicability of the particular concept. Theoretical suggestions here are usually supported by assumptions such as that humans are animals capable of feeling resentment or of entering agreements, beings that enjoy imitation or have a hedonic susceptibility to pure form. Answers to hermeneutic questions as to the extent to which the actions, cultural products and evaluative standards of other peoples can be understood tend to rely on presuppositions about the existence or non-existence of universal structures of the causation of human behaviour, of emotional experience and of representative categories. Finally, approaches to axiological questions concerning the validity of evaluative and normative standards can hardly proceed without assumptions about the needs, wants and susceptibilities of the bearers of such standards. There are undoubtedly logical barriers to deriving values or norms from facts; nevertheless, if there are properties of actions or objects that all humans either want, enjoy, need, are averse to or dislike, then such properties are at the very least going to be good candidates for the objects of justifiable norms.

The Structure of Being Humans Being Humans is a collection of papers motivated by the conviction that conceptions of the human play a significant role in structuring the research carried out by scholars in the various fields of the human and social sciences, whether explic-

A n Introduction

11

itly or inexplicitly. It is divided into four parts which focus in turn on the following issues: 1. What precisely is a conception of the human? How can such a conception be justified? 2. How are such conceptions related to particular contexts? Are they themselves inevitably dependent on unjustifiable background assumptions? How do they relate to scientific conceptions of objectivity? 3. What is the significance of such conceptions for hermeneutic and axiological issues in literature and the arts? 4. What is their significance for conceptual, axiological and normative issues in morality and politics? The answers collected here come from philosophy, anthropology, psychology, sociology and literary scholarship. They focus on differing aspects of the above questions, reflecting both the authors' disciplinary positions and individual approaches to the issues. Nevertheless, the varying approaches to a set of recurrent themes constitute a discussion which crosses the boundaries both of the disciplines and of the book's thematic divisions. The remainder of this introduction provides an overview over the collection, both presenting the main claims made by the contributors and indicating the structure of the issues played out more or less explicitly between the contributions. I. Conceptualising

the Human

Part I brings together sociological, philosophical, psychological and anthropological conceptions of human nature. It begins with a paper by the sociologist of culture, Justin Stagi, who argues in the tradition of German Philosophical Anthropology that the central characteristic of the human life-form is that of worldopenness. This characteristic is seen, on the one hand, as the basis of specifically human cultural capacities; on the other hand, as intimately bound up with palieontological and ethological facts about the ontogenesis and behavioural constitution of the human animal. Further, Stagi argues that criteria of the human are necessary in order to deal with those normative issues raised dramatically by modern medical technology and widely dealt with under the rubric of "medical ethics". The philosopher Mary Midgley agrees with Stagi that there is both a theoretical and practical necessity of some "essentialist" conception of human nature. In the first part of her paper, she attempts to clarify the reasons why so much suspicion has been shed on this notion, before going on to give an account of the form such a conception ought to take. In particular, she criticises simplistic attempts to apply the genus/differentia specifica schema to the human case, as well as rejecting the assumption that any such characterisation has to be honorific. The re-

12

On Being Humans

quired form of such a conception, she argues, is that of an integrated cluster of structural properties, a stricture to which any adequate understanding of even such a prominent property as language-use has to conform. The psychological perspective developed in the contribution of Michael Cole and Carl Levitin focuses less on capacities seen as characterising individual members of the species, emphasising instead the peculiar way that the human life-form involves processes of enculturation, in which both the developing child and its human environment play an active, "co-constructive" role. For Cole and Levitin, being human is being involved in culturalpractices, mediated by ones social environment and supported by specific imaginative processes, which give cultural data coherence and relate them to their bearer. They illustrate the significance of the process of enculturation for human development with the case of blind-deaf children, where the requirement of mutual, imaginative activity is particularly visible. The final contribution to Part I, that of the anthropologist Bradd Shore, is, like that of Mary Midgley, a historical narrative with a clear systematic point. In order to gain an adequate grasp of the relationship between universal and particular elements in the human life-form, Shore discusses problems in the early attempts to deal with the issue within ethnology and evolutionary theory, relating them back to theological issues in the pre-history of anthropological thought. Where Midgley emphasises the political significance that has been attached to the rejection of "human nature", Shore argues that the idea of "psychic unity" itself is best explained as a conceptual bulwark against racism. For Shore, as for Cole and Levitin, the essential dimension of human existence is its culturality. A correct understanding of this dimension, so he claims, would make it clear that no distinction between nature and culture can ground the difference between universal and particular properties of members of the species, indeed that the distinction can be given no non-vacuous sense. All four authors are in agreement that a conception of human nature has to integrate facts of human existence which are studied both by the natural sciences and by the human or social sciences. They also agree that any such conception will have to be able to say what it is about humans that explains the radical diversity of their cultural, and indeed individual, forms of life. In order to do this, Stagi, Midgley and Shore draw on the findings of ethology; Shore and Cole/ Levitin also turn to neuroscience. For Midgley, ethology provides functional analogies between human traits and those of other animals, analogies which should allow a naturalistic, but not necessarily reductive understanding of human constitution. For Stagi and Shore, the most significant findings of physical anthropology are those which mark the biological possibility, and necessity, of the cultural dimension of human life. From Stagl's phylogenetic perspective, these lie in the facts of upright position, enlargement of the field of vision and liberation of the hands; in Shore's more ontogenetic orientation, the central morphological facts concern

An Introduction

13

the delayed maturation of the human foetus. The enormous significance of this fact resides in the formative power which thus accrues to the cultural surroundings of the human neonate, whose mental traits and effective neurological structure only come into being as a result of exposure to cultural causes. In this point both Shore and Cole/Levitin see their contributions as deepening the insight of Clifford Geertz that humans are animals with a biological need for "completion" by culture. This notion is very close to what Stagi, following Scheler and Gehlen, calls "world-openness". The discussion between Stagi and Neil Roughley highlights the difficulties involved in giving precision to this concept and the causal role of the mechanisms it covers. Finally, Shore uses certain ideas of evolutionary biology to justify a claim of considerable weight: the claim that the dynamics of evolutionary selection mean that there can be no unchanging human "essence" and that there are only varying degrees of stability in human properties. In the context of the whole volume, it is worth noting that, in spite of their differences, all four conceptions appear to have a common opponent, mentioned explicitly by both Midgley and Shore. This is the adaptationist theory of our mental powers known as evolutionary psychology, which is represented by two contributions that appear later in the volume, those of Don Brown (Part II) and Wilfried van Damme (Part III). An analogy commonly used within this paradigm, indeed one which is often unquestioned in cognitive science, is that of the brain with computer hardware and the mind with software. Both Shore and Cole/Levitin argue that the neurological evidence lends no support to such an analogy and that the plasticity of human neural structures suggests instead some intermediate metaphor such as "mushware" (Shore) or "cultural firmware" (Cole/ Levi tin).

II. Contexts of the Human The contributions to part II consider the plausibility and significance of conceptualisations of the human in the very different contexts of emotion theory, epistemology, gender studies and anthropology. In his paper, Rom Harré argues that the investigation of particular cultural contexts reveals an enormous variety of phenomena that are falsified by the tendency of western investigators to take their own categories as natural. This, he claims, is particularly true in the sphere of the emotions, where the "affect theory" has distorted our understanding of cultural difference, a claim challenged both in Part II by Donald Brown and later in the volume in the contributions of Ronald de Sousa and Wolfgang Friedlmeier (Part IV). However, in spite of Harré's strongly developed contextualism, he insists that analyses of specific cultural contexts - exercises in empirical anthropology — are dependent on a general psychology or philosophical anthropology. For Harré, the objects of philosophical anthropology are the powers and capacities of

14

On Being Humans

human beings that enable them to follow the norms constitutive of particular cultures; and the objects of empirical anthropology are those norms themselves. His discussion with Thomas Luckmann concerns primarily the adequacy of Wittgenstein's concept of "grammar" as a tool for describing these norms. Harré demonstrates his approach for the two areas of emotions and the self. The philosopher David Cockburn sides with Harré on the question of the paradigmatic importance of Wittgenstein's later philosophy for an understanding of the human. For Cockburn however, this is not a question of developing an appropriate theoretical framework that might be designated a philosophical anthropology; instead he sees an understanding of the human as primarily practical, a matter of the way in which humans interact with, and experience each other prior to forming theoretical abstractions. Starting from this "bedrock", he develops a critique of the Cartesian conception of objectivity and its defence by modern philosophers, in particular by Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel. The Cartesian notion of a "view from nowhere" is, according to Cockburn, radically flawed by its lack of human contextualisation, i.e. by the failure to acknowledge the specifically human conditions of the generation of such a perspective. He sees these conditions in the intersubjectivity necessary for epistemic processes and the corporeality of the bearers of knowledge. An objective view is thus, he claims, always going to be from somewhere, namely from within a community of embodied beings with shared practices. The notion of a view from nowhere is also the target of critique of the psychologist Helen Haste. However, whereas Cockburn argues for the human contextualisation of all knowledge, Haste argues that the determining contexts are inevitably infra-human in character. She sees warranted assertability as systematically tied to the perspectives of particular sub-sets of the species, perspectives constituted firstly by particular interests and secondly by the metaphors made possible by technological developments. In particular, she argues that the conception according to which this is not the case is itself the product of a particular western tradition of conceiving the human subject, a tradition characterised accurately by Geertz. Haste's paper is an extended critique of what she interprets as the myth of the western, male, autonomous subject, as well as of those critical reactions to it which fail to escape its logic. Among these are both dualistic, feminist responses and humanist responses which attempt to reincorporate those aspects of the human shut out by such mythical constructions. The paper with which Part IV concludes is a discussion by the anthropologist Donald Brown of the topic of human universals, whose study he argues is essential to an understanding of what it is to be human. According to Brown, there are many universal properties of the human life-form, where "universal" means "present in all ethnographically or historically studied cultural contexts". One reason for their neglect, he claims, is the lack of differentiation between types of such "uni-

An Introduction

15

versality", a lack he seeks to rectify by providing an extensive typology of universals. Most significant for the questions at issue in this volume are the distinctions between ernie and etic and between manifest and innate universals. The former distinction presupposes that there is no strict conceptual incommensurability between cultures, a point emphasised by Brown later when he argues that both universals of communication and the capacity for empathy can break down such cultural barriers. T h e latter distinction is the basis of the concept of human nature Brown takes from evolutionary psychology and which he specifies as that set of innate universal dispositions which has been selected for and encoded in the genetic make-up of the species. In sharp contrast to the culturalist positions of Cole/Levitin and Shore, Brown argues that the modular conception of mind, according to which mental traits are the product of selection processes independent of one another, has shown the explanatory role of culture to be considerably smaller than has often been assumed. The diversity of cultural contexts merely helps to account for the differences in realisation of those dispositional properties that make up human nature, as phenotypical traits only come into being when the conditions for the actualisation of the genotype are given. The relationship between the universal and the particular not only maps onto that between genotype and phenotype; there are also a whole set of universally instantiated human properties — Brown mentions agency and intention — without whose presupposition no forms of particularity could be made sense of. Like Part I, Part II contains various perspectives on the appropriateness of the computer analogy for an understanding of the human. Where Brown argues that culturists have failed to see that mental "programming" does not primarily take place through the influence of culture, but through the "design" of natural selection, he clearly assumes the appropriateness of the analogy. For Harré, the number of significant analogies between brain and computer is less than their significant disanalogies. For Haste, the computer model is a central example of the power of convenient metaphors to structure scientific thought about - among other things - the human. She provides us with a further phase of the ideological history of the concepts of the human and the natural, concentrating on their uses within feminist debates. Her contribution is undoubtedly the one which most radically rejects the claims of science in such debates, arguing that artificial intelligence, ethology and evolutionary biology are all constructed around metaphors or narratives, devices whose cognitive status is that of providing more or less useful heuristics for making sense of the human, and the female, conditions. The contrast with the uncompromisingly realist (or "supra-human") conception of objectivity at work in Brown's conception could not be more stark.

16

O n Being Humans

III. Anthropology, Literature and the Aesthetic The papers brought together in Part III discuss the status of conceptions of the human for the understanding and evaluation of representational artefacts and other objects of aesthetic attention. The first two contributions, by the philosopher Bernard Williams and the literary scholar Aleida Assmann, discuss the relationships between literary understanding and the two senses of "anthropology" distinguished above. Firstly, they both see parallels between literary hermeneutics and the task of the ethnologist in the face of another culture. And secondly, they ask whether universal claims about the human are either presuppositions of such understanding in particular cases or reflections of the general capacity for literary production and reception. The second pair of papers, authored by the anthropologist Wilfried van Damme and the philosopher Andrew Harrison, focus on aesthetic responsiveness to visual properties as a central feature of being human. Aleida Assmann's paper presents various research projects which the term literary anthropology is used to designate. She distinguishes two main forms (the relationship between which is the core issue in her discussion with Gottfried Seebass): the first form employs literature as a heuristic mode of access to specific properties characteristic of the human life-form in general. The second investigates literary texts as components in specific cultural contexts, constituted by particular conditions of production and distribution and particular meaningsystems. Echoing Harré's distinction between philosophical and empirical anthropology, she labels these two approaches abstract and empirical. However, whereas Harré claims that a pre-empirical conception of the human is a necessary foundation for empirical anthropology, Assmann, like Haste, argues that any such conception will inevitably bear the mark of the interests behind its generation. In particular, she sees this as true of the conception of Wolfgang Iser, according to which literature is the medium that allows a specifically reflexive realisation of human freedom via "the imaginary". In this, she joins the ranks of those contributors who argue that the purported universal validity of conceptions of freedom or autonomy is radically restricted by the conditions of their genesis. Her reduction of Plessner's Philosophical Anthropology to an expression of the postw a r German spirit of reconstruction parallels Midgley's reading of the Sartrean Ego as a political requirement of the French Resistance. A grander version of such "Ideologiekritik", Geertz' thesis that all conceptions of the autonomous self are the reflection of western socio-cultural formations, is discussed by both Haste and Michael Carrithers (in Part IV). Like Assmann and Harré, Bernard Williams emphasises the advisability of extreme caution in attributing properties of ones own life-form to another culture under study. When one is dealing with "literature", i.e. writings of a society with a marked reflexive stance, the difficulties in understanding the culture which

An Introduction

17

produced it are increased as a result of the intervention of stylistic devices whose relationship to the life of the audience is far from straightforward. Nevertheless, following Davidson, Williams argues that interpretation would be impossible without certain assumptions about the aims and beliefs of the interpretees, a principle he sees as valid not only for the flesh-and-blood members of other cultures, but also for the characters represented in their texts. Thus understood, an anthropological principle of charity is unavoidable not only in the participant observation of ethnological fieldwork, but also in what Williams calls ideal anthropology: the anthropology without participation undertaken when attempting to understand a culture no longer existent, for instance that of Homeric Greece. For Williams, the content and status of the assumptions at work here are the object of a philosophy «/"anthropology - rather than a philosophical anthropology. He insists that we have no grounds for any kind of aprioricity in making such claims; instead, there is simply an enormous burden of proof to be shouldered by anyone who argues for radical incommensurability in the face of the task of understanding the behaviour and interaction of other humans. The point is similar to what Brown calls the asymmetry between universals and particulars; the difference being that Williams is extremely cautious as to what can be claimed here to be fact, whereas Brown has no qualms about the straightforward claim that concepts of intention and action are universal givens. Of the two contributions dealing with visual aesthetics, neither is overly worried by questions of incommensurability. The paper by Andrew Harrison begins with the claim that, alongside certain deeply mysterious marked surfaces, easy-torecognize pictures are a universal human institution. His project is the investigation of the implications of that universality for an understanding of the human in general. He concludes that, if linguistic capacity can universally be ascribed to humans and constitutes a significant ground of their rationality, then humans are also beings with a further irreducible cognitive, yet non-epistemic capacity, which has to be part of an inclusive account of human thought. This is the ability to make spatial sense of ones surroundings, an ability which involves establishing patterns of spatial salience and which is expressed in, and developed through dealings with those structural analogues to spatial organisation known as pictures. Harrison expresses a certain skepsis towards both the suggestion of evolutionary psychology that there is a language instinct, and towards Fodor's idea of a language of thought; but again maintains that if plausible arguments can be developed for these hypotheses, then an equally good case can be made for a pictorial instinct or a proto-pictorial mental capacity. An analysis of such a capacity, Harrison contends, is an essential component in understanding the sociality which both Aristotle and Kant saw as at the core of what it is to be human. Following Kant, Harrison claims that this aspect of our humanity involves the ability to engage in "universal communication without recourse to concepts", shared aesthetic re-

18

On Being Humans

sponses which, so it seems, bridge the gap between culturally diverse forms of cognition — independently of whether the epistemic commensurability can be established which Williams argues we must presuppose. Wilfried van Dammes paper also focuses on the issue of shared aesthetic responses. However, whereas the responses Harrison has in mind are hermeneutic in character, Van Dammes discussion of "visual aesthetics" in cross-cultural contexts does not restrict its subject matter to representations, but examines those (primarily) visual properties possessed both by sculptures and by other members of the species that are experienced as pleasing in three contemporary African cultures. Van Damme begins, in a manner reminiscent of Boas' treatment of formal aesthetic characteristics, by examining the evidence for the cross-cultural prevalence of positive reactions to properties such as symmetry, clarity and smoothness. He then goes on to look in some detail at the close correlation between varying "socio-cultural ideals" and the sources of visually pleasant experience. In both cases he argues, firstly, that regularities can be established and, secondly, that explanations can be given in terms of evolutionary selection. His main argument concerns the possibility ofexplaining culturally relative aesthetic preferences in terms of underlying "epigenetic rules", which "prescribe" the experience of pleasure when the values of the population to which one belongs are symbolised. Such an adaptively advantageous hedonic tie to ones community would be part of what Brown, following Le Vine and Campbell, calls "the universal syndrome of ethnocentrism". IV. Humanity, Morality and Politics In contrast to the metaphor of "prescriptions" being "followed" by neural mechanisms, the papers collected in the Part IV are concerned with the norms literally conformed to by human agents. Whether or not one agrees with Harré's characterisation of culture as exclusively constituted by norms, he is surely right that normativity is a central characteristic of the human life-form. The four contributions here approach the relationship between normativity and the human from two different angles. The papers by Christopher Berry and Michael Carrithers offer conceptions of normativity that embed them in a conception of being human. The papers by Ronald de Sousa and David Copp focus on general axiological issues, specifically on the question of whether, and if so how, particular human properties — in the one case, needs, in the other, emotions - can be the source of normative reasons. The political theorist Christopher Berry and the anthropologist Michael Carrithers take two different routes - in the first case, an historical route, via an interpretation of Hume; in the second case, an empirical route, via a discussion of biographies taken from diverse cultural contexts - to the same topic: the signifi-

An Introduction

19

cance of what Geertz called the biological "incompleteness" of the human animal for an understanding of normativity. Christopher J. Berry takes from Hume the phrase unnatural infirmity to designate the lack of instinctual regulation of human behaviour. His aim is to move from an analysis of the specific type of sociality characteristic of humans to an understanding of what makes them political animals in the more restricted sense of the word. His argument, which bears certain similarities to the institutional theory of Gehlen, is that the relative flexibility of human motivational constitution confronts groups of a size larger than the breeding pool with the necessity of developing shared responses to certain ineluctable features of their existence. Shared responses which take on a certain fixity are the conventions under which, according to an ancient dictum, it is in the nature of humans to live. Berry argues that the specific feature of political conventions, one which makes the characterisation of chimpanzees as "Machiavellian" purely metaphorical, is the recognition of authority. Michael Carrithers' main concern is a critique of what he argues is a widespread error in anthropological and social theory, an error which derives from a misconception of the character of human agency. He starts from the same claim of Clifford Geertz with which Haste begins her discussion: the claim that the modern western self is essentially characterised by cognitive and motivational distance from its social environment. Where Haste accepts this as a description both of the myth and of the reality, before going on to discuss strategies of its feminist critique, Carrithers questions the premisses of the diagnosis. The central premiss in question is expressed in Geertz' argument that the biological underdetermination of human nature needs completion by "cultural programs". This metaphor implies that the various systems of collective representations, such as the programme "western individualist self', can be installed in their bearers and simply "run". Carrithers argues that there is a philosophical anthropology at the base of conceptions of this kind: that the single disposition common to members of all human societies is their limitless cognitive and motivational plasticity, their total malleability at the hands of socio-cultural structures. This is the same grounding anthropological premiss Stagi identifies at the core of historicism. Against this, Carrithers uses biographical material from India and East Germany to show that no social theory for which the primary agents are impersonal ideological systems can explain either individual action or the dynamics of social change. These tasks, he claims, can only be fulfilled by a theory which makes conceptual space for the active and, above all, interactive relationship of humans to the symbolic systems which in part make them who they are. In his emphasis on the creative possibilities open to humans in their relationship to normative cultural systems, Carrithers picks up a theme which is central in other contributions, particularly in that of Cole/Levitin, for whom active imagination is an enabling condition of human culturality, and thus of the characteristic human life-form.

20

On Being Humans

The contributions of both Carrithers and Berry concern the general question of what it means to be a creature with an irreducibly normative form of life. Although the focus of neither paper is the justifiability of particular norms, Berry does argue that human "infirmity" opens up a set of alternative political possibilities between which a decision has to be taken on the basis of justificatory criteria other than "human nature". In contrast, the papers of David Copp and Ronald de Sousa claim that there are characteristics of humans which are the sources of justification within normative contexts. David Copp argues that a certain set of relational properties possessed by all human persons, their basic needs, provide them with reasons for their actions, independently of the values they may have. Rejecting analyses for which the basic needs are all-purpose means, requirements of a normal life or of biological flourishing, Copp focuses the conceptual issue on the question of what these needs are requirements for. This is not dictated by "nature" in any biological sense. His suggestion is that the basic needs are the necessary conditions for the upholding of an agent's autonomy, explicated as the capacity to act on the values one has formed oneself. In answer to the question as to why it should be important to us to comply with our values, Copp claims that our values are a central part of our character structure or identity and that failure to act in accordance with them generally leads to guilt or shame. The anchor of Copp's argument for the significance of needs in practical deliberation is thus the claim that at bottom all human persons have a desire to avoid the loss of self-esteem or damage to their identity, a bottom-line desire which explains the striving for autonomy, even in cultures in which autonomy is not positively valued. This grounds what Copp calls the needs and values standard of rationality, which prescribes action according to ones values except where such action would endanger ones basic needs. According to this conception, humans have two sorts of reasons for action, which correspond to two of their central properties: being valuing creatures and being creatures with needs. As he argues against Bernard Williams, the former sort of reasons is accounted for by axiological subjectivism; the latter, however, is not. A very different attempt to found normative demands in the natures of human beings is advanced by Ronald de Sousa. He sets the scene for his constructive suggestion with two negative claims, both of which are also advanced by other contributors. The first is that no purely descriptive conception of human nature is to be had, an argument also to be found in the texts of Stagi and Assmann. The second is that evolutionary biology's rejection of all but genealogical criteria for the definition of species means that there is no such thing as a universal human nature, a claim also made by Shore. De Sousa, however, goes on to argue not for a rejection of normative arguments from nature, but instead for the grounding of norms in the particular natures of individuals. In effect, what is "natural" for an individual reduces to what gives her satisfaction, and may be expected to originate

An Introduction

21

in, and reflect, the possibilities and necessities of specific socio-cultural contexts. According to de Sousa, finding out what that is involves attending - critically to ones emotional experiences. His central claim is that the human emotions are a specifically human mode of simultaneous access to, and constitution of, axiological reality. In spite of the fact that this value-dimension is neither universal nor timeless, it still makes sense to think of it as the nature of individual humans, because of its being pre-given in their dispositions and passively actualised in emotional experience. For de Sousa, there are thus facts about what is good for each of us, and it is through our emotions that we have cognitive access to those facts. A central topic of de Sousa's discussion with the psychologist Wolfgang Friedlmeier concerns the extent to which the good for individuals thus conceived permits a derivation of the moral good for some collective. The papers collected here by no means delineate exhaustively the significance of conceptions of the human within the human and social sciences. Indeed, they show that the formation of such conceptions is in part dependent on the way in which more specialised issues are dealt with within specific disciplinary contexts. Nevertheless, they clearly demonstrate that there is a highly significant common set of issues at stake in disciplinary contexts largely considered as independent of one another and that the respective discussions can only benefit from familiarity with the way in which other disciplines deal with the issues. A careful reading of the contributions also shows that a considerable number of what appear to be indissoluble controversies are rooted in differing uses of terms, which at times lead to confusion about the relationship between the varying referents of the terms in question. As this is particularly the case with the expression "human nature", the collection ends with an Afterword which attempts to provide an overview over the various uses the term is given, as well as over the problems raised by those uses.

I

Conceptualising the Human

Anthropological Universality. On the Validity of Generalisations about Human Nature

The species man and Marmozet Are intimately linked The Marmozet survives as yet, But Men are all extinct. (Hilaire Belloc, The Bad Child's Book of Beasts,)

So far as I can see, it has as yet never been seriously contested that all human beings have (or should one better say: are?) bodies. These bodies are characterized by a number of features common to all organisms and especially to the animals, and others common only to the mammals, among which man most closely resembles the primates. Anthropological propositions, though allowing for these common features, especially focus on man's particularities, i.e. they attempt to bring out the specific difference between man and the other animals. And here anthropology is above all concerned with the difference between man and his closest relations among the primates, the Pongidae or anthropoid ape family. To draw the dividing line even more exactly, it also explores the relationship between these and the Hominidae, the zoological family which, besides man (Homo sapiens), includes his extinct precursors, and further investigates the position of Homo sapiens within that family. I quote from a personal communication from the physical anthropologist, Horst Seidler: "First of all, one has to point out the significance of the speciesdesignation in binary nomenclature. A species is defined by the substantival genus-name and the adjectival species-designation: Homo sapiens = genus Homo, species sapiens. This rule of nomenclature is no mere verbal play. Species (of one genus, J.S.) are populations which, albeit relatively close to one another genetically, are separated by the barrier of reproduction (members of different species cannot reproduce sexually, J.S.). Now, to be sure, there exists only one species of the genus Homo. In terms of paleoanthropology and comparative anatomy, evolution towards Homo sapiens is determined by the fact that, through an everincreasing adaptation of the whole skeleton, bipedal locomotion as a new acquisition has proved successful from the point of view of natural selection. Today we no longer speak of the 'missing link', but instead of the 'connecting link', which defines for us the transition from more or less arboreal primates (the Pongidae, J.S.) to the bipedal Hominidae (anthropoids, not to be confused with the genus

26

Justin Stagi

Homo; minimal definition: Hominidae are bipedal primates)." Seidler goes on to explain that such a "connecting link" was actually found in 1992 in Ethiopia: Ardipithecus ramidus was a "very apelike Hominid", who lived 4.4 million years ago and who was already capable of bipedal locomotion, whilst still feeling at home on trees (Seidler 1997). Bipedal locomotion led to an upright position, thus to the enlargement of the field of vision and to the liberation of the hands for uses other than locomotion. There are many other morphological peculiarities of the genus H o m o which are interconnected with these features. Taken together, they show the Hominidae to be less specialized and thus more adaptable (more "open towards the world": "weltoffen") than their pongid relations (Gehlen 1988, 79-116). Whereas the specific difference between the Hominidae and the Pongidae can be seen in bipedal locomotion, that between H o m o sapiens and the rest of the Hominidae seems to be the former's more systematic use of tools and implements: "It has been suggested that, as a matter of convention, the terms 'man' and 'human' may reasonably be applied (and limited) to those representatives of the family Hominidae which acquired a level of intelligence enabling them to fabricate tools and implements" (Le Gros Clarke 1966, 732). As the well-known experiments by Wolfgang Köhler have shown, primates also occasionally use tools (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1972, 312-316). Yet they do not use them systematically: their subsistence does not depend on their use. Thanks to the liberation of their hands, the Hominidae used tools more regularly; this formed part of their way of life: "Not: man makes tools — tools make man", as Seidler puts it. The genus Australopithecus, one of the Hominidae and a precursor of the genus Homo, which lived in central and southern Africa between 4.1 and 1.5 million years ago, already had hands capable of manipulating tools. An early species of the genus Homo, which lived in Tanzania about 1.8 million years ago (and thus for a time contemporaneously with Australopithecus) and is called H o m o habilis, used his hands in a secure and goal-oriented way for the fabrication of tools and implements. H o m o habilis' thumbs could be directionally opposed to his other fingers, enabling him thus to perform precision grips. Accordingly, his brain capacity — and as a result, his intelligence — was one and a half times larger that of Australopithecus, although still merely half of that of H o m o sapiens. It is reasonable to assume that the systematic use of tools and implements, including their fabrication, evolved pari passu with some system of communication and tradition, i.e. culture (the first signs of which have been observed among primates). So far, I have merely provided a minimal list of anthropological universals of a certain kind. If someone inquires about universal human characteristics, I would generally assume that the kind of answer I have provided is not likely to satisfy

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him. What such questions usually aim at is likely to be less the results of biological, than of philosophical inquiry. For the term "anthropological" has two principal meanings: It refers (a) to the biological concept of H o m o sapiens ("physical anthropology") and (b) to the philosophical concept of "human nature" ("philosophical" and "cultural anthropology"). Even if interconnected, the two concepts are not the same. Nobody will doubt that the human body has something to do with human nature. But is the latter reducible to the former? The immense range of humanly possible behaviour makes this highly improbable. The problem of human nature cannot be solved solely from the biological point of view. This problem is a well-known and ancient one. In the West, it was first posed when the Greek "Sophists" opposed "nature" (φύσις) to "custom" (νόμος) and to "the arts" (τέχναι). Plato reports that for Protagoras of Abdera (ca. 490-420 B.C.), man's non-specialization in relation to the other animals was the reason for his reliance on fire, tools and his intelligence (Prot. 320d-322a). According to the same report, Protagoras recognized varying degrees of mastery in "the arts", thus recognizing technological progress. In "custom", i.e. in social, political and religious life, he could, however, detect no such pan-human development: here, he claimed, mere relativity prevails. All "customs" are equally good for Protagoras, in so far as they bring about internal stability and external security, thereby fulfilling useful functions for the social units they serve (322a-323c). This greatest of the Sophists can thus be seen as the originator both of our present-day concept of culture - via Cicero's "cultura animi" (Cicero, Tuse. disp. II, 13; Dalfen 1984, 21 -34) — and of the doctrines of cognitive and moral relativism - tersely summarized in his dictum, "man is the measure of all things" (Diels/Kranz, 80 Β 1). He stands thus at the fountainhead of two intellectual movements still important today, anthropology and historicism. "Anthropology", as a subdiscipline of philosophy, is an outgrowth of German Humanism. The term ά ν θ ρ ω π ο λ ο γ ί α is not classical Greek. It was coined by one Magnus H u n d t in 1501. It was a Greek rendering of "Humanism" and at the same time a counterpart to "theology". It was given its classical definition by another German Humanist, Otto Casmann, in 1594: "Anthropology is the doctrine of human nature. H u m a n nature is an essence partaking of two worlds, the spiritual and the corporeal, yet united in one vehicle". 1 This definition, which stands in the Platonic and Christian tradition, situates human nature between the intelligible and the sensible worlds, or one could also say, between heaven and earth. It thus allows for the conception of culture and society as a "third world" between the natural and the supernatural (Niedermann 1941; Leopold 1980).

"Anthropologia est doctrina humanae naturae. H u m a n a natura est geminae mundanae, spiritualis et corporeae, in u n u m hyphistamenon unitae, particeps essentia". Cf. Diem 1962 and Marquard 1965.

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"Philosophical anthropology" was taught as a special subject at German Protestant universities until the early 19th century. Its tenets were derived from speculation, yet it supported them with empirical findings from the natural and moral sciences. It culminated in the anthropological writings of Immanuel Kant. Kant defined human nature by self-consciousness and the ensuing capacity for selfimprovement. Unlike Protagoras, he saw this latter capacity at work not only in the realm of technology, but also in social, political and religious life. Yet he claimed that it can only be realized by mankind as a whole, not by any individual human being (Spec. Beg.; Anthr.). Such confident speculation was attacked by Protagorean relativism, which revived in the 18th century in the shape of the "historicist" philosophies of Vico, Herder and Hegel. These were efflorescences of a growing historical sense. They aimed at an understanding and evaluation of all human behaviour from its specific, singular and unrepeatable preconditions. They contended that in order really to understand a piece of human action, one had to take on the actor's point of view, to enter into his mind by means of empathy. Historicism appeared to be an empiricist critique of premature generalization, whereas it was in fact an attack on the prevailing form of rationalism. It reverted from Plato's "essentialism" to the "instrumentalism" of Protagoras (Popper 1972). 2 In consequence it abandoned the notion of an immutable human nature. Instead, it saw that nature as forever changing with time, place and circumstances, and hence as accessible merely to a posteriori empirical research, not to a priori intuition. Nevertheless, historicism has in the meantime produced "essences" of its own: "national spirits", "class interests", "mentalities", "genders". One could say that historicism admits but one general proposition about humans: that human nature, though homogeneous enough to permit our empathy at all times and places, is otherwise so malleable that no other generalization can be made about it. "Cultural anthropology", the empirical discipline which came to the fore in the 19th century, is deeply indebted to this train of thought. Starting out from the "empirical pluralism of cultures", it regards these cultures as "typical chances of humanely possible behaviour", which tell us something, if not everything, about human nature (Mühlmann 1966, 17, 21). The empirical findings about various human ways of life, which had been accumulated by history, cultural anthropology and the related disciplines, allowed the problem of human nature to be posed in a methodologically more conscious manner in the 20th century. German "philosophical anthropology" The term "historicism" is often used in a rather imprecise way. Daniel Fulda distinguishes between what he calls "historicism I", the insight into the historicity of all reality, and "historicism II", modern historical science (Fulda 1996, 267-272; cf. also Muhluck 1991, 412-435 and Acham 1995, 294-298).

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was revived by authors like Scheler, Cassirer, Plessner and Gehlen. In the AngloSaxon countries, doctrines like Functionalism, Cultural Materialism and Neoevolutionism proceeded from general assumptions about "basic human needs". French Structuralism claimed to be a general theory of the human mind. This reappearance of anthropological thought confronted a historicism still vital in Marxism, cultural relativism, irrationalism and postmodernism. The question at the core of this collection of essays, and which I have taken up in the subtitle of this contribution, itself appears to grow out of historicist-empiricist assumptions. Translated into Kantian terms it would read: how is a philosophical anthropology possible? My stumbling block here is the idea of validity for all human beings. What exactly does this mean? At any rate, it brings up two problems: (a) "cultural universals" and (b) the boundaries of humanity, problems which must be briefly considered, before I can return to the question itself. ad (a). "Cultural universals" are "cultural forms and contents which, irrespective of historical connections, appear or may appear in any culture" (Hultkranz I960, 283). These include the uses of fire, tools and implements, clothes and adornment, symbols (language!) and the prohibition of incest, which can be seen as the corner stone of the family and kinship systems and thus of all other institutions. It is easier, however, to start such a list than to finish it, since most "cultural universals" are empirically contested. And it is near to impossible to integrate them all into one theoretical concept. All such attempts from Wissler (1923) to Malinowski (1944) and Rudolph/Tschohl (1977) have so far proved abortive. I think it is Claude Lévi-Strauss who can show us why. Whatever is universal, LéviStrauss contends, belongs to nature, whereas in culture infinite variability prevails. "Cultural universals" hence mark the precise turning point between nature and culture. They stand for anthropogenesis, the transition from the world of the Primates to the human world. Thus they tell us more about that transition than about culture itself (1970, 3-11). "Cultural universals" are hard to operationalize in such a way that their presence can be proven for all places, times, and circumstances. They are thus a favourite battleground for the age-old dispute between anthropology and historicism. Historicists delight in bringing up empiricist objections against any propounded universal. They thereby reduce anthropology to the rather insipid status of a "museum of counter-examples" (Christian Morgenstern). This of course cuts short any further discussion of human nature (Cf. Herskovits 1948; Rudolph 1968; Gellner 1985; Bohannan 1995; Searle 1995). I consider this a rather facile strategy. Employing it can enable one to gain the satisfaction of proclaiming one's own high methodological standards whilst dismissing those of other people, relegating their problems to the realm of nonsense. Yet however strict, I doubt that these methodological standards can do justice to

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disciplines like history and cultural anthropology, and to the problem under discussion. Firstly, the obsession with counter-examples does not reckon with the qualities of self-consciousness and world-openness, which enable human beings to "say no" even to their own inherent tendencies. "Cultural universals" are not so much extant institutions than such tendencies. Alleged counter-examples turn out under closer inspection frequently to be intended exceptions to recognized rules. This seems, for instance, to be the case in the reported transgressions of the prohibition of incest (Vivelo 1978, 214-230). Secondly, the empirical verification ofwhether a universal forms part of a particular culture is necessarily hampered by the fact that "cultures", "societies", "peoples" and other units of that kind are notoriously hard to delimitate. It is next to impossible to put forward exact criteria for membership in them - this too being a consequence of human world-openness (see below). But if such units are ill defined, it is hard to say which cultural properties form part of them and which not. Statements about "cultural universals" are thus necessarily less verifiable than an empiricist would wish. Nonetheless, they are possible within the indicated limits. And such statements are no doubt anthropological claims. ad (b). The boundaries of humanity seem at first sight to be obvious, much more obvious at any rate than those of the "peoples", "societies" and "cultures" within humanity. There are no intermediary beings between men and animals. Homo sapiens is the only surviving species among the Hominidae. Why then cannot the demarcation problem be quietly shelved? Why bother about the boundaries of humanity? The answer is that there are "connecting links". And the palaeoanthropological demarcation problem might very well reappear in what I propose to call "epeitanthropology", anthropology of the future. Will a genetically manipulated human being still be a member of humanity just like you and me? Moreover, a demarcation problem, albeit one which is often overlooked, even exists today. It is a nasty problem, which many nice people tend to avoid. When brought up, it engenders strong feelings. These are well-known features of an intellectual taboo. This taboo extends to the very discussion of human nature. The warning signal is the accusation of "biologism". Why should this be so? I think because of the modern linkage between membership in the species Homo sapiens and the possession of "human rights". A biological concept is thereby linked to a philosophical-juridical one. The single proposition of historicist anthropology formulated above can thus also be reformulated in the following way: because human nature is understandable everywhere at all times, however much it varies in all other respects, it entails the possession of human rights.

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Any attempt to discuss human nature more closely, especially in so far as it focuses on the human body, is seen as an attack on this axiom. Biological or semibiological concepts such as the"preadamites", the "races of man" or the"polygenesis of mankind" have been used to exclude certain human beings from the possession of human rights, as is well known. This is, however, no cogent reason for the refusal to discuss the subject any further. As I will attempt to show, this "politically correct" refusal is actually counterproductive. Exclusion of certain human beings from human rights is thus able to be perpetuated in practice in an uncontrolled manner. Do claims with general validity for all human beings also have to be valid for every individual human being? In that case, humanity would be definable as carrying the human genome. Self-consciousness, for example, cannot be ascribed to an idiot or a newborn. This is no academic hair-splitting. Both classes have been denied full human status and their members have been treated accordingly. The same problem poses itself in an even more pointed manner in the cases of the cerebrally dead and the unborn. Though carrying the human genome, they can, according to many people, certainly be capitalized as organ banks or aborted (and used by the pharmaceutical industry). I happened to read in today's paper that prenatal diagnostics under conditions of "defensive medicine" leads to pressure on pregnant women to have the foetus aborted, even in case of doubt. 3 Is such a "doubtful" foetus already beyond the boundaries of humanity? To me all this shows that a clear conception of human nature is indispensable. Simply identifying it with membership in the species and the possession of human rights is an easy way out which does not work in borderline cases. Those who prefer to leave the boundaries of humanity comfortably in the dark also use another warning signal called "essentialism". This doctrine, first coherently propounded by Plato and his pupil Aristotle, contends that related phenomena share a common "nature" or "essence". Nowadays it has a rather bad reputation. Like "biologism" it is said to be basically a doctrine of exclusion. O n e is reminded that Aristotle taught that slavery was justified by the "nature" of the slaves, a "nature" dissimilar to that of their masters, yet similar to that of the "barbarians", who are thus destined to become enslaved by the Greeks (Pol. 1255a-1256a). It is true that such apodictic determinations of "essences" exclude whatever or whomever one wants to exclude. They resemble the mythical-genealogical self-definitions of primitive and traditional societies, which hold themselves to be the first-born of mankind and concede full human status only to some choice, long-standing neighbours (Müller 1987). Modern racism revived this attitude by dramatizing quite insignificance differences within the species, such as skin colour or the shape of the skull, in the interest of exclusion. Frankfiirter Allgemeine Zeitung 128, 6/1997, 41. For the general problematic, see Hepp 1997.

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Nevertheless, if decisions concerning the boundaries of humanity are repeatedly made in practice, it is high time to face the problem in theory. O r should one continue to leave the ultimate decisions to uncontrollable and unqualified agents, such as individual pregnant women and their - however interested - advisers, the disconcerted medical personnel, the insurance companies or the organ dealers? I would consider this unworthy of a responsible intellectual. A few words have to besaid in this context on "human rights". The concept has not always existed, and is far from being generally respected, even today. It is a secular offshoot of the related ideas of "law of nature" and "divine law" (Jellinek 1919). It has, however, a social foundation more ancient and more enduring than Stoic and Christian thought, going back, as it were, to the very beginnings of human history. Moral or legal obligations between members of different groups, and thus between these groups themselves, are the very basis of intertribal relations, and no human group is known to have existed in complete isolation. This does not contradict the above-mentioned tendency to consider oneself the standard of humanity, but complements it. Already the simplest known hunting-andgathering societies recognize a "supreme god" overarching the various tribal deities and genealogies (Schmidt 1912). Though hardly fulfilling religious functions within the separate groups, this god does so between them, legitimising, overseeing and sanctioning the dealings between their members (Durkheim 1915, 285-295). This mutual recognition of the qualification for reciprocity may take the form of ascribing a common "essence" to all human beings regardless of their group affiliations. As a religious or philosophical concept, this "essentialism" has developed pari passu with the extension of intertribal relations (Tenbruck 1989). It has an exclusive side, yet far more important was, and is, its inclusive one. In classical Greece, it began to be extended even to "barbarians" and slaves: Aristotle's defence of Greek superiority proves that it was under attack; Plato accorded to women the same rights as to men precisely for "essentialist" reasons (Rep. 45 ld457c). The sea-faring and mercantile Greek city states at the same time formed part of a zone of very diverse, yet interacting cultures focusing on the Near East. This zone was considered by its inhabitants to coincide with the "inhabited world" (οικουμένη) itself. Generally speaking, the ideas of "humanity" and of "one world" are closely interconnected. Both ideas returned with increased force in the modern period, no doubt due to Western world-exploration and world-hegemony (Tenbruck 1989). Yet in one crucial aspect this modern οικουμένη differs from the classical one, as well as from those of all other great civilizations. These simply assumed that they coincided with all humanity. At their outer margins, they considered themselves to be merely surrounded by insignificant "barbarians" not worth closer inspection, and beyond these by semi-human mythical beings. Their concept of humanity was thus first and foremost religious-philosophical and only partly empirical. O n e could say

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that they preferred to leave the boundaries of humanity comfortably in the dark (Stagi 1997). The modern οικουμένη instead not merely assumes, but positively knows that it coincides with the inhabited world. By means of systematic exploration, it has learned that no intermediaries between man and animals exist and that no mythical beings live on earth. It is easy to be scandalized by those 16thcentury theologians who discussed whether the American "pre-adamites" were to be accorded full human status, or to poke fun at those 17th-century explorers who sought mythic Herodotian monsters in the interior of Africa. Our modern sensitivity and superiority are founded precisely upon their endeavours. They brought about something new in world history. The notion of a homogeneous species Homo sapiens inhabiting the whole earth is a scientific one which we owe to Linné. Yet this makes the problem of human nature by no means easier. For the notion of the species Homo sapiens was bound up from its beginnings with the legal-philosophical (and ultimately theological) notion of human rights. For this reason, it is misleading to consider the problem of human nature purely in empiricist terms. A conception of that nature which fully answers to the challenge of my subtitle must be, I think, compatible with empirical findings, supported by them and capable of further elucidating them, without being empiricist in the sense of claiming to be exclusively derived from them. Incidentally, empiricism is here not as innocuous as it pretends to be. Reformulated assertively, the refusal to state anything positive about human nature (besides its malleability) amounts to the claim that human cultures are incommensurable. Yet if this is the case, why should we not approve of unchecked enmity between human societies? Cultural relativism sees itself as utterly fair to every one of these, adopting their own specific points of view and standards of evaluation. Yet faced with the above-mentioned self-preferment of all cultures, this so-called fairness leads to cultural Darwinism, the valuation of success over and above anything else. And the historicist reproach of "essentialism" can easily be countered by the reminder that people have also been excluded from human rights for historicist reasons, e.g. as "objective enemies of the proletariat" (Stagi 1992). In anthropology, as in autobiography, the subject and object of reflection are the same. It is always a little awkward to talk about oneself. Self-knowledge cannot be proven to an unsympathetic listener. Thus it is with anthropological knowledge: "The nature of man is familiar, impressively unique and almost indescribable. Common experience meets it daily; every considered system of thought or action declares or implies some view of it; none of the scholarly or scientific disciplines presents it in terms of all that common sense recognizes in it" (Redfield 1996, 827). 4 On self-thematisation cf. Hahn and Kapp 1987.

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A certain family likeness of all human beings to each other, which someone not afraid of being denounced as an "essentialist" may call "human nature", is the prerequisite of all fruitful communication and interaction within humanity: "homo sum; humani nil a me alienum puto", as Terence tersely summarized the Stoic doctrine (Heaut. I, 1, 25; cf. Pohlenz 1948). Empathy between human beings may even surmount extreme cultural and epochal distances. No attempt to understand human nature may dispense with the experience of the "humanely possible" thus collected. Nonetheless, our knowledge of human nature begins at home. If we understand the manifestations of others — admittedly, we may not do so fully, yet still to a certain degree - this is because we find the germs of such forms of behaviour within ourselves. Empathy cannot do without introspection. Yet empathy and introspection are distrusted by strict empiricists, because the knowledge thus gained is not wholly communicable. Anthropological tenets are even more difficult to justify than other forms of self-thematisation. In other cases, the statements which somebody makes about himself can be checked by external evidence. In statements about human nature, there is as it were no external evidence, for whoever makes them shares that very nature with his audience. And human nature nowhere occurs "in the raw", but can only be inferred from human manifestations. There is thus little unanimity about it. It is easy to delude oneself about it in ways which accord with one's particular wishes and fears. This is of course water on the mill of the sceptics. Notwithstanding all this, I dare to propose here a model of human nature. This model is derived from a tripartition made by Robert Redfield (1966), who distinguished three principal components of human nature. I would like to propose viewing these three components as a three-layered structure, upon which we should see a fourth layer as being superimposed. Human nature is represented in this model thus not as a homogeneous "essence", but as one welded together during the process of anthropogenesis from several components, which are all nonetheless "essential" to the finished product. If it is permitted to compare the great and the small, one can imagine a well-seasoned cake, composed of four layers which have had time to interpenetrate and to intermingle their flavours: ( 1 ) The biological heritage of the species Homo sapiens. This heritage has already been alluded to above. It includes many characteristics shared with other animals. Like these, man has certain inborn dispositions for special forms of behaviour (instincts and reflexes). Yet in human beings, these are only rudimentarily developed and therefore very malleable. Non-specialization, "world-openness", is thus already a biological characteristic of the species. (2) The cultural heritage of mankind. Human "world-openness" readily combines with the demands of the various environments man has proved able to live in. Man has thereby transformed himself from a biologically determined to a socio-culturally co-determined being. "Art is man's nature", as Edmund Burke

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put it. Eugen Fischer has expressed the same thought in biological terms: man is the domesticated form of an animal of which no wild form survives (Gehlen 1988, 106). The cultural universals are, so to say, "index fossils" of this transformation. (3) Particular traditions within humanity. As far as we know, mankind has always lived divided into distinct communities. These communities have developed special traditions adapted to their environment and to their historical fates. These local-historical traditions can be seen as modifications of man's cultural heritage. They have the above-mentioned tendency to exclusiveness, which, however, could not prevent interaction across their boundaries. Man's cultural heritage is transmitted to the individual via one (sometimes more) of these particular traditions. They are thus closer to the life-world, and easier to describe and analyse than "human nature" itself. Yet somehow they share in the elusiveness of that concept. "Socio-cultural system", "fait social total", "cultural pattern", "ethos", "culture-and-personality", "national character", "mentality", "lifestyle" and so on - the very plurality of these notions show that these "human natures" are as difficult to conceptualise and to justify as the "human nature" behind them. (4) The Utopian potential of humanity: Components (2) and (3) share one essential feature: they attempt to cope with the world as such (tendentially: the whole of the world). They thus have to define the position of humans in general (component 2) with respect to their own socio-cultural group (component 3) within the world. Both can then be seen as anticipations of the whole of the world from a locally and temporally restricted point of view (Stagi 1993). This need to satisfy oneself about one's own position in the world is already observable in archaic rituals of imitation, disguise and transformation of identity (Gehlen 1986, 145-164). Such rituals transpose human beings to a position outside themselves, and for that precise reason enlighten them about themselves and their position within the world. O n e could use the term "transcendence" in this context and maintain that human culture as such entails an openness towards transcendence. Thus no culture is ever "completed"; a culture is inevitably susceptible to further development. "Human nature" and its derivatives are thus burdened with a double aspect: they are both descriptive and prescriptive concepts. They involve valuejudgements and political attitudes. Stating what is "human" also means stating what is "inhuman" or "superhuman". Actual human behaviour - and thus the "nature" behind it - shows potential in both directions. "Human nature" thus also contains a call upon human beings to strive to attain superhuman goals and to avoid the inhuman: "put off the old man ... put on the new man", as the Gospel says (Ephes. IV, 22, 24). In Kant we get the enlightened expression of this Christian thought. Its religions roots are still palpable in modern secular meliorism. The malleability of human nature stressed by this train of thought entails the claim that nothing here is definitely fixed, that this nature could be bettered, for example, by changing the environment human beings live in.

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The model thus adumbrated can well do without the concept of "essence". That of "family resemblance" would do just as well. This resemblance is not surprising considering the genetic relationship and historical cross-influences between all human beings. Yet for reasons of convenience, I continue to call it "human nature". It depends on one's value judgements to which of these four components one assigns the greatest weight. Whoever stresses ( 1 ) and (2) will take a sceptical view of meliorism and educational optimism, and vice versa. Those with such a perspective, among whom I include myself, are often characterized as "biologistic". Those who believe in the unlimited powers of environment will deem (3) the most important, and enthusiastic meliorists even (4). Much so-called anthropological discussion is actually a controversy about such values. Meliorism is a noble thought, focusing in the very best in human nature. Yet in spite of that (or is it because of that?) it has caused much evil. The somewhat reserved expression "utopian potential" has not been chosen inadvertently. Whoever strives to improve men opens up a gulf between the objects of their endeavours and the unimproved rest, and we are back with Aristotle and exclusion. If it is to be all mankind, this entails a universal compulsion to adopt the thus improved nature, and in consequence the oppression - and in last consequence the extermination - of all those who cannot or don't want to catch up with it. Either because of the emotions involved here, or because of the inherent complication of the whole matter, anthropology, considered as the study of human nature, has so far not made the progress one could have expected of it. It has not succeeded in balancing the four above-mentioned components (and possibly others which I may have overlooked) in a sound, empirically substantiated and uncontested way against each other. The complication is great indeed. Anthropology remains a philosophically oriented super-discipline encompassing the natural and social sciences as well as the humanities; it uses various methods, thus arriving at propositions with different epistemological statuses. All this must sadden the lovers of simplicity. Yet it cannot be helped. However divergent in its components, human nature seems to be quite well integrated, even if'open towards the world". I think that Gehlen was right in calling man a "special project" ("Sonderentwurf") not known before in nature, even if most of its elements had in some form or other already been there. Moreover, I am convinced that he was also right in stating that man must be analysed in terms of the accomplishments of the tasks posed to him by his life (Gehlen 1988, 3-13). This both connects anthropology with the natural sciences and detaches it from them. This also implies that its starting point (and the point to return to when lost on a wrong track) is the life-world, knowledge of oneself and of others. Thus, in spite of its lack of a characteristic method, its elusive subject matter and the heterogeneity of its findings, anthropology retains a unity, and this is the reason for its standing as a separate discipline.

"World-Openness" and the Question of Anthropological Universalism. Comments on Justin Stagl's Paper Neil Roughley Justin Stagl's paper closes with what he calls a "model of human nature", which is divided into four strata (p. 34f.). The content of level 3 is grounded in the claim that it is part of human nature to take on particular, culturally specific forms: the claim that humans are essentially cultural beings, supplemented by the premise that significant and unavoidable components of cultures are particular.1 Level 2 consists of those characteristics which occur in all human cultures. The second and third strata thus consist of properties which seem to differ merely in the extension of their applicability. Now, it is incumbent on any "model" which operates with different levels to provide some insight into the ways in which these are related, if it is to be legitimately called a model at all.2 Stagl's metaphor of intermingling flavours hardly fulfils that task. In what follows, I want to focus on the most significant transition, that between the first, biological level and the rest. Its central significance lies in the fact that it is intended to explain the genesis of all three further levels: of the elements of universality (level 2), particularity (level 3) and potentiality (level 4) which Stagi sees as characterising the cultural life of all humans. Stagi presents the transition in the following way: firstly, he lists the morphological characteristics of bipedal locomotion, upright position, enlargement of the field of vision and liberation of the hands. These biological characteristics are then qualified as symptoms of the reduced specialisation and increased adaptability of the Hominidae in comparison with the rest of the Pongidae. In a third step, the feature of increased adaptability is then equated with a property which plays a pivotal role in the German tradition of philosophical anthropology. This is the property of "world-openness". In my understanding of the writings in which the concept is to be found (Cf. Scheler 1991, 38; Gehlen 1983, 103f.), this refers to more than simply biological adaptability. In a preliminary move towards clarification of the concept, one can say that "world-openness" entails having a "world" or cultural surroundings, as opposed to a purely natural environment. Having the latter involves an organism's perceptual apparatus and motivational constitution

1 2

Strangely, Stagi claims that the elements of particularity resulting from specific cultural contexts are themselves part of human nature. I will disregard this peculiarity in the following remarks. No isomorphism, or structural analogy, between model and field of application can be established where the relationships within the model are unclear. Cf. Black 1962, 238.

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being focused exclusively on specific aspects of its surroundings. An example from the literature is that a squirrel and a spider on the same tree don't exist for each other, as they have no role to play in each other's survival (Gehlen 1941, 45). As I wish to show, a great deal depends on the positive content which the concept of world-openness is given. At this stage, two points should be noted. Firstly, the concepts of increased biological adaptability and having culture are certainly not identical, although this is implied by the grammatical device of apposition (p. 26). Secondly, adducing the feature of culturality alongside the aforementioned biological characteristics doesn't amount to its explanation. W e simply have one further feature, one which we can express with Bernard Williams by saying that culture is a fact of human ethology (Williams 1995, 79f.). At the core of Stagl's paper is the justification of claims about level two of his model, claims about cultural universals. These have to be shown to be at least compatible with empirical findings, both of biology and of ethnology, as well as being plausible in the light of our everyday experience (anthropology "begins at home", p. 34). H e proposes a certain conception of what such compatibility involves, a proposal which has to solve two kinds of problem: firstly, what I will call the difficulty of integrative theory and secondly, problems with the empirical testing of claims to anthropological universality. These problems arise as a result of apparent methodological difficulties of spanning the nature-culture divide, and because, on certain assumptions, it may look as if falsification oí any universal claim is possible. It is in his solution to this second problem that Stagi makes it clear the significance he attaches to the biological level. And it is here that the argument from "world-openness " takes on its central role.

1. The Difficulty of Integrative Theory The first difficulty Stagi sees with lists of cultural universals, such as that given on p. 29, is a difficulty of developing a theoretical conception which could accommodate all such phenomena. The extent to which one sees this as a significant difficulty for the validation of individual claims depends on how strongly one is committed to some kind of epistemological coberentism. Even if one does take a strong coherentist position, the lack of some such theory which integrates all those phenomena that are empirically found in every society investigated is hardly a sufficient reason to reject claims about the individual phenomena in the meantime. Stagi adopts from Lévi-Strauss what he claims is an explanation for the difficulty with such theoretical integration (p. 29). It involves three claims, two of which appear to contradict each other: firstly that universals belong to nature, rather than to culture; secondly that there are cultural universals after all, but that these mark th^.transition between nature and culture; and thirdly that this precultural

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or transitional status explains the impossibility of integrative theory. H o w can the first and second claims appear together? I would guess in the following way: if, with Aristotle, we conceive "nature" as that realm of phenomena which exists independently of any intervention on the part of human beings (Phys. 192 b 8ff.) and culture is seen as what is constructed by human beings, then the claim that cultural universals are in some sense natural would be the claim that there are certain forms of construction of the human environment about which human beings in general have no choice. The relationship between nature and culture would not be disjunctive, as certain forms of constructive human intervention would be determined by elements of the human condition - perhaps genetic which are there independently of what human beings do. In this way, cultural universals could turn out to be natural, in the sense of being determined by natural universals. I presume that it is this understanding of the two concepts which makes it possible to claim both that universals are natural, rather than cultural, and that there are cultural universals which mark the transition from nature to culture. What we then have is a certain conceptual structuring of the relevant domain and a claim about the relationships between the different aspects of that field. In certain forms that claim would be accessible to empirical testing. It is a central claim of evolutionary psychology that the disciplines it draws on do indeed provide information about determinants which culture has to follow. If I have reconstructed the argument correctly, then there is nothing here which explains why theoretisation of cultural universals isn't possible. O n the contrary, it provides the structure of such a theory. It should be noted that, even if one accepts that this is the theory-structure one needs here, then it would still not necessarily provide an exhaustive explanation of cultural universals. Perhaps there are general forms of construction of the human environment which come into being, not because there are causal mechanisms which determine what humans in general do, but because human beings have generally seen that certain forms of behaviour are rational, considering their own make-up and the environment around them. Such forms would be purely cultural in the sense of only coming into being because agents chose to construct them. They would however have a natural foundation, in the sense that there would be no reason for rationally choosing such forms if certain aspects of the environment and human constitution weren't already given.

2. The Difficulty of Operationalisation and the Status of Counter-Examples The second kind of objection which for Stagi can sensibly be raised against a list of cultural universals is that they tend to be empirically contested. This can be the case for two reasons. Firstly, there is an obvious problem with any notion of

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verification here: if universality entails not only applicability to all geographical regions, but also to all temporal regions inhabited by human beings, i.e. the past and even the future, then anyone after something called universal verification is going to be in big trouble. However, if this is supposed to be an objection, it is clearly a silly one. It is of course the old problem of induction. Without wanting to claim that either the problem of induction or the more general problem of scepticism have been solved, we should first of all hold onto the fact that these problems are there in the hard sciences, so that anyone who brings them up in the context of anthropology isn't saying anything specific about the field in question. Secondly, it might be shown that there are cultures in which no phenomena corresponding to the postulated universals actually crop up. It should be noted that Stagi appears to allow that there may be putative counter-examples to any feature that seems universal. I wonder whether this is plausible. At any rate, where we have such counter-examples, it would seem that we have straightforward cases offalsification of empirical claims. Now, as is well-known, even within the natural sciences, individual counter-examples are often insufficient to lead to the abandonment of a theory. In the words of that genuine empiricist, Nelson Goodman: "Most scientific laws are ... not assiduous reports of detailed data but sweeping Procrustean simplifications" (1978, 121). O n the other hand, theories of the human are in a very different situation to theories of specific areas of particular natural sciences. W e are precisely not dealing with a field with clearly delineated boundaries, within which there is a theoretical consensus up to a specific point, on the other side of which disagreements begin. And the kind of pressure not to see a specific counter-example as conclusive does not come from the constraints imposed by theoretical background assumptions shared within a scientific community. It stems instead from the everyday understanding acquired in the course of living within a culturally specific life-world.

3. "World-Openness" Stagi offers one main reason why one should not be too hasty to abandon general claims about the human in the face of counter-examples: cultural universals have, he claims, a different status to the laws of natural science. They are regularities with the status of tendencies, so that nothing determines when they are realised. This claim presupposes a fundamental fact about being human, which Stagi, following the philosophical anthropologist Max Scheler, labels the capacity to "say No" to one's own impulses (1991, 55). Following Arnold Gehlen's modification of Scheler's position, Stagi then relates this capacity to "say No" to the previously mentioned biological fact that the human animal is not adapted to any specific environment. H e also adds the further concept of self-consciousness. T h e latter two

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attributes, he claims, explain the first (or at least: they make it possible, p. 30). The relationship between these three different notions seems to me however anything but clear. Firstly, if Stagi is right that human beings have a unique capacity to take a stand on their own impulses or desires, that is, to decide whether or not they endorse such impulses and act accordingly, then the attribute in question is that of a specific kind of freedom. It is then a further question what that freedom precisely consists in: whether it is simply the capacity to make first-order impulses the object of further higher-order impulses, which are themselves causally determined, or whether the capacity to take such a stand has to be seen as including a stronger conception of independence from pre-existing states. If one opts for the second possibility, then it is, secondly, difficult to see what the theoretical status is of the biological facts brought together under the concept of non-adaptation to a specific environment. They may be the preconditions for the development of such a capacity, but what seems clear is that they can not take on anything like an explanatory role in relation to such a form of freedom. If, on the other hand, one opts for the first possibility, then the notion of human beings as entities with the peculiar capacity to take a stand themselves on their own impulses (Gehlen 1988,24) 3 loses much of its theoretical importance. For Gehlen, biological determination by pre-programmed responses to the environment is replaced by determination by social and cultural factors (1983a, 162). In the expression "openness to the world", "openness" doesn't then mean that the options an individual might take are open, that is, undecided in advance. Instead, it means that the organism is completely exposed to, subject to a moulding by the cultural environment. The notion of "world-openness" doesn't clarify the issues, but rather lumps things together which ought conceptually to be taken apart. Thirdly, although both Scheler and Gehlen see the attribute of self-consciousness as intimately connected with the capacity to take a stand on one's desires (Scheler 1991, 52ff.; Gehlen 1983, 104), the relationship of this practical capacity to the theoretical capacity for reflection on one's own condition is anything but clear. As Kant also plays a central role in Stagl's paper, it is worth mentioning Kant's position on this one. Kant originally believed that freedom could be derived from self-consciousness (Met. L 1( 269), but in his critical writings - and it seems to me, correctly — he came to the conclusion that such a theoretical capacity could be imagined without any necessary consequences for the ways in which the beings with that capacity bring about their own actions (CpR A 546ff. / Β 574ff.) . 4

3 4

T h e German "das stellungnehmende Wesen" ([1940], 32) is rendered in English by the somewhat abstract "being w h o must form attitudes". This is what is at stake when Kant wonders whether "reason can have causality".

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Awareness of something doesn't necessarily entail the interest in, or capability of, doing anything about it. O f the three attributes mentioned together here then, self-consciousness is, taken on its own, irrelevant for the claim that cultural universals are to be understood as mere tendencies. Which of the other two characteristics is to be seen as explanatory depends on which reading of "world-openness" is chosen. Either way, we have here a claim about a founding characteristic of the structure of what it means to be the human. H o w this claim is to be justified remains an open question. That of course depends on which option one takes. They are, as I hope to have made clear, principally different. H o w are we to establish which is correct? As I said, I don't see how the paleoanthropological and biological facts mentioned are going to help, however empirically well-documented these in themselves may be. They are compatible with either version. As Stagi rightly states (p. 30f.), putative discussions about descriptive characteristics of the human can often be shown to be disputes about values. Does this mean that we simply have to chose whether we prefer to think of ourselves as autonomous rather than as pre-programmed? There is a further problem here for the descriptive universalist who postulates either version of "world-openness" - either as the freedom of individuals or cultures to resist natural tendencies, or as the possibility of natural determinants being completely overridden by socio-cultural determinants. Either version is not only compatible with a large empirical variety of cultural phenomena. It is also a useful argument for the cultural relativist, who can use it to dispute the existence of any cultural universals at all. In fact, it appears that the second version is precisely the one anthropological proposition which Stagi attributes to historicism (p. 28). 5 I think we need more information on the status of the tendencies Stagi refers to. Are they dispositions which might not be realised at all, but which we can safely? - assume to be present even where not actualised? And how far can such non-actualisation be accepted as compatible with universality? When merely a few individuals in a given culture don't behave according to such tendencies? When certain groups consciously resist them? Or even when a whole culture doesn't manifest them? O n e would be grateful for greater precision on these points. The argument that units such as cultures or societies are difficult to delimit (p. 30) doesn't help; it only increases the difficulty of knowing what is being claimed. Without some precision here, it looks rather as though we might be free

5

Something along just these lines is to be f o u n d in Clifford Geertz. Geertz argues that, because "man is ... an incomplete, an unfinished animal", he is desperately dependent on "cultural programs", "outside-the-skin control mechanisms", and that this is the reason why "to be human ... is to be a particular kind of man". See Geertz 1973, 44ff.

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to postulate all sorts of universals and simply argue that their non-instantiation is due to the human beings in question not conforming to tendencies they really have. This is obviously a very slippery theoretical slope.

4. Anthropology and Normativity The last area I want to comment on is that of normative questions, which, as Stagi rightly reminds us, are closely bound up with questions of descriptive universalism in this context. I will touch briefly on two issues. Firstly, there is the question of the classification of the cerebrally dead, the unborn, the radically mentally deficient and even possible future genetically altered relatives of our own species. Stagi asks whether we are to say that they belong under the category of the human or not. He argues that if we don't draw a clear dividing line between the human and the non-human, we leave it undecided whether certain entities are invested with the rights which all human beings have. This is, in a sense, correct. If someone refuses to apply the concept of the human equally to people from different cultural communities, then they are not going to apply the concept of human rights equally - if they indeed possess that concept at all. Nevertheless, Stagl's urging this point in relation to the kind of cases he mentions doesn't take adequate account of the fact that, even if belonging to the human species can be seen as a necessary condition of having full human rights, it is hardly a sufficient condition. A terminally comatose human being is undoubtedly a human being. He or she is however a human being with a very special further property, and one which is certainly morally relevant. Obviously, all the questions of so-called practical ethics loom here. Without entering into a discussion of the difficult issues involved, it seems to me clear that one cannot develop sensible argumentative strategies without differentiating within the sphere of the human. It would, I think, be an absurd category mistake to want to apply the full gamut of human rights to a foetus. Should we just say that foetuses generally don't make use of their right to freedom of speech? Being human is not an all-or-nothing moral category, which decides all the issues one way or another. On the other hand, if we take the plausible option of working with the more restricted category of the person, which is likely to be a sub-category within the class of human beings, one must certainly beware of concluding over-hastily that the descriptive property of not belonging to that class of beings has the immediate normative consequence of depriving the entity in question of all rights that persons have. A permanently comatose human being may no longer be a person. However, he or she was one before, and that certainly makes a difference. Secondly, Stagi concludes his reflections on the boundaries of humanity with a historical narrative, which tells a tale of the parallel genesis of the descriptive and

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normative concepts of the human. His socio-historical claim is that reciprocity formed the basis of both descriptive and normative concepts. I think this tale of the constitution of the descriptive category has a high degree of plausibility. O n the other hand, there is a logical and motivational gap between the recognition of forms of commonality which make such reciprocity possible and the acceptance of the equal value of the beings in question. Stagi himself asks: "if [human cultures are incommensurable], why should we not approve of unchecked enmity between human societies?" (p. 33). Intercultural understanding is indeed, at least ideally, a check on intercultural hostility. A commonality of descriptive characteristics is however not in itself a commonality of normative standards. What one would have to show here is that there are common descriptive characteristics of all human beings which make it rational for them to accept specific norms, independently of their particular cultural orientations and individual desires.

A Reply to Neil Roughley Justin

Stagi

Though well argued, Neil Roughley's comments do not seem to me to be altogether appropriate to what I have said. His main strategy is to produce an "alienation effect", thus making my text appear more idiosyncratic than it actually is. By inserting labels like "explaining", "explanatory" and "explanation", Roughley makes it look over-assertive. He reconstructs it in order to deconstruct it by applying to it a rigorous logic of science. He completely leaves out what I said about empathy, introspection and the relationship between anthropology and autobiography. Some of his objections are constructive, especially those in his fourth section: Anthropology and Normativity. Others seem to me to be characterized more by ingenuity than by adequacy to their purported object. This is particularly the case in sections 2 ( The Difficulty of Operationalization and the Status of Counter-Examples) and 1 ( The Difficulty of Integrative Theory). These are, after all, both difficulties which were not raised by me, but which are part and parcel of the anthropological discussion. In my reply, however, I will focus on our main disagreement, which centres on my "model of human nature" and on the concept of "worldopenness" (Roughley's introductory remarks and section 3: "World-Openness"). I probably have not made it sufficiently clear that the Hominidae do not form part of the Pongidae (pp. 25f.). Both are more distantly related; some people think that they are separate families of a single "superfamily", Hominoidea. The paleoanthropological and biological facts about Homo sapiens are not as insignificant for human nature as Roughley holds them to be (p. 41). His approving quotation from Bernard Williams, "culture is a fact of human ethology" (p. 38) is, taken by itself, a mere sophism. By subscribing to it, one can be a "naturalist" (man is just an animal) and a "culturalist" (man is completely moulded by his cultural surroundings) at the same time. I do not think that I am being unfair to Roughley if I assume that this is his basic attitude in the question of human nature. What does he gain by playing down the difference between man and the other animals in this way? He is able to dramatize the gulf between level 1 and the other three levels of my model. Yet after he has achieved this, biology recedes into the background; he is no longer interested in it. Concerning my levels 2 and 3, he says that they "merely" differ in the extension of their applicability (p. 37). He thinks it "strange" that particularism should be considered as a part of human nature itself (ibid.). Now this is precisely what historicists assume. With my insistence on

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human particularism ("human natures", as Robert Redfield has it), I am also not alone in philosophical anthropology. Erich Rothacker even speaks of a "law of the polarity of universal and particular tendencies" in man (Rothacker 1988, 42ff.). If my model is to make sense at all, everything depends on the interpretation of its pivotal concept, "world-openness". Max Scheler, who coined the term, says that a "world-open" being, i.e. man, "has 'world"'} He neither says that such an entity has "a 'world'", as Roughley erroneously translates, nor that having world is identical with having "cultural surroundings", as he wrongly expounds (p. 37). Scheler was a phenomenologist. For him, the world is the "things themselves". Man is for him characterized by his "objectivity" or "determinability through the thus-ness of things themselves".2 Arnold Gehlen, who is concerned to avoid Scheler's opposition between "Spirit" and "World", yet nonetheless retains the conception of "world-openness", sees the world as a principally open sphere of objects, which overwhelm with impressions those beings which are open to them. In coming to terms with them, man builds a "nest" within the world - culture (1983, I60ff.). "World-openness", as I understand it in the tradition of Scheler and Gehlen, is thus emphatically not determinability by any given environment, be it natural or cultural. I have therefore expressly said that man reflects on his position within the whole of the world ("transcendence": see my remarks on level 4). I think that many of the disagreements between Roughley and me follow from this basic misunderstanding.

1 2

"Ein solches Wesen hat ' Welt"' (Scheler 1991, 38). "Bestimmbarkeit durch das So-sein von Sachen selbst" (1991, 39).

Human Nature, Human Variety, Human Freedom Mary Midgley

Jean-Paul Sartre and B. F. Skinner did not agree on many things, and on still fewer did they also agree with Karl Marx. But when Marx said that there was no such thing as human nature, only human history, he spoke for both o f them and for many other influential theorists in their century as well. By Marx's day, the whole idea of human nature was already in such deep trouble that there seemed good reason to abolish it altogether. More lately, however, people are beginning to suspect that we do have a need for such a concept and to sketch out the repairs that we must do if we are to use it properly. Having long been engaged in this difficult business myself, I am particularly happy to contribute to a volume which aims at getting this whole topic in perspective. I have always understood that anthropology is a central area for the problem. But because a dozen other disciplines are also involved in it, it may be worth while to stand back somewhat from all of them and try to see why things went so badly wrong with this concept in the first place. The ancient abuses that distorted the topic are still very active. I think we need to look at them before we can approach our present difficulties.

1. Interest and Generality in the Study of Human Nature Essentially the trouble has always been that ideas about human nature have been used as weapons of war rather than as tools of enquiry. Attempts to define it have almost always been propagandist, yet their bias tended never to be properly recognised. Theorists claimed to be declaring a timeless, universal truth when in fact they were usually supporting one side or the other in the clash between individuals and the society of their day. Thinkers who were fairly well satisfied with that society (such as Aristotle and Hegel) expounded ideas of human nature which justified current customs. Since those customs were usually complicated, this approach could produce quite complex theories. But they were always firmly slanted towards acceptance of current hierarchical social arrangements. O n the revolutionary side, more discontented and drastic thinkers such as Plato, Hobbes, Nietzsche, Freud (and Marx himself) produced accounts of our species-nature which were much simpler, more sweeping and more dramatic. Each of these prophets celebrated a particular chosen motive or group of motives

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which he thought would tend to change society in the right direction, claiming that it was central to our whole nature. Because they were convinced of the importance of this change, these thinkers often treated other competing motives with reductive contempt. No doubt some bias here is unavoidable. We cannot be indifferent to questions about human nature. We cannot approach them as purely objective factual enquiries. Indeed, people do not usually start speculating as widely as this about our natural constitution at all unless they suspect that something has gone wrong. They point out facts about it because they think those neglected facts ought to be attended to and acted on. They are recommending new ways of looking at things, not just because they have noticed some new truths but because they think this will make for better ways of acting. In itself, this reforming approach is quite in order. The trouble arises when the resulting suggestions are treated as if they were not moral advice but purely factual propositions which could be proved to anybody by citing evidence. Thus, when Hobbes wrote that "no man giveth but with intention of Good to himselfe, because Gift is Voluntary, and of all Voluntary Acts, the Object is to every man his own Good" (Lev. I, xv; 83) or that "the Value, or W O R T H of a man, is as of all other things, his Price; that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his Power" (Lev., I, x; 50), he did not think that he was just recommending a way of looking at things which might be useful for some political purposes. He took himself to be stating universal, provable propositions like those in geometry, which he considered to be the only true science (Lev., Part I, ch. 4; 22f.). It was in Hobbes's time — in the early seventeenth century - that this assumption really began to be troublesome, because it was then that the modern ideal of a wholly objective scientific fact began to take shape. The later development of that ideal, along with the rising prestige of the physical sciences, extended this pattern gradually till it began to look obligatory for all serious thought. The English word "science" itself, which originally had as wide a meaning as the German "Wissenschaft" and held that sense till the mid-nineteenth century, became contracted to denote only the methods of the physical sciences — more particularly of physics. Even for German-speaking peoples, however, the same attraction seems to have prevailed. Marx, and still more Engels, often claimed to be talking science in a sense connected with the physical sciences, as also did Freud. This development steadily eroded the space left for discussing topics like political theory and the psychology of motive, where the moral dimension is crucial. The trouble is not that there are no real objective facts in these areas. There are. Particular historical facts are as real as facts in the physical sciences and the results of certain surveys, or the statistics showing people's behaviour, are certainly objective enough. But how do the historians choose which area to concentrate on?

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H o w do the researchers choose the topics that they will investigate, and the words they will use to describe its various features? T h e importance of these choices is obvious today when a sudden rise of confidence in genetics has raised the hope of discovering "genes for" every human evil from alcoholism to suicide, thus diverting the tide of research effort and money to genetic investigation rather than to other ways of understanding these phenomena. Such choices are bound to express particular attitudes, and they work best if they express them explicitly. If we once grasp an author's priority-system and the set of values that underlies it, we can use his proposals properly by relating them to those of other people. With that background, even apparently extreme and eccentric psychological suggestions, such as those of Plato or Nietzsche, can be fitted into a wider spectrum of thought and often make good sense there as special aspects of a larger truth. W e can see them as parts of a wider system which is more complicated than we had supposed. But if, instead, we are asked to swallow them on their own as literal universal truths, they begin to look bizarre and unusable. There is, of course, a very general problem here about the status of all generalisations — not just ones about human psychology. Their truth-conditions are different from those of detailed propositions. They can never claim the same sort of finality and they must always be read against a background of assumptions into which they fit. But on questions such as that of human nature this kind of caution was seldom observed because the passions involved were too strong. T h e social and political issues affected were too pressing. T h e defence o f the chosen motive was seen as a life-and-death matter. Freud thought that the sexual instinct was under attack and accordingly vetoed all theories, such as Jung's, which showed it as less than supreme: " W e must defend it with all our might". In the same way campaigners against the power of the church were no less virulent in their own cause. They agreed with Voltaire's advice to d'Alembert: "In all that you do, crush that unclean thing". 1 In this way, human pugnacity ensured that both opponents and defenders of the status quo regularly presented their suggestions as the last word on the emotional constitution of their species. Even when the prophets themselves allowed for more complexity, their disciples commonly did not, because qualifications are much harder to remember than slogans. Thus, debates on this subject proceeded largely by a confused dialectic between extreme positions, a rivalry between candidates for the position of the single dominant form o f human motivation. In Marx's time, this dialectic had already begun to discredit itself. It caused particular alarm among theorists who still hoped to be classed as "scientific" and who were determined that psychology as a whole should count as a "science" in 1

'Quoi que vous fassiez, ecrasez l'infame" ([1762], 317).

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the narrow modern sense. If it was to do this, it plainly needed more simplicity, more clarity, and above all more unanimity. There were two possible ways of meeting this challenge. First, it would have been possible simply to dismiss the ambition of imitating physics. Psychologists could have said plainly that human life and thought are so complex that they call for different methods of enquiry, methods which must be more varied, less confident and less reductive. About motivation, this meant that the various suggestions about rival dominant motives must be accepted on their merits as contributions to a more subtle inclusive picture. The next task would then be to understand their relations to one another within that whole. Neither finality nor unanimity was to be expected. Some psychologists, such as William James, did indeed talk in this way, but the spirit of the age was against them The second possibility was to abandon this whole enquiry about human nature as intellectually disreputable and to stop using that term altogether. Psychologists would then claim that they were occupied only in a strictly objective factual enquiry, and would try strenuously to confine it to relatively detailed matters which could be settled by control experiments. Their background assumptions, which flowed from their various biases on that matter, would either be pushed under the carpet and ignored or simply stated openly as scientific principles or truths. Those assumptions would no longer need to justify themselves, as admittedly moral proposals must do, by ethical standards against other possible moral views. Thus, John Watson and B.F. Skinner were able to lay down their principle that human behaviour is caused directly by previous behaviour and is unaffected by conscious thought, as if this were simply a principle of science. They could ignore the startling moral implications which flow from this refusal to attend to people's subjective point of view on their actions. They did not need to ask why this stance was the proper one, beyond describing it as objective (in a sense which is extremely obscure and tendentious) and therefore scientific. They could thus propound what is actually a most bizarre theory of human nature - namely, the view that people are naturally wholly passive lumps of dough, infinitely malleable to the social forces that happen to condition their behaviour — without seeming to break the taboo by mentioning the topic of human nature at all.

2. Human Variety and Human Freedom In choosing this second course, Watson and Skinner were, of course, much helped by a rising appreciation of the diversity of cultures. Increased knowledge of that variety, which anthropologists were beginning to provide, can readily make all the simplified views of human nature so far mentioned look shallow and provincial.

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Indeed, it easily generates scepticism about any kind of generalisation on the subject. This insight is of course not new. The Greeks, being a trading nation, early became aware of this diversity and brooded a good deal on the antithesis between nature and custom. Herodotus crystallised the point with his story of the Persian king who brings together ambassadors from a tribe who burn their dead relations and another tribe who eat theirs, and asks both parties what price they would demand for exchanging these customs. Naturally both tribes utterly refuse the bargain, and the king - since he knows about both customs - is left in the usual predicament of empire-builders, puzzled by the parochial obstinacy of his subjects (Hist. Book III, ch. 38; 228). However, these travellers' tales were not usually taken very seriously and were certainly not brought in systematically as exceptions to confront the sweeping theories about human nature that arose within the European tradition. As just mentioned, those theories were usually so directly aimed at particular local problems that people framing them did not easily think about remoter cases, except occasionally to pick up a favourable instance from them. For a long time, too, such stories were easily disbelieved. Thus in the late eighteenth century Dr. Johnson, who was not sceptical about alchemy or about swallows hibernating in the mud under ponds, habitually dismissed what travellers told him about the customs of "savages" as nonsense because it was not compatible with the "savagery" which was their one known characteristic (1938, vol. I, 241, 271; vol. II, 34, 253). In the late nineteenth century, however, these accounts gradually became better attested and revealed enormously more variety among human customs than earlier theorists had expected. Human nature, whatever it might be, was certainly more malleable than it had been thought. Was it, however, i n f i n i t e l y malleable? That conclusion was attractive, if only because it offered one more dramatic simplification which seemed to bring order to the confused psychological scene. Many anthropologists were disposed to accept this extreme environmentalism. In Britain, it received support from the already strong empiricist tradition. John Locke had provided it with a language by declaring that the human mind is white paper at birth and it is only EXPERIENCE (capital letters were needed to express the strength of his conviction) that can write anything upon it (Essay II, 1, § 2; 104). Locke, however, was talking about information, not about practical tendencies. He never doubted the presence of original instincts, and paid them much attention in his work on education. During the eighteenth century, the flood of speculations about right ways of education operated on both sides of this divide. Theorists such as Rousseau spent much time discussing the natural tendencies in children which they called on educators to respect and develop, and were thus often committed to a good deal of innatism. On the other side, however, they were so passionately convinced of

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the power of education itself — of the damage done by doing it badly and the huge benefits of getting it right - that they built up quite a strong case for environmentalism as well. Ideally, of course, these two elements in their approach need never have been seen as alternatives. They should have been combined. But once war was declared between them - once the whole idea of human nature was directly attacked - the environmentalist side naturally attracted much progressive support because it offered to oppose the fatalism which innatists had so often propounded. In the nineteenth century innatists such as Francis Galton hardened and emphasised that fatalism, dismissing many people - notably the poor, non-European races and women - as more or less uneducable. This approach emerged as specially scandalous during the late nineteenth century over the question of admitting immigrants to the United States, as Stephen Jay Gould has documented in The Mismeasure of Man (1981, 113ff.). At this point, then, the whole idea of human nature stood indicted as a tool of oppressive fatalism, a concept employed by bigoted defenders of the status quo to resist reforms by pretending that they were impossible. It was indicted as an attack on human freedom, a pernicious expression of what, in the later Sociobiology Debate, was called genetic determinism, though "fatalism" might have been a more appropriate term. In denouncing this approach, campaigners declared their complete reliance on education as a liberating force. They implied that we can vindicate freedom by using the social and educational powers which, as they now held, shape the individual, writing the proper message on the blank paper. Yet these powers are external to that individual. H o w can they supply what we can call freedom? D o they not just impose one more form of slavery? There is a real difficulty here about what freedom involves. The behaviourist belief in outside conditioning as the sole source of human behaviour makes inner freedom, in the sense of spontaneous, self-determining choice, a meaningless concept. Aldous Huxley immediately saw this in the early days of Behaviourism and displayed the point plainly and fairly in Brave New World. Skinner himself did not deny the charge. Indeed he explicitly accepted and underlined it later in Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1972, 26f£). He there rejected these two ideals altogether as irrelevant to the crude utilitarian ethic which had always underlain his writings, though he had not exposed that ethic so openly to criticism in the early days when his standing was less secure. It finally became clear that the political bias of his work was towards a hierarchical arrangement in which most people were indeed to be regarded as blank paper, passive raw material ready to be conditioned by the psychologists, who would alone possess the kind of autonomy that enabled them to direct education. Today, behaviourism has officially fallen into discredit among psychologists for a variety of reasons. But the convenient patterns that it provided often con-

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tinue to be used, simply because it is hard work to devise better ones, especially so for people who have had a highly specialised education. Current notions of freedom are still themselves very confused. Jean-Paul Sartre provided a helpful extreme position - a kind of North Pole at the end of the topic, which people could at least see whether they wanted to avoid visiting - by sketching out in Existentialism and Humanism (1946) an idea of freedom as entirely negative. To be free was, for Sartre, to be completely spontaneous, uninfluenced by any kind of cause - social or genetic, physical or mental. It involved becoming a selfinventing, solitary Will. This conception narrowed the idea of the Self to an extreme abstraction close to Absolute Zero. Theoretically, it represents the terminus of the Nietzschean ideal of solitary courage. In practice, ignoring the rhetoric for the moment, it seems chiefly to have represented the position needed by members of the French Resistance during the Second World War, when they were temporarily isolated from any social background that could guide their actions. This kind of negative rhetoric has, however, continued to appeal to many people who are dissatisfied with their societies, above all to the young. What I chiefly want to point out about it here is that, in spite of officially outlawing the idea of Human Nature, it actually implies just one more highly propagandist theory on that topic. The idea that human beings can, if they wish, function as abstract pure egos entirely detached from the causal sequence around them is a factual proposition about how they are constituted. It is surely an extremely strange one. Yet during the Sociobiology Debate in the 1970s, people who objected to the "genetic determinism" of the sociobiologists often seemed just as happy to oppose it by taking this Sartrean position - that there were no such causes at all - as by saying that the real causes of human behaviour were social. They oscillated between these two strange ideas, and, since no new and dazzling ideology has emerged since then to clear up the whole problem, their successors still do so today.

3. Conceptualising Human Nature: Pluralism and Concreteness Like philosophers, present-day anthropologists are faced with the confusions about human nature that have flowed from this somewhat bizarre history. Anthropology can surely be extremely helpful here. The comparison of different cultures provides absolutely central evidence for any sensible speculation about what mental tendencies may indeed be shared in common by the whole human species. And, on the whole, anthropologists have managed not to become involved in the more extreme and unreal kinds of constructivism that have lately been contorting the rest of the social sciences.

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How should we now read these questions? I am aware that the extreme and dogmatic environmentalist account of human behaviour that was espoused by Franz Boas and his disciples — the notion of infinite malleability, of omnipotent and mysterious "social causes" — has in general not survived. Totally Blank Paper is no longer in fashion. Indeed, The Tangled Wing by the anthropologist Melvin Konner (1982) takes very seriously the physiological and behavioural parallels between natural motives of the kind found in other animals and those that appear in Homo Sapiens. Personally I like this approach very much. It is surely true that ethological parallels can provide us with a very helpful context - a background of more or less parallel cases - against which we can begin to sketch out a notion of what the emotional constitution of our own species must be like. For it still seems to me that there must be such a constitution, and that it must be one shaped by more or less the same forces that have shaped the constitutions of other terrestrial animals. Of course it must also be one that allows for human peculiarities and subtleties, just as much as for commonalties due to our being mammals and primates. Our conception of such a constitution does not have to be crude and reductive, which was the fault of some early popular proposals about it by writers like Robert Ardrey and Desmond Morris. (Konrad Lorenz was, I think, actually very much less reductive, though discussion of his popular books became involved in such frantic and ill-informed controversies, even before the Sociobiology Debate started, that he got badly misunderstood in English-speaking countries). I suggest that we urgently need to work out a new way of conceiving our nature, a middle way which avoids both these extremes, by using a saner, more realistic conception of human freedom. Forging this new approach will be hard work, but once we see what we are trying to do it will surely not be impossible. Existing thought and research provides us with plenty of good material. But our first use of this material surely needs to be a negative one. Our first business is to refrain from drawing the extreme and arbitrary conclusions which hasty theorists have so often imposed on it. It is surely plain that, when we reflect seriously on any central human concern, we always find ourselves dealing both with natural tendencies and with the influence of society. So we must, above all, be prepared to acknowledge both kinds of factor and to think flexibly about how they are related. In considering what kind of methods might be useful in doing this, two things strike me as important. The first is indeed negative. We must avoid the traditional approach of trying to find a grand differentia, a single magnificent quality which unmistakably and completely "distinguishes man from the animals". It is this monistic approach which has constantly sustained the one-sided theories of motivation and made them look plausible. The second point is that, when we begin to think how our constitution might work, we should be as concrete as possible.

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We should move away from the familiar abstractions which have fuelled so many political debates and ask just what the question of innateness does and does not involve in a particular case. I originally dealt with these issues in two sections of Beast and Man. As these passages are perhaps still relevant for the issues raised by this collection, I propose to re-print them here as an indication of what still appear to me to be necessary steps on the way forward. After discussing the idea of a single differentia, I there concentrate on a particular case — namely, that of language. Language is obviously a crucial subject encapsulating all our difficulties about relating nature to culture. In the twenty years since I wrote this passage, there have, of course, been enormous advances in factual discoveries about it. But I am not sure that there has been any such great advance in the philosophical approach — any radical clarification of just what questions we need to ask about language and why these questions are important. It is quite possible, of course, that I am missing something here, that the shape of the whole argument has indeed become much clearer now than it was in the 1970s. It is true that there is less venom in the air than there was then. In theory, there is more co-operativeness, more readiness to compromise. But making intelligible compromises remains surprisingly difficult because academic specialisation still tends to confine theorists to the particular language that prevails within their own discipline, and each language carries its own assumptions with it. The latest debates between sociobiologists (now called evolutionary psychologists) and anti-innatists in the social sciences still seem often to assume a depressingly familiar dichotomy between extreme positions. If — as is quite possible — there really has been serious progress in those twenty years, then this extract may at least serve as a milestone to show in what direction we are moving. I hope that, in that case, readers of this book will be able to use it for their further journey. And if there has not, it will surely mark how badly that progress is needed.

4. The Lure O f The Simple Distinction Man has always had a good opinion of himself, and with reason. What, however, is essentially the ground of it? What finally (you may ask) does "distinguish man from the animals"? Nearly everything is wrong with this question. First, unless we take man to be a machine or an angel, it should read "distinguish man among the animals", and animals of this planet at that, with no extraterrestrial nonsense to give us all the drawbacks of religion and none of its benefits.

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Second, as the question is usually put, it asks for a single, simple, final distinction, and for one that confers praise. This results, I suppose, from the old tradition of defining things by genus and differentia; that is, by naming first the class to which each thing belongs, and then the characteristic which marks it out from other members of the class. This rather hopeful scheme is supposed to enable us to find a formula stating the essence of each thing (or rather of each natural kind). And the differentia ought indeed to be in some way the thing's characteristic excellence, its central function - since that, and not just some chance quality (as in "featherless biped"), is useful in helping us to place it sensibly, in telling us, therefore, what it is really like. The old, more or less Aristotelian, definition of man as a rational animal follows this pattern. 2 N o w most people today would with good reason reject this scheme as too ambitious to use outside the human scene. W e cannot expect (they would agree) that things not made by man will necessarily have an essence we can grasp and a simple characteristic excellence we can see the point of. Evaluating snails from the human point of view is a fallible process and should be taken as such. W e can certainly find marks that will help us to classify and understand them. But we had better not claim that by doing so we have finally expressed their true nature in a simple formula. People are slower, however, to see that the same obstacle blocks us when we ask What is the characteristic excellence of Man? If we mean "what would seem distinctive about him to a nonhuman observer?" we would need first to know that observer's frame of reference, and what contrasts would strike him. If we mean "what is the best and most important thing within human life?" this question is a real one, and we can try to answer it. But it is not about biological classification. It is a question in moral philosophy. And we do not help ourselves at all in answering it if we decide in advance that the answer ought to be a single, simple characteristic, unshared by other species, such as the differentia is meant to be. W h y should a narrow morality necessarily be the right one? W h y should not our excellence involve our whole nature? The Platonic exaltation of the intellect above all our other faculties is a particular moral position and must be defended as such against others; it cannot ride into acceptance on the back of a crude method of taxonomy. Oversimplicity, in fact, is what wrecks the notion of essence. Grading qualities as more or less essential - that is, more or less important to the species concerned — is not silly at all. Aristotle was doing this when he rejected two-footedness as a 2

Aristotle himself does not give this definition, though his argument in th eNicomachean Ethics 1.7 and elsewhere does suggest it. N o r (certainly) did he ever proclaim that everything should be defined in the way described. H e disliked such sweeping schemes and, if asked how things should be defined, would probably have answered that "it is the mark of an educated m a n to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits" ( N E 1094 b 24f.).

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proper genus of man. It simply was not central enough in the life of the species; "Bird and Man for instance are two-footed, but their two-footedness is diverse and differentiated". (De Part. An. 643 a 2f.). Birds and men, in fact, have dispensed with the support of forefeet for distinct though parallel reasons; if one mentioned those reasons, calling birds winged or flying animals and men handed or manipulative ones, one would be saying things of much greater interest. Flying and having hands are two fairly essential properties, in that they make a great difference in the characteristic life of the creature. They are helpful in explaining it, where the negative "two-footed" is not. Similarly, Konrad Lorenz criticizes Desmond Morris for "over-emphasizing, in his book The Naked Ape, the beastliness of man. ... He minimizes the unique properties and faculties of man in an effectively misleading manner. The outstanding and biologically relevant property of the human species is neither its partial hairlessness nor its 'sexiness', but its capacity for conceptual thought" (1970, vol. 1, 14). Lorenz's point is that conceptual thought is ¿structural property, one affecting the whole organization of the life of the species, while hairlessness and "sexiness" in his view are minor, more local properties that affect it much less pervasively. And because each species does have its own way of life, structural properties can indeed be unique to a species. But not all of them are, and even where they are unique, that does not prove them excellent, even from the species' own point of view. Any species can have pervasive and characteristic bad habits. Conversely, what is good does not have to be unique to a species. For instance, in describing beavers, we should certainly say that their engineering capacity was one of their most outstanding features. But this does not isolate them. The elements of this capacity are present in their heritage: beavers are rodents, and gnawing, burrowing, and building industriously are a part of rodent life. And termites build, moles burrow, bees are industrious. What makes beavers special is a particular combination and further development of these basic faculties. Again, if we consider the extraordinarily keen and effective eyes of birds of prey, we are not forced to isolate them. W e need to know that all birds have pretty good sight, which is necessary to flying, and that predators in general have to be sharper and better equipped than their prey. Or again, if the talk is of elephants, we can do justice to the miracle of the trunk without pretending that nobody else has a nose. Structural properties, then, do not have to be exclusive or necessarily excellent. Nor do they have to be black-or-white, yes-or-no matters. And certainly no one of them is enough alone to define or explain a species. W e commonly employ a cluster of them, whose arrangement as more or less essential can be altered from time to time for many reasons. And what is really characteristic is the shape of the whole cluster. The various things that have been proposed as differentia for man - conceptual thought or reason, language, culture, self-consciousness, tool-using, produc-

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tivity, laughter, a sense of the future, and all the rest — form part of such a cluster, but none of them can monopolize it or freeze it into finality. There are always more that we have not thought of mentioning yet, and among them the most obvious. What would we say about someone who had all the characteristics just mentioned, but none of the normal human affections? These, of course, are plainly very like those of many other species, so they do not get named as the differentia. But shortage of them is the commonest reason for calling people inhuman. Because of this sort of thing, it is really not possible to find a mark that distinguishes man from "the animals" without saying which animals. We resemble different ones in different ways. It is also essential to remember how immensely they differ from one another. In certain central respects, all social mammals, including us, are far more like one another than any is like a snake or a codfish, or even a bee. The logical point is simply that, in general, living creatures are quite unlike mathematical terms, whose essence really can be expressed in a simple definition. A triangle without three sides ceases to be a triangle. But a flightless bird does not cease to be a bird, nor a flying fish a fish. What is special about each creature is not a single, unique quality but a rich and complex arrangement of powers and qualities, some of which it will certainly share with its neighbours. And the more complex the species, the more true this is. To expect a single differentia is absurd. And it is not even effectively flattering to the species, since it obscures our truly characteristic richness and versatility. People therefore need not act as if they were threatened every time something that has been supposed an exclusively human attribute is detected in other creatures. Considering the carelessness, and the real ignorance about other animals which reigned when these criteria were set up, and also the still persisting reluctance to look at them dispassionately, we are bound to keep finding such attributes. The effect of dodging the situation by resetting the criteria each time in a way that it is hoped animals will be unable to penetrate is to separate the human differentia further and further from our central faculties. Nobody doubts that plenty of tests can be invented for aspects of language, tool use, foresight, and so on, which only man will be able to pass - though, as has already become clear, we cannot know in advance which they will be. But what reason could there possibly be for supposing that faculties for passing those tests would be man's central and most important faculties? Is man perhaps centrally a test-passing animal? To read some of the literature you might think so. This notion of human differentia has been misused in various ways. For instance, early in the German Ideology, Marx said: "Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence. ... By producing their means of subsistence, men are indirectly producing their actual material life. ... As individuals express their life,

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so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production." In what sense do other animals not produce their means of subsistence? Two interpretations otproducing suggest themselves: one, the processing of materials rather than simply gathering them; two, the free and deliberate planning of what one does, whether it be gathering, processing, or anything else. O n the first criterion, bees, beavers, and termites do at least as well as the simpler hunting-and-gathering human tribes, which shows, again, that you have to consider which animals you are distinguishing yourself from. O n the second, man is indeed in a special position, but then he is so for everything he does, not just for production. Which did Marx mean? A passage from the Paris Manuscripts is just as ambivalent: "Productive life is species-life. ... T h e whole character of a species, its generic character, is contained in its manner of vital activity, and free conscious activity is the species-characteristic of man." This, however, gives the main emphasis not to production, but to free conscious choice. That is something found over a much wider range of activity than mere production, and certainly is a human structural characteristic, though by no means our only one. Conscious choice seems to be what Marx meant by contrasting men's "beginning to distinguish themselves from animals" with their merely being distinguished from without to suit the special interest of some classifier. Marx, however, wanted to combine this general Kantian point with something much more specific, a concentration on man as Maker. Anthony Quinton, to whom I owe these quotations, remarks: "This conception of human essence is Marx's correction of Hegel's idealist and more or less Aristotelian notion of man as an essentially rational being. Man is, indeed, essentially rational for Marx but his reason is actualised in productive activity" (1975, 22f.). This is certainly right, but I think the point must be put more widely. Everybody after Aristotle who proposed this sort of definition of man was arguing with Aristotle, was commenting in one way or another on the definition of man as a rational animal, and was taking previous contributions for granted. Marx did not want to deny the rationality; he wanted to give it a different twist. But to do this effectively we need a quite different frame of argument, one where a number of different elements, all recognized as essential parts of human life, are explicitly considered together and set out in an intelligible order of priority. To do this, we have to drop the simple differentia scheme and leave any question of distinctness from other species right out of the argument. If another species were, in fact, found which did just what Marx meant by producing, it would not damage his argument about the structure of human life at all. The insistence on exclusiveness, in which so much intellectual capital has been invested, does no work whatever in the argument. 3 3

Sartre seems to be making just another move in the same game when he says that "man as the Existentialist sees him is not definable" till he "defines himself' ([1946], 28). The notion of defining here seems very cloudy.

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5. Language and Human Nature Since the development of linguistics and linguistic philosophy, the ancient definition of man as homo loquens has taken on a new plausibility. This is claimed in an exemplary fashion by Chomsky, who says that studies of animal communication only "bring out more clearly the extent to which human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world" (1968, 59). In some ways, of course, it is unique, but why must it be "without significant analogue"? He goes on that "assuming an evolutionary development of language from simpler systems of the sort that one discovers in other organisms" has no more basis than "assuming an evolutionary development from breathing to walking" (1968, 60); they are simply not stages in the same process. He concludes that it must be "an example of true emergence - the appearance of a qualitatively different phenomenon at a specific stage of complexity of organization" (1968, 62). He observes therefore that "it seems rather pointless, for these reasons, to speculate about the evolution of human language from simpler systems - perhaps as absurd as it would be to speculate about the evolution of atoms from clouds of elementary particles". Now incomprehension is not an advantage. We should put up with it only when it is really necessary. And this particular piece of incomprehension seems to me simply the nemesis of treating language with peculiar narrowness, as though nothing mattered about it except certain abstract matters. If the evolution of speech were really incomprehensible — if nothing in human life provided a particularly suitable setting for it — it ought to be just as conceivable that it should arise in any other species, say, crocodiles. The question of understanding it is not one of tracing the mechanics of evolution, of saying just what mutations or selections were necessary to bring about the change. ("Emergent evolution" describes a sudden large change whose mechanics are uncertain - for example, beginning to fly). Understanding a habit is seeing what company it keeps, what it does for us, what part it plays in our lives. Chomsky concedes that "the examples of animal communication that have been examined to date do share many of the properties of human gestural systems, and it might be reasonable to explore the possibility of direct connection in this case" (1968, 62). But this seems to leave gestures totally divided from language - insulated from it by an immense evolutionary gap like that between atoms and clouds of elementary particles. Descartes' wedge, here as so often, tries to split the unsplittable. You can only accept this idea, I think, if you have your mind entirely on printed language. It is a splendid and remarkable feature of human language that it can be printed — its fruits are not only larger than those on other communication trees, they also keep. They can be picked and transported and used a couple of thousand years later, and this is indeed glorious. But

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it does not make irrelevant the tree on which they grew in the first place, and on which each example must still grow. Most human language, even for the most literate of us, is spoken, not written. And when it is spoken, the words themselves are only the peak of a pyramid, of which tone of voice, gestures, facial and bodily expression, pace, timing, silences, and the relation of the whole to what is going on at the time form the major part. To see what I mean by major, anyone can try the experiment of saying his words in a tone and with gestures which do not suit them. This is not easy to do. It is difficult in just the same way as making two consecutive remarks that do not make sense together, or saying the words in the wrong order. Our habitual sense of order and meaning protests against it. But if it is done, one thing is certain - the hearer cannot just accept the words at their face value. A conflict is set up, and the words are not going to win it. The tone, gesture, and so on will be taken as probably more informative than the words. And in a natural example, this will nearly always be right. (One such example is the familiar case of the person being asked for help, who speaks at great length and apparently helpfully — but whose manner conveys instantly to the practised observer the real message, "I cannot do anything for you and am not even going to try".) The relation between the words and the way they are spoken is not, I am suggesting, just that between any two chance aspects of an organism, like "breathing and walking". It is conceptual; they are parts of the same meaning-system. We use them as complementary tools for the same job. Is that meaning-system then impoverished when the speaker is not present? It would be, if our imagination were not so prompt and active in reproducing him. This is plain when people reading letters from someone they have been missing are delighted to "hear his voice" in the written words, or pained when they fail to do so, and also in the difficulties of telephone communication. Again, in reading good novels or plays, we may not attend much to the inner dramatization by which we bring the ink marks to life - but that it has been going on becomes suddenly and painfully manifest when we see bad stage or television performances of them. "Darcy was never like that", we howl, and rightly. It is worth remarking too that until this century novels were always meant to be read aloud (Crystal 1975, 65ff.). With nondramatic prose - straight description or argument - things are little less simple, but I think essentially the same. We feel the difference between a mincing, artificial style and a direct, straightforward one as a difference in tone. We do "hear the writer's voice", and it affects us «oí just with an irrelevant liking or disliking for him, but with a sense of his whole personality which modifies the meaning of what he says. Hume's or Plato's tone of voice comes through the centuries, sharp and unmistakable, filling in for the imagination a whole immense background of personal reaction that completes the sense of what they are literally saying, making all the differences between an isolated argument and a comprehensive view of life, between, in fact, a little philosopher and a great one.

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Even quite simple informative prose is never wholly detached from its writer. W e always need to know enough about him to grasp how reliable he is and what he can be relied on for. Style helps to sort out the honest but unimaginative informant from the smart aleck, the dispassionate from the prejudiced witness, the original investigator from the zombie. The great flexibility of language allows everybody to leave his private mark. But the more we need to check on his reliability, the more anxious we are not to stop at mere words, but if possible to meet the writer face to face. I am making the fairly obvious point that speech is only part of the way in which a person communicates. The creative and innovative recombining of signs, which Chomsky so rightly emphasizes in our sense of words, appears also in our joining of them to particular gestures, facial expressions, looks, silences, whistles and nonverbal activities of every kind. "Human gestural systems" are not separate, self-contained entities. They are aspects abstracted from the one great communication system. The relation of gestures anywhere to the local language is organic. A foreigner must grasp them, as much as the tense structure and the polite forms of address, if he does not want to misunderstand and be misunderstood. What makes the grasping easier, and often stops us from noticing that it is taking place is that, though there is a conventional element, the basis of gesture is innate and universal. Local variation is not very great. But while our general basic equipment of expressive movement is innate, 4 we are also innately equipped to vary the details in any context indefinitely, for both cultural and private reasons. That is how we are able constantly to signify our changing attitudes to one another. N o w it seems reasonable to say that our power of varying our words and their order is a further special development of this basic communicative power. Speech makes sense only for a species that is already constantly communicating by expressive movements.

Conclusion The moral of all this is simply that we can never hope to understand any human faculty unless we are continually aware of its place in the total context - the whole of human life. People who have proposed the various differentias that I have been discussing have often failed to do this because they wanted above all to treat them as distinct - as radically different in kind from our "animal" nature. Speech, in particular, has repeatedly been isolated as if it were a kind of golden prosthesis inserted by some celestial surgeon in a crude, earthly organism. That was clearly how Chomsky saw the matter, and of course it is no accident that his discussion 4

Cf. Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1971 for a central and convincing analysis of the range.

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of the matter used the language of Descartes, appealing to a kind of "innate ideas" which were as far as possible from ordinary impulses or instincts. For Descartes, indeed, language was a spiritual capacity quite disconnected from the body. But this kind of dualism is proving unworkable today. It will serve us no longer. More recently, an even more radical insistence on fragmenting human faculties is appearing among the "evolutionary psychologists", who are the supposedly more moderate heirs of sociobiology (see, e.g., Pinker 1997). Their method is to "modularise" human traits, dividing them systematically into separate sub-traits which can (apparently) be assumed to have been produced by separate genes. This approach has the double advantage of supplying the anxious public with a very simple picture of evolution and of suiting the specialization which now rules so much of academic life. I don't know, however, that it has any other advantage. O n the whole I regard it at present with some gloom as a step backward from really trying to understand how human life works. However the future is always uncertain and I must leave my readers to settle the matter.

A Cultural-Historical View of Human Nature Michael Cole and Karl Levitin

For more than 20 years the authors have been seeking to understand and extend an approach to human nature that takes as its starting point the mediation of human experience through culture as a way to supersede the long-standing dichotomy between "nature" and "nurture" which continues to bedevil the human sciences. A crucial point of intersection in our respective inquiries was the Soviet psychologist, Alexander Luria, one of the originators of cultural-historical psychology in what was then the U.S.S.R. Although currently remembered largely for pioneering the discipline of neuropsychology, which might make it appear that culture was perhaps peripheral to his theory of brain functioning, Luria was steadfast in his insistence that "in order to explain the highly complex forms of human consciousness one must go beyond the human organism" to include the "external conditions of life," particularly human beings' life in society (Luria 1981, 25). In effect, Luria argued, the circuits of the brain are completed through the culturally organized environment, a position perfectly in line with current neuroscientifie thinking (Edelman 1992). In keeping with the bi-national authorship of this chapter and its focus on cultural-mediational processes, we want to highlight the strong affinities between Luria's view and the approach adopted by the American anthropologist, Clifford Geertz. In a widely quoted article, Geertz examined the mounting evidence that the human body, and most especially the human brain, has undergone a long (perhaps 3 million year) co-evolution with the basic ability to create and use artifacts. Consequently, he argued, man's nervous system does not merely enable him to acquire culture, it positively demands that he do so if it is going to function at all. Rather than culture acting only to supplement, develop, and extend organically based capacities logically and genetically prior to it, it would seem to be ingredient to those capacities themselves. A cultureless human being would probably turn out to be not an intrinsically talented, though unfulfilled ape, but a wholly mindless and consequently unworkable monstrosity ( 1 9 7 3 , 68).

In the pages to follow we want to illustrate the power of Luria and Geertz's common vision using examples drawn from both Russian and American research traditions. It is our belief that a judicious combining of the two national traditions provides rich resources for the development of a comprehensive, bio-social-

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cultural approach to human nature. Central to both traditions is the belief that human nature cannot be reduced to the socio-cultural environment or to biology. Rather, each views human beings as hybrids of the cultural, the phylogenetic, and the ontogenetic. Each of the examples we provide explores a different aspect of that hybridity.

The tripartite nature of consciousness From the time of their earliest publications in the late 1920's and early 1930's, the Russian cultural historical psychologists emphasized the tripartite nature of human mental processes. They represented the basic structure of consciousness as the emergent process involving an active subject, an object, and the cultural medium, which they depicted as a triangle (see. Fig. 1). Vygotsky (1929) referred to this set of relationships as "the cultural method of behavior." Conventionally, the base of the triangle represents "natural" (phylogenetically controlled) processes, while the apex of the triangle is a "stimulus means" (a sign or a tool), e.g., a cultural medium. It is possible to interpret this idea by saying that in the course of hominization, one form of psychological process, the "natural, direct" relation of subject to object is replaced by a "cultural, indirect" (e.g. culturally mediated) process. However, Vygotsky makes a particular point of arguing that it is not the

M (artifact)

M (artifact)

St

(A)

n+1

(B)

Figure 1 (A) T h e basic mediational triangle, in which subject and object are seen as not only "directly" connected, but simultaneously "indirectly" connected through a medium constituted of artifacts (culture). (B) A dynamic representation of the basic mediational triangle that includes time in the unit of analysis. T h e fact of non-correspondence between mediated and unmediated (indirect and direct) subject-object relations is represented by the oval at the right, indicating the need for active cognitive resolution of the discrepancies by the subject, the process referred to in the text as voobrtizhenie.

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addition of a new element to the process of thinking that is essential, but rather, the new structure of behavior that arises. The cultural method of behavior, he wrote, unites the natural and cultural lines of development in a structural, not a mechanical way: "... all processes forming part of that method form a complicated and structural unity" (Vygotsky 1929, 420). Cole (1996) points out that a shortcoming of the triangular representation of the hybrid phylogenetic/cultural nature of human thinking is that it fails to represent the fact that a static figure is used to represent a dynamic process occurring over time. In place of a static triangle, he suggests that one think of a triangle with a gap where the "natural" and "cultural" lines intersect; according to this view, precise coincidence of the two sources of information about the object is rare and fleeting, so that the subject must actively engage in a process of constant reconciliation of discordant information. Consciousness, in this view, is that process of reconciliation, occurring over time in the course of human action. In the following sections we present several phenomena which support this view.

Stabilized images Research which stabilizes the retinal image of an object on the retina, achieving the kind of rigid structural coupling embodied in the static triangle at the left of Figure 1, provides insight into the hybrid nature of human psychological processes as a result of their dual phylogenetic and cultural natures. Under ordinary conditions, light reflected by objects in the visual field is kept constantly in flux with respect to the retina owing to saccadic eye movements, over which we have no control and concerning which we have no conscious awareness. These movements are not an epiphenomenon, they are essential to normal vision. It has long been known that if one creates perfect coordination between eye movements and objects in the visual field by use of an apparatus that fixes the image relative to the retina, one's image of the object disappears; the visual field is experienced as a uniform grey (Iarbus 1957; Pritchard 1961; Zinchenko 1958). Pritchard's studies of fixed image phenomena are particularly relevant to our current topic, because he demonstrated the existence of two different kinds of objects on the basis of the dynamics of the process of image disintegration in the course of fixation and reappearance when the visual object was permitted to move relative to the retina. The first category of objects appears to be heavily constrained by human phylogeny, what Vygotsky would have termed, "natural processes." These included, for example, the profile of a human face; as the image disintegrated, the last of its features to disappear were those connected with areas of high contrast, such as the forehead/hairline, or the nose. These are precisely the kinds of features detected by newborn infants (Haith 1994).

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H3 Η Β 3 HFigure 2: The HB monogram at the left hand side of the figure is what the subject sees when the image is allowed to slide freely across the retina during normal saccadic eye movements. The Η, B, 3 and 4 to the right of the monogram represent the elements that appear as the initial image fades or when there is a brief, slight movement of the image after it has faded.

The second category of objects were cultural in origin. While they retained the "natural" features such as points of high contrast, they had the added characteristic that the partial images that floated in and out of consciousness when the image was fixed or when slight movements occurred in the apparatus fixed on the retina were meaningful patterns acquired in the course of prior culturally mediated activity. A striking example is provided by a monogram made up of an Η and a B, in which the right side of the Η and the left side of the Β share a single, common line (see Fig. 2). In principle, when this image began to disintegrate, any combination of elements involving high contrast might be expected to endure longer than others. However, what Pritchard found is that subjects report seeing only combinations of lines which have cultural significance, such as a 4 or a B. Pritchard interprets this result in terms of Donald Hebb's notion of a "cell assembly," a configuration of brain cells that fire in unison because they have been repeatedly experienced as a unique pattern. The adults upon whom this research was conducted, for example, had coordinated their interactions with the world through print for many years, starting from before the age of 7. Here we have excellent examples of the kinds of stimuli for which highly literate people would have formed cell assemblies. Whether one finds a Hebbian interpretation plausible or not, Pritchard's fixed image experiments established the co-existence of natural /phylogenetic aspects and cultural/ontogenetic aspects in the process of forming visual images of the world. The fixed image experiments also highlight the necessarily dynamic character of the underlying processes. Whether one uses stimuli associated with phylogenetic or cultural sources, a full image will not reappear unless and until the image is allowed to move freely across the eye. A complete image of the world is obtained only when three elements are present: phylogenetic contributions arising from the history of our species, cultural contributions arising from repeated sense-making through cultural forms, and the active resolving actions of the human brain, which must construct a complete image from fluctuating light patterns sliding across the retina in microgenetic time. As Irwin (1998, 99) notes in a recent

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article, "the perception of stability across saccades appears to depend on a very local evaluation process centered on the saccade target o b j e c t . . . " In other words, perception involves more than the physical response of the retina and central nervous system to direct stimulation, it requires an intervening process which is not strictly determined by external stimulation. H o w are we to conceive of that process?

Voobrazhenie Several years ago, Alexander Suvorov (1983), published an article in the American journal, Soviet Psychology entitled "Formirovania voobrazhenie u slepoglukonemikh detei". Literally, this title should be translated "The formation of imagination in blind-deaf children," but as editor of the Journal, Cole decided to replace the word "imagination" with the word "representation" because the process Suvorov was describing seemed to him to correspond more closely to what English-speaking readers understand by the concept of representation. Subsequently, David Bakhurst and Carol Padden (1991, 202) commented that this substitution obscures Suvorov's point that "the formation of any image or representation of reality involves creative exercise of imagination." Taken in conjunction with research on fixed images, Bakhurst and Padden's point takes on additional importance. The Russian word, voobrazhenie is made up of three parts: vo (into), ohraz (image), and (z)henie ( a gerund indicating process). So, literally translated into English, vo-obraz-(z)henie means "into-image-making" or "the process of making an image." Suvorov's metaphor for the process in question is "to rise up from the earth and return again." W e were struck by how closely Suvorov's metaphorical description of voobrazhenie parallels the process the process of "centering on the target object," looking away and then recentering on the object (the saccadic movement of the eye). It is our belief that Suvorov, Bakhurst, and Padden are precisely correct. Every act of "seeing the world" is a process that requires a creative synthesis of information at time Τ and at time T+1. These two sources of input can never completely coincide with each other; consequently, the corttinuity of daily conscious experience is imagined; the literal physical interactions involve, of necessity, discontinuity (owing to saccadic and other bodily movements). Alternatively, we can say that discoordinating with the world is constitutive of the illusion of continuity in consciousness, of the feeling that we are coordinating with the world. From what we have said so far we can conclude the following: consciousness, our "image of the world," is a dynamic process emerging from three sets of constraints: phylogenetic constraints, cultural constraints, and a process of voobrazhenie, or in Irwin's terms, "evaluation." The need for voobrazhenie (the

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term we prefer because it indexes the ineluctably creative, productive nature of the process) arises because of a gap caused by the time it takes the eye to "lift up" off the fixated object and return to it again, now in a different relationship, owing to movements of the person, and perhaps the object, in the intervening "blink of an eye." Animals, other than human beings, share a great deal of the basic properties of their brain organization and functioning with human beings and as in humans, their retinas are in constant motion. At this level of organization, humans are likely to have a primitive form of consciousness in common with higher primates. Put differently, phylogenesis plays an obvious and important role in voobrazhenie. However, both the structure and content of human consciousness are distinctive among species. With respect to both structure and content, from early infancy onward, human conscious is "de-formed" by the need and ability to mediate action, including the acts involved in comprehending what is going on, through culture. By culture, here, we are referring to the product of the ways in which human beings have evolved a means of accumulating the experience of prior generations extra-corporally, as part of their "social inheritance." Culture is like "history in the present," creating an essential level of constraints upon the constitution of consciousness. Moreover, as Pritchard's experiments demonstrate, extensive coordination with the world through culture feeds back on biology, creating a kind of "cultural firmware" in the form of cell assemblies, sensitized patterns of neurons tuned to the cultural world. A seemingly inevitable next question now emerges. How does the cultural world, initially exterior to the individual, come to be incorporated in our bodies so deeply that it becomes, "second nature?" There are many approaches to answering this question which fall under the broad umbrella of "cultural psychology" (See Shweder et al 1997, for a recent review). Our own approach, as indicated earlier, follows in the tradition of cultural-historical psychology, initiated by Vygotsy and his colleagues, and elaborated by their students (Vygotsky 1978, 1987)

A brief set of principles From our perspective, the following brief set of principles characterizes adherents of the cultural-historical clan among cultural psychologists. 1. The basic premise of a cultural-historical approach to mind is that human beings have the need and ability to mediate their interactions with each other and the non-human world through culture. 2. Culture is conceived of as human beings' "social inheritance." This social inheritance is embodied in artifacts, aspects of the environment that have been

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transformed by their participation in the successful goal-directed activities of prior generations. They have acquired value. 3. Artifacts, the constituents of culture are simultaneously material and ideal/ symbolic. They are materialized in the form of objects, words, rituals and other cultural practices that mediate human life. They are ideal in that their form has evolved to achieve pre-scribed means to pre-scribed goals, and these have survived to be our tools for our use in the present. Tomasello (1998) refers to them as "intentional artifacts" to capture these properties. Consequently, in an important sense, culture is created from the process of exteriorizing mind, while mind is the product of interiorizing culture. 4. The "effective environments" of mental life are taken to be the different practices or forms of activity in which people engage. That is, human psychological processes are acquired in the course of joint-mediated activity. 5. Consequently, it is by analyzing what people do in culturally organized activity, people - acting through mediational means - in a context, that one comes to understand the process of becoming and being human. Mediation of action through culture in social interaction is the essential precondition for normal human development. It is the process by which phylogenetically given constraints on mental activity are combined with cultural constraints, making the process of specifically human forms of voobrazbenie possible. 6. The historical origins of the cultural medium lead directly to the conclusion that all culturally mediated behaviors are social in their essence, and social in the dynamics of their origin and change in the course of a single human life. Vygotsky expressed this idea (which can also be found in the French sociogenetic tradition) in what he called "the general law of cultural development": Any function in children's cultural development appears twice, or on two planes. First it appears on the social plane and then on the psychological plane. First it appears between people as an interpsychological category and then within the individual child as an intrapsychological category ... but it goes without saying that internalization transforms the process itself and changes its structure and function. Social relations or relations among people genetically underlie all higher functions and their relationships (Vygotsky 1981, 163).

This view of social origins requires that special attention be paid to the power of adults to arrange the environments of children so as to enable their development. This effect can only be achieved by coordinating with them through cultural artifacts in meaningful human practices, through which they can then acquire the cultural heritage essential to adult thought processes. Methodologically, it urges on the researcher a strategy which traces the process of enculturation over time. A great many research programs could serve as examples for the application of this strategy (see, for example, Cole 1996; Tomasello 1998; Wertsch 1997).

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However, we have chosen to highlight a remarkable program of research undertaken in the then-Soviet Union by Alexander Meshcheryakov with children who were blind and deaf. O u r choice is motivated by both personal and methodological considerations. First of all, the authors have first-hand knowledge of this research, which is little known outside of Russia: Levitin has had extensive personal experience with both the researchers and subjects in the Soviet research, including a number of blind-deaf psychologists; Meshcheryakov was a student of A.R. Luria's, providing a direct connection between his research on the blind-deaf and the wellsprings of cultural-historical psychology; and both authors had a long, personal relationship with Luria, who made sure we appreciated the significance of this line of research. Less personally, the blind-deaf offer a unique set of circumstances for tracing in detail the process by which adults arrange for children to appropriate their cultural heritage, and therefore, the process by which the tripartite structure of consciousness underlying higher psychological functions comes into being.

The Predicament of the Blind-deaf First, consider the cognitive predicament of being blind and deaf for an adult. The blind-deaf have lost the two major senses by which one can obtain information about the environment "at a distance." While the sense of smell can, in some conditions, provide information from a source that is not physically in contact with the body (the smell of onions frying on the stove), the two remaining senses, touch and taste require one to come directly in contact with the physical environment. For the blind-deaf, in the most physical and concrete fashion, the task of encountering the world at a distance, the creation of a gap that allows anticipation and adjustment of experiences to come, is an absolutely essential precondition of freeing themselves from the tyranny of direct environmental pressure in order to be able to think. 1 Thought of from this perspective, it becomes clear that the world extends beyond the body only to the extent that one can create a medium of interaction that enables the individual to encounter the world at a distance, temporally as well as physically. At the same time, it is necessary to fill the gap thus created in a manner that allows the individual to anticipate the world on ego's own terms. 1

It might seem that the same is not true of the sighted-hearing person, for w h o m the senses of hearing and seeing appear to provide direct access to the "world at a distance." However, as the fixed image experiments demonstrate, this phenomenological experience of directness is an illusion. T h e sighted-hearing, no less than the blind-deaf, require a gap between themselves and the world in order to be conscious of (imagine) it, the gap provided by saccadic eye movements.

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This point is illustrated by considering the circumstances of another sensorially deprived group, the blind, using the famous thought-experiment of the blind man and his stick. The following example is from Gregory Bateson: "Suppose I am a blind man, and I use a stick. I go tap, tap, tap. Where do I start? Is my mental system bounded at the hand of the stick? Is it bounded by my skin? Does it start halfway up the stick? Does it start at the tip of the stick?" (1972, 459) The answer, for purposes of connecting to the predicament of the blinddeaf, is that the mind begins at that furthermost point where the organism is coordinated sufficiently well with the environment to be able to move within it confidently, that is, the point at which the environment yields an interpretable image. In so far as the stick is coordinated with the person using it, acting as a medium through which the blind man can imagine his environment satisfactorily, that medium becomes transparent. When initially handed a strange stick, the blind person feels it with his hands, "takes its measure." At this point, the mind's furthest reach is the hand which is exploring the stick. As the stick becomes familiar, the man takes it and begins to use it to explore the environment at a distance, mediated by the stick. With practice, the mind, so to speak, moves outward to the tip of the stick, which ceases to be consciously felt, it becomes, so to speak, transparent, and now the mind terminates at its point of contact with the sidewalk. When walking in a familiar place, the mind extends beyond the stick, to that furthest point where man, stick, and environment are sufficiently coordinated to allow the stick to remain the invisible medium of interaction-at-a-distance. It might be, for example, that the process of voobrazhenie extends through the stick and down the street to the restaurant where the man's friend is waiting for lunch. But should there be an unexpected obstacle, the mind, as it were, "comes closer" receding to the tip of the stick. And when the man sits down to eat his lunch, "the context changes." Now it is forks and knives that become relevant and through which mind constantly fills in the needed gaps relating person to world. In short, because what we call mind works through artifacts, it cannot be unconditionally bounded by the head nor even by the body, but must be seen as distributed in the artifacts which are woven together and which weave together individual human actions in concert with other parts of the permeable, changing contexts of action. The principles we are summarizing here apply universally, but just as they apply differently to the sighted person and the blind person, so they differ between the blind and the blind-deaf. The attendant complexities are informative. Blind-deaf people, like blind people, often walk with the aid of a cane. But if they encounter a difficulty walking along the street, they cannot verbally ask a passerby for help. What sort of artifact, in addition to a cane, would suffice for a blinddeaf person? One effective tool used in the Russian blind-deaf community is a

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small dactylic alphabet card with Russian printed above each dactylic letter. At the top of the card, in printed Russian, it explains that the person holding the card is blind and deaf. It goes on to ask the person to whom this card is shown (perhaps a passing pedestrian at a street corner) to watch as the blind-deaf holder of the card spells out a message. Its use of both a dactylic representation of the letters of the Russian alphabet and conventional printed letters of the alphabet enables a form of speech transformed into writing. Using two tools, a cane as a prosthetic device for locomotion through space and the card, as a prosthetic replacement for hearing, blind-deaf people can achieve a remarkable level of mobility and independence (as described by S. Cole 1986). Describing the accomplishments of adult blind-deaf people in this way raises the key challenge that we wish to concentrate on in the remainder of this paper. That challenge can be phrased as a question: By what process do children deprived of sight and sound come to mediate their interactions with fellow human beings through an alphabet representing an aural language to which they have no access? It is this question, embedded in the ethos of Soviet psychology of the time, that made the study of the education of the blind-deaf one of the most interesting programs of research within the cultural-historical framework. This work is particularly interesting within the context of this collection of essays on human nature because cultural-historical philosophers and psychologists saw the challenge of fully educating blind-deaf children to be a kind of "crucial experiment" demonstrating their views about human nature. This challenge is also an unusual opportunity. Here is how Alexander Zaporozhets, a colleague of Meshcheryakov, described the special scientific importance of studies of the development of the blind-deaf: ... blind-deafness represents a truly unique phenomenon of nature providing unparalleled opportunities for the study of the conditions necessary for the formation of human personality and the patterns to be found in that formative process. All the processes which occur at breakneck speed in the course of a normal child's development, intricately interwoven one with another and shaped by a whole host of spontaneous influences that are most difficult to assess, are easy to distinguish in the deafblind child since they unfold slowly, and what is particularly important, do not arise naturally, but are engendered with the help of special teaching methods that can easily be ascertained. It is this factor which provides unique conditions for experimental research into the dialectics of human mental development (Zaporozhets 1974, 6).

With these goals in mind, the Soviet Academy of Pedagogical Sciences opened a special school in Zagorsk, a small city not far from Moscow in 1955. In 1963 a special home for deaf-blind children associated with the school was opened. The school was initially directed by Ivan Sokolyansky. In 1960 Alexander Meshcherya-

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kov, who began his academic career as a philosopher and then obtained his graduate training in psychology, became director of the school. Under his direction, a corps of teachers and teachers' aides were instructed in principles for enculturating blind-deaf children motivated by the cultural-historical psychologists who then played a prominent role at Moscow University - A. R. Luria, A. N. Leontiev, P. Ya. Galperin, Α. V. Zaporozhets and others. Resources were provided to create as rich an environment as possible to promote the intellectual and social development of the students. The Utopian goal of this research was to demonstrate that if sufficient care is taken to arrange the experiences of blind-deaf children, they can become fully functioning human beings, capable of living independently and earning a decent living. T h e crowning achievement of this work occurred when four graduates of Meshcheryakov's school went on to receive degrees in psychology from Moscow State University.

The initial state of the children There has been a great deal of argumentation focused on the initial state of blinddeaf children who underwent instruction at Meshcheryakov's institute. (See Bakhurst, 1991; Bakhurst and Padden, 1991). From a purely logical point of view, research on the mechanisms of development among such children would be simplified if all the children were born blind and deaf, with no other problems. However, children are very rarely born blind and deaf and even when they are, blindness may be caused by cataracts which leave residual vision of light or there may be some retention of partial hearing. As a rule, the sensory deficits are suffered early in life owing to disease; hence, it is impossible to exclude the possibility that successful instruction depends, at least in part, on learning that took place before they entered Meshcheryakov's specially designed home at Zagorsk. However, we do not demand a mythical "blank slate" in order to be able to learn a great deal from research on the enculturation of the blind-deaf. From myriad descriptions of individual cases, it seems clear that, although some of the children may have had sight or hearing for a few years when they lost sight and sound, the general character of their interactions with the world soon lapsed into one of extreme lack of responsivity. Meshcheryakov (1974) sites both an extensive prior literature and his own observations in claiming that the blind-deaf, deprived of instruction, can spend many years in bed, or in the corner of a room fenced off from others, making no efforts to make contact with objects or people, appearing to achieve no mental development, and failing to learn to walk, eat, drink, etc. Meshcheryakov (1974, 83) succinctly characterized the very limited repertoire of the young people brought to his special school in Zagorsk:

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The whole of these children's mental activity is confined to the perception of the most elementary physical needs and the experience of elementary pleasure at the satisfaction of those needs or displeasure if the needs are not satisfied. Essential elements of human behavior are for all intents and purposes missing altogether. In its place we find stereotyped motor activity that allows children to expend their energy. According to Meshcheryakov, in many cases parents attempt to care for their children in the earliest years of life by keeping them constantly "to hand": mothers may spend the first two years of a such a child's life constantly in contact with their offspring, but eventually the burden becomes too great, and they are forced to separate themselves in order to be able to provide food and shelter. Left alone for long periods of time, as a consequence of their isolation from the world, such children developed a kind of extreme "learned helplessness" and stop orienting to the world, except when another person directly touches them for purposes of feeding or cleaning them. Meshcheryakov reports that "a completely unfamiliar object placed in the hands of a deaf-blind child does not stimulate any tactile investigation on the latter's part; a pen, a box of matches or a pencil will be dropped or thrown away by the child" (1974, 89). He noted that it is only when the object is part of a practical activity that satisfies a basic, biological need that one sees elementary forms of exploratory actions, especially if the object interferes in some way with satisfaction of that need. "If it emerges that the stimulus is not linked to the boy in a practical relationship," he reports, "the orientative reaction to it does not evolve" (ibid.).

Initiating Enculturation Meshcheryakov notes that the first impulse of many psychologists when they encounter the blind-deaf is to develop their linguistic skills, on the premise that language is the central medium through which their intellectual functions can be awakened. This idea has been propagated through famous cases, such as that of Helen Keller's well-publicized "breakthrough," when she realized that the feel of water, and the feel of her teacher's hand making a particular pattern of movement on her hand were connected, such that the pattern of movement "re-presented" water. Meshcheryakov explicitly rejects this idea. While acknowledging that language acquisition is crucial to the development of blind-deaf children, he argues that "fostering speech skills in such children is not and indeed cannot be tackled as the first objective in nurturing of a human mind" (1974, 84). Instead, basing himself on the tenets of cultural-historical psychology, he argues that the inclusion of the children in socially organized, culturally mediated, joint activity is the essential precondition for their development. In his words,

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A child's mind takes shape and develops as a result of its interaction with the world of things and the world of people. T h e things with which a child interacts are the products of human labor. T h e essence of interaction with things and people consists in the fact that in both cases this is interaction with a human factor. Expressing this idea in somewhat paradoxical terms we may say that the individual's relationships with other people are realized through things and his relationship to things through his relationship to other people (1974, 86).

Initially these interactions are focused on mundane self-care activities that satisfy essential biological needs: eating, staying warm, elimination. These intensely practical activities serve as the foundation on which non-practical activities, such as play, are developed. These non-practical activities in turn create the foundations for the further development of practical activities. Of the dozens of detailed examples provided by Meshcheryakov, we can present only a few fragments which illustrate the basic principles at work. Rita was two years, eight months old when she entered the special school in Zagorsk. She had congenital cataracts that allowed her to distinguish light and dark, but she could not distinguish objects and she was totally deaf. She had been carried around by here mother almost constantly and had developed no self-care skills. She could walk on an even surface holding an adult's hand, and drink from a cup that was held to her lips while she sat on her mother's lap, but she ate with her fingers, was not toilet trained, and her only communicative gesture was to stretch out her arms to be picked up when she felt an adult nearby and to shout when she wanted attention. She did not imitate adults actions and showed no interest in objects, pushing them away from her if she encountered them. Instruction began with establishing a regular daily schedule in a highly ordered environment. At first she would cry when put down to sleep, and throw all the bedclothes on the floor. The teacher would take Rita's hands in her own and lead her over to where other children were taking their naps, allowing her to feel the other children, to learn that they had undressed and lain down to sleep. Then she would place Rita's hands together in the gesture used to mean "sleep." This routine was repeated daily, along with regularly sitting her on a potty, taking her to wash her hands and face, and helping her to get dressed. Care was taken to be sure that the potty seat was not cold and that the water was warm so that Rita would come to find the experiences pleasurable. All the while the teacher remained in physical contact with Rita as she was led through these routines, often holding the child's hands in her own as she went through such mundane actions as putting on a dress or washing her face. Initially, Rita resisted these activities so that, in effect, she was being "carried through" them by the adult. But the adults were trained to give as little help as necessary. Within a few months, Rita began to take an active role in parts of various actions, and the teacher's role correspondingly decreased.

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As was true for all the children, the bed where Rita slept was the "home base" from which she gradually began to expand her world. Initially, extreme care was taken to make sure that every object in the room had its specified place: her towel was folded over the head of the bed, a chair was placed next to her bed, always in the same place. Her clothing was placed in a neat stack in an invariant order. Together, the establishment of repetitive routines of self-care in spatially predictable environment constituted the initial conditions to allow the child to begin to anticipate the order and location of events. In Meshcheryakov's terms, "The stability of the deaf-blind child's tangible environment is essential if he is to develop proper skills in spatial orientation. It helps him to create an integral picture made up of images of the objects around him, a picture which reflects the external world" (1974, 131). Only after the child has learned to orient in this environment does the teacher begin to vary the location of objects or the order of routines. Such variation, introduced gradually, creates active orientation on the part of the child, so that it becomes routine for it to explore the environment without become overly fearful and lapsing into a state of learned helplessness again. Although new skills are introduced by the teacher literally leading the child through them, teachers are trained to be sensitive to even the slightest evidence of active behavior on the part of the child. Such activities are the seeds of future independent action and they are used by the teachers as guides to the gradual withdrawal of their supporting/leading behaviors. A deliberate effort was made to orient Rita to what the children and adults around her were doing, accompanied and guided by her teacher. An especially important activity was play, which was initially entirely absent. The teacher introduced her to play by leading her to other children as they played, allowing her to feel their movements and the objects they were playing with: how they built and took apart a block pyramid, or assembled and disassembled a set of nested matryoshka dolls. The teacher would also engage Rita in interaction with a doll, indicating how parts of the doll's body corresponded to parts of Rita's body, how items of the doll's clothing corresponded to items of Rita's clothing. As a part of these engagements, the teacher would make a point of introducing each new activity by making a manual sign indicating the name of the activity they were about to engage in. For example, her hand would be moved up her leg from her foot to her knee, after which the teacher would put on her stocking. For a long time, Rita did not comprehend such signs. The effective signal for dressing was the feel of the teacher starting to pull Rita's sock on. A little later, Rita would help the teacher put the sock on and eventually, would put it on herself. Only later did she begin to pull on her socks in response to the manual sign. Production of signs lagged well behind their comprehension.

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These same procedures were repeated with dozens, then hundreds of mundane actions; predictable sequences were initiated by the teacher who "carried" Rita through them. As she began to be able to anticipate next steps in the sequence, she began to co-operate with the teacher, and then began to engage in the actions in response to a manual sign. Meshcheryakov repeatedly emphasizes that it is not the isolated sequences by themselves that are important. Speaking of another child, Lena, whose story is similar in all essential respects to Rita's, Meshcheryakov writes, In this activity (self-care) one m o v e m e n t followed on f r o m another, a n d the end o f each action provided the signal for the next one to begin. All these actions taken together constituted an integrated, uninterrupted stream o f h u m a n behavior. In this way all Lena's behavioral skills, the progress achieved in orientation, play a n d self-care developed not separately f r o m each other but as parts o f an indivisible whole. As a result, the images o f objects which t o o k shape in the child's m i n d , as she c a m e to master them a n d their functions in order to satisfy her needs, did not constitute a haphazard selection o f separate disconnected images, but m a d e u p a connected system o f images linked together in an integrated "vision" o f the external world ( 1 9 7 4 , 124).

It is in the context of such joint activity in a meaningful world that the initial manual signs used by the teachers begin to take on meaning and come to be actively appropriated by the children. Meshcheryakov describes, for example, how children, once they began to play with other children, began to show an interest in the dactylic signs that they made by tracing movements on each other's hands. They would "inspect" other children's hands while they were conversing through patterns of touch on the palms of each other's hands, at the same time that they engaged in play with objects. In the course of this activity, they came to acquire the rudiments of finger-spelling simple words such as ball or doll, precursors to the acquisition of the use of braille that would give them access, once they began formal instruction, to the Russian language and the storehouse of the social inheritance of the larger society of which they were a part. Once the children are part of the community, having mastered its routines and having acquired a rudimentary set of manual signs, and perhaps a few fingerspelled simple words, the foundations are set for the acquisition of verbal speech, which, for the blind-deaf, means the acquisition of finger spelling. Meshcheryakov summarizes the process as follows: Learning verbal language starts not with letters but with words, and not simply with words as such but with words as part o f a connected, meaningful text. T h e sense context for the child's first words are signs. T h e child's first dactylic words are incorporated into a story that is transmitted by m e a n s o f m i m e . O n l y after a child has mastered several dozen words d e n o t i n g concrete objects can it c o m e to grips with the dactylic alphabet, which in practical terms it has already learnt. O n c e it has mastered

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finger spelling it can be taught any word, providing a correlation between the object and the corresponding sign is made clear. ... After learning the dactylic alphabet by heart, the child is acquainted with Braille signs for the letters. Each Braille letter is associated in the child's mind with the manual designation of that letter, with which he is already familiar (1974, 213). Working their way from a core vocabulary based on the everyday routines that they have already mastered, the children are introduced to more and more complex language forms. N o effort is made to teach grammar because Meshcheryakov understood that hearing/sighted children acquire grammar as they extend their vocabularies, without explicit tuition. However, the teachers gradually expand the complexity and range of the dactylically finger-spelled vocabulary that children are exposed to and, along with it, the range of grammatical forms that they become acquainted with. Later they will be taught to read braille rapidly and to write using a specially designed typewriter with braille characters that produce either braille or printed Cyrillic symbols.

Some Concluding Remarks A chapter such as this is too brief to permit us to do more than provoke the reader into considering our main thesis: that the mediation of human action through culture is constitutive of human consciousness and the human form of life. We have attempted to show this at two vastly different levels of analysis. First, we have drawn upon evidence concerning the microgenesis of images among enculturated adults, arguing that cultural constraints merge with and supplement phylogenetic properties of the eye in the generation of our image of the world. Second, we have argued that the constraints provided by phylogeny and ontogeny are insufficient for the production of meaningful images; rather, images are processes, not things. Central to the process of image-making (voobrazheniej is the active striving of the individual to reconcile the disparate information emerging from the convergence of information in successive moments of time. For eye movements, this means moments of coordination/fixation separated by discoordinating saccadic eye movements. For everyday activity, it means the moments of coordination in joint activity are interspersed with the ineluctable moments of discoordination that arise from the loosely coupled transactions of human beings with each other and their physical-sociocultural environments. In both cases, the creating of meaningful images of the world requires the active, purposeful, actions of human beings, who must resolve the uncertainties that arise from the discoordinations that are a necessary part of all human experience. The two different levels of analysis in this paper are brought together in a poignant way by the experience of Alexander Suvorov. Although we did not

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mention it above, Suvorov, who suggested the "metaphor" of rising off of the world and returning to it as the basic cognitive act, voobrazhenie, has himself been blind and deaf from early childhood. He entered Meshcheryakov's school as a young child and underwent the course of enculturation that we have described here. So, when he characterized voobrazhenie as one of "rising off the earth and returning to it," he was not really speaking entirely metaphorically. Rather, he was communicating the phenomenology of a person who, at one point in his life, could not separate himself from his environment in the delicate balance of culturally mediated coordination and discoordination necessary to create a meaningful image of the world, but who acquired this ability through the painstaking efforts of Alexander Meshcheryakov and his staff. The accomplishments of Suvorov and his fellow students gave rise to the natural question: how could someone who is blind and deaf, seemingly cut off from culture and all but the most proximal of environmental stimulation, acquire the ability to read and write Russian, to matriculate from Moscow University, and to live as an independent citizen in a his nation's capital? W e found the answer in the role that cultural mediation, self-consciously organized by socializing adults, plays in the development of mind. It is by being incorporated in the meaningful, culturally organized, coordinated, joint activities of a human community that human infants come to acquire higher psychological functions. This cannot be accomplished without the active, exploratory, information-seeking activity of the child, nor without the tolerance, if not willingness, of the community to facilitate this process. Alexander Meshcheryakov liked to emphasize that "one is not born a full personality." His research enormously enriched our understanding of the complex sociocultural process by which the mature personality is constructed from the raw materials provided by nature. Were he alive today, he would almost certainly approve of the way that David Plath, an American psychologist, expressed the same idea: "The mature person is one of the most remarkable products that any society can bring forth. He or she is a living cathedral, the handiwork of many individuals over many years" (1980, 6).

Human Diversity and Human Nature. The Life and Times of a False Dichotomy

Bradd Shore

I affirm, that if we consult History, both Ancient and Modern, and take a view of what has past in the World, we shall find that Human Nature since the fall of Adam has always been the same, and that the Strength and Frailties of it have ever been conspicuous in one part of the Globe or another, without any regard to Ages, Climate or Religion ... As Human nature always continues the same, as it has been for so many thousand years, so we have no great Reason to suspect a future Change in it, while the World endures. (Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, II, 229) It is very strange how certain modes of thought become general, and can, for some length of time, be maintained, and for long be regarded as something actually existing in human nature. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Letter to F. Schiller, March 18, 1801, 25-26)

At first glance, it seems like a straightforward proposition. Anthropology is the study of human nature in light of human variation. Specifically, anthropologists focus on group variation, which, depending on the subfield of anthropology, entails some combination of biological, cultural or social differentiation. But what exactly does it mean to study human nature in light of human variation? A moment's reflection suggests that defining human nature in light of human variation appears to be more a paradox than a simple definition. It defines not so much a discipline as a dilemma, one that has been at the heart of anthropology since its inception. The study of human diversity and the study of human nature feel like quite different — even contrary — enterprises. In this essay, I will argue that the apparent dilemma of reconciling human nature with human variability is in part a legacy of a long history of theologically motivated speculations about the relationship between human variation and human nature. Conventional wisdom within anthropology sees modern anthropology as an enlightenment reaction against traditional Christian views of the origin and nature of humanity. But there is an important sense in which the view of human nature that sees human variability as accidental rather than essential to human nature is an unexpected common ground for theological and scientific speculation. A deeply entrenched set of cultural and religious presuppositions linking human nature with universal rather than with variable aspects of humanity has

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had a significant impact on how modern scientists (including many anthropologists) have viewed being human. Christian theologians, philosophers and evolutionary biologists have shared the assumption that "human nature" is sufficiently defined by human universals. So accounting for a distinctively human nature implied getting beneath or beyond human variation rather than embracing it. Throughout the history of our young discipline, anthropologists have grappled - not always successfully - with the implications of human variation for an understanding of human nature by throwing themselves headlong into the study of human diversity. Though it appears that describing human diversity and accounting for human nature are inherently antithetical enterprises, I think this view is short-sighted. In this spirit, I intend to propose a number of non-trivial generalizations about human nature that emerge not from bypassing human diversity but, on the contrary, by taking seriously the fact of cultural diversity and variability in human life. To get a sense of the scope of our problem, we begin by tracing some of the early attempts among Western thinkers to reconcile human diversity with human nature. Then we turn to specifically anthropological versions of the dilemma of how to reconcile increasing evidence of the cultural and social diversity of our species with what became known as "the doctrine of psychic unity." Finally, I propose a number of ways to move beyond the false dichotomies that have for centuries driven a wedge between conceptions of the human which focus on human nature and those which emphasize human diversity.

Polygenesis and Monogenesis as Competing Views of Human Origins Until the fifteenth century, Western social thought was theological in character. H u m a n nature was the assumed to be the product of God's will and all social phenomena were understood as reflections of a divinely inspired master plan (Slotkin 1965, 1). Early Christian thinkers used Genesis as evidence to support the older Aristotelian assumption of the inherent incommensurability of distinct species. "God ...," wrote Paul of Tarsus in Corinthians, "giveth to every seed his own body. All flesh is not the same kind of flesh; but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fish, and another of birds" (I Corinthians, 15, 38-40). While the plan of creation ordained a different flesh (or, in Aristotle's terms, a different soul) for each creature, the special creation of man and woman meant at once that humans would be understood as both distinct from every other species, and as a single species with a common nature. Humans were assumed to be one in creation and one in Christ. T h e differences among humans did not

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escape the notice of these early thinkers. For example, in the seventh century Isadorus of Seville remarked on the differences in temperament among human groups, attributing them, as would continue to be the case for centuries to come, to climatic variation: In accordance with diversity of climate, the appearance of men and their color and bodily size vary, and diversities of mind appear. Thence we see that the Romans are dignified, the Greeks unstable, the Africans crafty, the Gauls fierce by nature and somewhat headlong in their disposition, which the character of the climates bring about (cited in Slotkin 1965, 3).

This early account of "national character" contains a number of assumptions which were characteristic of early accounts of human variation. First, there is no clear distinction made among physical, mental and cultural characteristics. Each dimension of human nature is assumed to reflect the others by a kind of analogical reasoning. Secondly, groups are reduced to a single cluster of essential characteristics. And thirdly, these characteristics, though traced ultimately to accidents of climate, are essentialized and held to define each group's "nature." So relatively early on in Christian thought, the theological doctrine of special creation came into conflict with observed differences of the "nature" of human communities. H u m a n nature as described in Genesis was at risk in these ethnological characterizations, and theologians knew it. As early as the Fifth Century, St. Augustine felt compelled in his Civitate Dei to defend the doctrine of monogenesis, a single creation (and nature) for all humans: ... whoever is anywhere b o m a man, that is a rational, mortal animal, no matter what unusual appearance he presents in color, movement, sound, nor how peculiar he is in some power, part, or quality of his nature, no Christian can doubt that he springs from the one protoplast. ... If they are human, they are descended from Adam (De Civ. 16.9).

That observed variations among human groups might challenge the monogenist orthodoxy, and suggest the possibility of multiple creations and a plurality of human natures was a heretical notion to Christian thinkers. Yet by the beginning of the second millennium, the known world to Christians was rapidly expanding, thanks to the Crusades which began in 1097. The Crusades brought Christians into direct and significant contact with cultures of the Near East and North Africa. T h e important divide in human nature became not culture or race per .rebut rather the gulf between the Christian and the infidel. While not challenging the monogenist orthodoxy of the Church, Christian thinkers used Genesis as a textual framework for a kind of second-order polygenist position, a division of human nature into diametrically opposed moral subspecies.

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Biblical history could thus provide a charter for both the original unity of the human species and its subsequent dissolution into a plurality of distinct populations. The contest between monogenesis and polygenesis as ways of understanding human origins would continue well into the nineteenth century, persisting in different guises because it addressed some of the most basic and troubling issues about being human. George Stocking put it this way: [P]olygenism and monogenism can be regarded as specific expressions of enduring alternative attitudes toward the variety of mankind. Confronted by antipodal man, one could wonder at his fundamental likeness to oneself, or one could gasp at his immediate striking differences, one could regard these differences as of degree or kind, as products of changing environment or immutable heredity, as dynamic or static, as relative or absolute, as inconsequential or hierarchical (Stocking 1968, 45). In the West the debate between polygenism and monogenism has proven to be a resilient discourse within which issues of human nature and human diversity could be played out in numerous keys. In early Western speculation about human nature, these concepts organized alternative theological positions on how to interpret Genesis. Much later the same debate would reappear, but this time orchestrating conflicting views of human evolution.

Linguistic Diversity and Human Nature: The View from Babel Many of the early arguments about monogenesis and polygenesis focused on the issue of language. Specifically, the argument pitted those who stressed language as a common and exclusive possession of mankind and those who saw in language a prime example of human diversity. While the original split between the righteous and the evil required only the history of Adam's sons, the more complex sort of variability suggested by the limitless diversity of human linguistic habits was accounted for by the story of the tower of Babel. The earliest Christian speculations about linguistic diversity relied heavily on an unadorned reading of the Tower of Babel story. But early Renaissance thinkers understood how language was a key to understanding both the unity and the diversity of the human. By the thirteenth century, Dante's ideas about language betrayed a mixture of Biblical orthodoxy and a more modern and complex understanding of the place of language in human life. For Dante, the human was distinguished from both the angel and the animal by the possession of speech, as the natural medium of human reason. Dante proposed that language both unites and divides the species. By possessing language, humans are joined in a community of sensible rationality. As the possessors of languages, however, humans are divided from one another and from their maker. The loss of the original Hebrew tongue marked humans as

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fallen creatures. For Dante, the division of our species by diverse tongues is inherently linked to the division of labor, a state that reflects neither the nobility of human work, nor the growing complexity of human society, but the arrogance of human pride. The higher an individual's branch of labor the lower the form of language to which he was consigned, and the greater its distance from the original prelapsarian language that unified the species. In this account, the diversification of the human species represents the loss of an original unity and a severing of a direct connection with the language of creation. While Dante's reflections on the Babel story constitute a sophisticated version of an orthodox Christian view of linguistic difference as a sign of man's having fallen away from God, Dante was in fact on the verge of a more modern and empirically informed view of human diversity. In his De Vulgari Eloquentia, written in 1304, Dante speculated that the confusion of tongues brought about at the Tower of Babel resulted in humans being "first scattered through all the climes of the world, and the habitable regions and corners of those climes" (De Vulg. Eloq. 1, 10). Stemming from the "avenging confusion" following upon the disaster at Babel, "from one and the same idiom ... various vernaculars drew their origin" (ibid.). And with the confusion of tongues came a fundamental transformation in human nature. Having lost an original species unity in a direct connection with God, humans became pliant creatures, culture-bearing beings, destined to take on the character of their local habitation. Change and variability in language, dress and manners became the indelible signs of mankind's fallen nature.

Polygenesis: The Radical View of Human Variation By the sixteenth century, writers were becoming less reticent about challenging Church orthodoxy about creation. As travelers' accounts of variations in human appearances and manners proliferated, the idea of a single human creation, and its corollary of a common human nature, were increasingly challenged by Renaissance thinkers. An empiricist skepticism began to shape Renaissance views of human nature. Michel de Montaigne, well traveled and cosmopolitan, struggled in his Essaies to reconcile his belief in a single human creation with his observations of the striking diversity of human thought and practice. Montaigne was not, in fact, a defender of polygenesis. He believed not only in a single human creation, but in what later came to be known as the "psychic unity" of mankind. "[M]en," he declared, "are all of one species, and are provided more or less with the like tools and instruments for judging and understanding" (cited in Slotkin 1965, 61). Yet Montaigne was remarkable for his appreciation of the power of local custom over human life. He betrayed what would certainly have been seen in his day as a

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striking skepticism, and greeted exotic beliefs and customs with a distinctly modern sense of cultural relativity. "I believe," he wrote in his Essaies, "that no fancy, however crazy, can enter into the human imagination, of which we do not find an example in some popular usage, and which consequently is not founded on or supported by our reason ..." (ibid., 55). For Montaigne, "the effects of custom" shaped not only the external appearance and the manners of humans, but, were most in evidence in "the strange impressions which [custom] makes upon our minds, where she meets less resistance" (ibid.). Human opinions and judgements were, in Montaigne's views almost infinitely variable. While he seems to have shared with his contemporaries a belief in a universal human "reason," Montaigne asserted that the force of custom upon the mind was so great as to effectively render much of human thought and action impervious to the dictates of reason. Montaigne tended to view human variation in thinking and judgement as the product of climatic and geographical variation, rather than of any organic differences among humans. Yet he was a profound skeptic and empiricist in the matter of human nature and human variation and was notably equivocal about the question of whether there was any kind of natural law imminent in the minds and hearts of mankind. Other thinkers of the age were less equivocal about the unity of the human species, and saw in the growing record of human diversity clear evidence of more than one human creation. Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim ( 1493-1541 ), contemplating the newly discovered "races" of man, proposed that "the same God that gives and has given everything, and is known by philosophy, did not allow such forms and so many kinds of people to come from one father but from many, and neither did he order anything unnatural or monstrous, but given all an equal soul, though not similar forms ..." (1894, 3). Attempting to reconcile the observed diversity of organic creation with a traditional vision of a divine order, William Petty (1623-87) proposed a version of "the great chain of being" idea, defined by what he termed "scales of animate being." The order of nature was radically hierarchical, with an upper scale headed by God, and a lower scale of being with humans at its apex. Humans are positioned midway between God and the lower animals. Sharing with the latter basic survival reflexes (1927, 219-20), humans are nonetheless distinct from the rest of creation by virtue of the possession of reason, self-consciousness, speech, curiosity as to causation and the use and enjoyment of sexuality for other than purely procreative purposes (ibid., I, 155-6). Petty's fascination with tracing the hierarchical ordering of organic creation in terms of increasing distance from God was carried through into his thinking about group differences within the human species. More clearly than most thinkers of his day, Petty laid out the implications of a polygenist alternative to the orthodox view of human creation when tied to medieval conceptions of a hierar-

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chically ordered cosmos. Petty interpreted all differences a m o n g humans as differences o f degree. Cultural differences became merged with a conception of racial differences. G r o u p differences a m o n g humans were understood as a kind of internal speciation, hierarchically conceived. I quote extensively, and in the original spelling, a remarkable statement o f an influential version o f a polygenic reading o f h u m a n nature. O f man itself there seems to be severall species. To say nothing of Gyants & Pigmyes or of that sort of small men who have little speech and feed chiefly upon Fish called Uries. For of these sorts of men, I venture to say nothing, but that 'tis very possible there may be Races and generations of such; since wee know that there are men of 7 foot high & others but four foote, that is to say, the one a foote and a half above, & the other a foot and a hälfe below the middle stature of mankind which I take to bee 5 foot & a half. I say there may bee Races and generations of such Men, whereof wee know the individualls; as wee see vast differences in the Magnitude of severall other Animalls which bear the same name, - as between the Irish wolf Dogg and the Bullonian Tumbler & the Iceland Shock; [etc.] ... And what difference is between the Bulke of one Man & another, seemes to mee, to bee also in their Memories, Witts, Judgements 6 withall in their externall Sences. ... Besides those differences between Man & man, there bee others more considerable, that is, between the Guiny Negros and the Middle Europeans; & of Negros between those of Guiny and those who live about the Cape of Good Hope, which last are the Most beastlike of all the Souls of Men with whom our Travellers are well acquainted. I say that the Europeans do not onely differ from the aforementioned Africans in Collour, which is as much as white differs from black, but also in their Haire which differs as much as a straight line differs from a Circle; but they differ also in the shape of their Noses, Lipps and cheek bones, as also in the very outline of their faces & the Mould of their skulls. They differ also in their Naturall Manners, & in the internall Qualities of their Minds (Ibid., II, 30-31). Petty has outlined a thoroughgoing racialist doctrine, whose assumptions permeate all forms of modern racism. G r o u p differences are assumed to be categorical, defining natural types. Key physical features are used to index general distinctions not only in body type but also in the quality o f manners and mind. In stark contrast with Montaigne's attempt to "denature" h u m a n differences, Petty sees mental and cultural characteristics as "natural" extensions o f fixed physical types. T h e classic markers o f race - skin color, nose and hair types - are used uncritically to distinguish one group from another. A n d these physical differences are extended analogically to mental, behavioral and ultimately moral qualities, generating a hierarchy a m o n g the races at once physical, mental and cultural. W h a t is significant about Petty's version of polygenesis for our purposes is its attempt to reconcile empirical evidence o f h u m a n difference with an older Christian view o f a unitary theologically ordered universe. A single hierarchy o f di-

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vinely created organic life, in the form of Petty's "scales of animate being," allows diversity to be neatly reconciled with a unitary plan of creation. Differences of kind are transformed into differences of degree, and the racialist ideology emerges clearly when this logic is applied to group differences among humans. What is remarkable about this formulation is how closely it approximates a later evolutionary schema that Victorian anthropologists used to reconcile human diversity with a theory of common human origin and common human nature. Theological and evolutionary visions of human diversity, usually opposed to one another, turn up here as strange bedfellows.

Early Evolutionary Thinking about Human Nature By the eighteenth century, an older tradition of theological speculation about human origins and human nature competed with increasingly detailed scientific observations of the diversity of biological forms. As director of the Paris Zoo, Europe's largest at the time, George Louis LeClerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-88), had ample opportunity carefully to observe variations among a wide range of animals in both behavior and anatomy. He was struck by the similarities of internal anatomy between humans and other animals, and concluded that the major differences among animals were in "the external cover" rather than in their internal structure (Buffon 1791, VI, 3). When it came to the apparent external affinities between apes and humans, however, Buffon reversed himself. In the interest of defending the doctrine of special creation, Buffon argued that such external similarities were superficial, and that it was their internal differences that distinguished humans from the apes, most especially the possession of a soul. A theological conservative, Buffon also went to great lengths to defend the idea of monogenesis. He proposed that the dramatic variations that had been documented for human groups could be explained by a combination of climatic factors, differences in food and, especially, by variations in customs. While appearing to refute polygenist claims of multiple human lines, Buffon actually simultaneously supported and undermined the idea of an essential unity of the human species. H u m a n nature itself, he proposes, is subject to profound alterations in different environments, alterations so fundamental as to lead people to suspect that different human groups were in fact distinct species. This leads him to characterize these differences as "purely superficial." This is a clear statement of the assumption that any exogenous factors that are believed to shape human nature, no matter how profound their influences, are to be considered merely surface phenomena, rather than characteristics of human nature. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, evolutionary thought was deeply imbued with theological doctrines that had been around in one form

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of another for over fifteen hundred years. Though monogenist assumptions would continue to be challenged into the twentieth century, the idea of a single human origin and its corollary notion of a single human nature became the accepted views on the matter of human nature of both early evolutionary thought and orthodox Christian belief. In both traditions, the "superficial" facts of human diversity were reconciled with a single and essential human nature through the idea of a hierarchy of linked forms, ranging from lower to higher. Rather than understanding variability and the tendency to change as fundamental features of living things, Buffon tended to interpret variation as a kind of disease or deformation, a deviation from an original and authentic unity. Indeed the tendency to variation is itself viewed as a sign of imperfection. The "more dignified" the species, Buffon claimed, the less it will be subject to variation. The implications are unmistakable: human variability is not a constitutive feature of human nature, but rather its nemesis, a consequence of Adam's Fall. Though sharing the older view of human nature as essentially unitary, nineteenth century thinking about human evolution turned the biblically inspired narrative of human history on its head. A progress narrative of a gradually perfecting species replaced the story of a species whose variability represented a fall from grace. But modern ideas about cultural evolution did not come about in a simple way. They gradually developed from a not always coherent set of ideas about the relationship between human variability and human nature. For example, Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin's grandfather, seems to have subscribed to an early version of cultural relativism of thought while simultaneously viewing human history as the working out of a perfecting tendency in nature. From a synchronic perspective, Erasmus Darwin seems to propose that human reason is simply differentiated linguistically and culturally. But his view of human nature is quite different when viewed historically. For the elder Darwin, organic life, including human life, develops by a kind of directed development guided by an inherent tendency towards perfection (cited in Slotkin 1965, 301). The idea of progress underlay the nineteenth-century evolutionists' conception of what Sahlins calls "general evolution."1 Through the notion of a general evolutionary schema, human history could be viewed as a series of determinate and progressive stages. The sequence of general evolution was gradually worked out over the course of the nineteenth century, but relied heavily on technological criteria of human progress. Sir Edward Tylor (1832-1913), an ardent evolutionist strongly influenced by Darwinian thinking, believed that the sweep of human history revealed a uniform pattern of progressive change, one that demonstrated the effects of the application of human rationality to the problems of survival.

1

O n general and specific evolution see Sahlins/Service/Harding 1960.

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Contemporary examples of "backward" peoples could be understood as "survivals" of earlier stages of cultural evolution, peoples whose evolutionary development was retarded, and who could be considered as "primitive" forms of human life. Such "primitive peoples," in this view, provided us with a window on ourselves at an earlier time, living relics of our own evolutionary history. While we may assume that all evolutionists believed in the unity of the human species, in fact the debate between polygenesis and monogenesis continued well into the twentieth century. The late nineteenth century saw a revival of polygenetic theories of human origin, especially among American writers (Stocking 1968). It is important to remember that Darwin himself was equivocal on the question of one or multiple human origins, and was predisposed to view the Negro and European races as distinct species (ibid., 46). Toward the end of the nineteenth century there was a lively debate about whether different races were in fact distinct species with different origins. Folk theories about the inability of different races to successfully mate were quite common in the United States toward the turn of the century, and were often supported by anecdotal evidence that masqueraded as scientific report. Among anthropologists of the time, polygenism was adopted by both physical and cultural anthropologists. It is fashionable nowadays to assume that biologists are more interested in human universale while cultural anthropologists study human diversity. But at the turn of the century it was by and large the biological anthropologists who advocated polygenic theories of human origins. For their part, those interested in cultural evolution tended to support the idea of a single human species with a common origin.

Psychic Unity and "Primitive Mentality The Victorian cultural evolutionist faced the same dilemma as the medieval theologian. Each sought to hold fast to a single human nature in the face of evidence of significant human diversity. And both found the answer to their dilemma in the idea of a hierarchy or scale of human life. Difference could be acknowledged, but only in order to be overcome by reference to a scale of perfection. Christian thinkers saw perfection in the past. Present diversity represented one or another degree of degeneration. For their part, cultural evolutionists saw perfection in the future, a potentiality of human reason for perfecting the species. Diversity was understood as different stages of development or maturity. The earliest attempts to classify the stages of cultural evolution focused on technological or economic criteria such as tool making and subsistence modes. But the real debate over the implications of human evolution for a conception of human nature was to take place "indoors," so to speak, over the issue that was lodged uncomfortably between the phrases "primitive mentality" and "the psy-

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chic unity of mankind." 2 The notion of psychic unity is the psychological component of a universalistic conception of human nature. The idea that all humans possessed fundamentally the same capacities for thinking and feeling has, as we have seen, been a feature of Western conceptions of the human for centuries. Within anthropology, the doctrine of the psychic unity of mankind was first formulated by the influential German ethnologist Adolph Bastian (1826-1905). Bastian, like many thinkers of his day, was an evolutionist, who believed that cultural traits evolved according to fixed laws of cultural evolution, modified only by climatic and geographic factors. His distinction between Elementargedanke (primary thought) and Volksgedanke (local "folk" thought) was his attempt to distinguish the universal from the purely particular components of human mentality. His ideas were widely read in his day and are believed to have had a major influence on Bronislaw Malinowski and Carl Jung. Bastian is no longer read by many anthropologists, but his notion of psychic unity has become something of an article of faith for modern anthropologists, reaffirming as it does the fundamental unity of the species, and the common psychological capacities of all humans. The idea of general evolution was anthropology's early way of reconciling cultural variability with psychic unity. The influential nineteenth century philosopher Herbert Spencer affirmed cultural diversity in human life, while insisting that the "laws of thought" remained common human property. Human nature as embodied in human thought revealed itself in evolutionary time. In Spencer's view, the human mind operated on laws that were independent of a particular culture, even though specific cognitive abilities were closely tied to the group's level of social evolution. The mind, unified in its essence, was pluralized in its temporal existence. Yet this complex position on the psychic unity of humankind was ambiguous at best and, at worst, was self-contradictory. In fact it was the evolutionary conception of culture that made it difficult to draw the line between what was fundamental and what was purely local. It was just these troublesome issues about psychic unity that impelled the early anthropological field-workers like Franz Boas and William Rivers to leave the university for distant lands, where they might have a first-hand look for themselves at the human mind in its diverse settings. Boas, one of Bastian's most famous students, was deeply concerned with reconciling the notion of psychic unity with the prevailing notions of human variation. But his writings on these issues are more equivocal than most anthropologists realize. In 1909, in an address at Clark University, Boas began by claiming that the issue of psychic unity was nothing more or less than anthropology's 2

For a more thorough treatment o f the problem o f "psychic unity" in the face o f cultural diversity see Shore 1996, 15-41.

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fundamental problem. "The fundamental problem on which all anthropological inquiry must be founded," he said, "relates to the mental equipment of the various races of man" (Boas [1910], 243). Though Boas is remembered today for his anti-evolutionary sentiments, and his insistence on distinguishing race, language and culture, Boas was actually quite slow in breaking completely with the prevailing evolutionary assumptions of his day. In 1910 Boas had not yet freed himself of the notion of general evolution as a framework for understanding group differences. Distinctions between racial groups and ethnic groups were still linked in his mind with differences in evolutionary advancement. Boas' most famous statement on the issue of psychic unity is his 1911 volume The Mind of Primitive Man. Here Boas is still clearly trying to sort out the issues of difference and unity in human life and to find a way out of conceptualizing difference in terms of evolutionary hierarchy. In Chapter 11, "The Mind of Primitive Man and the Progress of Culture," Boas repudiates the vision of a unilinear evolution from simple to complex cultural forms. Still, he acknowledges that "increasing intellectual achievements" have produced clear advantages for human communities in security and food production. These changes also represent to Boas clear cultural advances. In terms of the human psyche, Boas still believes in an evolutionary transformation of human sensory perception. Boas still believes that primitive thought exists as a distinct kind of cognition. As others of his time did, Boas associates primitive thinking with such characteristics as anthropomorphism, concreteness, and a tendency to reify abstract phenomena into agents or objects (as in theories of illness). At first glance Boas would seem to be affirming the evolutionist's view of primitive mentality. But a close reading of his argument suggests that Boas is trying to transform the distinction between primitive and civilized minds to a distinction between the "traditional ideas" of different kinds of cultures. Boas preserved the psychic unity of humankind, while freeing himself of the racial assumptions of evolutionism by distinguishing between cultural traditions and mental endowment as the basis for differences in mental life. But this apparently neat solution to the problem of psychic unity had a serious cost. And it is a cost that has continued to trouble modern anthropology. A unitary human nature is affirmed without recourse to evolution, but only at the price of disengaging culture from mind. With the "fundamental" unity of the mind assured, or at least bracketed as an issue, ethnologists were free to document the variety of cultural traditions, traditions that may be held to shape a people's "mode of thought," their "style of thinking" and their "beliefs." Yet in no sense may we conclude that there is any fundamental difference between "minds." The effect of culture (viewed as external) on mind (viewed as internal) is thus relatively superficial, in the same sense that any human variations must be superficial in regard to a more fundamental human nature.

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If culture thus conceived is to be connected with mind, it must be as a content is related to its container. Culture is conceived as one of the contents of mind, rather than as a constituting dimension of mind. Thus anthropology achieved an independence from psychology. The study of culture (as a dimension of human variation) could be dissociated from the study of mind (as a dimension of human nature).

The French Connection This separation of anthropology from psychology derives in large part from the success that Durkheim and his followers had in the first quarter of this century in establishing sociology as a field, by distinguishing social facts from psychological ones. 3 Durkheim's conception of a "social mind," whose functioning is grounded in external models is surprisingly modern in its anticipation of cognitive anthropology. In fact Durkheim and Mauss articulated an early version of what has become known as "prototype theory" in cognitive psychology, whereby basiclevel categories are derived from key exemplars (Rosch/Lloyd 1979; Lakoff 1987). Yet while Durkheim proposed an enlightened view of the cultural basis of classification, his separation of psychological from social facts provided him with no way to deal with the issue of the relationship between social representations and the individual mind. Durkheim's contemporary Lucien Lévy-Bruhl dealt with the same set of questions as Durkheim, but came up with some very different answers. French thought has long revealed a fascinating mixture of rationalism and romanticism. Whereas Durkheim followed the rationalist path in contemplating human nature, LévyBruhl took the romantic path. And in so doing he came closer than anyone else to challenging the doctrine of psychic unity. Like many of his colleagues, LévyBruhl encountered exotic cultures through secondary sources rather than by doing fieldwork. His ethnographic readings gave him a great appreciation for apparently exotic modes of thought. Without complete success, Lévy-Bruhl sought a way to characterize cultural variation as pure difference, and to avoid the sort of hierarchical classifications of thought that typified the writings of evolutionary anthropologists. Lévy-Bruhl's most influential ideas about the psychic unity of humankind are contained his 1910 book Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (mistranslated as How Natives Think). Lévy-Bruhl chose the unfortunate term "pre-

3

Durkheim's views on the distinction between "individual facts" and "social facts" are found throughout his writings. See especially D u r k h e i m 1964 and 1951. For an excellent discussion of Durkheim's critique of psychological explanations of social phenomena, see Parsons 1949.

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logical" to describe the mystical character of "primitive" religious thought. He chose "pre-logical" more as a technical term than as a value judgement. The word denotes beliefs that violate Aristotle's principle of "non-contradiction," which governs the evaluation of formally logical statements. "Pre-logical" beliefs and practices proposed the coexistence of apparent contradictory states such as life in death, unity and multiplicity of being, the identity of distinct forms of life or of distinct species. They constituted logical and categorical anomalies. Though he used the language of his time, colored by evolutionist and racist assumptions, a close reading ofLévy-Bruhl suggests that he did not assume that "primitive thought" was inferior to logical thought, but rather that it was simply based on different assumptions. T o the extent that "psychic unity" refers only to the capacity of mind rather than the actual functioning of mind, Lévy-Bruhl was an ardent defender of the doctrine, though this is not always appreciated. He attributes the failure of "primitive thought" to note contradictions to a lack of interest in logical consistency, not to any innate inability to reason logically. Differences in "mentality" are a function of the "social milieu" (1926, 43). For Lévy-Bruhl, pre-logical and logical modes of thought are derived from a common brain, but are distinct collective representations, or what we would now call distinct cultural models. Logical and pre-logical thought, deeply affecting the habitual modes of thought of a people, are nonetheless matters of cultural value rather than cognitive capacity. "Undoubtedly," Lévy-Bruhl affirmed, "they have the same senses as ours ... and their cerebral structure is like our own. But we have to bear in mind that which their collective representations instills into all their perceptions" (ibid.). The social value that underlies the disregard of logical consistency is positively defined in terms of "the law of participation." By "participation" Lévy-Bruhl meant that people perceived correspondences or relationships where logical thought proposes differences and oppositions. Participation is the principle behind mysticism and its identification of things that in everyday life appear to be separate. Concepts governed by the Law of Participation are sensuous, colored by feeling and by bodily activity. They are not abstractions and are not apprehended as pure ideas: "In its purest form, primitive mentality implied a participation which was felt and lived, both by individuals with the social group, and by the social group with the surrounding ones" (ibid., 366). Only with the emergence of individual consciousness do such sensuous concepts become true abstractions. Lévy-Bruhl, like Montaigne three centuries earlier, understood that a doctrine of "psychic unity" might account for the universality of the most abstract potentialities of the human mind. But he also knew that it could never do justice to the actual diversity of human mental life. Rather than characterizing "mind" in its generality, he sought to characterize diverse "mentalities." "Mentality" lay at the intersection of a common human sensorium and a variable set of cultural repre-

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sentations (models). Had he not used a terminology tinged with condescending evolutionary assumptions, Lévy-Bruhl might well have laid the foundation for a cognitively grounded conception of culture and an intellectually vigorous and non-hierarchical vision of the psychic diversity of humanity.

Human Nature and Human Variation in Modern Anthropology In these pages, my primary concern has been to trace the roots of a dilemma in early writings about human nature and human variation. The detailed history of how this problem has affected more modern anthropologists is another matter that has been dealt with elsewhere.4 Even a cursory look at the history of modern anthropological thought suggests that anthropologists have been struggling with many of the same issues that characterized the earlier speculations of theologians and Victorian evolutionists about the implications of significant group variation for a general conception of the human. Anthropology appears to be a deeply divided discipline today, and much of the disagreement (and confusion) stems from the field's inability to come to terms with its own seemingly paradoxical mission: the characterization of human nature in light of human diversity. In the 1960s and 70s, symbolic anthropologists like David Schneider and Clifford Geertz outlined a semiotic conception of culture that sought to define anthropology as the study of cultural diversity. In two seminal books on kinship, written two decades apart, and a series of controversial and provocative theoretical papers on the symbolic analysis of culture, Schneider outlined a radically relativistic conception of culture as "a system of symbols and meanings" (1968; 1976; 1984). Human reality was, in Schneider's view, a symbolic construct, and cultures were self-contained symbolic "systems," which made cultural comparisons or generalizations difficult. Schneider was an arch cultural relativist, whose critique of traditional approaches to the study of kinship sought to transform a kinship system from a universal framework of relations through blood and marriage to a diverse and often non-comparable set of symbolic systems. Clifford Geertz is another ardent exponent of an interpretive symbolic anthropology. For Geertz, the anthropologist's mission is to reveal (and revel in) the sheer diversity of ways of being human. In a recent essay, he proclaims the ethnographer "the connoisseurpar excellence of alien turns of mind" ( 1994,462). Geertz's most famous (and still highly influential) book was a collection of essays pub4

Cf. Shore 1996, especially Chapters 1, 13, 14; also Shweder 1984. For a conception of human nature that takes cultural variability seriously see Shwederl989. The turbulent state of modern culture theory is on display in a recent collection of essays by leading anthropologists: Borofsky 1994.

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lished in 1973 called The Interpretation of Cultures. The plural form of culture in the title was meant to signal that the proper subject matter of anthropology was the study not of human nature but of the variety of ways of being human. In a series of early essays, Geertz made a brilliant attempt to confront directly the relationship between culture as the source of human diversity, and culture as an aspect of human nature. H e looked to the record of hominid evolution for insights into the origins of culture (and thus of a significant kind of group diversity). The human capacity for culture (a dimension of psychic unity, strictly understood) rests on the extensive symbolic mediation of behavior. Cultural systems were made up of models or "templates" for meaning. Cultural models are both public and conventional (i.e., historically and locally contingent). Culture is a semiotic system, a set of symbolic models that function as an extrinsic control system for human action: The "control mechanism" view of culture begins with the assumption that human thought is basically both social and public, that its natural habitat is the house yard, the marketplace, and the town square. Thinking consists not on "happenings in the head" (though happenings there and elsewhere are necessary for it to occur) but of a traffic in ... significant symbols(1973, 45).

This human reliance on what Geertz calls "symbolic sources of illumination" derives from human behavioral plasticity and the relative incompleteness of the human neonate: T h e behavior patterns of lower animals are, at least to a much greater extent, given to them with their physical structure; genetic sources of information order their actions within much narrower ranges of variation, the narrower and more thoroughgoing, the lower the animal. For man, what are innately given are extremely general response capacities, which although they make possible far greater plasticity, complexity, and, on the scattered occasions when everything works as it should, effectiveness of behavior, leave it much less precisely regulated ... Undirected by cultural patterns - organized systems of significant symbols — man's behavior would be virtually ungovernable, a mere chaos of pointless acts and exploding emotions, his experience virtually shapeless. Culture, the accumulated totality of such patterns, is not just an ornament of human existence but — the principal basis for its specificity - an essential condition for it (ibid., 45-6).

The human reliance on culture has significant implications for how we conceptualize human nature. Geertz's arguments are directed against what he terms "the Enlightenment view of man." This was the view that underlay Spencer's version of psychic unity: that human nature, having been laid down once and for all through evolution, is invariant and regular. In view of the plasticity and social dependence of the human mind, Geertz argues that human variation must be

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viewed as a constitutive feature of human nature. What is sometimes called "the human animal," human nature stripped of its historical and cultural accretions, is not a more basic vision of the human. Indeed, such an "unaccommodated man" is no human at all. Time and space, history and culture, the local dimensions of the human, must be viewed as constitutive of human nature. Rejecting the reduction of mind to its organic basis, Geertz argued instead that the mind was a relationship between a nervous system and its extrinsic sources of activation. His views echo those of Gregory Bateson, for whom mind was the intersection of a brain and an organized environment (Bateson 1972). Geertz notes that the evolution of the hominid nervous system appears to have taken place under the selective pressure of increasing dependence on culture. He notes that the increasing centralization, autonomy, and hierarchical complexity of the nervous system together produced a brain increasingly dependent for its functioning on external sources of patterning and activation (Geertz 1973, 69). The notion of psychic unity as a feature of a biologically completed species presumes an erroneous and seriously misleading dichotomy between a fixed nervous system and a changeable environment. The fear that appears to have led Geertz along with many other anthropologists to affirm psychic unity in the face of his own devastating critique of the notion is clearly the race issue, and with it and the spectre of "primitive mentality." The doctrine of psychic unity of mankind, which, so far as I am aware, is today not seriously questioned by any reputable anthropologist, is but the direct contradictory of the primitive mentality argument; it asserts that there are no essential differences in the fundamental nature of thought processes among the various living races of men (ibid., 62). The unfortunate legacy of cultural evolution, with its hierarchy of human types, underlies Geertz's commitment to a vague notion of psychic diversity. In light of his own subtle understanding of the mind as deeply dependent on cultural programming for its basic functioning, it certainly is not clear what Geertz means by "the fundamental nature of thought processes." It is hard to conceive of a more fundamental variability in mind than the kind of brain-culture interaction that Geertz describes. Like Boas before him, but much more successfully, Geertz wrestled with anthropology's fundamental dilemma. With eloquence and erudition, he attempted to write his way out of the conundrum. Yet the result is an obscure vision of culture in its relation to mind, and a somewhat muddled vision of the relationship between human diversity and human nature. Geertz appears to subscribe to two incompatible models of mind. The one, essentially organic and fixed, underlies his belief in psychic unity. The other, emergent and contingent, is the basis for his argument for cultural diversity.

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The pattern of anthropological theorizing about human nature seems to repeat itself generation after generation. In the first quarter of the twentieth century, evolutionism, with its commitment to orderly processes of cultural development and the implied unity of the species, vied with the newer views of cultural particularly and contextualism in the work of Boas and his students. And in France the rationalism of Durkheim and his students contended with Lévy-Bruhl's romantic embrace of diverse mentalities. In mid-century, two distinct semiotic views of culture and human nature competed for the attention of graduate students. In France Lévi-Strauss' elegant structuralism reinforced the sense that psychic unity was tied up with human reason, and beneath the tangle of cultural tropes lay a coherent and universal code that defined the contours of the human mind. Knowledge was ultimately a property of the species — human knowledge. At the same time, in the United States, symbolic anthropologists were insisting that cultural worlds were not fully commensurable or reducible to any kind of useful generalizations about human nature. Knowledge was ultimately a property of the neighborhood - local knowledge. Today, the rift between those who define anthropology as the study of universals and those who focus on the local and contingent properties of human communities has, if anything, widened. The twin offspring of anthropological speculation, human nature and human variation, have not been getting along. Positions have hardened. The anthropology of human nature, carried out now largely by sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists, has become more rigidly committed to the equation of human nature with human universals. Cultural psychologists emphasize the contingent nature of psychological processes and the cultural diversity of cognitive, affective and motivational structures (Shweder 1984; 1989; Bruner 1990; Cole 1996). But evolutionary psychologists see the human psyche as a relatively stable and universal product of natural selection (Barkow/ Cosmides/Tooby 1992). They define the psyche in terms of a set of universal cognitive, perceptual and motivational structures which were selected for during hominid evolution, and which constitute the psychological component of a shared human nature. By contrast, the anthropology of human variation has been for the past several decades in a decidedly postmodern mood, wary of all generalization or even of claims to be able to make generalizations. In a style of analysis increasingly associated with the term "cultural studies," "culture," if it is acknowledged at all, is viewed as a field of contention, in which diverse discourse and representations vie for attention and power. The emphasis is on multiple voices, permeable boundaries and contested meanings. In such an intellectual milieu, the very idea of culture, once an accepted basis of significant group variation, has come under sustained attack as a notion too coherent, too "essentialist" and insensible to the actual give-and-take of human life. The extreme particularism of the pluralist camp views tends to shift attention from diversity between cultures to diversity

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within cultural communities. The study of "culture" takes on a decidedly subjunctive mood. Take for example the recent comments by the distinguished Norwegian anthropologist Fredrik Barth, who proposed three modifications of the culture concept: 1. All concepts are embedded in practice; and so their definition and thrust can only be determined in the context of that practice. 2. All views are singular and positioned; and anthropological accounts and generalizations about a cultural tradition will represent the anthropologist's own construction, based on her judgments and analyses. 3. All meaning remains contestable, within as well as between social circles and cultural traditions (1994, 356). At an earlier time in the study of human variation, the assumed level of variation relevant to the anthropologist was a community presumed to share a common culture. But the increasingly globalizing and unbounded world together with the anthropologist's current anti-essentialist sensibility conspire to make us look beyond cultural units for more granular levels of human variability. This is how Barth puts it: Perhaps we would do best if we stopped privileging the representation of "culture" and instead focused on the level of events, acts, people and processes. But to the extent to which cultural patterns remain salient as a level of description, we shall certainly have less use for structural models, since they inevitably lose something of their allure once we discontinue our search for the hidden essence of things. If our object of study is a diversity of positioned views and distributed cultural materials, f r o m which ranges of events and acts are generated; and if our interest also embraces the processes whereby these events and acts may either reproduce of change their own preconditions, then we shall obviously need to construct systems models of a kind. But to represent p h e n o m ena as complex and varied as this, we must probably tackle the task of building models that represent disordered systems, systems in flux, forms which at once are both diffuse and emergent (ibid., 358).

Some Propositions about Human Variation and Human Nature In view of the difficulties anthropologists have had in reconciling human nature with human variation, does it make any sense to define anthropology as "the study of human nature in light of human variation?" I believe that this somewhat paradoxical vision of anthropology does make sense, but only if we can clarify what we mean by "human nature." What follows is a set of propositions that are aimed at reframing the relationship between human variation and human nature. They constitute a set of reflections on what happens to human nature when human variation is moved from the sidelines of human life onto center stage.

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1. Human "nature" encompasses the human capacity for and dependence upon "culture." In this sense nature and culture are not opposed, as the structuralists had asserted, but mutually and dialectically constitutive of human life. 2. As Geertz pointed out three decades ago, to be human is to be a particular kind of human. There is no general human being. There is no way out of it. Being human means being a particular kind of human. Just as we all must realize our linguistic capacity by speaking a language, we can only realize our species being through being particular kinds of humans. The contingent aspects of our beings - those historical, cultural and autobiographical characteristics which are "added to" our natures after birth — are not after all secondary attributes of being human. 3. "The psychic unity of mankind" was always more a well-intentioned way to combat false notions of racial mentality than a viable concept for making sense of mind-culture relations. Narrowly construed, the psychic unity doctrine was simply a rejection of hereditary differences in mental capacities, and an affirmation of the environmentalist position. 5 Its ideological purpose was to undercut the notion of innate group differences in mental capacity or endowment. In this sense, the doctrine of psychic unity is a natural extension of the doctrine of monogenesis. If all humans are descended from Adam, then it might be reasonable to expect that all humans share (within a range) the same basic mental capacities and abilities. But ruling out inherited group differences in mental capacity (a valid assertion) strikes me as a much more limited concept than is suggested by the name "psychic unity." Thinkers who attempted to reconcile cultural diversity with a notion of psychic unity have done so by treating culture as if it were purely a feature of the environment, and thus that culture was external to mind. O n the other hand, the biological infrastructure of mind was implied to be a nervous system whose characteristics were genetically fixed and (biologically) impermeable to environmental modification. Put simply in Durkheimian terms, culture (or society) is outside, the mind (or psychology) is inside. Using a more up-todate analogy, culture is conceived as the software of the psyche, while the brain is the hardware. But given what we know about epigenesis in human development and about brain functioning, these distinctions will not hold. Since C. H. Waddington, human physical development is not understood simply as the unfolding of a child according to its genetic template. Ontogenesis, even prior to birth, is not simply genetic, but epigenetic, in that environmental variables will affect the developing

5

I am grateful to Robbins Burling (personal communication) for pointing out to me that my broader reading of the psychic unity concept and its implications for a modern theory of mind (a reading which I believe is accurate) is nonetheless somewhat different from the original sense in which the term was used.

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fetus at key points of its development. So even before birth, the human is biologically a product of the interaction of genes and environmental variables (Counce/ Waddington 1972-73; Waddington 1952; 1975; see also Oyama 1985). Moreover, modern neuroscience does not support the metaphor of brain as hardware. The functioning brain is more like "mushware," since both hemispheric distribution of function and the brain's neural pathways are clearly subject to constant modification. Modifications of this sort show degrees of stability, and are shaped by different orders of feedback from the environment (Changeux 1986; Laughlin/McManus/D'Aquili 1990). The implications are that it is not just the person who learns, but the brain as well. Bateson appears to have been right when he defined the mind as an emergent property of the interaction of brain and environment, though even Bateson may have been using too essentialized a notion of brain. If the functioning brain itself is to some extent environmentally (and hence culturally) configurable, then the framework of assumptions about biology and culture that shaped the discourse on psychic unity is misleading. The rejection of the notion of innate racial mentality, with its assumptions of polygenesis, is implicit in the psychic unity thesis. And this rejection is right. But the entailed assumptions that the human mind - and even the brain — are essentially the same for all humans because we are one species misrepresents the nature of brain functioning and the complex relations that appear to hold between brain structure and functioning and environment. Social representations are not simply cultural facts that belong to the external world. They are also cognitive facts, are inscribed in the human nervous system, though epigenetically (Shore 1996; Q u i n n / Strauss 1998). In view of modern understandings of brain functioning, it is not really possible to make the case for cultural diversity and psychic unity. Some nontrivial conception of "psychic diversity" becomes inevitable, without implying anything even close to a "racial" determination of mind. 4. The dichotomy between fixed and variable aspects of our natures is misleading, since it proposes two alternatives rather than a gradient of possible states. There is no choice to be made between some sort of fixed human "essence" and what Barth called "disordered systems, systems in flux, forms which at once are both diffuse and emergent." The opposition between the fixity of human essence and the flux of human experience is a false dichotomy. This is why I believe that "essentialism" is a straw man in the culture wars. Strictly speaking, there can be no human essences, since all human physical and mental characteristics are the products of evolutionary history and continue to be subject to both natural and cultural selection. 5. In light of the previous discussion, it is clear that there is no way to ever decide whether humans are basically like each other or different from each other. Both logically and empirically, both positions are equally valid. The term "basi-

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cally" is meaningless in this context. It is generally used for rhetorical force, but otherwise has no empirical reference. Since there is inevitably ample evidence to support either the unity or diversity position, the question cannot be answered scientifically, but remains a matter of ideology or personal preference. 6. The dichotomy between human universals and human variation in group behavior is not the same as the difference between biological and cultural explanations, though it is sometimes presumed to be. Biological anthropologists are at least as concerned with human variation (at both the group and individual levels) as they are with universals. Indeed in the late nineteenth century, it was by and large biologically oriented anthropologists and not the cultural anthropologists who defended polygenesis as a support for theories of racial speciation. Similarly, there are certainly cultural universals that can be traced to factors other than biology, factors such as global diffusion (the near-universality of money as an exchange medium in today's world) or overwhelming adaptive necessity/advantage (the universality of controlled use of fire among modern human populations). Debates about human universals vs. human variability are orthogonal, not parallel to debates about biological vs. cultural influences in human life. 7. The really important issue that gets masked by the false opposition between flux and essence is the relative degree of stability and adaptability of different aspects of the human. H u m a n nature is found in the relationships between different kinds of control systems governing human response, systems operating with very different degrees of flexibility, and different rates of change. Indeed one of the selective advantages of cultural adaptation over biogenetic adaptation is the relative flexibility and speed of many (though not all) cultural changes compared with biological ones. There is no doubt that some features of human existence are more stable than others. Scholars interested in "human nature" as a matter of human universals simply select more stable features of human life to study. O n the other hand, those interested in demonstrating human variation choose to focus on more flexible and variable human features. Contemporary cultural anthropologists find ample evidence to convincingly demonstrate the fragility and mutability of the human condition, by focusing on societies whose knowledge systems are in flux, whether in New Guinea or Bali (Barth 1987; 1993). But human ethologists like Irenaus Eibesfeldt, Paul Ekman or Desmond Morris are equally successful in demonstrating the persistence of common human behavior, such as violent behavior (especially of males), basic emotion expressions or certain universal gestures (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1970; Ekman 1980; Morris 1994). Surely the ethologist's data is of a more stable order than that of the cultural anthropologist. But it is not thereby more basic to being human or more consequential. 8. Recognizing a spectrum of stability-flexibility among human behavioral dispositions allows us to see some interesting possibilities that lie somewhere

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between so-called "fixed" responses and flexible deliberate behavior. For example, human ritual (along with the entailed human capacity to ritualize behavior through repetition) is a significant intermediate form of behavior, positioned midway between biologically conditioned ("hard-wired") and consciously controlled behavior. Ritual is important because it has some of the characteristics of both flexible (culturally conditioned) behavior and hard-wired (genetically conditioned) behavior. Ritualization is a valuable behavioral option for humans because it manifests both the flexibility of learned/invented adaptations and the relative stability and automadcity of hard-wired responses. In this sense, ritual might be thought of as "pseudo-instinct," a kind of fixed-flexible behavior that is central to all institution-making and maintenance. As the spectrum of human behaviors goes, ritual has a more "essentialist" feel than some kinds of human responses and a more flexible feel than others (Laughlin/McManus/D'Aquili 1979; Erikson 1977; Garvey 1977). 9. There are two significantly different kinds of human universals, which I will term substantive and generative. Substantive universals (and they are legion) like certain physical reflexes, or the yawn of fear or nervousness, or facial expressions for anger are significant in themselves because they clearly have (or had) significant adaptive value. They represent a substantive repertoire of universal human behaviors. Generative universals are those shared human dispositions or features which underlie and produce significant human variability. For instance, developmental retardation and pedomorphic characteristics (like the human body-head ratio, or relative hairlessness) are generally considered to be universal general characteristics of human ontogeny. T o the extent that these universals of development contribute to delayed maturation, increased dependency and extended periods of educability of the human child, they promote the kind of diversity that comes with the production and transmission of complex cultural traditions (Bruner 1972). The retention of juvenile behavioral characteristics in adults also encourages the extension of playfulness into adulthood. Play is the mother of all invention, and underlies the human predisposition for cultural adaptation (Huizinga 1938). Play might be thought of as culture's answer to mutation in genetic evolution. It is a fundamental source of variability and novelty in human behavior (Bruner ibid.). Another example of a generative universal of human nature is a brain preadapted by evolution for plasticity of response (Donald 1995, esp. 1093-1095). Such generative universals are the shared preconditions for human variability. They are involved importantly in what is shared among humans and they are implicated in what must vary. Generative universals are important for many reasons, not the least of which is that they both propose, and resolve the human paradox that links human variability with human nature.

II Contexts of the Human

Encountering the Other through Grammar Rom Harré

Introduction Access to the Other Can anything more be said about the oldest chestnut in the philosophy of anthropology: how is it possible to understand The Other? This is as much a problem for philosophical anthropology as that discipline is understood in the German tradition as it is in the philosophy of anthropology as a field study. The contrast between the assumptions ofTylor (1871), that the others were less well developed versions of ourselves, and of Malinowski (1936), that the Others lived parallel lives of comparable psychological and social complexity, has been recognised by many but is not, I think fully resolved to this day, especially in the ethnocentric assumptions of English speaking cross-cultural psychologists. W e have the advantage of a tantalising but deep analysis of this contrast in Wittgenstein's Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough (1979). And we have a literature in anthropological linguistics that includes some of the most brilliant gems of twentieth-century human studies to inspire us. Taking Wittgenstein as our guide, we can refine our conception of how it might be that an understanding of the Other can be accomplished. H o w can I enter into the form of life of others? In a famous remark Wittgenstein said that if a lion could speak we would not understand him. But why not? Not because the topics were remote, or the vocabulary opaque, but because Xtovimç.grammar would be beyond our ken. T o imagine a grammar is to imagine a form of life. What is this tight link between "form of life" and "grammar"? T o understand the point one must bear in mind that for Wittgenstein the word "grammar" comprehended any normative constraints and guides to action and speech. Like the relation o f s c h o o l grammar" to speaking our mother tongues, the explicit description of implicit norms, "grammar" in general is the explicit expression of much that is not formally described, nor formally taught. A form of life is intelligible to me just in so far as I have mastered its grammar, not what is, but what ought to be. What do I have to master to have done that? N o t the practical techniques or customary practices of that form of life. If that were required, then I could enter into the life of others only by becoming one with them. It is not to acquire the ability to live life as they would live it. It is to have a grasp of the implicit and explicit norms, the standards of correctness and propriety that are immanent in

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their customs and practices. Mastery of the norms is not a mastery of the practices. It is rather like the relation between a coach and a player. The player plays better than the coach, having mastered the art of the game. But it is the coach who, knowing the norms of correct performance, can criticise and thereby refine the skills of the player, contrasting what he or she does with what it would have been best to do. Anthropologist is to the Other as coach is to player. The task then of the human sciences is to recover the norms of forms of life. I shall briefly survey the two main areas of such research, emotions and the self. In these at least it is hard to deny that diversity and multiplicity reign. In this way I shall be looking for insights into the human condition in general. How can it be that diversity and universality can be reconciled? W e can understand this only by treating the question in terms of universal and local norms or standards rather than universal or specific practices. The notion of "culture" loses its central place, or rather becomes transformed, and tightened up. It no longer refers to everything that a people or a social class or a family or a work group does, but rather the immanent and transcendent norms that constitute their form of life. Thomas Luckmann has pointed out that even the broad notion of "grammar" may prove to be too narrow for the job of expressing the normativity of life in the everyday. In particular, when coupled with the metaphor of "rule", be it rulefollowing or acting in accordance with a rule, there is a suggestion of a tight discipline on personal and collective action. But most of life is much more loosely ordered, and is not fully coherent. Others have shown that conversations, when examined from a "third person" perspective, are a good deal more indeterminate than those who take part in them suspect, in the sense that the intentions of speakers are rarely adequately expressed or fully taken up by others engaged in the interaction. It is also worth remarking that there are other approaches to the understanding of everyday life that are closely related to the "discursive turn". Ethnomethodologists have made close studies of the patterns of very small scale interactions, coming up with hypotheses about the rules for such exchanges as adjacency pairs, for instance question/answer sequences. We should also take account of communicative genres, such as narratives, story-tellings of all kinds. For example Propp's analysis of the structure of Indo-european folk-tales (1924) displays a linear time order, whereas story-telling in Indonesia, for instance, shows a structure based on significance rather than time.

Language games and forms of l i f e Human beings think, act and speak within forms of life. I choose the Wittgensteinian way of expressing this insight and all that follows from it. The more or

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less equivalent expressions of this insight to be found in the writings of Heidegger and the phenomenologists are expressed in ways with which I feel less at home. I shall, therefore continue to use Wittgenstein's terminology. T h e details of Wittgenstein's scheme lead more or less directly to useable methodological proposals. In particular there is the idea of a hierarchy of forms of life, each framed by a grammar or loosely organised set of rules and customs, according to which the correctness and propriety of what we think, do and say can be assessed. In so far as people are trained into acting according to the rules that define their form of life, they reproduce it. It is in language games that a form of life takes concrete form, that is in mainly interpersonal activities, frequently involving the use of material skills, in which language plays a variety of indispensable parts. The normative constraints on these activities are only as stringent as the circumstances and the task demand. From this point of view "a psychology" will consist of a description of the rules and conventions of a culture, coupled as appropriate to a catalogue of the skills and personal powers required to accomplish such projects as and when they are called for.

What psychology? The remarks in this paper are framed within a certain general account of the nature and methods of psychology. The study of the psychological processes that are the subject matter of the discipline, as I shall recommend it, is emphatically not modelled on the Cartesian paradigm in any form, that is on the idea of a mental mechanism, a kind of diaphanous parallel to the material mechanisms of the body. Mental phenomena are not distinguished from neural phenomena as attributes of different substances. That way lies 350 years of philosophical frustration and badly formed psychologies, which continue to return to the insoluble questions posed by the traditional mind-body problem. For example: How can I justify my acting towards you as if you "had a mind"? How is it possible for anyone's mental resolution to issue in bodily actions? This hiatus between myself and the Other, and my own thoughts and my public actions, opens up an unbridgeable chasm if these seeming problems are taken up into philosophical anthropology. Instead I propose to frame psychology in a different metaphysics, one that is neither Cartesian nor reductionist. According to this way of thinking, human beings are active participants in a common material and symbolic form of life, using their bodily equipment for all sorts of tasks, some physical, some cognitive (Midgley 1996). Thinking in terms of people as active centres of power, we can see a close analogy between the metaphysical underpinnings of physics and psychology. Research in physics is controlled by the thesis that the powers of material things are grounded in states of those things. Secondary powers are grounded in struc-

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tures of more elementary subsystems, the powers of which are explained by the distinctive powers of the yet more elementary beings that make them up. These in their turn are grounded in more basic structures, until a level is reached in which there are only charges and fields, that is beings which are possessed of powers and capacities which are not further grounded. In physics and chemistry there is such a hierarchy of levels of structures that it has taken four centuries to penetrate to what we think might perhaps be the primary active agents, the possessors of basic powers. In psychology we reach a level at which there are primary powers ungrounded in any underlying psychological processes of structures very quickly. 1 Nevertheless, though our cognitive powers are not psychologically grounded, they are grounded in neural structures and processes. For example, my skills as a speaker are grounded in structures and processes in my brain and nervous system, but are not reducible to them. The irreducibility comes simply from the fact that distinct entities in each level are related to one another in different and irreducible networks, meanings with meanings, neural states with neural states. This pattern of analysis fulfils Wittgenstein's principle of inhomogeneous foundations upon which all human and cultural sciences must be based. He realised that if the proposed foundational level for some human skill, for example a system of rules, were to consist of a deeper layer of rules, a sceptic could always ask for a deeper level, the rules for the application of those rules, and so on. H u m a n life could not be lived that way. His solution was to draw our attention to the fact that rulebound activities of all sorts — and there are several ways in which what people do is framed within systems of norms - are grounded not in rules but in practices, practices in which we are trained. Basic habits are not exercised by following rules, though we may have been taught by someone who used rules in teaching us good habits. A grounding in practices is non-homogenous, that is it is a grounding in something that is not a rule. The problems engendered by trying to set up a hierarchical grounding through the invocation of psychological processes of which we as actors are unaware - a grounding of psychological phenomena in hidden psychological processes — is avoided. The foundations of psychological states are neural and so inhomogeneous with the psychology powers they support. Psychology then has a psychological foundation in basic perceptual, cognitive and motor skills. These have a neurological foundation in bodily mechanisms. The bodily mechanisms and organs are related to the relevant skills as tools to tasks. In no way can a prescription of a task be reduced to a description of the tool best suited to perform it. Tools can be described independently of their role in the task, but then their status as tools, that is their relevance to the task performance is left out 1

Pace Freud and Fodor I do not believe it makes sense to invoke unobserved psychological processes, intentional states and so forth, behind the skillful management of symbols.

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of account. A chemical analysis of the material of a spade does not include the concept of "digging", the use to which it will be put. No more does the analysis of the neurochemical processes that enable remembering as a psychological phenomenon include the concept of "getting it right or wrong". The analyses which follow are animated by an insight that can be found in the writings of both Aristotle and Wittgenstein. It runs counter to a metaphysical presumption that runs through a great deal of twentieth century psychology and philosophy of mind. The presumption is that behind the psychological phenomena of which we are aware, such as acts of remembering, making decisions and so on, there is another realm ofpsychological phenomena which are hidden from us. The framing of psychology in this metaphysics has been like an epidemic that infects almost all the post-Aristotelian psychology that began with Descartes' moment of transubstantiating the Christian soul into the substantial ego, and infects to this day much of post-Behaviourist psychology.2 Both cognitive "science" and contemporary readings of Freud are metaphysically diseased. The same misframing is evident in much contemporary linguistics, particularly clearly visible in the writings of Fodor with his unobservable but intentional mental states (1976) and his "language of thought" that he believes must lie behind our uses of our mother tongues. To develop an ontology for persons, much can be gained by conceiving of psychology as having a sort of parallel to physics, in that in each science we ground our explanations in powerful particulars and their dispositions. In physics the powerful particulars are charges and their dispositions are distributed in space and time as fields. In psychology the powerful particulars are people and their dispositions are their skills and capacities. But whereas the domain of physics and chemistry has turned out to be hierarchical, with layers of unobserved and even unobservable potent entities, one behind the other, so to speak, there is no such hierarchy in the domain of psychology. Our skills and capacities are not grounded in unobservable psychological levels, but in the neurophysiology of our bodies. It is as if at the surface we are already at the depths. One of the great merits of the psychologies of both Aristotle and Wittgenstein - and in the intermediate era, Thomas Reid (Essay [1768]) - was the clear grasp of this fundamental point. Relocating cognition So conceived, the person has no long-standing psychological attributes other than his or her powers to produce psychological phenomena in the flow of private and public actions, both symbolic and practical. Memories come into being as acts of

2

The honourable exception is discursive psychology (Edwards/Potter 1992).

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remembering, attitudes as declarations or displays of judgements and opinions, beliefs are given concrete and momentary form in the answering of questions and so on. Most importantly, even "selves" are created ad hoc. The only individual entity psychology need recognise is the person. Selves are not inner entities but appear like vortices in a mélange of attributes of the flow of action, complex phenomena brought about often by the exercise of rather disparate personal powers, in interaction with the productive capacities of others engaged in producing psychological phenomena from their own points of view. "Selves" are attributes of the flow of action that active people produce in exercising their various skills and capacities on what the human and material environment presents them with. If our philosophical anthropology is based on the principle of a unitary person, creating with others different selves on occasion, then our empirical anthropology must be alert for cultural variations in selfhood. An even more complex focus of study is the psychology of emotion. A display of emotion, be it public as a performance visible and audible to others or private to oneself in the form of a feeling can be studied as a physiological process, or it can be looked at functionally. The function of displays of emotion seems to be communicative. As acts of communication, a public display or a private feeling express judgements of a rather complex form. They are either modelled in cognitive processes or, in many cases, seem to presuppose cognition. Unlike many but not all other cognitive processes, the judgements expressed by displays of emotion are usually premiseless, in that they rarely involve reflection. The old word "passions", used for some of those phenomena we now lump together as emotions, reflected the fact that the emotional response to some state of affairs is habitual, unreflective, almost it seems, caused. The sophisticated emotions to be found in the lives of mature members of a society are the result of elaborations on a basic set of primitive reactions, genetically provided and explained by Darwinian selection. The ethology of human emotion displays investigates the origin of certain fixed action patterns in the approved Darwinian manner of Tinbergen (1953) and Lorenz (1952). But if we come to see emotion displays as communicative acts, with a quite complex cognitive content, as I shall demonstrate in discussing some recent work in the field, we must be careful not to slip into the assumption that there is a pattern of unconscious cognition, which "lies behind" the expressive judgements of emotion displays. Emotion displays and feelings are a class of communicative acts which are grounded wholly physiologically. While some of this physiology is inherited, most of what is required to ground the emotion displays and their recognition by mature members of a culture is trained in, like any skill. Of course, after the event, we can retrospectively disentangle the bits and pieces of evidence, of interpretation, of reasoning that would have taken place or been relevant, had the judgement expressed been the result of prior discursive "work". The cognition appears elsewhere than in the prior conditions for the

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emotion display. It is encapsulated in the trained or habituated practice, developed out of the simple ethological repertoire, refined by its relation to the norms of the local society. In testing a hypothesis about the complex social meaning of a display, we can usefully substitute a verbal expression with the same communicative force, as a thought experiment. A gasp of fear may be functionally equivalent to a shout of "Watch out!" The main theme of discursive psychology could be summed up in the principle that collective activity is the psychologically primitive condition, exemplified for instance in the psychological symbiosis between parent and child. Individual psychological activity, such as holding an opinion, making a decision, feeling an emotion (as opposed to being physiologically stirred) are secondary achievements. Causal sequences and habituated patterns of action It is important in all branches of psychology, and particularly philosophical anthropology, to keep in mind the broad distinction between behaviour which is caused and actions which are the realization or expression of norms. To explain the former we develop hypotheses about causal mechanisms. T o explain the latter we advert to systems of rules. Much confusion has been brought about in psychology by the fact that many patterns of behaviour are or have become habitual, and their origin in rule-following forgotten. They look superficially similar to causeeffect sequences. Equally the cultural transformation of the causally prompted fixed action patterns of human ethology may be overlooked if the superficial similarity between the ethological display and its culturally modified and elaborated descendants is misread as thoroughgoing identity. However habits are not causes, and much methodological muddle has come from treating them as such. The aetiology of habits is quite different from the aetiology of cause-effect sequences. There is deliberate training in proper behaviour, so that we do not have to think to use a tissue to blow our noses. Elias's studies of the transformation of public life by the importation of "manners" into Western Europe (1978) directs our attention to a long forgotten historical moment, in which the "training" aspect of many matters that in our culture are so habituated that we can almost see them as causal to us, is manifest. For example, there is the picking up of patterns of behaviour by imitation, so that we manage our clothes in accordance with local rules of propriety. Most importantly, the difference becomes very clear when the question of changing patterns of behaviour arises. The methods by which we change habits are quite different from the methods by which we change or more likely override cause-effect sequences. Changing a cause-effect sequence will involve changes in the physiology and genetic endowment of human organisms that may take generations to achieve naturally or the use of powerful drugs to achieve momentarily.

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Language, culture and action Making the Other a mirror for ourselves The most specific form that the influence of language has on thought ought be visible in studies of linguistic cultures other than our own. The conclusions drawn by Sapir (1949) and Whorf (1956) are generally condensed in to the so-called "Sapir-Whorf' hypothesis, that language forms influence (or in a common misreading of the writings of both men) determine the possibilities of thought. If there are aspects of our language that are deeply embedded in our thought patterns they will be very difficult to discern. Since every aspect of our culture will display them, from family life to law to religion, we will have no contrast with which to make them visible. For example the radical individualism of much of American life and its realisation in a very rule bound culture escapes the attention of most Americans. In just the same way the subtleties of class in Britain escape the attention of those who live by them. H o w to make ourselves strangers to our own culture is the first step in devising a methodology by which the rules that express the basic patterns of cognition in our culture can be discerned. O n e way is to turn to linguistic and cognitive anthropology, the study of language games other than our own.

Language and psychology In giving a central place to language in human forms of life, Wittgenstein neither endorsed nor disputed the thesis that language shapes our ways of thinking. That we do think with language and other symbolic systems that are language-like can hardly be disputed. But it has been held that linguistic differences are too superficial "dressings" on an underlying common species-wide system with which all human cognition is accomplished, the fanciful "central processing mechanism" properly castigated by Shweder (1991). According to Lakoff (1987, 327-337), there are criteria for deciding whether in any particular case a culture makes use of a cognitively distinctive conceptual system, as exemplified in linguistic matters. "Whorf was right in observing that concepts that have been made part of the grammar of a language are used in thought, not just as objects of thought, and that they are used spontaneously, unconsciously and effortlessly" (Lakoff 1987, 335). There are linguistic tools put to use in cognitive and practical tasks. T o some extent the form of the tool constrains the tasks to which it can be put. Though I could use a screw driver as a chisel I could not use a mallet for the same purpose. O n e could not play tennis with a fishing rod and a rugby ball. Generally speaking, it is possible to translate statements descriptive of material states of affairs in one language into statements in another, in such a way that

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truth is preserved. The evidence suggests that for psychological matters this is strictly limited since there are many psychological words for which no equivalent exist in the criterial language, say English. The dogmatic universalist then goes on to claim that the concepts of the exotic language can be described without remainder in the criterion language. O f course, as Goddard and Wierzbicka (1995) point out, this is neither here nor there for the question of alternative conceptual systems. A conceptual system is not a catalogue of signs, it is a system in use. A strikingly powerful account of the use of the words "mind" and "soul" in English and of the word "dusa" in Russian is to be found in Goddard and Wierzbicka (1995, 44-49). These authors offer a detailed use-analysis of the words in their cultural contexts. Given the relevant experiences, one can come to understand, though I would argue always ceteris paribus, the conceptual system of another culture. After all these are human beings with whom we share a generic form of life, upon regularities in which the very possibility of psychologically important aspects of language depend. The point was made forcefully by Shylock in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. However, there are deep cognitive differences in the way resources are used. In so far as the tools of a common human culture are used differently from those of another culture the psychologies of these cultures differ. W e can discover and discuss exotic psychologies in just the way that we can come to understand our own, namely by discerning the normative background within which people set themselves tasks and the means they adopt to fulfil them. The short statement of all this is "find the rules", or write some out, as expressions of how our conceptual tools are supposed to be used.

Grammar or lexicon LakofFs critical assessment of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis makes use of a distinction, central to Whorf s own view of the relation between language and thought, between the role of a local lexicon in constraining thought and the influence of grammaticalised distinctions, from which he extracts a plausible working hypothesis about the relation between language and cognition. Though he does not refer to Wittgenstein, the result of his reflections is pretty much like Wittgenstein's distinction between the framework that makes the use of certain distinctions possible and concrete episodes in which the available distinctions are actually used. The available vocabulary facilitates some cognitive activities while rendering other difficult, but surely not impossible. Despite Pinker's (1994) demolition of the claim that Inuit speakers have a richer vocabulary for types of snow than Europeans do, it is true that Australian Aboriginals have a richer vocabulary for kangaroos than Australian English has. But an Aboriginal stockman could instruct me in distinctions I do not presently know how to draw, distinctions which it might be

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useful for me to make when I am out in the bush. This is quite a weak constraint on thinking. But the constraints exerted by grammar are of an altogether different cast. The normativity of grammar is such that leeway in violating its principles is narrow on several fronts. There is evidence for at least a correlation between the availability of complex tenses and patterns of temporal reasoning. But in the case of the self the grammar of pronouns clearly exerts a potent constraining force. If I open my mouth in France, I must choose between the formal and the informal grammatical forms, for instance "vous" and "tu" in addressing you. If I suppress the pronouns, the verb inflexions require the same choice in expression of the social relations presumed to obtain between us. It is not that having "tu" and "vous" in the language creates a contrast between two kinds of interpersonal relation. Rather having to make that distinction forces me to have to think in terms of asymmetrical social hierarchies. Whichever form I choose, I cannot but express a social attitude to you. If I don't use one or the other I can't speak. Recently, serving as one of a six-membered doctoral jury at the Sorbonne, I was struck by the grammatical shift that occurred at the end of the examination. During the five hour viva, the candidate was uniformly addressed as "vous", even by one member of the jury who was of the same age and a good friend. Immediately after the announcement of the result, favourable in this case, the three jurors who were of an age with the candidate adopted the informal "tu". The nature of the two language games was both signalled and realised in the grammatical choices.

Methodology I: how anthropology and cross-cultural psychology might meet Having settled the outlines of our philosophical anthropology, we can turn to the question of the setting up of methods of enquiry in accordance with them. We have already discussed the complementary way in which lexical and grammatical matters interweave in the creation of psychological realities. The lexicon The main problem that besets and often vitiates cross-cultural research is the preempting of results by the use of analytical categories that are deeply embedded features of the cultural matrix in which the investigator has their own psychological and social being. More often than not this cultural baggage is carried in a vocabulary, perhaps even in a pseudo-scientific vocabulary that the investigator takes to be etic. A word like "affect", for example, carries a heavy cultural load, only some of which may be found in the target culture. In the past much misunderstanding came about by the use of English as the language of reference. The question couched in English and exemplified by: " H o w do these people show their anger?" has shaped and distorted a great deal of research. This distortion is particularly clear in the writings of Izard (1977), but it is very widely to be seen.

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The prior question " D o these people have a concept close to or overlapping with our concept of "anger"?" must be addressed. T o o often the answer to the latter question has turned out to be " N o " , thus vitiating all the hard work that went into trying to answer the former query. The following methodological principles and techniques are culled from recognizably "good work", such as that of Catherine Lutz (1988) or Anna Wierzbicka (1992). The first lesson, then, is that we must pay close attention to the local lexicon, and track its uses closely.

The grammar The research projects undertaken by such authors such as Mühlhäusler and Harré (1993), Rosaldo (1980) and others, in tracking the complex patterns of psychological functioning through which personhood and the self are created across time and place, have depended heavily on linguistic analyses. For example, much of the work of "self' is based on studies of the first person, using "I", as an exemplary first person device. It can be seen that it is not a queer sort of referring expression or ambiguous name, targeting people one by one. The only referring expressions in the language games of self-attribution and description are proper names and their equivalents and they are used to refer to actually, formerly or potentially embodied persons. But we must beware of taking it for granted that the grammar of the English "I" is a model for all other first person grammars. Much of the implicit ontology of personhood on which psychology has rested since the seventeenth century is surely unwarranted, in the light of how the impression of personal singularity is actually created in all sorts of forms of life. Taking English grammar as our base-line pre-empts the way that the reflexive discourses of various cultures embody a variety of concepts of person and self. T o substantiate these bold claims two jobs need to be done: i.

to make out a case for the methodological thesis that the empirical study of grammar is the route by which the relevant forms of human experience can best be revealed; ii. to illustrate this thesis by example. In order to do this, I shall try to show that the grammatical function of the first person is indexical and not referential and to analyze its very complex and culturally diverse indexical forces, which express culturally diverse aspects of the sense of self. I turn now to illustrate the use of the methodology that we have drawn out from the philosophical anthropology implicit in the advent of discursive psychology. Methodology II: making the texture of life visible We are presented with a world of enormous complexity and indeterminacy. This is true in both its physical and its cultural aspects. The greatest innovation in technique, an innovation that made physics possible, was the development of the

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technique of building, imagining and using models. A model is an analogue of its subject. Let me illustrate two important roles of model-making, both of which have an important part to play in psychology, with examples from early modern physics. Idealisations /abstractions It often happens that in the real world an object or process that seems to be at the heart of some phenomenon of interest is too difficult to study in itself. It may be too large or may be happening to rapidly or too slowly. In 1600 William Gilbert published his great work, the De Magnete, the definitive work on the properties of simple magnets. Gilbert was interested in the problems of navigation and particularly in the use of the magnetic compass as a navigational instrument. To experiment on the whole earth was then impossible, so to shrink the world to manageable size Gilbert constructed a"terrella", a little earth, a sphere of loadstone with the magnetic and geographical poles coinciding. The oceans were carved out and he attempted to chart the magnetic variation from true north as he moved a miniature compass across the micro-oceans. Such models have been variously named. I prefer to call them homeoemorphs, in recognition of the principle that they share a form with their subject. T h e physical sciences and engineering are full of these models.

Explanatory models: paramorphs Francis Bacon was puzzled by the anomalous effect of heat on different solids. For instance, wax was liquefied by heating but clay was solidified. H o w could this be? He tried to explain the difference in the effects by imagining what solids might be like, assemblages of small, hard particles, or corpuscles. His model for heat itself was a motion "expansive and constrained acting in its strife upon the inner parts of bodies". By assigning wax atoms and clay atoms different degrees of adhesion he was able to invent an explanation. In the hands of Boyle, Newton, J.J. Thomson, Rutherford, Feynman and many others this primitive model of matter has been amazingly refined and elaborated. Paramorphs are invented and applied to the reality they model, whereas homeoemorphs are abstracted from it. However, there is a constraint on how we are permitted to imagine explanatory models. They must be possible realities. The way to ensure that is to set up a double analogy. The model is an analogue of the unobservable state, object or processes we are assuming really explains the phenomena of interest. But in most cases it is itself an analogue of something we already can observe. So that Bacon's corpuscles are not unlike the grains of sand that can be made to stick together into a sand castle or more drastically into glass.

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Both kinds of models deal with problems of observation. In the one case the reality is too difficult to observe and study conveniently, while in the latter it cannot be observed at all.

Models in the human sciences There are plenty of examples of both types of model in h u m a n studies, and indeed in the patterns of thinking of everyday life. Every time one consults a map, one is using a homeoemorph of the countryside. Maps are simplified and reduced abstractions from the reality of a region. Every time one declares oneself to be fighting off a virus, one is thinking in terms of a paramorph. Viruses, until recently as unobservable as quarks, were invented to explain the onset and course of diseases for which no bacterial cause could be found. But what about models for psychological phenomena themselves? T h e dramaturgical model in social psychology, used to good effect in several contexts, is an abstraction from the messy goings on it is used to represent, for example the behaviour of the staff of a restaurant, which presents a puzzling appearance. But by trying to abstract a pattern from the events, controlled by the idea of the performance of a play, its staging and so on, G o f f m a n was able to present the work of the restaurant in a simplified but illuminating way. Similarly the fine structure of football hooliganism was revealed by Marsh's use of the idea of a ritual to abstract a pattern from what seemed at first sight to be chaotic (1977). Cognitive psychology is rich in paramorphic models. For instance the use of cost-benefit analysis to analyse the thinking of romantic lovers, may seem somewhat unromantic, but it has offered a possible explanatory account of the ups and downs of love affairs. More technically impressive has been the use of a famous analogy through which Artificial Intelligence has spawned some cognitive science. T h e model-creating analogy looks like this: C o m p u t e r : Running a program :: Brain : T h i n k i n g T h e slogan that the brain is a kind of computer is a rather extravagant way of stating the thesis that computation is a model of some (or all) kinds of cognition. Here we have a very powerful, though ultimately flawed paramorphic model. It is flawed because the number and weight of ways in which brains and their functioning äre unlike computers vastly outweighs the number and weight of ways they are alike. It is not too much to say that a great deal of thinking, perhaps all, is a matter of model making, sometimes richly imagined but sometimes taking the form of highly schematised formal representations. T h e model-engendering relation is analogy.

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Conversation:

The leading model for discursive

psychology

I have been arguing that cognitive psychology ought to be focused on the public uses of words and other symbolic devices by active people trying to bring off all sorts of projects. The means adopted in most cases involves a great deal of public and private talk. If this is not in words, talk proper, then the way it goes suggests that it has a great deal in common with talk proper. For example what people do is effective insofar as it has a more or less shared meaning in the group involved, and takes place within a tacit system of norms that would, if stated explicitly, express the loosely bounded set of possible courses of thought and action that these people would regard as justified, sensible and proper. Since conversation is literally a subtle symbolic public activity, often but not always directed to some overt or covert end, occurring within the bounds of certain conceptions of what is a possible conversation, and is not wholly opaque, it ought to serve as a model for all types of meaningful interpersonal interaction, whatever be the medium (including tennis). It further follows that in so far as all human encounters are meaningful and norm-bound, the conversation or discursive model should straddle the boundaries between social orders and their cultural realisations. In the examples which follow, I will try to illustrate the use of conversation literally as a guide to the psychology and thus to important aspects of the life of the Other, and I will be using it as a model to explore the emotional life of some of the Others. Worked example 1 : The discursive account of emotion To make any headway in the study of emotion across cultures, we must have at our disposal a working account of what emotions are, what role they play in life and how they should be investigated. In this paper I shall be working from the standpoint of the discursive account, according to which emotion displays and the feelings that sometimes accompany them are social acts, whose role in social life is communicative. Their closest parallel in adjacent fields are the performative utterances of speech-act theory (Austin 1965) with their illocutionary force. Part of the difficulties that plague emotion studies comes from the ambiguities and national differences in the use of the very word "emotion" itself. Current uses of the word "emotion " Though the word "emotion" is a late entrant into the English language, nevertheless it has already acquired a variety of uses, not least among psychologists. Broadly speaking, there are two main ways of using the word and so two main fields of studies of the emotional life of people and animals. Particularly in the United States, in both lay and professional discourse, "an emotion" is taken to be a bodily

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condition. For many people an emotion just is a feeling, for example "anger" is a particular pattern of abdominal tensions, visceral sensations and so on, caused by something in the environment or even by one's own thoughts. For more physiologically or biologically oriented psychologists, an emotion is a physiological state or group of states, the existence of which is explained causally. However this way of locating an emotion as a phenomenon sidelines most of what is important in the lived emotionality of human beings and animals: namely, the expressive function of emotion displays and feelings such as "being angry", "feeling elated", "raging at someone", "being envious of someone's success" and so on. From this point of view, an emotion display or feeling is an expression of a complex judgement about some person's actions, one's own performance or sometimes a situation. In many cases, such as chagrin, the display is often a social act, in this case a sort of apology. Grief expresses the judgement that someone of value to the mourner has been lost, while in displaying it a person expresses their regrets and so on. Both the biological and the discursive points of view allow that emotions can be both inherited and learned. The biological reductionists neither pay much attention to the huge cultural variations in human emotion repertoires, nor to the role of emotion displays and feelings in the episodes of everyday life. Laird and Bressler (1992) have demonstrated that the traditional folk-wisdom that acting out the display brings on the feeling, is right for several important groups of emotions, such as dread and happiness. This again raises the question of the primary location of emotions: in the public world as displays or in the private arena as feelings? Historians have shown that the 17th century ancestors of many of our emotions words were used to refer only to displays and not to feelings. Laird's work has a profound consequence for the question of the biological roots of emotion, and so of bridges to the emotional repertoires of the Others. If Laird is right, these roots lie in human ethology, in what Wittgenstein (1953) called "the natural expressions" of the human form of life. As such they are publicly meaningful acts, part of the repertoire of devices by which we warn, threaten, entice, etc. nearby members of our tribe. Emotion displays, then, are primitive discursive acts. Cultural elaboration and suppression of the ethological endowment of human beings, qua members of the species homo sapiens, results in more fine-grained and differentiated displays, in more sophisticated discursive acts. In so far as local practices and vocabularies are picked up together, language at least shadows the development of a socially particular emotion system. Crosscultural studies of emotions then are set firmly within the purview of discursive psychology. If there is any comparison to be made, differences must have a cultural and not a biological origin. As cultural constructions, emotion displays and feelings are intentional acts, the meanings of which have a place in particular cultures.

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Expressive force of a display or feeling of emotion If a display of emotion is an expression of a judgement, whether it be public as overt behaviour or private as covert feeling, we would expect it to have cognitive components. i. The feeling or display must be taken by the person displaying the emotion and by others who are aware of what is going on if that display is public, to be about something. There is a vast range of intentional objects that emotions can be about. For instance, jealousy is oriented to a good the jealous person believes is theirs by right, dread is oriented to an unspecified but deeply threatening danger to the person who feels or displays it, shame to the judgements by other people that one's actions were immoral. This object-orientation is readily observable in the way that one is no longer afraid if the situation is shown to be non-threatening, even though one's heart is still beating fast! O n e is no longer proud if the action or seeming achievement is shown to be worthless. ii. There must be an assessment of the value or quality of that to which the emotion is directed. For example one would hardly feel pleased for someone who achieved something quite worthless. O n e would hardly feel schadenfreude when someone enjoyed good fortune. O n e is embarrassed by those of one's actions that others plainly regard as uncool, and so on. iii. The relations between the people involved are also germane to the interpretation of the display and related feeling in an emotional episode. Positions in the local moral order, the local structure of rights, obligations and duties to which people believe themselves subject, play a large part in the fine tuning of some emotions, such as envy and jealousy. Jealousy is typically displayed by someone who believes that their rights in or for some good have been violated or usurped. Envy, in both its benign and malign forms, is typical of situations in which one wants the valued object in the possession of another person while acknowledging their right to possess it. It is worth remarking that this aspect of the cognitive structure of emotions is very variable, even within broadly the same cultural-linguistic group. And it is also very variable with respect to the social class and gender. iv. There is the aspect of a display of emotion as the expression of a social act. The performative theory of language-use goes back to Austin (1965), who realized that much of what we say to one another in everyday life is not reporting facts but getting things done verbally. Words can be used not only to describe states of affairs and to convey information about them, but also to issue orders, to apologize, to insult, to plead, to condemn and so on. This aspect of language-use is the salient point when we set about analyzing emotion displays by analogy with speech acts. A display of anger not only expresses a complex judgment about rights and their violations, but also expresses a condemnation of or protest against the viola-

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tor. A display of grief not only expresses the judgement that a valued being has been lost, but expresses regret that it should be so. A display of embarrassment is the performance of an act of contrition for the violation of some non-moral norm, as well as the expression of the judgement that one's actions were socially inept. A system that allows quick reactions to current events and situations obviously has great value for the individual person and for their social group. Displays are more forceful than words. Though we could replace the emotional expression of the cognitive aspects of displays and feelings, we would not only find ourselves reacting more slowly, but some of the force and vehemence would be lost. What sorts of judgements are routinely expressed as emotions? There are at least four main categories. a. Prudential: these are emotions that express judgements that some situation, person, animal or thing is dangerous (displays/feelings of fear, dread, anxiety and so on). b. Evaluative other-directed: these are emotions that express judgements that some situation or act by another person imperils or enhances one's worth or standing (anger, jealousy, envy, chagrin and so on. c. Evaluative self-directed: these are emotions that express judgements that oneself (or another associated with oneself) has broken some rule, ordinance, convention, either moral or social (embarrassment, shame, guilt). d. Aesthetic: these are emotions that express judgements that something is aesthetically pleasing or displeasing (disgust, delight, joy, revulsion ). Emotionology An emotionology comprises the local taxonomy of emotions and the local beliefs about the nature, meaning and role of the tribe's repertoire of emotions in daily life. The term comes from Stearns and Stearns (1988). Emotionologies are studied by an analysis of the local lexicon of emotion words and the rules for its use. These rules will express, among other things, the norms within which emotions are expressed and properly felt. H o w do we know which words are the words for emotions? Only from the role they play in the local culture, picking out displays that seem to express judgements of one's own and other people's behaviour along dimensions familiar to all of us, having to do with loss, possession, enjoyment and so on. In short, if they seem to include the four cognitive aspects above and to be expressions of the four types of judgements set out above (and perhaps others as well), then we would say the relevant words are words for emotions. A glance at the literature on emotionologies reveals that the methods involved boil down to the technique of describing in the English metalanguage how the words of the target language are used, as for example in the work of Lutz (1988) and Rosaldo (1980). The metalanguage constrains research only in so far as it is

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assumed that there is an adequate vocabulary for describing the situations and personal interactions in which the target emotion has a place. For example "being ill", "leaving home" and so on are taken to have more or less the same field of application as their exotic counterparts. O f course nuances may be very different, for instance "falling ill" has different implications from "being ill". Though the work of Wierzbicka (1992) makes use of a universal semantic basis, through the use of which the exotic word can be explicated, the real work is done, I believe, in the preliminary descriptive studies of the way a candidate emotion expression is used. For example in an excellent demonstration that the emotion for which the English use the word "disgust" is not the same emotion as that for which the French use the word "dégoût", Wierzbicka assembles reminders of usage that amount to the description of local rule systems. For example (Wierzbicka 1992, 129) she says "the feeling designated by the word dégoût is associated much more closely and much more directly with eating than is that designated by the word disgust". Ignoring the ambiguity between displaying disgust and feeling something on the occasion of the display, we have here a crucial difference in the rules for the use of two expressions. The divergence spreads out into other contexts. As Wierzbicka points out, disgust can be displayed in comment upon "bad and ugly" human actions which would not be described as a display of dégoût. In setting out examples of cross-cultural studies according to the discursive methodology, I shall assume that the job has been done when the rules of use have been set out. N o further gloss is required. However, establishing a vocabulary is hardly the end of the matter. Emotionologies describe the resources, but they leave untouched the question of how these resources are used in the episodes of everyday day life in the linguistic culture in which they have their native place. Words and actions: speaking in everyday episodes T o illustrate the way that a study of the rules for the use of a certain word can reveal aspects of the emotionology of a remote culture, I take one of the examples so brilliantly analyzed by Lutz (1988). W e shall also see how the establishment of a lexicon must be supplemented by a detailed account of the life episodes in the accounts of which the key words have an indispensable place. T h e Ifaluk frequently use the word "fago" to denote a certain class of embodied judgements as to their relations to someone else. They have/are "fago" t o / f o r someone who is ill, for someone departing from home, someone who is dying or dead, for someone who, though cheerfully engaged in some activity, might be endangered, and t o / f o r someone who is a polite, good natured and socially competent person. Lutz assembles a list of English words that cover some of the semantic field of this emotion, including"compassion", "love" and "sadness". Generically"fago" seems to express the judgement that someone is deserving. O n e can be deserving for a

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very wide variety of reasons. For example those who are ill are deserving of our attention and compassion. Those who are socially skilled are deserving of our attention and appreciation. Those who are dead are deserving of our attention and regret at their passing. Putting this another way, "fago" expresses the judgement that someone may potentially lack something, the ill may lie uncared for, the dead may be buried without a sense of loss, and the socially competent may go unappreciated. I know of no European language in which there is no distinction between desert that arises from a virtue (His kindness was not properly appreciated) and that which arises from a misfortune (Her sprained wrist was ignored by her colleagues). T h e sorrow I might feel in each case would be a very different emotion. Lack of appreciation is one thing while lack of care is quite another. If we add from the Ifaluk a desert that derives from death (Her death was not properly mourned) we arrive at a complex of situations which are various, yet seem to be united in that we might say we regretted the lack in each case. But "fago" is neither "regret" nor "being sorry for". It is evoked when the person is being cared for, is being mourned and is appreciated. It reflects the need or desert, satisfied or unsatisfied. T h e element of sadness that Lutz identifies is a kind o f peripheral or corollary judgement, that one can envision lack of care, lack of appreciation and lack of mourning. So whenever one appreciates a virtue or cares for a misfortune, that is coloured by the fact that the one for whom "fago" is felt might have lacked such care and appreciation. It should be clear from this example alone that the Ifaluk taxonomy, its way of lumping and splitting matters for which the culture provides ways o f giving bodily expression to judgements, is very different from ours, and yet not so different as to be unintelligible. T h e methodological point ought to be equally clear. If Lutz had asked herself: "When are the Ifaluk sorry about something?" she would have failed utterly to comprehend their emotionology. Only through meticulous attention to semantic detail can we undertake serious empirical research. Neither the titration of blood and the measuring of galvanic skin response, nor the experimental methods of oldstyle psychologists would offer any hope for an understanding of Ifaluk emotions. Pitfalls, however, abound. There are some classification systems that seem to depend on tracking the state of some bodily organ as the emotion phenomenon, rather than classifying emotions according to their targets and the social force of their expression. T h e words for Maori emotions, for instance, are derived from qualifications o f organs such as stomach, heart, liver, bowels and so on. Heelas (1987) has pointed out that there is a system in use among the Chewing that is based on the presumed state of the liver. However it is clear from the way the Maori and the Chewing expressions are used that they are not descriptions of felt bodily states. These systems seem to be a metaphorical outgrowth from a basic taxonomy in which the felt accompaniments of the relevant displays have been

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prominent, and which have been elaborated into a taxonomy including seeming body states which are not, or even could not be felt. Why do such taxonomies exist? One possibility, suggested by analogy with the history of European emotion words, is that a certain cultural pressure to a stoical and dignified demeanour in all circumstances led to the suppression of the ethologically based displays, and so attention turned to the métonymie remainder of the whole experience of emotion reactions, namely the bodily feeling. This explanation would fit Maori culture very well, since it was traditionally based on a cult of honour and prestige. Such cults almost always involve the cultivation of displays of "effortless superiority". Worked example 2: The "self': what is universal and what can be diverse?3 Dimensions of variation What room is there for differences in the way the psychological characteristics of the actions of human beings are manifested? There might be differences across generations, across cultures, across ages and across genders and between individual people. I shall call these differences diversities. There might also be more than one way that some generic psychological characteristic, such as selfhood, is produced in the life of any one human being. I shall call this multiplicity. It might be that individual multiplicity (displays of more than one social persona, for example) ties in with cultural diversity, in that in some cultures some categories of persons are accorded more licence in displays of difference from the local standards of "proper personhood". Not only do people often display more than one personality, but most people have more than one story to tell of their lives, depending on the situation, the task in hand and who else is about. Both diversity and multiplicity are normal variations in psychologically significant presentations, but they are taken to be pathological when certain normative boundaries are violated. Where those boundaries lie can easily be shown to be different in different cultures, at different ages, in different social classes, and so on. Unacceptable multiplicity is more difficult to track and pin down than is unacceptable diversity. Some degree of multiplicity is necessary to living well. Excessive rigidity in self-presentation as well as too labile a self are both on the boundaries of acceptability. Assessments of pathology are common enough with respect to how individual people function. They have also had a place in the assessment of cultures and forms of life. Concepts like "primitive", "backward", "undeveloped", and so on play the role of terms for pathological characteristics of the psychology of a culture. The weaknesses of such judgements have been brought out by Wittgenstein in his Remarks on Fraser's Golden Bough, and by other authors. 3

An earlier version of this section has appeared in Harré 1998.

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Person and self: the core cluster of concepts H u m a n individuality is made of a complex web of ways of being, that fit together in different ways. The universal concept of a person picks out the publicly recognised and named human individual. The first person has at least the common role of indexing what one says as the speakings of that person. But there are at least three other aspects of personhood for which the word "self' has been appropriated in English language discourse. There is the singularity of one's sense of one's own being, as a unique embodied centre of consciousness. 4 There is the totality of personal attributes which that person and only that person possesses.5 There is the way a person presents themselves as being of a certain sort in interaction with others. 6 W e could call these Self 1, Self 2 and Self 3 respectively. O n e might call the "Person {Self 1, Self 2, Self 3}" structure, the "standard model". Each component of the standard model can be considered with respect to the tolerance of its possible dimensions of multiplicity and diversity.

Diversity The dimensions of possible diversity in selfhood stand out in this catalogue. It would be very surprising indeed if there were not great differences in how people in different cultures thought of themselves, in the sense of their self-concepts. Differences in the importance of physical prowess and intellectual power are sometimes significant. Some psychological characteristics are more fateful than others, and this differs from place to place and time to time, for example a tendency to epilepsy. It would also be very surprising if there were not great differences in the kinds of personality and character that were valued and so encouraged, from tribe to tribe. But it would be very surprising if the concept of person diverged much from that known amongst ourselves, and even more surprising if the Selves 1 of other cultures shed our body-centred point of view in perception. The first person is used to index what is said with the speaker's spatial location, moral position, social status. The latter two are obviously contestable, but since spatial location is that of the speaker's own body, it must surely be a universal aspect of selfhood. However, we have good reason to believe that there are great differences in the degree to which a person's actions are taken by that person and others to be the sole responsibility of the speaker as actor. If what is taken to be pathological is defined by a degree of difference between what the local norms prescribe and what someone does, there will be pathologies that stem from individual variations from standard ways of behaving. There will also be those which 4

Philosophers call this aspect of selfhood 'personal identity'.

5 6

Psychologists call this aspect of selfhood 'the self-concept'. Social psychologists call this aspect of selfhood the 'presented self.

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stem from unacceptable variations from the local standards for such highly structured multiperson entities as families and business corporations. Here the Other may be very close to us, in our own human surroundings. It might be the other gender! (Tannen 1990). It might be another generation. It might the people in the psychiatric clinic. Multiplicity The strange phenomenon of multiple personality syndrome, the seeming presence of more than distinct person in the same body, raises questions about the self from another direction. There seems to have been a general consensus that the principle one person/one body is close to a logical truth. In the past demonic possession was somewhat like another person sharing a body. However, there are several famous cases in this century that suggest that two or more ordinary people can inhabit a single body, appearing successively. Though the interpretation of the phenomenon has been much disputed, and even denied to really exist, there are two famous cases, which have served as the sources for most thinking about the problem. These are the young woman, Miss Beauchamp, who from time to time would insist she was called "Sally" and when in that state, called Miss Beauchamp, "you". A third person, also revealed grammatically, appeared in Miss Beauchamp's life, calling both Sally and Miss Beauchamp "she" (Prince 1910). T h e other classic is that of Eve White, who began to display very different characteristics from those she usually presented, even insisting that she was not Eve White, her married name, but Eve Black and that she was single (Thigpen/ Cleckley 1957).

The double singularity principle Using the simple terminology of Self 1 for singularity of point of view and Self 3 for the publicly presented self, and assuming there is an interplay between them, our local culture reveals a pair of powerful normative constraints on how a person should be. Only those human beings who display a singular, continuous Self 1 as an aspect of whatever Self 3 they may from moment to moment be presenting, are to be counted as psychologically normal, perhaps even as persons properly so called. Disruptions of the Self 1 singularity, such as Alzheimer's condition, fugue, amnesia 7 and so on, are diagnosed as disorders, even diseases. Only those human beings who display or present a singular, harmonious, and coherent Self 3 are to

7

Sabat has shown h o w inadequate attention to the overall structure of the discourse of Alzheimer's sufferers can induce a false sense in the interlocutor that the Self 1 of the sufferer has been disrupted (Sabat/Harré 1995).

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be counted as morally acceptable. Dissimulation, Machiavellianism, vacillation, insincerity and hypocrisy are taken to be vices. Taken together I call this pair of standards the "double singularity principle". This principle is not based on observation of people's behaviour. It delineates the limits of what is to count as a proper person. Deviations from either singularity are to be taken as failings, to be remedied in the one case by reform and in the other by cure. Normative constraints can be challenged. It might be argued that life need not be and perhaps ought not to be lived in accordance with the form that the Double Singularity Principle takes in some particular social setting. However, we can hardly maintain our humanity unless we frame our lives within some version of the Principle. W e must have some criteria of health and / or morality to roll back the incipient chaos that a normless life would bring. There have been various challenges to local and even to general forms of the Principle, particularly from feminist authors of a poststructuralist bent. Dorothy Smith (1987) has challenged the Principle in her claim that women do not live singular lives and that this fact should not be taken as mark of a lesser standing. She describes a woman's experience as typified by a "bifurcated consciousness". A woman's mind consists of "two modes of consciousness that could not coexist with one another". Smith's state of mind could not literally be that of bifurcated consciousness, otherwise she would not be able to realize that she remembered, planned or feared different things in different circumstances. Smith, however, does provide a gloss in which the two modes are explained as being "different organizations of memory, attention, relevances and objectives, and even different presences". If we take "presence" to mean something like a Goffmanesque presentation of Self 3, it is clear that what I have called the Self 1, point of view, must have been conserved for Smith throughout her life. Her memory of the events of her life as this person is unimpaired. Her sense of continuous self-embodiment is not in question. But from time to time she entertains thoughts and undertakes patterns of action that either could not be performed together or that, though thought together, were mutually contradictory. It is easy to see that her identity as a person is robust and conserved as a singularity, given that Smith's account of her "contradictory" life depends on all the thoughts, episodes, and so on being indexed with the unique and singular spatio-temporal trajectory and moral standing of their author as an embodied being. There is no doubt that her sense of personal identity in the philosopher's sense is unimpaired. The sense of drama that Smith's remarks display comes from running together different aspects of the standard model, in particular Selves 2 and 3 with Self 1, and that with the root concept of Person. Her remarks would have been more interesting shorn of the covert "political" agenda that they exemplify. Even within our culture there are variations around the two dimensions of diversity and multiplicity, within the bounds of what counts as proper personhood. Some of these variations may be more widely spread

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in persons of one gender rather than another, just as they may be differently distributed among members of different professions and social classes. If Smith seems to deplore the depreciation of an abundance of Selves 3 and a complex Self 2, according to some standard of desirable normality, the contemporary attitude to the kind of multiplicities of self described by Morton Prince (1910) and Thigpen and Cleckley (1957) implies a pathologising of multiple Selves 1 in the life of the one embodied person. T o the rest of us, Miss Beauchamp and Eve White/Black are more "Other" than the people in New Guinea, so remote from our little world-centre that they did not know until recently that we existed. O u r mutual ignorance of each other was perfectly symmetrical. But they were embodied, agentive persons like us. Though Miss Beauchamp knew what it was like to be an ordinary person in the early twentieth century United States, a form of life that required there to be one person per body, she acted and especially spoke as if there were three of her in the one body. Her use of personal pronouns created the impression of three people, each indexing their memories, decisions and observations of each other as if they were separately embodied. O f course, all this is clearly a matter of the norms of a form of life. Where bank accounts, credit cards, and Christian ideas of responsibility reign, Miss Beauchamp and those who live her way, are a strange tribe in our midst, and, like Eve White, the patient described so vividly by Thigpen and Cleckley, they are suffering from a disorder, and thus are in need of a cure. Oddly, recently, in the United States, the boundaries of what is acceptable in personhood have moved to include persons presenting themselves in such ways. In some states of the union, each of the "persons" inhabiting the one body can be sworn in separately as witnesses in courts of law.

Conclusion I have tried to present a sketch of the discursive turn in psychology in such a way that it expresses a thesis in philosophical anthropology concerning the nature of human beings. Humans are symbol-using beings, actively engaged in fulfilling plans and projects, thereby creating an interpersonal world of meaningful acts. People are neither disembodied souls nor physiological mechanisms. Neither compression into unity of the essential duality of human life will do justice to it, and certainly has proved a poor foundation for coming to understand ourselves and the Others. Access is not just through the learning of languages, nor through immersion in the stream of Other lives. It is gained through the creative and judicious use of models. The model that offers the most, I believe, is the generalisation of the metaphor of life as a conversation.

A Grammar of Human Life? Comments on Rom Harré's Paper Thomas Luckmann

I should like to begin my comments on Rom Harré's paper by turning to its conclusion. I am in full sympathy with his general claim that human beings "are symbol-using beings, actively engaged in fulfilling plans and projects, thereby creating an interpersonal world of meaningful acts" (p. 130). Who but adherents of a willfully wrong-headed psychological dogmatism could quarrel with that? If a "discursive turn in psychology" — as Harré puts it — will contribute to the welldeserved demise of that dogmatic school of thought, all the better. And I also share Harré's assumption that "the metaphor of life as a conversation" (ibid.) illuminates an essential aspect of human existence. However, what can "generalisation" of this - or any - metaphor possibly mean? And, assuming that there is a precise sense to the generalisation of a metaphor, how could it constitute a"model"?' Back to the beginning. As the title indicates, Harré's main thesis is that the way to understand other persons and other "tribes" is to understand their grammar. In explicating this thesis, he takes for the most part a wide, not to say a rather loose Wittgensteinian view of what "grammar" (pp. 107f.) means. "Grammar" are not only the rules which guide people's speech, or, more generally, the norms guiding various kinds of their communication with each other, but all the norms of social interaction. In this sense, "grammar" is to be understood as a system of rules that underlies a particular form of life. Nonetheless, Harré occasionally and almost imperceptibly shifts to a narrow, linguistic conception of grammar. This is not overly surprising because it appears that Harré assumes a high degree of isomorphism between "the basic patterns of cognition in ... culture" and the rules of "language games" (p. 114). I find this assumption, tacitly or explicitly shared by various (pan)semiotic schools of thought, untenable. It is a distortion of an old insight which is of the highest relevance for

1

W h e n I was asked to c o m m e n t on R o m Harré's paper, I had good reasons to accept without hesitation. I had known him and some of his writing for quite some time. Moreover, when twenty years ago he and I participated in a conference on the claims and limits of h u m a n ethology, in which Eibl-Eibesfeldt and I were paired in the first session of the meeting, Harré commented on our presentations. H e dealt kindly with my theses about personal identity as an evolutionary and historical problem. W h e n I accepted the assignment, I was sure that I would be in sympathy with his general anthropological / psychological position. T h a t turned out to be the case. But ... the devil is hiding in the details!

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an understanding of human culture. As early as the 1830s, Wilhelm von Humboldt, in the introductory volume to his writings on language, the so-called Kawi-Werk [1830-35], took up some earlier notions and suggested that "the inner form of language" (by that he meant more than syntax in the narrow sense) is coextensive with a world view ("Weltansicht"). Humboldt applied this insight in many detailed linguistic studies. Later, Humboldt's dialectical view of the relationship between language, world view and thought was applied somewhat narrowly in continental, especially German semantic-field analyses and suffered considerable distortion in its transmission to another continent. If Sapir [ 1921 ] already tended to simplify Humboldt's position, Whorf [1956], for his part, simplified Sapir and ended up with a kind of linguistic determinism which was at least partly refuted in subsequent studies. (I admit that now I am capping all these steps of simplification by my own way of characterizing Whorf.) N o w to return to Wittgenstein. T o a certain extent, his use of "grammar" as a metaphor for the normative structure of social life proved helpful. T h e metaphor suggests that there is some sort of structure that includes and organizes various sub-structures often considered as being without much connection: both the relatively tight linguistic and other semiotic systems, as well as the non-semiotic objectivations of a form of life. However, as soon as one abandons the metaphor as a metaphor and treats it as a general model of culture, one superimposes the notion of tight structure upon something which demonstrably consists of a loose configuration or, if you prefer, a brittle coalition, of a few sets of relatively tight structures, such as a normative linguistic syntax, a legal system of the kind represented by the C o d e Napoléon, certain poetic genres such as the Petrarcan sonnet, classical Russian ballet, chess, Javanese (or were they Balinese?) cockfights, etc. etc., on the one hand, and many substantially looser structures of socially objectivated meaning, such as the moral order of modern Europe, the world view of the Pygmy society of the Ituri Forest, non-expert notions of health, and generally, the bulk of non-canonized common sense knowledge in any society. Let me repeat: I think that the transformation of grammar as metaphor into a model, as Harré seems to propose, is highly problematic. T h e problem is compounded by the fact that Harré takes matters even further and suggests that the model be used as a methodological programme. T h e consequence is that what is an empirical question, to be decided by investigation, is prejudged in advance. T h e question is: what are the degrees of coherence of semiotic and other subsets which characterize different cultures? In this connection I may mention a minor quibble. It isn't always clear, at least to me, and possibly to others, whether Harré refers to a grammar-in-use or to a reconstructed grammar, or to both at the same time, if I may adopt and adapt Abraham Kaplan's reference to two aspects of logic in science (1983). I admit that I may be mistaken, because Harré's simile of coach and player may refer to just

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this difference. But it would be helpful if the formulations in Harré's paper precluded such a misunderstanding by making it explicit when he is referring to the one and when to the other. In any case, in view of Harré's appreciation of, even enthusiasm for the contributions of anthropological linguistics to the empirical study of "language games" other than our own and thus to an understanding of'exotic" forms of life (p. 115), I find it surprising that he does not make more of what, from his point of view, could be called something like a Wittgensteinian turn in that field. I am not the only one who will say that one of the most significant developments in anthropological linguistics, since the publication in 1964 of the special volume of the American Anthropologist, edited by John Gumperz and Dell Hymes, was a systematic extension of the scope of anthropological linguistics and, indeed, all anthropology. To descriptive and comparative lexical/syntactic linguistics, occasionally amplified by traditional sociolinguistic studies, there was added what Gumperz and Hymes called an ethnography of communication, a programme and a methodology for the study of language-in-use. In a Wittgensteinian mode, one could say that this was a turn to the study of "language games", were it not for the fact that this term has been badly overworked and should be put to rest. Back to the text. Harré suggests that "the task ... of the human sciences is to recover the norms of the forms of life" (p. 108). This seems an unexceptionable proposition. Wittgenstein's insights into the connectedness of the various rules and constraints that make up a form of life may be well-chosen as a general frame for discussions of the conditio humana. Especially so in countries where such insights had been blocked by the dominance, in the philosophical and scientific community, of certain implicitly Cartesian and explicitly reductionist traditions, traditions to which Harré refers critically. A philosopher who saw the basic flaw in Frazer's "explanation" of magic is certainly an admirable guide if one is trying to give an account of how it is possible to understand others, to understand other people, other cultures. I should like to give the flavour of Wittgenstein's remarks on Frazer by quoting one of the typical observations from his notebooks: "His explanations of the primitive customs are far cruder than the sense of the customs themselves".2 Taking a Wittgensteinian perspective and looking at research in the area of emotions and of the Self, Harré hopes, to gain "insights into the human condition in general". But, as it turns out, taking this seemingly productive approach to interpret some particular areas of research — or, more precisely: a small number of studies in certain areas of research in the human sciences - in the hope of illuminating the human condition hides some serious difficulties. They are not dissimi2

"Seine Erklärungen der primitiven Gebräuche sind viel roher, als der Sinn dieser Gebräuche selbst" (1995, 277, 11. 9-11).

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lar to those that were encountered by Peter Winch in his attempt to formulate a Wittgensteinian Idea of a Social Science (1958). Many of these difficulties were raised in the discussions that were provoked by Winch's book, published in 1958, and I am not sure that they were resolved to everyone's satisfaction. I am referring to the debate between proponents of - to use somewhat simplified labels - idealistic and critical rationalist versions of the old relativism versus human universals problem. Again, it was all about how one can understand alien (or, as Winch put it, "primitive" - Harré now speaks of "exotic") cultures. I did not refresh my memory about the details of this debate. But as I recall it, Peter Winch, Ernest Gellner, Alasdair Maclntyre, Robin Horton and others re-argued some of the points at issue in Wittgenstein's criticism of Frazer (cf. Gellner 1968; Maclntyre 1971; Hollis/Lukes 1982). It may interest our British and American colleagues to hear that the debate was continued in Germany, among others by Jürgen Habermas (1982). 3 ( If my memory of these matters is correct, we are now engaged in a sort of Alexandre Dumas sequel - Vingt ans après, or rather, Quarante ans après— to what had been, in the first place, a reprise of the problems addressed by Wittgenstein in his notebooks, especially in his remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough) I dare say that that particular debate on how one can understand others was somewhat insular. It tended to ignore, with hardly an exception, the fact that the modern variant of the old question had been articulated much earlier in two other traditions. O n e was the hermeneutic tradition. The question was first raised - and answered, to his own satisfaction - by Dilthey, (well, actually he was not the first either, but should we go back all the way to Schleiermacher?), and then by Gadamer, Ricoeur and many other philosophers and literary scholars of the so-called Poetik and Hermeneutik group. The same problems were raised in a different context and, to my mind, in more satisfactorily precise terms in still another, the phenomenological tradition, by Husserl, Sartre (in what in my view is his most important philosophical work, La transcendance de l'ego) and by Alfred Schütz. However, I am to comment on the present paper by Rom Harré and not on the paleontology of the problem. Let me return to it and take up Harré's methodological thesis. He maintains that "the empirical study of grammar is the route by which the relevant forms of human experience can best be revealed" (p. 117). It is pertinent to note that he says "the route" and "best revealed'. I think that the claim is exaggerated. I am not aware of a dominant line of investigation in social anthropology, anthropological

3

If I may indulge in a touch of nostalgia, in the late sixties Winch, Habermas and I debated these issues with some advanced German students, members of the "Studienstiftung" in a romantic moated castle. Most appropriately, considering the topic of the colloquium, it was one that belonged to the Barons of Münchhausen.

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linguistics, linguistics proper or other fields and schools of empirical investigations of culture which explicitly claim to be descendants of Wittgenstein or systematically employ a conception of"grammar" derived from Wittgenstein. This is not to denigrate Wittgenstein or to deny that directly and indirectly his philosophical investigations contributed to a change of intellectual climate in the philosophical conception of the human form of life. But other approaches are at least equally powerful candidates for a philosophical foundation of empirical investigations in the social sciences in general, and in sociology and anthropology in particular. (In any case, I couldn't say what the systematic difference between the latter two is supposed to be). Some might be inclined to argue that Wittgenstein or another coherent philosophical position is merely a matter of choice among a number of equally legitimate possibilities for a systematic clarification of the foundations of the social sciences and that it does not matter all that much for empirical investigations in the various disciplines of the social sciences what the choice is. But Harré goes on to a significantly more specific claim: " T h e details of Wittgenstein's scheme lead more or less directly to useable methodological proposals. In particular there is the idea of a hierarchy of forms of life, each framed by a grammar or loosely organised set of rules and customs, according to which the correctness of what we think, do and say can be assessed" (p. 109). I leave aside the question of whether this general insight, shared by generations o f theoretical minds in social science and philosophy, really constitutes a usable methodological proposal. Instead I want to point out that at least one of the other candidates for a philosophical foundation of the social sciences or, if one prefers, for giving a systematic account of the presuppositions for doing social science, did rather better in engendering viable methodologies for the empirical investigation of human realities. This is not the occasion to preach the Gospel according to Schütz and it would be even less appropriate to cite chapter and verse from later apocryphal writings. However, I may be allowed to state my conviction that the precision and empirical productivity of the phenomenological proto-theory of action and signification, as it was first formulated by Schütz and developed by a number of his students, far outstrips comparable other attempts including, for example, speech act theory and whatever came after Winch. There is another coherent approach to the theory of action, the rational choice school of thought. It is a fairly well developed field in economic and sociological theory, but, with certain restrictions, it can be made compatible with Schützian theory of action or be integrated into it. I claim that by this approach many of the questions raised in this context, both in the present paper by Harré and in the general discussion of the methodology of the social sciences, can be neatly resolved. It is incumbent upon me to specify what "usable methodologies" I have in mind. There are two different, but not unrelated investigative enterprises which

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take Schütz' protosociology as a starting point. I shall not try to make any claims with regard to Ervin Goffman and Aaron Cicourel and I would be even more hesitant to do so with respect to Clifford Geertz. Their links to Schütz are rather tenuous, although some connection could be shown to exist. However, a valid claim of descent concerning useable methodologies can be made for two other developments in sociology. Both originated in the sixties, after Schütz' death, and both can be shown to be direct and more or less legitimate descendants of Schützian proto-sociology. O n e of them, incidentally also mentioned by Harre, is ethnomethodology with its offshoot, empirical conversational analysis - some of whose practitioners, it may be noted, also refer to Wittgenstein as a general source of insight. Another, whose genealogical connection to Schütz is even more obvious, by the intermediate link of what was occasionally called the "new" sociology of knowledge, is the theory of communicative genres as applied both to direct oral communication and to the mass media. But that is another story. In the present context, Schütz' systematic shift from transcendental phenomenology to an anthropologically based phenomenology of the life-world deserves attention. I raise this point here because Rom Harré says that Heidegger and the phenomenologists express insights similar to those of Wittgenstein, the insight being that "human beings think, act and speak within forms of life" (p. 108). True, but Alfred Schütz, 4 Aaron Gurwitsch and others did not only take that insight for granted as a general frame for human studies; they went on to analyze its implications systematically and in detail. Incidentally, the order of mention, "Heidegger and the phenomenologists", reverses the order both of historical precedence and of intellectual relevance, at the very least as far as the social sciences are concerned. Another point. An understanding of what Harré introduces as the Double Singularity Principle depends on a clear conception of what he means when he talks of Self 1, Self 2 and Self 3. Self 1 is an "embodied center of consciousness", Self 2 the "totality of personal attributes", and Self 3 the way in which a person (one may, perhaps, overlook the tautology involved) "presents" itself to others (p. 127). I am not altogether happy with the enumeration of some but not all5

4

It should be noted that in an early manuscript (approx. 1925), which bears the title Lebensformen und Sinnstruktur, Schütz, still building on Bergsonian rather than Husserlian foundations, prepares the ground for his sinnhafle Aufbau der sozialen Welt [ 1932]. H e distinguishes six forms of life: of the pure durée of the Self; of the Self endowed with memory; of the acting Self; of the Self in relation to another Self; of the speaking Self; of the conceptualizing Self. T h e manuscript, together with four other, minor manuscripts, was endowed with an excellent introduction and published by Ilja Srubar under the title Theorie der Lebensformen (Schütz 1981).

5

W h a t is most conspicuously lacking is any reference to the subjective control of actions in time and to the intersubjective construction of a moral (i.e., accountable) core ofSelfhood in the sense of G . H . Mead. (Cf. Mead [1934]).

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dimensions of Selfhood and their reification as three distinct Selves. If I understand Harré correctly,6 the Double Singularity Principle is intended to combine a conception of normality that includes both diversity and universality. This is an ambitious undertaking. I hope that Harré will continue clarifying the relation between the different Selves or, pace Harré, the different constitutive dimensions of personal identity, and add a consideration of — socially imposed - moral accountability, which in different versions seems to be universal. There are some minor points. I shall forego commenting on the aesthetic and conceptual merits of the term emotionobgy which Harré takes over from Stearns and Stearns, and mention one matter only of at least terminological, if not substantive consequence. Harré speaks of "participants' use of a common material and symbolic form of life" and later of "tasks, some physical, some cognitive" (p. 109). Already the first phrase isn't quite free of terminological traces of the Cartesian dualism which Harré rejects; the second is even more strongly contaminated by it. Of course one may distinguish between actions which directly gear into the world, such as digging a ditch and those which don't, such as trying to remember what the square root of 121 is, or even actions that consist in abstaining from doing something, e.g., remaining silent under interrogation. But all of them are constituted as meaningful human actions, as projects of what Harré calls "active centres of power". Any task performed by human beings is a cognitive task. No doubt the mere use of this particular turn of a phrase does not in itself constitute a relapse into Cartesian dualism. My point is that the phrases quoted are not as innocuous as they seem at first glance. While / am not assuming that there is isomorphism between thought and language, I do think that there is a dialectical relation between them. That suffices to counsel terminological caution.

6

This is not altogether easy. H e writes: "Taken together, I call this pair of standards the 'double singularity principle'", the standards being, first, the display of "a singular, continuous Self 1 as an aspect of whatever Self 3 they may from m o m e n t to m o m e n t be presenting", and, second, the "display (of) a singular, harmonious, and coherent Self 3" (pp. 128f).

A Reply to Thomas Luckmann Rom Harré

As always I am grateful to Thomas Luckmann for homing in with unerring accuracy on the ambiguities and other weak points of my presentation of the discursive turn. This provides me with the opportunity to respond to his welltaken criticism with some further clarification and reconstructions of the point of view I have been pressing. The physical sciences make use of the metaphor/model methodology as the core of their procedures, transforming insights back and forth between linguistic (metaphor) and iconic (model) expression as a field of investigation develops. Metaphors that were first proposed for a narrow range of phenomena, for example the metaphor of "field" for magnetic action at a distance, sometimes find a ubiquitous use in the whole of physics, as indeed the field metaphor and its complementary iconic models have done. This is the sort of generalisation of a metaphor that I had in mind in using the phrase in my exposition of the role of conversation in discursive psychology. To treat parent-infant interaction as primarily "conversational" as Vygtosky did, is not to generalise the metaphor, but to give it a specific application. But to analyse a tennis match as a kind of "conversation" is surely a step of another kind, perhaps a generalisation. Justifying such a methodological move takes me to the issue of the scope ofWittgenstein's notion of a "grammar". At the heart of the kinds of psychologies of which Thomas Luckmann and I approve is the general principle that human action is not best framed within a cause-effect metaphysics, but rather within a metaphysics the leading root-ideas of which are intentions and norms. People mean what they do and say, and react to each other's doings and sayings in so far as they take them to be meaningful, and meaningfulness is a joint production. But intentional action is constrained and prompted within a loose cluster of rules, conventions, customs and so on. Some such constraints are immanent in practices and others are expressed discursively in all sorts of ways, distinct from and so transcendent to the practices that conform to them. Some slip from immanence to transcendence, from instruction to habit and back again. Wittgenstein's notion of a "grammar" as expressing a form of life seems to me a useful collective expression for the rag-bag of norms within which our patterns of action are framed and constrained. The occasions for the explicit formulation of much of our local grammars are episodes of great interest, since they bring out the different relations to norms that we find with

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coaches and players, music critics and performers and so on. Of course this catalogue includes psychologists and people going about their everyday affairs. Luckmann asks about the degree to which Wittgensteinian concepts are deployed by psychologists outside the population of those he and I despair of. In one flourishing genre at least, these concepts are dominant, though not always described by Wittgenstein's own terminology. I have in mind here the work of the "cultural psychologists" such as Cole (1996) and Shweder (1991). Shweder "contingent universale" are exactly the constituents of Wittgensteinian grammars, especially as these propositions are treated in On Certainty. Finally I would like to comment on the place of phenomenology in relation to the enterprise of creating an adequate psychology, that is a psychology adequate to its putative subject matter, human life. It seems to me that from the very beginning, Husserl and later Schütz took for granted the possibility of communication by symbolic means, and went on to develop the consequences of that assumption. The question of how that might be possible was by-passed by Schütz when he settled on intersubjectivity as the transcendental condition of human life, finding intrasubjectivity derivative and so communication unproblematic. For those of us who share that perspective, according to which the mental life is primarily public and only secondarily private, there must be a deep grounding for sustaining a shift of so radical a kind against the prevailing Cartesianism that makes subjectivity the root of the human condition. We find that grounding in Wittgenstein's analyses of the conditions for the possibility of the human form of life, for the creation of meaning in language games, practices that are essentially material and symbolic. It seems to me that phenomenology is not another genre of research practices, but one amongst a family of ways of looking at human life that can be seen to be comprehended within, though not necessarily derivative from, the later philosophy of Wittgenstein. Luckmann's other candidate, rational choice theory, seems to me not at all on a par with either cultural psychology or phenomenology, â la Schutz and Luckmann. It exploits a dialect of English, or if one likes, another discursive convention, the generalisation of which to larger stretches of human life than shopping needs more justification than it has so far had. In general Luckmann's comments seem to me well taken. Notions like the "conversational metaphor", the use of Wittgenstein as our mentor, and so on, taken for granted in my paper, can always be further spelled out and stand in need of justification. In this short response I can only point the way ahead. But on the matter of the person/ self complex I now have the opportunity to refer to my own recent study of just this conceptual cluster (Harré 1998). In that work, some of the points that Luckmann makes about the very complex pattern of concepts and root-ideas we encounter in trying to make sense of how personhood is experienced and presented discursively have been addressed.

Human Beings and "An Absolute Conception"

David Cockburn

1. It might be said that there are two fundamental ways in which the idea of a human being enters into Wittgenstein's later thought. On the one hand, we have remarks such as these: ... only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious. (PI §281) The human body is the best picture of the human soul. (PI 178)

Here the interest is, we might say, in the philosophy of mind; and Wittgenstein's aim is to combat philosophical models according to which the real person - that which thinks, has sensations, and so on — is something non-bodily ("the mind") or bodily (the brain) that has its seat within the human being. In combating such models Wittgenstein gives a central - though not exclusive - place to my thought about others. This area of concern might be contrasted with that reflected in remarks of the following kind: The common behaviour of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language. (PI §206) Concepts lead us to make investigations; are the expression of our interest, and direct our interest. (PI §570) If a lion could talk could talk, we could not understand him. (PI 223) W e react to the cause. Calling something "the cause" is like pointing and saying: "He's to blame!" W e instinctively get rid of the cause if we don't want the effect. W e instinctively look from what has been hit to what has hit it. (I am assuming that we do this.) (1976, 4 1 0 )

Here, and in many other passages, Wittgenstein stresses the role that our responses to things that we encounter play in our understanding of them and in the language in which we speak of them. As the point might equally be expressed: he stresses the way in which the sense of our talk of, for example, "cause and effect" cannot be separated from the forms of behaviour in which that talk is embedded. Now in some of the contexts in which he speaks in these terms, Wittgenstein highlights the idea that my responses to what I encounter — the forms of behaviour in which my talk is embedded - are essentially human in the sense that they

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reflect distinctively human concerns and interests: concerns, for example, for food, warmth and companionship; and, to touch on a rather different kind of example, those "concerns" that Wittgenstein alludes to in his remark "man is a ceremonial animal" (1993, 129). They are also, and in partially connected ways, essentially human in the sense that they are the responses of a being with the distinctively human bodily form. W e might speak of all of this, as Wittgenstein does, in terms of "forms of life". W e can summarise the contrast between the above two groups of quotations like this. In the first group the emphasis is on the way in which the human enters into our thinking; in the second it is on the way in which our thinking is a reflection of our humanity. I want in this paper to focus on the question: what is the relationship between these two ways in which the human features in Wittgenstein's thought? 2. One relationship is this. Among the things to which I respond in distinctively human ways are other human beings. " M y attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul" (PI 178). I seek the companionship of others, seek or avoid eye contact with another, feel and behave differently when another's eyes are on me, respond with pity when another behaves in ways that are expressive of pain, with pleasure when another smiles at me, and so on. Further, these responses are only the responses that they are in so far as they are responses of a being of the human bodily form. I avert my eyes, put my arm around the other, smile in response to her smile, and so on. T h e terms in which we speak of others - our "concepts" of a person, of seeing, of pain, and so on — are an embodiment of these ways in which others matter to us: the sense of what we say of others is what it is only within the framework of these ways of responding to them. Another relationship, running in, so to speak, the opposite direction, is inseparably linked with this. M y responses to what I encounter are, quite generally, moulded by, and in part picked up from, other human beings. T h e child imitates adults: scolding her dolls or the dog, repeating the sounds - the words - that adults produce, and so on. And some of the child's responses are inhibited by signs of disapproval, or encouraged by signs of approval. This process continues, though no doubt in different forms, throughout the child's development to adulthood — indeed, throughout her life — with the result that the child develops into an adult who reacts in the situations in which she finds herself in rough conformity with those with whom she is in community. These two connections between the ways in which the idea of a human being features in Wittgenstein's thought are themselves mutually linked. T h e dispositions to imitate other human beings, and to respond to their criticism and encouragement, play a central role in my acquiring my general understanding of the things that I encounter; but are themselves important aspects of the attitude

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towards others - the range of responses towards others — that Wittgenstein characterizes as "an attitude towards a soul". Conversely, those responses are themselves in part picked up through imitation of other human beings, and moulded by their criticism and encouragement. 3. W e can place these very rough remarks beside another picture, or, perhaps, group of pictures, that has a strong hold on the philosophical imagination. This picture perhaps finds its clearest, and most consistent, articulation in the philosophy of René Descartes. Consider first Descartes' conception of rigorous enquiry: his conception, exemplified in the method of doubt, of the form of any serious concern to think straight about the world. Two striking features of this conception are these. First, the individual bears ultimate responsibility for her picture of the world, in the sense that there is an intellectual obligation on her to validate all aspects of that picture for herself. 1 Other human beings are, then, simply one range of objects encountered, having no special position in my attempt to think straight about the world. And second, Descartes' metaphysics of the self embodies a picture which implies that certain features of my nature are to be thought of, quite generally, as "obstacles to clear thinking". According to this picture, my own humanity is such an obstacle. That I am, or, more strictly, that I have my seat in, a human being - a bodily being of this particular form, having this distinctive range of sense organs, and this distinctive range of emotions and concerns - is something to be overcome by one who aspires to truth. I want, however, to focus on a version of the Cartesian ideal of clarity in thought that is to be found in the work of Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams: A view or form of thought is more objective than another if it relies less on the specifics of the individual's makeup and position in the world, or on the character of the particular type of creature he is. T h e wider the range of subjective types to which a form of understanding is accessible - the less it depends on specific subjective capacities - the more objective it is. (Nagel 1986, 5) In simple terms it is the view that the world is independent of our minds, (ibid., 90) W h a t really happens in the pursuit of objectivity is that a certain element of oneself, the impersonal or objective self, which can escape from the specific contingencies of one's creaturely view, is allowed to predominate, (ibid., 9) ... our ideas of the world, however sophisticated, are the products of one piece of the world interacting with part of the rest of it in ways that we do not understand very well, (ibid., 73)

1

O n e explicit statement is this: "I have never contemplated anything higher that the reformation of my own opinions, and basing them on a foundation wholly my own" (Disc. 13).

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[We need] a conception of reality corrected for the special situation or other peculiarity of various observers, and that line of thought leads eventually to a conception of the world as it is independently of the peculiarities of any observers. (Williams 1978, 241 ) Pure Enquiry .... is the undertaking of someone setting aside all externalities or contingent limitations on the pursuit of truth, (ibid., 66) The above passages represent various attempts to articulate a notion of "objectivity" - a notion that has been labelled "the absolute conception" - which, it is suggested, we must hold on to if we are to think there is such a thing as knowledge. Williams adds that this notion is fundamental to the Cartesian outlook, though disastrously entangled there with "the characteristic Cartesian beliefs in God, in dualism and in the search for certainty" (1978, 249). A central concern of my discussion will be that of whether the second of these entanglements is quite as optional as Williams would have us believe. 4. First, however, I want to note some difficulties in the above formulations. O n e problem is this. W e are told that we need the idea of a world that is "independent of our minds": the idea of "a conception of the world as it is independently of the peculiarities of any observers". And, of course, that much is clear. But, as Williams and Nagel acknowledge, there are readings of these ideas such that they can be readily admitted by virtually anyone; and further, readings of these ideas such that they will be satisfied by notions which all who speak in these terms are quite clear do «oí belong in an "absolute conception". For example, no view should, or need, rule out the intelligibility of speculation about the dominant colour of rocks on a certain part of the planet before there were any observers. This recurring inadequacy of central formulations of the notion of "mind-independence" is, perhaps, grounds for unease. Another possible area of difficulty arises from the fact that the idea of an "absolute conception" has two faces. It embodies, first, the idea that there are certain notions that would feature in the thinking of any being that has a conception of the world at all; thus, it is often argued, with considerable plausibility, that to have any conception of the world one must possesses something like our conceptions of size and shape - along with the other traditional primary qualities. 2 But the idea of an "absolute conception" is linked also with the idea of a "scien-

2

There is, I think, a danger of an important confusion here. One of the central concerns of a certain style of philosophy - we might call it "Kantian" - is an attempt to identify aspects of our understanding that are necessary features of any conception of the world. Such aspects will, of course, be forms of understanding that are accessible to all "subjective types" (assuming that a "subjective type" is a type of being that has some conception of the world). But this, I take it, is not what — or not all that — is at issue in discussions of an "absolute conception". For discussions of the latter kind involve the idea that we identify the content of the absolute conception by

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tifie representation of the material world". Now the link here is not simply that it is assumed that the content of an absolute conception will be a conception of the world provided by science. For the idea of an "absolute conception" involves the thought that we can explain features of our more local, subjective, conceptions exclusively in terms drawn from the absolute conception — and it is assumed that such explanation is the business of science. (See, for example, Williams 1978, 244f.) The pull of the philosophical notion of an "objective conception" - the particular kind of depth that we think we see in it - is, I think, dependent on the way in which it combines these two thoughts. Yet we cannot, on the face of it, count on a mesh between these two strands in the notion. The lack of any necessity here was disguised for so long as it was taken for granted that the fundamental categories of physics would inevitably consist of, or at least include, the shape, size, motion and solidity of insensible particles of which the objects of our everyday experience are composed. With the abandonment of that assumption - with the emergence of physical theories in which the central categories are substantially removed from any that we employ in our everyday dealings with the world - any idea of an "objective conception" which presupposes a necessary convergence of these two ideas begins to look seriously exposed. (An analogue of this point will, it should be noted, have application to any alternative view of what explains our local, subjective conceptions.) A third area of possible difficulty in the notion of an "objective" or "absolute" conception emerges in an apparent tension in Nagel's presentation of the idea (a tension that may, in part, be a reflection of the two faces of the notion that I have just distinguished.) On the one hand, Nagel writes: "The wider the range of subjective types to which a form of understanding is accessible - the less it depends on specific subjective capacities - the more objective it is" (1986, 5). Thus, if a form of understanding is not accessible to a certain subjective type - for example, human beings - then it is not part of an objective understanding. Yet Nagel also insists that "... there are probably [things] that we lack the capacity to conceive not merely because we are at too early a stage of historical development, but because of the kind of beings we are" (ibid., 92). 3 Whether or not the appar-

identifying the range of types to which certain forms of understanding are accessible; by contrast, the Kantian enterprise involves identifying possible subjective types by identifying forms of understanding that are necessary features of any conception of the world. I suspect that some of the plausibility of the former tradition derives from an illicit conflation with ideas from the latter tradition. 3

Another manifestation of the tension that I think we find in these passages is seen in Nagel's repeated insistence that "reality is not just objective reality" (1986, 87). There may be readings of that remark that would allow Nagel to agree with most of what I say in this paper. But any such reading would sit very uneasily with m u c h of the other imagery that Nagel employs.

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ent contradiction can be escaped, it is, I think, clear that Nagel's thought is subject to potentially conflicting pressures. We might articulate the conflict in terms of the following question about a particular "peculiarity" of some thinker: should this be regarded as "a feature of his nature that enables him to see aspects of the world to which others are blind", or as "a feature of his nature that leads him to see in situations aspects that are not there at all"? The question is one that any reflective person will periodically encounter in particular contexts. For example: "Is the guilt that I feel about this simply a hangover from my upbringing, which I ought not to let colour my judgement of what I am doing?".4 Anyone who thinks, as Nagel and Williams do, that some philosophical account of the nature of knowledge can provide us with a completely general formula for answering such questions is, if their theorising is responsive to reflection on particular examples, bound to feel the tension that I have suggested we find in Nagel.5 5. Williams speaks of an ideal of purity in thought that involves "setting aside all externalities or contingent limitations on the pursuit of truth". Now I suppose that almost anyone will agree that we must, if we are seriously concerned with the truth, overcome all limitations on its pursuit. And it is tautological that we must set aside all "externalities" if this term means something like: factors which are in fact irrelevant, but which might have an influence on our thinking. The crucial question, however, is: what is to count as an "externality"? If one assumes that that which has knowledge is something distinct from the human being6 - something that, in some sense, has its seat in the human being then it is likely to seem obvious that anyways in which my humanity is implicated in my having the picture of the world that I do is to be regarded as an "externality": as a "contingent limitation" which is to be overcome if I am seriously concerned to determine how things are. Indeed, this way of thinking of the matter might seem almost inevitable if we formulate our question like this: to what extent is the picture that I have of the world a true reflection of how things really are? The language of this formulation is drawn from familiar ways of speaking of an individual's understanding of his situation; and is linked with familiar ways of

4 5

6

For a nice discussion of this kind of example, see Taylor 1989, 163f. I have found this book very helpful, in a number of ways, in writing this paper. And anyone seeking such a general formula will feel pressure, from one direction, to present all features of an individual's nature as "peculiarities" in the relevant sense; for there is no feature which could not, in some circumstance, be rightly regarded as a peculiarity. In my use of it, the term "human being" is not an equivalent of the philosophical term "person" or "self': these terms meaning, roughly, "that thing, whatever it may turn out to be, that has thoughts, sensations, and so on". "Human beings" are, on my use of the term, the bodily creatures of human form that populate this planet. Though one of the questions that I am, if indirectly, addressing in this paper concerns our understanding of the scope of this term.

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exploring the adequacy of that understanding. But in the hands of a philosopher, the language may draw in a range of connotations which are, possibly, not so richly implicated in those familiar ways of speaking. A human being "having a picture" of the world, or of a particular situation, is construed in terms of there being "within him" an inner representation of an outer reality. My humanity the character of my sense organs, my particular bodily form, my interests, and so on - is a medium - a potentially distorting medium - through which an image of the outside world reaches me. Or, on what is possibly a slightly different understanding, the inner representations are "the products of one piece of the world interacting with part of the rest of it in ways that we do not understand very well" (Nagel 1986, 73). Is the ideal, then, one in which, for example, my bodily sense organs play no role in my coming by my understanding of the world?7 On the face of it, this line of thought pushes us towards the conclusion that, whether or not we can attain it, one who really knows how things are is one whose relation to a situation does not involve sense organs, or any other aspect of his nature. So long as the picture is a product of an interaction between that of which it purports to be a picture and something else, we do, at the very least, have no guarantee that it is an accurate representation of the former. This line of thought may push us towards an image of an ideal observer as one who has no nature; or, in the different direction pursued by Spinoza, towards an image of an ideal in which, when I have knowledge of an object through perception, no interaction is involved since the object perceived is not external to me. I said that one is likely to find oneself on some such path as this if one assumes that that which has knowledge is something distinct from the human being. If, on the other hand, one takes it that it is the human being that has beliefs about, or knowledge of, the world, then the particular bodily form, and the particular needs and interests, which are characteristic of human beings will, perhaps, be viewed quite differently. In so far as my humanity defines me as being the kind of creature that I am, it can hardly be regarded, in a quite general way, as an obstacle to the proper exercise of my capacities. To express the same point in slightly different terms, suppose that belief is a state of the human being in the following sense: the paradigm of someone who knows her way through a forest is, not someone whose "mind" or brain contains a representation of a path through the forest, but someone walking confidently through the forest; the paradigm of someone who believes that the ceiling is about to fall on her is, not someone with an inner representation (appropriately tensed) of a collapsing ceiling, but someone cover7

It may be worthy of note that, with no preliminaries of any kind, Descartes presents as being one of the benefits of his doubt the fact that it "affords the easiest pathway by which the m i n d may withdraw itself from the senses" (Med. 75).

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ing her head and running for cover; and so on. O f course, work is needed to bring out the force of the suggestion that these are "paradigms" of knowledge and belief; and that work is one important strand in Wittgenstein's later philosophy. For the moment my point is simply that, if there is something to this suggestion, then we must reject any general picture of the acquisition of belief according to which "my body" is a medium through which an image of the outside world reaches me. If one gives to the notion of a human being the kind of place that I have been discussing one will not be tempted to speak, with Nagel, of "a gradual liberation of the dormant objective self, trapped initially behind an individual perspective of human experience" (1986, 85). For one will not think of my humanity as something by which / am entrapped. 6. But just what is at issue between one who speaks as Nagel does and one who insists that my humanity is definitive of my being the kind of creature that I am? Further, just how far does that insistence take us? It does, on the face of it, leave us with the question: what is to count as an aspect of "my humanity"? Or, to ask the same question the other way round: what is to count as a merely personal peculiarity which is to be transcended in my attempts to see things as they are? We can focus on this group of questions by asking: what is the relation between my thought that I am a being of a certain kind - a being with certain essential characteristics - and my identification of certain others as being of the same kind as myself? A consideration of this relation will take us back to the distinction that I drew in my first section between two ways in which the notion of a human being enters into Wittgenstein's philosophy. One picture of this relation - that which is presupposed in the philosophical "problem of other minds" - could be formulated in terms of the idea that another human being is, for me: another of the same kind a s / a m . For, as Descartes insists, my grasp of what a person is, and of what beliefs, emotions, sensations and the like are is grounded in my experience of myselfand of my own states. O n the most familiar version of this picture, I come to think of another as a person who has beliefs, emotions and sensations through noticing similarities between his body and behaviour and my own, and concluding, by analogical reasoning, that it is probable that behind these lies a being - a mind - of the same kind as I am, with states of the same kind as I have. I will not rehearse the — in my view decisive - objections to this picture that have been raised by Wittgenstein, and others. For my aim here is not so much to defend Wittgenstein's understanding of the individual's relation to other human beings, as to explore the connections between that understanding and the question of whether my humanity is merely a "contingency" of my particular individual perspective.

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Wittgenstein, then, invites us to view the relationships here in a quite different way. For example: It is a help here to remember that it is a primitive reaction to tend, to treat, the part that hurts when someone else is in pain; and not merely when oneself is - and so to pay attention to other people's pain-behaviour, as one does not pay attention to one's own pain behaviour. But what is the word "primitive" meant to say here? Presumably that this sort of behaviour is pre-linguistic that a language-game is based on it, that it is the prototype of a way of thinking and not the result of thought. (Zettel §§540-1)8 My understanding of another as a person is not grounded in my understanding of myself as a person. We need not picture my understanding of myself as one among others of the same kind as dependent on a prior identification of my own essence - an identification that is prior in a sense such that I can say: any being that shares this with me is one of the same kind as myself. I think it might be added that, in some respects, it may be closer to the reverse. That is to say, my understanding of what is essential to my nature - what is definitive of my being the kind of creature that I am - is an expression of my recognition of what I share with those with whom I am in community. To insist that my being British, or my being a member of this particular race, is not an essential feature of my nature, is to insist that I am "in community with" a broader range of beings than is defined by those terms. Much, of course, turns here on the force of the term "in community with" a term to which I have helped myself with little attempt at elucidation. If, however, the general direction of these remarks is correct, the question of whether my humanity is merely a "contingency" of my particular individual perspective, as opposed to being an essential aspect of my nature, will appear in a different light. My humanity is essential to my being the kind of creature that I am to the extent that the class of human beings is to be fundamental to my understanding of those with whom I am in community: those of whom I am one. But (for reasons that will become clear very shortly) I suspect that the point would be better formulated without appeal to the notion of what is "essential to my being the kind of creature that I am". The suggestion of this section might then be summarised in the following way. Williams suggests that we are to " [set] aside all externalities or contingent limitations on the pursuit of truth". While granting a sense in which this is (vacuously) true, I suggested that that leaves us with the question: what is to count as an "externality"? And I noted the way in which certain metaphysical imagery may push us towards an idea of the ideal 8

In these remarks the notion of the h u m a n features in both of the ways that I distinguished in my opening section.

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observer as one who has no nature. In other formulations, we are to seek "a conception of reality corrected for the special situation or other peculiarity of various observers"; one which relies as little as possible "on the specifics of the individual's makeup and position in the world, or on the character of the particular type of creature he is". If we do not start with a Cartesian metaphysics of the self, this will not lead us to the (incoherent) view that I am to set aside all features of my makeup. I am to set aside only those features that are "specific", or "peculiar", to me: those that mark me off from others. And that much, I take it, is clear. For example, if the sadness that I hear in a certain piece of music is simply a reflection of the place that that music had in a particularly sad incident in my life, then the fact that I hear the music in that way is to be "set aside" when I am trying to convey to others the character of the music. I am, then, to set aside only those features that are "specific", or "peculiar" to me: those that mark me off from others. So now our question "What is to count as an 'externality'?" becomes the question "Which others?" And my suggestion in this section has been that that question is not to be settled by reflection on my own nature. The question of what is to be counted a personal peculiarity — something to be transcended in my attempts to see things as they are - is to be resolved by reflection on those others with whom, as I put it, I am in community. 7. A personal peculiarity - something to be transcended in my attempts to see things as they are - is a characteristic that marks me off from others. Which others? O n e answer to this question will speak of those features that mark me off from any rational being: any being that could have some conception of the world. I am viewing the world "as it is in itself - as it "objectively" is - only in so far as my picture of it is not conditioned by anything that I do not share with all other rational, cognitive beings. To express the suggestion in the (hostile) terminology that I have introduced: the class of beings with whom I am in community is the class of rational, cognitive beings. A doubt about whether this suggestion can do the work that we expect of it may emerge when we reflect on the platitude that: our understanding of which beings are rational, cognitive beings is our understanding of which beings are rational, cognitive beings. The significance of this platitude here can be expressed in this way. My judgement about which of my features are "peculiarities" - and so are to be set aside in the serious pursuit of truth — is dependent on my judgement of what kinds of being could be said to be "rational". How, then, is it to be settled which of my features are to be set aside in making that judgement? Without pursuing that question, we can simply note that in many contexts in which, in dialogue with another, I am "seeking the truth" about some matter, it seems to be quite irrelevant whether there could be a "rational, cognitive" being to whom I could not make what I am saying acceptable - the obstacle to my doing

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so lying in some fairly fundamental difference between our natures. Is my attempt to persuade my friend of the importance of some obligation, of the depth of some other's remorse, or of the occurrence of some event in the distant past, in some sense a fraud if the appeal of my reasonings is dependent on things that I share with him, but might conceivably not share with some other "rational" being? Why should it be a matter of any concern to me that there could be a being that, let us suppose, can deal with the world in a highly competent way, and yet, for reasons which are beyond the reach of anything that I can say, is incapable of grasping the idea of remorse, or is convinced, on "grounds" of a kind that can find no foothold in my thinking, that the world was created in 4004 B.C.? ("But is it quite certain that there could be such a being? Might there not be some incoherence in these suppositions - in something akin to the way in which there is, perhaps, an incoherence in the supposition that there could be a rational, cognitive being that lacks any notion of the primary qualities? How do you know?" I don't. And that should help to remind us that whether or not there is such an incoherence is quite irrelevant to my dialogue with my friend.) Those who speak in terms of "an absolute conception" may well not deny any of this; for they need not suggest that we are, or ought to be, aspiring to the absolute conception in all of our "attempts to find the truth" about some matter. These considerations are, nevertheless, worth developing a bit further; for the point that is involved in them is, I want to suggest, a quite general one. Consider a situation in which I am trying to describe the expression on another's face - we can imagine that I am looking at a photograph or a painting of the face. It is important to remember that, while my attention will be focused on the face, the words with which I describe the face are words in a public language. They are words that have a life that is quite independent of my use of them on this occasion; and it is only because this is so — only because they already have meaning - that they can serve my purpose. In my use of these words I am, then, responsible to that independent life. That independent life is a life in the conversations of human beings; indeed, in the conversations of a narrower group: those human beings who speak the same language as I do. In searching for the precise words to capture the expression on the face, I am searching for the words whose independent life is such as to fit them for this role. For example, if I describe the expression as "contemptuous", or as "morally indignant", I am representing this face as that of a man from whom certain things can be expected and towards whom certain responses are in place. That responsibility that I have to the independent life of the words is connected with the fact that my words - my description of the face for example - are characteristically offered to others. Perhaps a man's wife has asked me what his expression was on hearing some news. To answer her question I must select the right words; and there is such a thing as "the right words" because, and only

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because, we speak a common language: that is to say, because I can draw on words that have a place in both my life and hers - or, as we might say, words that have their life within the community to which we both belong. There may be others to whom I could not make my words acceptable. We can imagine a variety of cases here, but a single one will do for the moment. Imagine a child in whose life there is, as yet, no place for the notion of "contempt", or of "righteous indignation". If our description of the face draws on one of these terms, the child will not be able to grasp it; in that sense we will not be able to make our words acceptable to him. The difficulty here is quite different in character from that which we will have with a Russian who has only a limited grasp of English (assuming that our word, say "contempt", has a reasonably unproblematic Russian equivalent). The difficulty is not simply that his vocabulary lacks a word (as a particular thermometer might lack calibration beyond 50°C).9 The child's life would have to change substantially - would have to acquire the particular kind of richness that marks the life of an adult human being in this culture — for any word on his lips to have the meaning that the word "contempt" has. There could, presumably, be a whole society with which there would be an analogous difficulty in making my description of this face acceptable. Is there any sense in which, this being so, my words necessarily fail in some goal to which we should aspire in thought and speech? At one level, I take the obvious answer to that question to be: no. And that, I take it, raises a fundamental question about the images of thought and language that are involved in the idea of "an absolute conception". It is, in effect, suggested that if my concern is with truth I must think of the audience for my words as being the class of all rational beings. In another formulation, it is suggested that the "concepts" in terms of which I think of the world approach an important ideal in so far as they are concepts that I share with all other rational, cognitive beings. But — in a way that is, perhaps, slightly paradoxical - the pull of these ideas is dependent on a failure fully to grasp the sense in which the words I use are public: the sense in which my words have an independent life, that is, have a place in the lives of beings other than myself. When I present views about how things stand in the world, I have a responsibility to others: a responsibility to those to whom my words are addressed. Certain familiar philosophical pictures of "objectivity", in their quite proper insistence on the idea that my words are "responsible to the world", fail to do justice to the fact that that notion cannot be elucidated without reference to this responsibility that the speaker has to others. 9

Nagel writes: "In the employment of language we are ourselves a bit like measuring instruments, able to respond consistently to certain aspects of the world, and therefore able to talk about them" (1986, 109). The analogy deserves closer exploration than I can give it here. I will simply note that it does, in my view, suggest a quite wrong model in terms of which to think of what is involved in an individual's attempt to find the right words to describe a situation.

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8. But, to return to a point raised earlier, does not the plausibility of these remarks depend on the particular kind of example on which I have focused? In a passage quoted with approval by Williams, Peirce speaks of a "final opinion ... independent not indeed of thought in general, but of all that is arbitrary and individual in thought" (1978, 244). It is quite consistent with this notion of a "final opinion" to acknowledge that there is much in our thought that is "arbitrary and individual", and that this is in no sense a deficiency in our lives. Again, Williams writes: "The scientific representation of the material world can be the point of convergence of the Peircean enquirers precisely because it does not have among its concepts any which reflect merely a local interest, taste or sensory peculiarity" (ibid., 245). In saying this, he does not commit himself to the claim that we would be in any sense "better" - or even "more rational" - beings if we did not describe certain aspects of our experience in terms such as "contemptuous" or "morally indignant", which reflect, as he will express it, "merely a local interest, taste or sensory peculiarity". The point is simply that science represents an aspiration to descriptions of the world which do not, in this sense, reflect what is merely local; and that this aspiration is crucial to a notion of "truth" that we cannot abandon without abandoning all thought. There is, of course, a sense in which the scientist aspires to overcome what is "arbitrary and individual" in his thinking. It is pretty fundamental to the activity of science that we do not expect dialogue between two scientists to break down simply because one, but not the other, is crazy about strawberries, Bach, and her husband. But equally there is a sense in which the film or wine buff aspires to overcome what is "arbitrary and individual" in his thinking. Of course, what will count as "arbitrary and individual" - in Williams' terminology, what will count as merely a local interest, taste or sensory peculiarity - will differ in these cases. I take it (partly on trust!) that there is a sense in which the enterprise of the scientist involves a reliance on fewer "specifics of the individual's makeup and position in the world" than do most other human activities. But however that may be, in science, as much as in any other area of our thought, the words that I use have a life that is independent of my use of them on this occasion; and I have a responsibility to that use. As we might equally express the point, the words that I use have a place in the lives of others; and I have a responsibility to those others - a responsibility to those to whom my words are addressed. We are, perhaps, tempted by an imagery of the following kind. It is only to the extent that our scientific thinking does not reflect any of the scientist's personal peculiarities that it is a pure reflection of the world. The idea of a "reflection" is then understood in a way that draws on associations with images in mirrors; as the idea of a "picture of the world" may, in philosophical contexts, draw on associations with pictures in the sense of paintings or photographs. Those who suggest that the thinker's nature inevitably plays a role in his "picture of the world" - who

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speak, with Wittgenstein, of concepts as being an "expression of our interests" may give the impression (perhaps sometimes even to themselves) that they are excluding the possibility of a certain kind of purity in our thinking: as if they are arguing that thought must fall short of some ideal. The impression has deep roots and is not easily overcome. To loosen its hold we need to remind ourselves that the point is not that science can never hope to produce a pure mirror image of the world. It is rather that in producing a mirror image - even if the image is of what is to be seen down the most powerful of microscopes or through the most powerful of telescopes — one is, at best, taking no more than a first step in the enterprise of science. (After all, what is the point of producing a mirror image of the world when we have the world itself at our finger tips?) My aim here is not to say what "the enterprise of science" is. My aim is simply to do what I can to expose certain images which may deflect us from a recognition that the words of the scientist have a life - have a place in the life of the human beings who employ them — just as do the words that I employ when I describe a face as "contemptuous". Of course, there are substantial questions to be asked about just what in the life of the scientist is bound up with his words in a way that has a bearing on the sense of what he says. Nothing that I have said rules out the possibility that Martians - however conceived — might be part of the community to which a scientist's words are addressed. For all that I have said, a Martian might have a life with a richness of a kind such there would be a place in it for words used as the human physicist uses the words "quark" or "anti-matter". (That it lacks the human physicist's taste in food, music or members of the opposite sex should not, as I remarked before, be a serious obstacle.) For all that I have said, it could be the case that physics would be in principle accessible to any rational, cognitive being.10 I would myself suspect that a more plausible case for such a thesis would be found in other areas: for example, in certain features of our moral language. But however that may be, it is quite unclear what connection any such thesis might have with the idea of an ideal to be aspired to in our thinking. 9. One neat philosophical story would go something like this: "We are presented, in philosophy, with images of a pure, rational nature that is the thinker in each of us. Linked with those images is the idea that, in so far as I am concerned about truth, I must aim to produce an account of how things are which could be made acceptable to all rational beings. This view is replaced, by Wittgenstein and others, with the idea that the thinker is the human being: a being of distinctive bodily

10 Whatever that may mean. Leaving to one side possible worries about the force of the phrase "rational, cognitive being", we can ask: is q u a n t u m physics accessible "in principle" to the 4 year old, or to the adult whose interests lie in other directions and who simply glazes over when the talk turns to physics?

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form and a distinctive range of interests that lives and acts in the very world of which he thinks. And linked with that idea is the suggestion that the class to whom it must be possible to make what I say acceptable - the class of beings with whom I am 'in community' — is the class of human beings." Much of what I have said might be read as a defence of the Wittgensteinian view so understood. That this would be a misreading - a misreading linked, perhaps, with a philosophical notion of an individual's "essential nature" - should be clear from another aspect of my discussion. I have suggested that what constitutes a "personal peculiarity", an influence to be overcome in my attempts to describe things as they are, is dependent on what is at issue and, linked with that, to whom what I say is addressed. For example, it need be a matter of no concern that the description I offer a woman of the expression on her husband's face involves terms that would make it largely inaccessible to a young child, or to someone from a quite different culture. But while this last point is of great importance it may need to be placed beside a consideration that gives a more pivotal position to the idea of a human being: that brings us closer, if only a little, to what I said above was a misreading of my argument so far. T o express the point briefly: the demand to seek forms of contact with - forms of communication with - another human being is not one that can be dismissed as lightly as the above remarks might suggest. Imagine a "human being" with whom one could make no "human" contact. O n e experiences shades of this in passing encounters with strangers: encounters in which one fails, perhaps fairly radically, to engage with the other's behaviour and expression. O n e may experience some such failure of engagement in a less extreme form over an extended period: one makes occasional eye contact with the other, short, inconsequential, conversations pass without serious hitch, some of the time one can make reasonable sense of his facial expressions - yet there is a persistent failure of the richer kind of engagement that we expect in even quite casual acquaintances. But imagine a case in which there is persistent, intractable and radical failure of human contact. While there is, perhaps, some difficulty in knowing quite how to imagine this, a measure of the level of failure that I have in mind might be given by envisaging that, while he clearly has sight, there is nothing in his responses which indicates any grasp of the location of the face or eyes of another. T h e experience of such a failure of contact would, obviously, be deeply unsettling. The degree to which this would be so would, I suppose, be reflected in an insistence that this being was "not human" (and there is little to be gained from pressing the question of whether that denial would be literal or merely metaphorical.) There are, primarily in psychiatric hospitals, individuals who approach this condition to a greater or lesser degree; and I have little doubt that those who manage to resist the temptation to turn away in horror devote much energy to the

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attempt to make some form of contact with them. That this is — in one straightforward sense at least — a human being places on us a demand to make contact. O u r sense of that demand 1 1 is, perhaps, one aspect of the "attitude towards a soul" of which Wittgenstein speaks when discussing our relation to other human beings (PI 178; cf. Winch 1978). N o w we might take such failures of contact, and the attempts to overcome them, as a model in terms of which one could think of our relationship to an individual from a very different culture. W e may, at a non-linguistic level, have difficulty in finding our feet with such a person: her responses, and in particular her facial expressions, may be something of a mystery to us. And if our contact with her takes on the richer forms that are involved in linguistic communication - in conversation - analogous forms of mystery may appear at different levels. An example of this, from close to home, would be the way in which a person might be simply mystified by the "religious" language of some of those with whom he mixes. 12 O f course, one might simply accept, and live with, the mystery. But equally one might feel a demand to search for ways of speaking that can begin to bridge the gap. The ideal of a universal language which will allow for complete communication between all human beings can be dangerously superficial: it can be - perhaps it just is - the image of a way of life in which things of enormous value - things that should not be given up lightly - in the lives of individual human beings are lost. But the ideal may - if in a confused form - give expression to the conviction that there is a demand on us to seek contact - contact of as rich a form as possible - with other human beings, whatever the obstacles may be in particular cases. The insistence that "These are, after all, human beings" can, among the many other things that it may be, be a reminder that we share more with them than certain superficial contacts might have suggested; and so that there are richer possibilities of mutual understanding than we have been assuming. It might, at the same time, be a reminder of the demand on us to strive for such mutual understanding. 13

11 In so far as we have it. I have not shown - I am not sure how it might be shown - that we ought to have it. 12 I should stress that I am not concerned here with the person who feels quite clear about what is going on when people speak in these terms, and thinks that it is a ghastly muddle. 13 These remarks do not highlight a distinction that needs further development in this context: the distinction between, on the one hand, convincing another that what I am saying is true, and, on the other, bringing another to grasp the sense of my words and to see how someone might say what I have said. I am grateful to Andrew Gleeson for, a m o n g a number of other things, stressing the importance of this distinction to the issues discussed in this paper; and I am sorry that I have not been able to incorporate it more fully into what I have said. I would also like to thank Ossie Hänfling, Maureen Meehan and Neil Roughley for helpful comments on earlier drafts.

Human Universals and their Implications Donald E. Brown

A concern with human universale can be traced to antiquity and to non-Western civilizations. In the Persian Wars (Book III, ch. 38), Herodotus, who wrote sympathetically of non-Greek peoples and cultures, recognized ethnocentrism as a human universal, while ancient Sanskrit texts identified several universal emotions that are close to those identified in modern work (see references below). Anthropologists have included human universals in their conceptual framework from the founding of the field as an academic discipline (for a summary, see Brown 1991). Nonetheless, anthropologists on the whole have been more concerned with difference, with the result that the anthropological literature on the existence, nature, and implications of universals is relatively slight.1 But there can be no understanding of what it is to be human — nor even a deep understanding of particular humans in particular places and times - apart from an understanding of universals. What follows is an attempt to further correct the imbalance between our understanding of universals and particulars.

Demarcating Human Universals In their "absolute" form, human universals may be defined as those (empirically determined) features of culture, society, language, behavior, and psyche found in all ethnographically or historically recorded human societies. This definition captures the commonest anthropological conceptions of universals, but it requires both amplification and qualifications. T o begin, I will present some examples of what are and are not human universals, will discuss some of the types of universals, and will address some of the more immediate or specific implications of the definition just given. Subsequently, I will discuss the methodological considerations that qualify what we can know about universals, the alternatives to the absolute form of universals, the explanations for universals, and, finally, some of the wider implications of universals. Examples of human universals are such disparate phenomena as tool-making and tools; myths, legends, and proverbs; sex roles, social groups, and kinship 1

For stylistic reasons I will sometimes use "universals" as short for "human universals," although in a few instances, where context should be clear, I refer to universals that are not human universals.

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systems; aggression, romance, and gestures; grammar, phonemes, and lexemes; emotions, psychological defense mechanisms, and recognition of individuals by their faces. Many human universals are not exclusively human, being found in other species, too. Ideas that are expressed in a universal form are not necessarily human universals. Declarations of human rights may be stated as universal ideals, but such ideals are not professed in all societies and are therefore not human universals. The value of π is a sort of universal but not a human universal. However, in one or another branch of anthropology the disparate sorts of universality may come together. Notably, the study of human universals unites them with the metaculture of science, which is inherently universal (just as ir is). Features of anatomy and physiology are not normally included among human universals but human universals may, increasingly at present, be traced to the functional (and physical) order of the mind (and brain). In some instances human universals are features of the human mind. Broadly defined universals often contain more specific universals, as in the case of tools, which always include pounders, cutters, containers, cordage, and more; or as in the case of social statuses, which always include kinship-, age-, and sex statuses. In some cases, the content of universals is highly specific, as in the facial expressions of basic emotions (Ekman/Sorenson/ Friesen 1969) and in the more complex "coyness display" (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1979, 20). Broadly defined universals, such as religion, are sometimes called universals of classification, in contrast with the more specific universals of content. Other universals consist of a coherent collection or syndrome of traits, such as, for example, the universal syndrome of ethnocentrism (Le Vine/Campbell 1972, 1 Iff; see also Brown 2001). The phenomenal realms (society, culture, etc.) specified in the definition above reflect conventional academic divisions of labor. Many universals lie simultaneously in two or more of those realms. For example, the kinship statuses just mentioned are simultaneously social, cultural, and linguistic. Alternative divisions or classifications (universals of art, music, or economics, etc.) may be employed as need or convenience dictate. Some universals have a collective referent while others are found in each individual. Some universals are attached either to male or female or to a limited age range. A strong preponderance of right-handedness is found in all societies, so that many cultural traditions presume or emphasize right-handedness — yet not all individuals are right-handed. By contrast, such phenomena as the use of elementary logical concepts ("not," "and," "or," "kind of," "greater/lesser than," etc.), the use of gestures, or the expression of likes and dislikes characterize the psyche or behavior of all (normal) individuals, even quite young ones. The predominance of women in infant socialization (Levy 1992) has a collective referent but

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is confined to one sex. The ease ("preparedness") with which youngsters acquire language characterizes all (normal) individuals within a limited age range. It follows from the definition given above (and from other considerations to follow) that human universals are a heterogeneous set. Any comprehensive account of universals will necessarily cross disciplinary boundaries. It also follows from the definition given above that human universals are situated in a historically broad but evolutionarily limited span of time. Universals that are even more time-specific have been proposed. Baseline universals are those that obtained in the earliest societies of which we have any knowledge (Hockett 1973, 275ff) while new universals are those that have become universal in more recent times (Aginsky/Aginsky 1948). This leaves any that were present in the former but absent in the latter as former universals. Tobacco, the dog, and fire-making are apparently among the new universals, while plastic utensils and matches (among other low-tech, inexpensive goods) must now be very nearly universal. In all likelihood the number of new universals will increase dramatically in coming years. Attempts to specify former universals appear to be rare (see Hockett 1973, 276, 277), although numerous technological developments have altered what might be called formerly universal conditions. For example, before the cultivation of plants all societies must have had upper limits on their population sizes that would now be quite small. Before the medical and health breakthroughs of the 20th century, with their dramatic reductions of infant mortality, the average woman everywhere bore and lost children at rates that are now much reduced in many societies (Ward 1963). Some universals are a part of each people's own conceptual order, while others are present though ignored in local conceptualizations. T h e former are called emic, the latter etic — terms derived by analogy from the linguistic terms "phonemic" and "phonetic" (Headland/Pike/Harris 1990). All languages have grammar, for example, but among many peoples there is no conceptualization of grammar as a distinct phenomenon. Such peoples recognize speech errors, but do not consciously or overtly formulate the rules that are broken. Thus grammar (syntax) is an etic universal that is revealed by scientific study, but is not an emic universal. As a further example, the Menomini Indians are said not to have distinguished religion as a distinct sphere of their culture (Hockett 1973, 132-134; cf. Brown 1991, 49), so that on this basis (at least) religion would not be an emic universal. Etically, however, the Menomini did have religion and it pervaded their activities. Emic universals are probably much less common than etic universals (see, e.g., the discussion of basic vocabulary below). A further distinction, and one with considerable theoretical significance, is made between manifest and innate universals. This distinction is particularly relevant to those cases in which an underlying set of universal mechanisms require particular environmental conditions to generate particular manifestations. In such

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cases one might find a range of frequencies or forms of manifestation, while the underlying mechanism is itself - as a feature of human nature — absolutely universal (Tooby/Cosmides 1989; 1992,45-46). The very concept of innate universale directs analysis beyond "surface" forms, which is where anthropological attention has been primarily directed, to "deeper" structures less available to direct observation but, for reasons given below, more amenable to theoretical understanding (more of which later). T h e Chomskian "language acquisition device," for example, is a feature of the human mind that generates linguistic competence in any (normal) child that grows up around people who speak, whether they try to teach or not. In those rare and tragic cases where, however, a child is deprived of normal access to speakers of language (even sign language) throughout the "sensitive period" in which the language acquisition device operates, the child will never acquire normal speech (Pinker 1994, 291-293). Thus in this case an innate universal (the language acquisition device) does not necessarily give rise to a manifest, absolute universal (language) at the level of the individual. Studies of facial attractiveness provide another example. In ancestral human populations mean facial proportions would generally have represented optimal adaptations to local conditions. Accordingly, humans appear to be adapted to unconsciously construct averages or composites of the faces they observe (allowing for sex and age differences) and then to find faces attractive insofar as they match the composite (or deviate from it in specific ways). Thus, what is attractive varies from population to population, while the template-constructing psychological mechanism is universal (Symons 1995). The notion of experiential universals refers to two related but distinct aspects of universality. O n the one hand it refers to invariant environmental conditions, which are not themselves human universals as defined above. That all (normal) individuals experience the sight of the sun and moon in their cycles, the sensations of hunger and thirst, etc., are among the many examples. O n the other hand the term also refers to those universals that are responses to universal environmental features. For example, in all societies the experiences of reproduction (including mating, parenting, and being reared) are so pervasive and important that in all societies there is a system of classifying the kinds of persons and relations that reproduction entails (as in the English kin terms "mother," "husband," "son," "sister," "cousin," etc.). O n the other hand, the attempt to produce a "basic vocabulary" consisting of words (lexemes) that reflect universal experiences and that are found in all languages showed that only an "amazingly small" number of meanings are universally encoded as (single) words (Hockett 1958, 530). None of the English kin terms just cited, for example, is universal. A large range of universals can be isolated that are not simply quantitative but that express the relative measures of, e.g., time, effort, or resources devoted to

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specified activities (suggested to me by an example in Hernadi 1995, 45). Thus, women universally average more time devoted to infant care than men do. Humans everywhere average more time awake than asleep.

Formal Variants There are a number of alternatives to, or variations on, the absolute conception of human universals. These variants generally refer to phenomena that are not observed in every society but that imply or rest upon universals or are otherwise closely related to universals. Among the variants are conditional (or implicational) universals, statistical universals, near universals, universal pools, and negative universals. A conditional universal consists of a phenomenon that always occurs when a specified condition is present. Examples from linguistics are perhaps the most thoroughly studied (Greenberg 1966), but examples in other realms are common enough. For example, if there is societal preference for one hand over the other, it will be the right over the left. If there is an idealized pattern of sociopolitical dominance of one sex over the other, it will be men over women. The real universality in these cases consists neither in the condition nor the phenomenon it entails but in the rule or pattern of co-occurrences and the underlying causation (see a discussion of universal mechanisms beneath variable behavior in Tooby/ Cosmides 1989). A statistical universal meets two conditions. First, it is found in a range of societies sufficiently unrelated to make borrowing from one society to another an unlikely explanation for its distribution. Second, it occurs cross-culturally at a rate greater than chance would dictate — which may place it far from absolute universality but which implies that its explanation is unlikely to be a series of culturally specific explanations. Instead, its explanation is likely to be in some sense universalistic (i.e., not in the domain of particular [folk] cultures but in the domain of the metaculture of anthropology). One example is terms for the pupil of the eye (Brown/Witkowski 1981). Given all the possible terms that might be used, in a very disproportionate number of languages the term refers to a little person, presumably because people everywhere see their own reflections in the pupils of other people's eyes (making this a sort of experiential universal too). Near universals include fire-making and keeping domestic dogs. Although all peoples used fire, a small number of known peoples did not know how to make fire. Similarly, an equally small number of isolated peoples had no domestic dogs. In some cases the designation of near universality merely indicates uncertainty about the absolute universality of the item in question. In many cases the expia-

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nations for near universale and absolute universale are essentially the same (see the discussion of causation below). A universal pool is a fixed set of possibilities from which particular manifestations are everywhere drawn. The idea is represented in the familiar example of the international phonetic alphabet, to the extent that it does accommodate all languages. T h e (emic) classification of the sexes provides a more esoteric example: apparently there are only three possibilities. One consists of the common but not universal two-sex systems, male and female. Another consists of cross-over systems that allow persons who would otherwise be classified as one sex to adopt the role and life-style of the other sex; the better known examples are the berdaches and manly-hearted women of North American peoples. The third possibility comprises three-sex systems in which a third sex role is intermediate between male and female or is considered neither male nor female; these are found in Southeast Asia and India (Brown 1976, 50-53; Martin/Voorhies 1975, 84-107). In some cases it is useful to think of universals in the negative. Consider again the case of handedness. As noted earlier, all peoples are predominantly righthanded, and where there is a societal preference for one hand — as in the handshake or oath-taking - it is always the right hand. In a small number of societies the preference is so great that naturally left-handed persons are forced to use their right hand for many activities. But there is no society in which individuals are coerced into a general pattern of left-handedness. 2 Sometimes straightforward universals are rephrased in the negative to shift the point of emphasis, as when the universal preponderance of women in the care of infants is stated to say that in no society are men the principal caretakers of infants.

Methodological considerations There are severe methodological constraints on what can be known about all societies. N o one actually knows the conditions in all societies, so even careful tests for universality consist of some form of sampling, and any claim of universality usually means that there are no known exceptions to what is claimed. The degree of skepticism that one should consequently entertain about claims of universality varies considerably. Many claims should be treated as provisional: both

2

There are two partial exceptions to these patterns. O n e is that in some societies certain specific activities that are considered to be unclean must be performed with the left hand by everyone. However, this is but another facet of a strong cultural preference for the right hand. T h e other partial exception is that in at least one society ritual officiants - but not others - reverse the normal pattern and give preference to their left hands (Needham 1973). T h e latter is presumably an instance of a wider pattern in which ritual reverses the routines of everyday life.

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the accuracy of the allegation of universality (the count of instances) and the accuracy of description of the alleged universal are at issue. Contemplating human universals in general is similar to what the learner of a new language faces: during most of the learning process it is clear that one knows the language to some degree and can use it to communicate, but one also makes errors and one is often unsure about what is correct and what is error. Given the high cost and difficulty of studying even a single society - past or present — the provisional nature of what can be said about all of them is a problem that will not soon disappear. In spite of the cost involved, anthropologists (and linguists), charged as they are with the empirical study of humans in all times and places, have generally insisted on cross-cultural studies to determine whether a trait or complex is universal. By contrast, scholars in a variety of disciplines — psychology being a notable example, but also political science, economics, and sociology - implicitly or explicitly often assume that certain traits or complexes are sufficiently unlikely to vary culturally that research conducted to determine their causes or consequences (or even their existence) may take place near to home. Where these studies have a strong applied or practical orientation, and are put to use in fundamentally modern industrial and post-industrial societies, their shortcomings may not be obvious. But such studies are de-facto intra-cultural, and validity across the entire range of modern societies is no guarantee of universality. Among the cautionary studies are a series that showed cultural differences in susceptibility to visual illusions, which might readily be thought so close to neurophysiology that variation would not be expected (Berry et al. 1992, 147-149). O n the other hand, it is important to note that if what the psychologist studies is indeed universal, then studies designed to elucidate, say, the ontogeny of the phenomenon in question might well be conducted in any convenient society. There are important exceptions to these differences in disciplinary tendencies, in, for example, cross-cultural psychology (e.g. Berry et al. 1992) and psychological anthropology. These fields combine the breadth of anthropology with the more intense focus typical of psychological research. However, the amount of research conducted in hybrid fields such as these is relatively slight. 3 It bears emphasizing that the methodological problems that confront the study of universals are not confined to determining how widespread a trait or complex may be. The precise specification or description of what it is that is alleged to be universal is equally problematic, and is particularly crucial to any attempt to trace the causes and consequences of the universal. The problem of description may 3

It is my impression that linguistics may provide the happiest combination of approaches. While cross-linguistic studies appear to be the discipline's mainstay, psycholinguistics is robust compared to its counterparts in most social sciences. In this as in other ways linguistics is in the forefront of, and provides the model for, the theoretical-rational as well as empirical study of universals.

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include the issue of level, which is particularly posed by the distinction between manifest and innate universals. Given the difficulties of description, it is often incomplete for simple forms but even more so for more complex universals. The problems of specifying the nature of complex universals of broad content, such as religion, are notorious. In some of these cases, and in the cases of proposed universal syndromes, some or all of the constituent elements of the complex or syndrome might not be universal, so that one is dealing with cases of polythetic classification or "family resemblances" that would defy any specification of essential features (suggested in Saler 1995). On the other hand, the more complex the form of a proposed universal appears to be, the greater the likelihood that its occurrence in disparate cultures is no accident. The "universal syndrome of ethnocentrism" (Le Vine/Campbell 1971) illustrates the issues. It includes such items as ingroup pride, distrust of members of the outgroup, denigration of the outgroup, cooperation within the ingroup, lack of cooperation with the outgroup, and many more features. For many if not all of these features it would be difficult to say that each is so defining that if it were missing one would not be observing the syndrome. Hence, some or many of the constituent elements of the syndrome may not be universal. And yet the sheer complexity of the syndrome (the number of its elements) compounds the odds against the possibility that even a majority of its features would cluster entirely by accident over and again across the very widely observed situations of interethnic relations (not to mention the many other kinds of ingroup-outgroup relations).4

Explanations for Human Universals Probability is an important consideration in the explanation of universals. Given the large number of human societies and the considerable variations among them - which has given rise in anthropology and beyond to an image of culture as limitlessly variable — any trait or complex found in all societies is exceedingly unlikely to result from chance events occurring repeatedly and independently in each case. Any pattern that might on the surface appear possibly to be sociocultural and that occurs in unrelated societies raises the question of whether its multiple occurrences are coincidental or whether some non-sociocultural causation is at work. The greater the number of societies that possess the pattern, and the more complex the pattern, the less the likelihood that the distribution of the pattern results from mere coincidence. Complex universals stand at the end of

4

T o further complicate the description of this syndrome, there is ambiguity about whether it is invoked primarily by ethnic relations and only incidentally by other intergroup relations, or whether it is a generic intergroup p h e n o m e n o n .

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this continuum of improbability. They demand explanation that of virtual necessity must transcend the cultures of particular societies. 5 There are only a few general explanations for universals. Some cultural universals, for example, appear to be inventions that, due to their great antiquity and usefulness, have diffused to all societies. The use of fire and, more specifically, the use of fire to cook food are examples. T h e dog achieved near universality for the same reasons. Explaining universals that result in this manner generally involves archaeology and employs long-established methods in anthropology. Other universals appear to be reflections in culture of non-culturalfeatures that are ubiquitous and important for one reason or another. Kinship terminologies are found among all peoples, and in all cases they reflect (at least in part) relationships necessarily generated by the facts of biological reproduction. Similarly, the classification of plants and animals everywhere shows a significant correspondence with scientific (linnean) classification (Berlin 1992). Most if not all of these kinds of universals are experiential. Explanations of this sort rely heavily on a commonsense or intuitive assessment of the probability that there is or is not a causal connection between patterns or structures in the world "out there" and in the patterns or structures of human cultures and languages. This was illustrated in a case referred to earlier: it seems probable that the observation of (reflected) little persons in the pupil of the eye gave rise to terms for the pupil that refer to little persons. 6 Many universals derive (more or less) directly from human nature or are features of human nature. They range from the relatively simple — e.g., dichotomous thinking or a preference for smaller ratios of waist-to-hip measurements in women than in men (Singh 1995) - to the more complex, such as the syndrome of cognitive and emotional traits comprising romantic love (Harris 1995). An inclusive framework for explaining these universals (and predicting more) has emerged in recent decades from a combination of ethology, sociobiology, Chomskian linguistics, artificial intelligence and evolutionary psychology. Ethology provides inspiration for the identification of species-typical behaviors and the study of the developmental processes (combining innateness and learning) that produce them (see, e.g., Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1989; Seligman/Hager 1972; Tiger/ Fox 1971). Sociobiology provides ultimate (i.e. evolutionary) explanations for such universals as kin altruism and the norm of reciprocity (Hamilton 1964; Trivers 1971). Partly inspired by developments in biology, Chomsky worked out 5

6

Again, when culturally specific explanations are ruled out, the only alternatives are those formulated as scientific universals. Any cross-cultural anthropological generalization invokes or implies this sort of universality. While the commonsense method employed to arrive at this explanation is imprecise, the issues can be grasped by imagining finding a perfect footprint in sand and then asking what the probability is that it was not made by a foot, but occurred through some entirely accidental, random processes of the movements of grains of sand. The latter is, of course, highly improbable.

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the notion of mental organs or modules that underpin complex, innate features of the human psyche (Chomsky 1980; Hirschfeld/Gelman 1994). A by-product of attempts to create artificial intelligence is the discovery that mental modularity must exist: Άgeneral information processor (which would mimic the "general intelligence" widely assumed to characterize humans) is a virtual impossibility; information processing depends upon inbuilt programs to, at the minimum, focus upon certain kinds or ranges of inputs (Tooby 1985; see also Symons [1992,142], who arrives at the same conclusion but on different grounds). Evolutionary psychology, which calls upon each of the other disciplines just mentioned, while also relying on ethnology and archaeology to understand the conditions that impinged upon humans in their evolutionary past, attempts to elucidate the nature of the human mind - and its causal role in the construction of society and culture (Barkow/Cosmides/Tooby 1992). In its shift from a typically anthropological inductive, empiricist approach to a more theoretically grounded deductive, generative, or predictive approach, evolutionary psychology has tended to shift the focus on universale from the manifest to the innate. Evolutionary psychologists find human nature in the "evolved architecture of the human mind" (Tooby/Cosmides 1992, 28) or the h u m a n " b r a i n / m i n d mechanisms ... designed by natural selection" (Symons 1992, 144)7 Due to the complexity of the human mind, and to the neglect of its study engendered by social science's biophobia (Daly/Wilson 1988, 154; Degler 1991; Brown 1991), the exploration of innate universale has scarcely begun. Correspondingly, the integration of innate universale into the framework of anthropological thought (and method) is far from complete. However, let me address a key issue in this view of human nature: the relationships between the constants it finds or posits and the manifest variability of human behavior. At the outset, a particularly crucial distinction must be made between functions and effects. T h e set of mental mechanisms that comprise the architecture of the h u m a n mind were designed by natural selection to solve particular problems and are finite in number. Solving these problems are (or were) their respective functions. However, a mechanism designed to discharge a particular function may have other effects, i.e., side effects or byproducts (just as the shape of the outer ear was designed to gather sound waves but may also be used to support glasses or pencils, receive punishment when you are a child or erotic nibbling as an adult, etc.). 8 7 8

"Mental mechanisms" are equivalent to the mental "organs" or "modules" referred to above with regard to Chomsky. Effects that are themselves species-typical pose particularly difficult problems of analysis. T h u s "general intelligence" characterizes humans, but it may well be an effect of the many highly specific mental mechanisms that evolved separately, rather than a characteristic that was selected for in the course of h u m a n evolution.

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In the case of humans the mental mechanisms are numerous and their effects - which presumably include a great many emergent properties stemming from the interaction of the discrete mechanisms — are either infinite or at any rate infinitely partible. In spite of the infinity of behavioral effects, the mechanisms leave the traces of their operation in varying degrees and modes: some very regularly noted (as in smiles and frowns), some with enough irregularity to fuel the well-known nature/nurture debates (as in many sex differences), and some that reveal themselves only through unusual observational situations, as in extensive cross-cultural observation or psychological experimentation. It is not only the infinity of effects that obscures the underlying mechanisms of mind. Let me mention several other conditions with similar consequences: 1) Many mental mechanisms motivate us toward goals (mating, ingesting food, etc.) without specifying the means. W e may meet these goals through infinite means. While the means are observable, the goals must be inferred (Symons 1987). 2) Some mental mechanisms are facultative adaptations, invoked under certain conditions but not others or invoked in varying degrees so that they are calibrated to environing conditions. 9 The resulting phenotypes are variable by design, though the underlying mechanism is unitary. 3) Many adaptations may in some circumstances conflict with each other, so that the resulting behaviors are compromises. 4) Some adaptations may be sufficiently imperfect that the probability of their successful operation in any individual is considerably less than 100 per cent. 5) As wondrously precise as genetic replication is, genes program the structure and operation of our minds and bodies in interaction with the genes' environments, which can and do vary, which in turn results in structures and operations that differ in varying degrees from one individual to another. In this context it is important to note that recent human environments, in almost all parts of the world, present many conditions quite unlike those that prevailed over the long period in which human nature evolved. Many modern behaviors may have their analogues more in the bizarre behaviors of animals in zoos than in what the same kinds of animals do in their natural habitats. 6) A certain amount of genetic variation that is probably an adaptation to combat pathogens via the mechanism of sexual recombination (Tooby/Cosmides 1990) makes each individual a unique combination of genes. Due to this mechanism a pathogen that has evolved an efficient attack on one or more individuals' substance (at the molecular level) will not find all other individuals equally assailable. Although the function of this mechanism is not to alter the structure and opera9

Conditional universals are analogous to facultative adaptations, and some conditional universale probably are facultative adaptations.

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tion of the brain/mind (but merely to build tissue from different materials), it could affect operation in one way or another. What are the implications of this view of human nature as innate universals? First, observable variation in behavioral output is normal. And yet this variation is entirely compatible with a panhuman patterning that is the manifestation of a common design of the human mind (barring sex and age differences that are equally likely to reflect design).10 Do all features of the design develop in all individuals? Certainly the answer to this is no: we find some individuals lacking one or another anatomical or physiological feature and still proving viable - why shouldn't this be true of some mental mechanisms?11 Thus the identification of a feature of mind as a part of human nature is not necessarily to say that it is present in all individuals.

Further Implications The existence and nature of universals have broad implications for what it means to be human and, hence, for the human sciences, philosophy, and (even) public policy. Among these implications are the role of universals in understanding human nature, the role of universals in intercultural communication, the universal background of particulars, the asymmetry between universals and particulars, the limitations universals place on relativism, the necessity of comparison in order to understand any society or civilization, and the non-Western nature of universals. Each will be discussed below. 1) Although innate universals are the constituent elements of human nature and other universals appear to be fairly direct reflexes of underlying features of human nature, human universals in general have no straightforward or simple relationship to human nature. Some universals are sufficiently removed from the elements of human nature, or from such an apparently seamless combination of them, that tracing back from the universal in question to the elements of human nature from which it stems is not at all straightforward. No one, for example, proposes that using fire is a feature of human nature, and yet various aspects of our nature — including our warm-bloodedness, the dexterity of our hands, and our skill at imitation — do play a part in the cultural pattern. No one proposes that the classification of kin is an adaptation, and yet classification itself may be a mental mechanism and various lines of evidence indicate that a concern for kin 10 T h e other side of this coin is that the great variability of h u m a n behavior "implies extreme mental complexity and stability; that is, an elaborate h u m a n nature. Behavioral plasticity for its own sake would be worse than useless, random variation suicide" (Symons 1987, 127). 11 O f course "viable" does not necessarily mean reproductively successful - even more so in past h u m a n conditions.

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somehow taps human nature. In cases such as these, identifying the features of human nature that lie upstream from the universal may be little different than identifying those that lie upstream from any cultural particular. Thus any equation of human universals in general with human nature is at best a half-truth. 2) Intercultural communication depends upon or is facilitated by universals in at least three ways (cf. Mihayara 1995; Tadayashi 1995). First are universals of communication itself - language, gestures, body language, and facial expressions - without which humans do not even communicate intraculturally. O f course these are in large measure universals of content, having local variations (Chinese versus English language, for example) that impede intercultural communication but do not ultimately thwart it. The record is replete with examples of persons of vastly differing languages and cultures coming together and managing to communicate, in time learning each other's languages. The notion that the differing peoples of the world live in interpretive communities between which there can be no meaningful communication is either false or a gross exaggeration (Gellner 1995, 13-15). In demonstrations of the extent to which cross-language communication can be turned into a skill, the world's leading authority on translation, Kenneth Pike, would go before audiences of linguists to be confronted with a monolingual speaker of a language unknown to him; within minutes Pike could determine enough of the language to carry on a rough conversation (Pike 1972). Pike might begin by pointing at things, on the usually reasonable assumption that he could get the informant to utter either the word for pointing or the word for what he pointed at, and with this opening wedge on the language's phonetics and semantics Pike could proceed. Second, and crucial to much human communication, is empathy. By empathy I mean those cognitive and emotional facilities that allow humans to divine what another person is thinking and feeling, above and beyond what overt communication may express. Selby (1974, 106-107) reports that this facility is culturally repressed among Zapotees: he was unable to get "any kind of introspective explanation from [his] informants. Stories are told ... but close inspections of the motivations of others are completely absent". However, he also (1974, 56) describes an instance in which a Zapotee woman lost her temper and shouted at another who was speaking amiably but who was divined to have ulterior motives. In spite of the cultural milieu, the facility for empathy seems to have functioned normally. There has been considerable recent research on the ontogeny and neurological basis of empathy, under the heading of "theory of mind". It develops early in childhood; its absence appears to give rise to autism (Cosmides/Tooby 1994, 102; Mitchell 1997). Finally, it seems reasonable to propose that the greater the shared experiences between two parties, the greater the scope for empathy or the more easily it is

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aroused. Accordingly, the many remaining universals that are neither communicative nor empathetic give humans shared experiences and interests that in turn give them something to talk about. Some of these universals are deeply meaningful to humans: the attachments of family members, the grief they will feel at loss, the anguish at betrayal; bonds of loyalty among members of a group; pleasure in music and dance; distinguishing between true and false; recognizing the morality in reciprocity - all these and many more are available to elicit not only empathy but even sympathy. Of course empathy does not necessarily gives rise to sympathy. Conflict or enmity may prevent or extinguish sympathy while still allowing the participants to anticipate each other's hostile attitudes and actions. 12 3) Particulars cannot (or can only rarely) be understood apart from universals. A unique event, condition, or phenomenon is a combination of more general, ultimately universal, elements. These two statements apply to the world in general, and to human affairs or conditions as a part of the world. Equally, the organs by which we perceive and understand events or conditions operate combinatorially, i.e., by combining universal elements of input (sound, light, shape, motion, temperature, etc.) into more or less unique mental traces. That humans may, of course, fail to consciously perceive or understand the universal in the particular, or may lack words to (fully) describe what they perceive, or may deliberately choose to emphasize the particular, does not make the universals disappear. Although historians, for example, might rightly stress the most minute particulars, they approach their task with an enormous reservoir of assumptions — based primarily on their being humans with more or less normal human experiences, but based also on their readings of the records of human affairs. These assumptions may go largely unnoticed and unquestioned, for they do so in almost all human communities, including academic communities. 13 This implication is illustrated in the next, and closely related, section. 4) T h e relationship between particulars and universals is asymmetrical. Although universals must manifest themselves in particular instances, be consciously discovered and communicated by particular individuals, etc., some or many of these particulars can easily be lost or omitted - accidentally or intentionally - and yet the universal can still be understood. That is, one can provide an abstract

12 It might be noted in passing that interspecific communication, too, relies on various universals, such as vocalization, gesture, and facial expression (including gaze). 13 H u m a n s are exquisitely adapted to perceive h u m a n differences, but seem to have few if any adaptations for perceiving h u m a n universals. T h u s all humans easily spot differences of accent, while it took a Chomsky (and all that his work rests upon) to reveal the amazingly efficient language acquisition device that h u m s silently in all children's minds (Donald Symons, personal communication).

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description of a universal in which the particulars (except for language) are not evident. "All peoples have language" is intelligible without such particulars as who said it or who determined it to be true. W e may want to know these particulars for various reasons, but we do not need to know them to understand the statement. The reverse is not true: the universals cannot be stripped from accounts of particulars, even though they may lie outside of conscious attention. "Geronimo, the Apache shaman, led successful war parties" can only be understood through a maze of generalizations including universal perceptions of actor, intention, causation, time reckoning, gender, naming, ethnicity, narrative, and so on. As numerous as such universals may be, they are also so routine that they are passed over without comment. But (and here is the difference) all (or many) of them may be recovered by analysis of the sentence itself, in combination with routine human understandings. 5) Many conceptions of relativism — in anthropology, the other social sciences, and in public understandings — overstate their case. This flows not from the nature of universals per se but from anthropological conceptions of them. Throughout much of the 20th century the social sciences have labored under the impression that anthropological studies had shown that particular supposed universals (adolescent stress, male dominance, and the sense of time) were not in fact universals and, by extension, that universals in general must be rare and/or unimportant. This situation was closely linked to an emphasis on cultural as opposed to biological determinants of human behavior. But these particular studies have now been refuted (Freeman 1983; Gewertz 1981; Malotki 1983), and the relativist conclusions that flowed from them no longer have the validity they once seemed to possess. For the same reasons (but other factors are involved too), the emphasis on cultural determinants of human behavior is also less justified now. (The overemphasis of relativism is examined at length in Brown 1991.) 6) Universals are frequently mis-identified as cultural particulars. The presentday widespread projection of cultural relativism beyond its legitimate bounds has made this such a common error that there ought to be a name for it. Overemphasis on cultural difference has led to the assumption that most of what is observed in any society - Western or not — is likely to be particular to it (or to have a relatively narrow distribution). Given that cultural relativism itself springs from cross-cultural comparison, it is paradoxical that the over-emphasis of relativism results from inadequate comparison. But it is only by comparison with other societies that one can see what is distinctive and what is common, and comparison reveals more universals than anthropologists have tended to suspect during much of the 20th century. At any rate, the mistake is often manifest in statements that begin "in our society ..." with the implication that the matter in question is peculiar to our society or to some relatively small proportion of societies. And yet the observation in question is true of all or virtually all societies. Such observa-

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tions are generally followed by the assumption or prescription that our culture needs correction (to eliminate materialism, sexism, or ethnocentrism, for example). However, the policies to be followed when something is universal (or even widespread) are likely to be quite different from what they would be for a cultural peculiarity. 14 The research questions that universale and particulars pose are even more likely to be quite different. 7) H u m a n Universals are not Western. While this is true by definition, it requires emphasis for two contrasting reasons. O n the one hand, matters that seem natural, right, and universal to Westerners, but which stem from the folk culture 15 of the West rather than from the empirically validated metaculture of anthropology, may well not be universal. Rightly or wrongly, non-Western thinkers have suspected or accused Westerners of foisting "universals" upon them that are in fact normative, culture-bound, and Western. Whatever the truth of these accusations in particular instances, the extensive participation of Western scholars in the discovery or formulation of actual human universals does not make them Western. It is probably true that more westerners than others have been involved in the search for human universals. But to say that this makes human universals Western is no more valid than saying that Harvey's discovery of the circulatory system made it Western. 16 True human universals will be discovered by whoever looks for them, and they will be human universals, not Western pseudo-universals (Gellner 1995). O n e illustration of this is provided by the set of emotions (and their expressions) identified by ancient Indian scholars in the course of their studies of dramaturgy. As summarized by texts dated to the tenth century or earlier (Ghosh 1967, 121-125; Gnoli 1968, xv-xvi),17 the list of "eight fundamental feelings" is too close to modern lists of "basic emotions" (e.g., Ekman/Sorenson/Friesen 1969; Ekman/Friesen 1986) to be a coincidence. For the ancient Indians: delight, laughter, sorrow, anger, heroism (or energy), fear, disgust, and wonder; for Ekman and associates: happiness, sadness, disgust, surprise, fear, anger, and contempt. As I noted at the beginning, the Indians identified these (and more) as "common" to humans, based on their observations of the varieties of peoples with which they were familiar.

14 This is not to say that "if it's universal it can't be changed." Consider stereotyping. At no time in the immediate future is any policy going to eliminate stereotyping in any society (that continues to exist). On the other hand, the content of stereotypes does change and can be changed. 15 I use the term "folk" to indicate that it is culture-bound rather than universal. 16 Of course new universals (plastic containers might be a possible example) could be Western in origin. 17 I am grateful to Otto Steinmayer for drawing my attention to these texts.

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Concluding Remarks I take it as axiomatic that human universals must play a part in understanding what it is to be human and, hence, in the discipline of anthropology. I presume that virtually all anthropologists (and others) agree. However, there is real disagreement on what features or complexes are universal, whether universals are few and general or many and specific, how and whether universals can be discovered, whether universals or particulars are more deserving of attention, whether attention should be directed more to surface or deeper universals, and so on. Let me also note that anthropology is an impossibly large topic, so that no one can confidently keep up with (let alone do research on) all its subfields and approaches. This being so, it is expectable that many would choose not to study or even follow the literature on human universals. There is no mortal error in this, as it is equally axiomatic that particulars always play a role in what it is to be human, so that a focus on particulars, or the differences between humans, has a rationale that only needs be qualified by the observation made earlier that universals will nonetheless play their part in the shadows of such studies. But the vastness of anthropology also, I think, creates incentives for explaining why one shouldn't study universals. Perhaps the key element here is the assumption, widely accepted in the social sciences for much of the 20th century (and still implicitly maintained in many academic circles), that the human mind was (is) a general information processor, programmed through local and particular cultural traditions, and, hence, unlikely to stamp humanity everywhere with anything other than the most general patterns. Following this assumption, there was no human nature to produce or explain more than a few very general universals. Thus the study of universals would yield little, and claims of specific universals were greeted with skepticism. With the collapse of this reason for thinking that universals must be rare (for reasons summarized in, e.g., Brown 1991; Degler 1991; Barkow/Cosmides/Tooby 1992; Hirschfeld/Gelman 1994; Pinker 1997) the grounds for studying them is now much expanded. That leaves disagreements over particular universals, and over how and whether they can be discovered and explained. Disagreements of this sort are normal in science (certainly in the human sciences) and, in the case of many human universals, will surely continue to exist into the foreseeable future. If nothing else, the methodological difficulties outlined above guarantee such disagreements. But these disagreements and difficulties should lead no one to abandon the study of universals. In closing, I will give three reasons for this. First, with respect to discovering universals, considerable progress can be and has been made with little more than good sense, familiarity with human affairs, and the desire to seek and verify generalized patterns. As I noted earlier, the ancient Hindus, without the benefits of twentieth-century science, arrived at a set

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of basic emotions closely parallel to those revealed by careful contemporary study. Perhaps more remarkable, Sanskrit grammarians of more than two millennia ago developed techniques for the description of language that when re-discovered in the West set in motion the formulation of universals now commonplace in linguistic analysis (Bloomfield 1961, 11). Ibn Khaldun's fourteenth-century work bristles with insights into patterns in human affairs, of which his views on the effects of partisanship on human judgment are surely universally applicable (Khaldun 1958, 71). O n my assessment (Brown 1988) the record of human attempts to take note of, and derive lessons from, human affairs is replete with evidence for a common human mind arriving at common assessments of human affairs when the conditions for objective analysis prevail (the record also shows common strategies, under other conditions, to avoid objective analysis). This is not specifically an endorsement of the study of universals, but of the human sciences in general in their attempts to arrive at conclusions with universal validity (see also Gellner 1995). 18 Secondly, we are getting better at doing social science, certainly at trying to explain the patterns we see. The example given above of Kenneth Pike's ability to work out the basics of an unfamiliar language in minutes rests not merely on his own brilliance and skill but on the cumulative record of linguistic analysis. And linguistic analysis has been an important tool for conducting research on diverse cultures (where the points of entry are overwhelmingly via language), a stimulus to formulating ideas of broad relevance for anthropological analysis (including Pike's own formulation of emics and etics), and more specifically a stimulus to the study of universals. There is a passage in Levi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques (1961, 44-45) where he frets over when would be the best time to encounter a foreign culture: the earlier the encounter the less the other culture is likely to be affected by the (homogenizing) trends of modern intercultural contacts; but the earlier the encounter the less one would be equipped (by the cumulative lessons derived from confronting other cultures) to make sense of what one beheld. Lévi-Strauss probably has it right, but what is lost as time passes is difference. The universals are still there to be studied.

18 T o give but a single example, Western scholars who, early in the colonial period, began to study India were impressed with the importance of caste and struck by the curious feature that the (Hindu) Indians, who possessed a lengthy and massive literary tradition, seemed relatively unconcerned with the literary genre that Westerners would identify as history. Various scholars have protested the latter observation as an imposition of Western standards on a non-Western culture and thereby in some sense invalid. But long before the Europeans colonized India, Muslims did too. And they made the very same observations (references are provided in Brown [1988], which attempts to explain the connections between caste and literary representations of the past).

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Finally, the sheer difficulty of discovering and explaining universale provides no grounds for avoiding them. Too much is lost by any methodological or theoretical concerns that preclude their study. Consider the study of literature. I am told that literary scholars are loathe to analyze translated texts, i. e., literatures in languages beyond their competence. Surely this avoids certain kinds of errors, the commission of which must violate some sort of professional taboo. The taboo is alive and well in branches of anthropology, too, among those who insist on emic purity (while ignoring etic analysis). However, just as surely as work with secondhand literary or cultural materials invites error so, too, a studied ignorance of what is to be learned by broad cross-cultural comparison (which necessarily precludes competence in each of the languages and cultures concerned) invites error. And these errors are just as laughable or serious. There is a sort of recklessness in talking about societies and languages one has not personally studied well, but the alternative is a sort of timidity in the face of real problems about what it is to be human. This timidity, at its worst, can barely escape reducing anthropology to the production of reports that in practice or principle (or both) project one or another culturally particular point of view, i.e., one or another ethnocentrism. Perhaps to be human is to be ethnocentric, but there is no reason to make an intellectual virtue of it. 19

19 Michael Price, Neil Roughley, Francis Steen, Donald Symons, Barty T h o m p s o n , and J o h n Ziker have all offered useful comments o n this paper.

Are Women Human? Helen Haste

A white-suited bundle floats into view. It gently drifts away from its metal womb, out into blackness, the unknown. A euphoric voice describes moving out to the last frontier. The bundle breathes, moves and is heard because it is tied to the mother ship by leads, cables, and guylines that will shortly retrieve it safely. Buta myth has been created. A figure stands on the platform. It leaps out into the chasm, falling, flying free and alone. After a few seconds, it comes to the end of its elastic umbilical cord, bounces violently, and is hauled up by the team. Two small boys playfully wrestle. They wield plastic symbols of masculinity originating two thousand years apart. One has a scimitar, curved and decorated. The other has a mobile phone - the large, bulky, 1992 variety. The white bundle could be a female space person; the bunjy jumper could be a woman; little girls play with mobile phones and even scimitars. But the symbolism of each is vested in powerful Western myths of autonomy, individuality and agency, the iconic attributes of masculinity. Women grow up with the suspicion that they are regarded as not quite human. Feminist analysis of language, symbol and metaphor has begun to unpack this, to make sense of girls' subjective experience that the 'generic male' is not merely a linguistic convention. To be female is to be 'Other.' This 'Otherness' may be denigrated or idealised, but nevertheless it defines the antithesis of that masculinity to which males must strive in order to be men — to be human. The 'feminine' is perceived as posing a threat to the 'masculine'; it has to be managed so that it does not undermine, subvert or weaken. Experience also told little girls that their role was to sustain these complex managements. Women's human-ness has been equated with 'womanliness'. It has been vested in supportive roles, protecting not only the well-being of the male, but the well-being of the mythology. Even explicitly 'human' virtues and qualities such as honesty, truth-telling, responsibility, courage, compassion and reason, locate in female-specific supportive and caring roles (Your family depends on your virtue and strength). This is a well-told tale of Western manhood and womanhood. While it is not the only one, it is the one which has been most easily targeted by both feminist critics and by critics of its impoverished conception of the human. It is an easy target because it explicitly reflects a set of values, and it is also transparent about

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how these are sustained and nourished. It is the tale told by my three vignettes; the illusion of independence, agency and autonomy lets us see the heroic individualism of the space man and ignore his umbilical cords, the mad courage of the bunjy jumper simulating free flight at the end of his rein, and small boys triumphantly asserting their power by flourishing masculine symbols of agency. In this paper I first will unpack the particular myth of Western human-ness that is tied to autonomy and independence, and show how it inevitably positions the feminine (and the female) as threat or antithesis. I shall also consider how it is a flawed way of talking about being human, and how alternative models of the human have been brought into this debate in efforts to redefine the human. But this is only the beginning. The story of feminist and humanistic onslaughts on the impoverished masculine myth has been told often. What happens when we try to find new definitions? My second agenda is to explore how this has made us aware of the role of story and narrative in making sense of our world the way the 'old' stories worked, and how we use 'new' stories as heuristics in the search for 'identity' and 'authenticity'.

The Dualistic Self and the Battle for Boundaries Clifford Geertz has given us a classic definition of "Western Self'. It encapsulates the myth and its mechanisms exquisitely: "a bounded, unique, and more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic centre of awareness, emotion, judgement and action organised into a distinctive whole and set contrastively against other such wholes and against its social and natural background" (Geertz 1983, 59). Geertz contrasted this idiosyncratic view of the confrontational relationship between the individual and the social context with other cultural stories about the self. Let us unpack the key elements of this model of Western self. 'Autonomy' is both a value, a telos, and a belief about the human condition. It entails qualities associated with independence and individualism, and both the courage and the cognitive capacity to distance oneself from the crowd. This is reflected in a majority of Western psychological theories, in which the child's growing independence from social pressures is treated as a sign of maturity, and fostering such capacity as a mark of good child rearing. Autonomy implies self-sufficiency, a cardinal element of the upbringing of 'manly' boys — and Marlboro Man. 'Self-sufficiency' also rhetorically entails emotional independence, and the dissociation of cognition from emotion, particularly in the cause of 'reasoned' and 'unbiased' judgement. Autonomy in the moral context does not only entail resisting social pressures, it also — at least as proposed by John Rawls, and endorsed in psychological terms by Lawrence

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Kohlberg - entails dissociating oneself from context altogether, arguing from 'the original position' in which one deliberates about the right course of action without reference to the special perspectives of the actors (Rawls 1991; Kohlberg 1981; 1984). It is, of course, easy to argue that such an ideal of independence and individualism is psychologically highly unrealistic, and can only be seriously contemplated if we forefront the cognitive to the exclusion of the affective, and if we choose to ignore the social and cultural context in which every individual is raised and in which we remain forever embedded. 'Otherness' entails boundaries, exclusions and inclusions policed by categories and rules. Geertz's 'bounded self separates itself from others, defends itself from threat and invasion. Otherness is not only about concepts to do with being human; it can be traced back to Aristotelian two-valued logic and is deeply embedded in our cultural history. According to this a thing is defined by its negation. Something "cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject in the same respect" (Met. 1005 b 19ff.). This axiom, for Aristotle "the most certain of all principles", expresses the deep-rooted dualism of Western culture. It not only forces concepts into one of two categories or states, it also requires crisp boundaries. The metaphor of dualism is not just a cognitive schema; it generates a deep anxiety about things that are vague, fuzzy or ambiguous. It also feeds our conviction that the 'positive' pole is continually under threat from the 'negative' pole, and that any loosening of the boundaries will increase that threat. These axioms have deeply influenced both our concepts of science and of what constitutes 'rational' thought. The idea of scientific objectivity sits firmly on the belief that one can make sharp boundary distinctions, and that one can separate that which (or who) observes from that which is observed.

To Have and Have Not I have argued extensively elsewhere that this metaphor is a major source of the cultural anxiety that surrounds gender (Haste 1994). For a start, Otherness is not reciprocal. We find in language, in metaphor, in terms of abuse and forms of humour, and most particularly, in evaluation and in concepts of 'deficit', the imbalance between the Self as male, and the Other as female. Masculinity has to be defended from contamination, dilution or pollution by the feminine - but not vice versa. The threat of the feminine comes in many guises. The bounded autonomous male must protect himself from his own internal femininity and 'weakness'. He is also under threat from the seductive external forces of feminine influence. To take a simple colloquial example; the connotations of 'cissy' are far worse than the connotations of'tomboy'. The cissy has lost something that makes him

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less human. The tomboy has gained something; she may be compromising her femininity, but she is not losing. The cissy must 'be made a man of ; the tomboy will in time be 'tamed' into her appropriate role. Let us consider how we deal with deficit. If one lacks a particular ability or quality, one has the choice of either denigrating it altogether, compartmentalising it as some other group or person's attribute and probably minimising its value, or idealising it and those who have it — but within carefully circumscribed boundaries. Here is a range of options by which we might deal with the evidence that females are better at x: we may decide that because males are bad at χ, χ is irrelevant and to be devalued (or even suppressed); we may decide that because females are good at x, it should be regarded as an essential feminine skill, and all females (but no males) tutored in it; we may decide that it is an essential skill but a menial one, and any male undertaking it would lose status; we may decide in contrast that Λ; is so special that we given it a spiritual status, and females who are especially good at Λ: become priestesses. It might follow that contact with the male would contaminate women who were performing χ — with dire consequences for society; we may decide that χ is an essential quality for human-ness, so we carefully tutor both sexes so that male 'deficit' is compensated for; we may decide that χ is an essential quality for certain activities that are socially defined as male, so female skills in this area are disguised or ignored, and male deficit is compensated for by training. In various contexts in the history of Western culture, healing, intuition, cooking, dexterity and certain stamina and survival capacities have fallen into one or more of these categories.

Getting in Touch with the Other Feminist critics are not alone in rejecting the 'autonomous male' as an incomplete model of the human. At various times, but most recently in the era of post-war Romanticism that we inaccurately dub 'the Sixties', there arise 'holistic' critiques which attempt to break the dualistic metaphor that traps each sex in a dichotomous, polarised position and - in particular - deprives men of emotionality and sensitivity, condemning them to the masquerade of machismo. One such book — of many - was Stan Gooch's Total Man published in 1972 (Gooch 1972). This explored the duality of Western humanity (but particularly maleness) and the ways in which fear of the feminine led men to reject a part of themselves. This, like most books of the genre, presents dualism as a given; there

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are two systems, ways of thinking, forms of response to the world, ways of dealing with emotion. It plots the two systems onto our conventional models of male and female, showing how each sex enacts the 'appropriate' pole. The argument is that each human does have the potential for an internal wholeness, which requires 'getting in touch with' one's 'Other' self. The new metaphor is balance, but the duality remains. It is not an argument for deconstructing difference, merely for finding a more productive way of dealing with internal conflicts. So the 'incomplete' macho male can gain sensitivity through accessing his 'feminine' self while never losing the desirable state of autonomy. (The 'incomplete' woman can also become more 'autonomous' through accessing her 'masculine' side.) The message of humanistic psychology was that this defuses the threat and anxiety of dualism. By recognising that the 'Other' is part of oneself one can control it, and possess it. This diminishes the fear of the feminine and also th ζ awe of the feminine. This awe springs from the idealisation of woman as carer, woman as forgiver, woman as nurturer. This is the flipside of woman as autonomythreatening smotherer, devourer and seducer - from which men must flee into the safe world of male rules and codes. If man can also nurture, he is less vulnerable to the nurturing power of an Other that can turn into an overwhelming or destructive force. Ways of dealing with the anxieties of dualism through finding a balance of masculine and feminine differ according to their perceived origins. If the roots of gender duality are seen as physiological (tied, for example, to brain latéralisation), it could be resolved by changing the cultural evaluation of left and right brain functions. Where the origins were seen as early childhood relationships, the damage was a'wound' that required healing (Hudson/Jacot 1991; Chodorow 1978). 1 The infant boy has to dissociate himself from the primary figure, the mother, in order to establish his identity as a male/human; it is only by such differentiation and separation that his own selfhood can emerge. He remains, inevitably, in a permanent approach-avoidance relationship with women, longing for the lost nurturing but fearing the threat to his fragile identity. The 'wound' is the loss of trust and the pain of severance. So he is thoroughly set up for anxieties about boundaries, differentiation and the need to protect himself from overwhelming emotions. In contrast, the infant girl never has to separate herself from her mother, whom she is like, and with whom she must identify in order to become a female/ human. Her mother is therefore not 'Other', except in the sense of being a distinct being, but a person with whom she can connect easily through similar

1

There has been a substantial literature in recent years about alternative forms of masculinity that tackle the issue of "the w o u n d ", for example, Bly 1990; Keen 1991.

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selfhood. In consequence, little girls learn the skills of connecting and maintaining connections. In this story, resolving duality is through learning the 'skills' of the other sex. 'Whole' human-ness involves a balance of two parts of the self, differently fostered in each sex. O n e example where this particular resolution is extensively worked through is in the domain of moral reasoning. Carol Gilligan criticised the Rawls-Kohlberg emphasis on justice as the core principle of moral judgement, tying this to her evidence that women worked with an alternative ethic of care and responsibility (Gilligan 1993). Gilligan argued that the two ethics are gender-linked because each rests on a concept of self as either connected or being separate. Justice-based reasoning assumes conflicts between separate persons with conflicting interests, to be resolved by finding the best balance or contract. Responsibility or care-based reasoning assumes connection between persons; conflicts arise which threaten the relationship, so resolution requires negotiating common interests in order to restore that connection. Gilligan's critique of justice-based reasoning as the primary definition of morality is consistent with the critique of 'autonomous man' as the tebs of maturity. T h e 'human' resolution is to be able to access both modes of reasoning. The story of the 'autonomous human', equated in so much mythology, metaphor and iconography with the male and the masculine, is challenged as impoverished and illusory. Furthermore, because huge tracts of human qualities and experience are cast as 'the Other' and denigrated as 'feminine', woman has no personhood unless she can overcome her 'deficient' femaleness. If we re-evaluate the polarities of masculine and feminine and argue that a 'whole' person has both, we undermine the boundary strategy of sustaining one pole by the denigration of the other, but we do not undermine the duality itself.

Feminist stories: Power, Discovery and Invention What of ways for dealing with this? In feminist theory we find three main strategies. They address the problem of dualism, the problem of meaning and the problem of human-ness, in different ways. In my chosen terminology they are 'power feminism', 'discovery feminism' and 'invention feminism'. 2

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I am making no attempt here to m a p on to conventional distinctions in feminist theory, except that 'power' feminism overlaps with socialist and liberal feminism; 'discovery' feminism includes radical feminism, eco-feminism and other feminisms that appeal to an essential femaleness, and 'invention' feminism covers broadly 'post-modern' feminist positions. See Haste 1999; also T u a n a / T o n g 1995.

Are Women Human? 181 The premise of Power feminism is that women's position is a consequence of male power - primarily economic power, but also social power that institutionalises rights, roles and stereotypes. The 'tasks' of feminism are to challenge this power and give women equal access to power, goods, resources and opportunities. The first task is to analyse the extent of inequality and the mechanisms by which it is reproduced. One of these mechanisms is belief about sex difference; because sex difference (and female deficiency) is used as an argument to justify discrimination, it must be challenged in its own terms — rationally demolished as factually incorrect, by summoning evidence for the absence of sex difference, and so undermining any justification of discrimination. This perspective does not challenge the model of autonomy; it works within it, arguing that women are equally capable of being that sort of human. The focus on rationality and on the surface content of gender stereotypes tends to dismiss those anxieties that sustain the strong boundaries as merely by-products of the power game. The solution is an androgynous human, with the qualities formerly assigned to each (however positively or negatively evaluated) being now seen as equally likely to be found in either sex, and functioning as 'human' characteristics. It may be strategically sensible to deny difference as a means of achieving equality. However it may not tackle a core problem, the problem of identity, of an 'authentic' self. Joining a club from which one has been excluded inevitably means accepting the terms of reference of that club - which in this case, have been formulated specifically to polarise and reject one's own identity. While one may attempt to redefine those terms, the process of redefinition has to start from somewhere. Discovery and Invention feminist perspectives both acknowledge the need for radical new definitions of femininity and masculinity; it is not enough to patch up the old models. The Discovery perspective seeks a more 'authentic' definition of femininity. Cultural and mythic evidence demonstrate the enduring, even universal, message of the 'feminine'. Feminism should be documenting and celebrating the authentically feminine and challenging the hegemony of the masculine myth, and of masculine power that imperially imposes that myth on the larger culture. Discovery feminism has also become associated with eco-feminism, and ecology movements attack the masculinist metaphors of power, control and objectivity. The'essentially' feminine — caring, nurturing, opposing violence, being part of, rather than objectively dominating - is evoked as a counterweight to this. Much Discovery feminism does claim that women have privileged access to these values and modes of interacting with the world. For Discovery feminism, the human-ness of women has been cruelly denied and suppressed by patriarchy, and it is only possible for women to become fully human through exploration of their femaleness. One manifestation of this is the

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effort to 'write the body' which is found in the highly innovative work of Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous (Irigaray 1993; Cixous 1992). 'Writing the body' means finding forms of expression (including language, but also other forms of action) which allow one to explore how the particularity of female experience mediates one's selfhood and one's interpretation of the world. At the very least, this means focusing on the characteristics of female body experience, but also on the metaphors which are entailed in this - cyclicity, enclosure, parturition and the symbols of female, rather than male, sexuality. This is in striking contrast to the Power perspective that tries to transcend specific aspects of male and female life in order to find a superordinate humanness. Discovery feminism affirms feminine principles, feminine modes of thinking and being, and the absolute necessity of recognising these as central to the human-ness of women. This does not challenge dualism perse·, it redefines dualism not as 'Self versus Other, but as a dynamic interaction between male and female, masculine and feminine. Many Discovery feminists (particularly those self-identified as radical feminists) assert the superiority of the feminine and the inherently flawed and destructive nature of masculinity. But even within this perspective, the resolution is an organic counterbalancing of masculine and feminine forces, within a redefinition of femininity and masculinity. My third category is Invention feminism, This starts from the premise that what we believe about gender, masculinity and femininity, is constructed through the stories that we tell, the cultural myths and icons that we utilise. The first task, therefore, is to understand how these processes work, how the present situation has arisen, and how it is reproduced. Invention feminism does not necessarily exclude the possibility that sex differences might be based on biological, physiological or evolutionary factors. But what is important is the interpretative status of this. What matters is not the 'fact' of this or that difference (having or not having a uterus), or this or that degree of difference (for example, more or less spatial ability) but its role in the story that we tell about why it is important, and what function it serves. To say that something is socially constructed is not to say that it does not exist; the point is that what we do with that belief, fact or evaluation makes all the difference to how we make sense of it. I showed earlier the very diverse ways that we might use the information that females are better at doing χ — each of which would have a very different meaning

On being Put in One's Place This moves us away from the manifestations of dualism to analysing how dualism functions. As we have seen, the evaluative connotations of gendered words and the context in which these are used, sustain the positive pole by the antithesis of

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the negative pole; to be 'rational' one has to counter the irrational (or the intuitive); 'hard' is the consequence of rigorously avoiding 'soft' (for example in logic and science); order is control over chaos. 3 There is more to this process than stereotypes and epithets. When we actually observe language usage, we see how we are positioned- how we are located in the telling of the story, and what stories we permitted to tell. If I apologise to you for exposing you to a taxing or distressing situation, I place myself in the position of being stronger and having responsibility to protect you, who are thus positioned as weaker and vulnerable and unable to take responsibility for yourself (Davis/ Harré 1989 4 ). If I ask your advice, I place you in the role of expert, entitling you to display your superior knowledge. If I criticise you, this reflects my view that I have the power, or the right, to do so - and if you apologise or j ustify yourself, you affirm that position. If I reveal intimate things about myself to you, I am positioning you as a friend. Understanding the mechanisms by which we are positioned through verbal and non-verbal behaviour helps us to decode the acts by which we are symbolically gendered, but there is another aspect of 'positioning'. Recognising that we are inevitably 'positioned' in any dialogue makes problematic the concept of a keystone of autonomy; the concept of objectivity as detached reasoning. This entails two assumptions. The first is that there are areas of scrutiny in which we can truly be observers whose observation plays no role in the phenomenon; this can be argued somewhat more convincingly for astronomy than for social sciences. The second is that we come from nowhere when we make our observations, that we have no history, no baggage of presuppositions - and yet at the same time we can be trained observers. This is manifestly problematic; as trained observers, we are steeped in the skills of selective perception. I remember standing with a palaeontologist on a field that was exceedingly rich in fossil fragments. He was wildly enthusiastic, but all I could 'see' was a lot of rubble. By the same token, I can make a stab at decoding Kohlbergian stages of reasoning in any reasonable chunk of moral discourse - which to my palaeontologist friend made no sense at all (and indeed, would make no sense to a differently-trained psychologist). We bring not only a trained 'eye', we also bring hypotheses, knowledge of the history of the debate, rules for what counts as evidence. Donna Haraway's term for the 'view from nowhere' is the 'god-trick'. She argues that we always come from somewhere — and that being rigorously scientific means being aware of our own perspective and how it frames our observations, rather than pretending an

3 4

See Haste 1994 for a fuller discussion of this. This paper describes positioning in detail, and also presents examples of the conflicts that may arise when a 'positioning' situation is interpreted differently by the parties involved.

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illusory and misleading 'objectivity' that denies our presence in the frame. T o be truly 'objective' means to be aware of multiple subjectivities - and to make use of them (Haraway 1989; 1991).

Telling Stories Understanding positioning is part of recognising how we are embedded in a social and cultural context. W e are inescapably social beings, interconnected with others, sharing language, culture and values. Making sense and negotiating meaning are necessarily dialogic. Dialogue is rhetorical; we start where the audience is, and we take them to where we want them to be - through shared allusions, through knowing what is taken for granted, and what needs to be justified (Billig 1987). W e negotiate shared meaning, through dialogue, narrative and storying. In narrative, we do not only convey facts to each other, we convey justifications, including accounts of origins, logical relationships and desirable goals. It is notable that extremely young children can follow a story, and resist any alteration of familiar details. Narratives are much better recalled than isolated events, and when we tell a 'story' of a remembered event, it has internal coherence. As we cannot separate ourselves from the social, it is meaningless to postulate a mythical private individual, operating 'autonomously' only inside his or her own head, and then engaging in monologues that display these internal representations. Being part of a social context is an ontological state, and we early become proficient in managing this. So 'human-ness' must recognise connection, interdependence and sensitivity to paralinguistic as well as the linguistic cues. T o understand how this sets the context for human-ness and gender, let us explore some 'story-telling".

The Nature Story T h e stories of'nature' and 'the natural' particularly illuminate gendered humanness. In the game of 'spot the gendered polarities' it is clear that 'nature' is perceived as female and 'nurture' as male — because 'nurture' implies control and order, and 'nature' the untamed and disordered state. Female Nature can be traced to the ancient metaphors of the powerful nurturing Mother, who may also wrathfully withdraw her bounty, and also to the unpredictable female Nature of storm, tempest and geological disturbance. O n e message of Natural Philosophy that emerged in the seventeenth century was that we would be able to tame and control Nature's forces, and direct them for our own purposes (Merchant 1982).

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Nature tamed by masculine reason and science parallels woman (and the feminine) being storied as less controlled, more emotional, not governed by reason or order and in need of governance by a masculinity nurtured in reason and the control of affect. But as the 'nurtured' is always under threat from invasion or subversion by 'wild' nature, so vigilance is ever needed; men must preserve their reasoned equilibrium both from their own 'natural' tendencies, from destabilising emotion - and of course from subversion by the 'feminine'. The control of'Nature' has been a pre-eminent metaphor in the development of science and engineering, both in the texts of practitioners, and most powerfully, in their fictionalised representation. Man strides out into the wilderness (or the laboratory) and proves his manhood by conquering and harnessing natural forces. This is one Nature story, the one most closely tied to the 'autonomy myth' and the need to maintain strong boundaries. Yet the limitations of that story are reflected particularly in Romantic mourning for the 'lost' sense of connection to the natural, the unspoilt - a connection that women are seen as having retained. This may come out in appeals to women's wisdom, in seeking access to the 'feminine' side of oneself (as in humanistic psychology) or in idealising women young girls in particular - as icons of innocence and natural affect. The story of lost innocence and connection to the natural is not only attached to gender; it romanticises the uneducated. From rustic shepherds to Pink Floyd's The Wall, there has been a suspicion that 'nurture' and education cut one off from a 'real' world, and indeed expose one to 'thought control'. Here, somewhat paradoxically, 'autonomy', 'wisdom' and 'freedom' come from being unshackled by too much reason and objectivity (explored in Shama 1995). In storying the 'natural' we pit it not only, ambivalently, against the 'nurtured' but also positively, against the 'unnatural' (Michael 1996). Here Nature is cast sometimes as a wayward force to be placated, and sometimes as the gold standard of the true, the good and the inevitable. To go against Nature by doing something that is 'unnatural' - whether it is interfering with genetics or transgressing conventional gender roles — leads to some dire consequences. Being 'unnatural' upsets Nature, and Nature is an unstable system which can wreak havoc if pushed out of kilter. The rhetoric of Nature's 'revenge' echoes punishment by the gods. Responses to genetic engineering have revived the rhetoric of the 'unnatural' and evocations of Frankenstein (e.g. Mulkay 1993; Turney 1998). Ecology rhetoric depends greatly on the principle of harmony and equilibrium in the natural world system (Harré/Brockmeier/Mühlhausler 1999). This is a deliberate metaphorical contrast with Man's control over an untamed and disordered universe through power, machinery and reason. The metaphor of a harmonic system implies an internal self-regulation; to survive within that system, we must work with, not against it.

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The unnatural threatens harmony; the natural leads to health and growth. 'Natural' food has come to mean not only unpolluted (by additives) but harmonically chiming with the bodily system to promote well-being. W e now see our bodies as dynamic, organic eco-temples, rather than as machines that need to be fuelled and serviced. Evolutionary psychology is bringing back another dimension of'natural' which never died in lay discourse. This is the idea of 'natural' as a sort of gold standard of explanation. "It's natural" implies that it is universal, it ultimately serves human purposes (even if it may be temporarily inconvenient, in the way that male aggression can be disruptive) - and it is the essence of 'the human'. If we locate attributes or behaviours in the larger evolutionary context, we can explain how the mechanisms which kept early hominids alive have been transmuted into the needs of twenty-first century corporate and urban life. The question is, how do we tell this story? There is virtually no information about the social life or communication of our ancestors, so if we want to explain survival in terms of social processes, we must draw analogies. W e must tell 'our' story by reference to our nearest and most similar cousins.

Origin Stories O u r stories are purposive. O u r stories of the future reflect our expectations of progress; our stories of the past explain present arrangements. Currently, one of the most powerful stories is evolution. The evolution story is guided by certain key principles. O n e is continuity between humans and animals; while we have distinctively 'human' attributes, they derive from functions that we share with other species. Another is seeing the larger pattern. The evolution story has suffered somewhat from its cruder popularisations. The early story of sociobiology emphasised more obvious survival mechanisms like sexuality, male dominance, and parenting and made some fairly far-fetched analogies between modern male human bonding and the behaviour of rather remote species. In this story, the human female was relegated largely to the role of passive spectator of the male game and eventual recipient of the successful male's sperm, or as a somewhat pathetic manipulator trying to entrap the essentially polygamous male into monogamous parenting (e.g. Ruse 1985). Latterly, the picture has become more complex. T h e attention of evolutionary psychology is now being directed to the survival aspects of higher mental functions, in particular to consciousness, cognitive processes and morality (Barkow/ Tooby/Cosmides 1992). Individual survival depends on successful interaction with the physical environment, within a small cohesive social group.

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Objections to popular sociobiology included ridicule of the caricature of both masculinity and femininity, and of what seemed a simplistic pseudo-scientific justification of men behaving badly (Hrdy 1981; Haraway 1989). While sociologists and many psychologists have been content to dismiss any 'nature' argument on a priori grounds, biological scientists like Sarah Blaffer Hrdy and Donna Haraway are aware of the more subtle arguments and of the need to take account of evolutionary processes. According to Hrdy and Haraway, the problem was not with the theory, but how human (and primate) behaviours were being scrutinised. They argue that male primatologists have taken an androcentric perspective, attending only to male behaviour, and seeing female interactions only in relation to that - so ignoring, for example, evidence that female sexual choice is not always governed by male dominance hierarchies. Females may have independent dominance hierarchies, and female parenting behaviour may involve social relations amongst females, with little reference to males.

Which Ancestor? The choice of primate also reflects the story that is being told. Primates differ strikingly in their social organisation. Some have harems - usually fairly unstable. The baboon has been the ancestor of choice for some researchers interested in male dominance as the determinant of female sexual choice. Marmosets are, in contrast, reassuringly monogamous. For others, the chimpanzee has been the ancestor of choice - justified on the grounds of close genetic similarity. Meticulous work on chimpanzees in natural surroundings, suggests that chimpanzees do have certain 'human' attributes. The males patrol territory, hunt, in small, fairly short-lived, groups and they aggress, particularly against outsiders even killing (Wrangham/Peterson 1996). Female chimpanzees are fairly socially isolated, in contrast, and are vulnerable to rape and violence. What do we do with these findings? Do we try to argue that parallels between this 'demonic' behaviour (to use the authors' term) and human male behaviour are evolutionary explanations? We must always remember in playing the ancestor game that present-day primates are not our ancestors; they are the outcome of the same long evolutionary development as ourselves, from a common ancestor who may have behaved quite differently from either us or the chimpanzees. Such ancestor stories are heuristics, devices for making sense of the world. They may also allow us to explore alternatives, to choose a new metaphor. This has happened somewhat with the bonobo, who is a gift to feminist heuristics. The bonobo (pan paniscus) is closely related to the chimpanzee pan troglodytes — and for a long time, was confused with it. In contrast to pan troglodytes, bonobos' social life is based on female, rather than male, power. Female bonobos form

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alliances within the group, and males are socially isolated. A young male gains his social power from the status of his mother, and from the support his mother gives him in confrontations with others in the group But the most striking aspect of bonobo life is their use of sexuality in social relations - with each other, and with outside groups. Sexuality is continuous, not confined to an oestrus. Bonobo females use sexual congress with other females, as well as with males, as a way of making social contact, dealing with conflict and sustaining established relationships. The bonobo therefore undercuts all the assumptions hitherto made about the 'necessity' and 'natural inevitability' of male aggression, dominance and 'protection' of the group, and of female subservience to the male social structure. It also transforms many assumptions about the receptive and passive 'nature' of female primate sexuality. One can indeed hijack the bonobo story to the larger story of 'natural' explanations for human-ness - but the story is rather different from other 'natural' stories.

God-tricks and Groucho Effects The pursuit of new ways of conceptualising gender and the human requires more than old stories with new evaluative twists. We need to deconstruct the existing storying, unpack its premises, and start constructing along different dimensions. Feminist analysis in fact parallels other challenges to boundaries. A real challenge to dualism comes from taking 'positioning' seriously; for when we recognise the fallacy of detached objectivity, of taking a 'view from nowhere' or exercising what Haraway calls 'the godtrick', we have to manage multiple perspectives. In two-value dualism, there is an implicit assumption that where a number of different arguments co-exist, all but one must be in error, and through recognised procedures for arriving at solutions, one will emerge as 'correct'. This carries the premise that there is one single 'closed' solution. It also carries assumptions about acceptable and unacceptable concepts, hypotheses, evidence and procedures. Those outside the frame are deemed 'irrational', 'loony', 'off the wall' and other epithets of'Othering' - epithets that protect the insiders, affirming and strengthening the boundary criteria (see, e.g., Collins 1985). This clearly prescribes acceptable modes of behaviour. One can join the club - if one knows the rules and if the club members decide to forget or reclassify one's Otherness. Joining the club does nothing to the dualistic position. "Women can do it too" may be an argument against discrimination, but it does not challenge the dualistic metaphor itself. When the outsider plays by the rules sufficiently well to be let into the club, they must either drop their alien perspective, or transmute its wisdoms into the dominant language. For example, it is commonly the case that people in less powerful positions have quite different values, and a quite

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different perspective, from those in power. It is presumed that once the less powerful person joins the elite group, he or she will quickly adopt the values, and modes of thinking, of that group and their alternative perspective will be lost. What happens when we do take another perspective seriously, and do not immediately assume that it is in some way 'incomplete' or 'in error'? The alternative to losing the 'other' perspective is to tolerate diversity, multiplicity and the breakdown of the boundary. Recognising and working with pluralistic perspectives is the first step to breaking down the boundaries maintained by dualism. This is extremely difficult. The common outcry of 'relativism' stems from anxious defence of a 'one true value'. We see this outcry in everything from multiculturalism (especially with regard to religion) to moral values, and particularly to science. To break the dualistic metaphor we must challenge the hegemony of a unitary perspective, and demonstrate that effective knowing requires managing a multiplicity of perspectives. The challenge to a unitary, bounded autonomous self is coming from many sources. Cultural and discursive psychology draw attention to diversity and multiplicity, and to dialogic interaction (Cole 1996; Harre/Gillett 1994). In a different context, communitarianism is not just a value system that critiques individualism; it is a major shift to taking seriously the ontological state of being embedded in a social and cultural context (e.g. Taylor 1981; Haste 1996).

Conversations and Cybernetics One issue that has become salient in discussion of the bounded self is objectsubject relations, which can be succinctly expressed as Ί/thou versus I/it' (see Michael 1996). At the simplest level, this is about differentiating between the 'Other' who is a 'person' and therefore has a perspective to be taken account of, and with whom one engages in dialogue, and the 'Other' who is an object, upon whom (or which) one exercises agency, and whom one address in monologue. It has long been a humanistic message that one should treat all people as 'persons' and not as objects. This has generated a considerable literature on how one defines 'persons' and what would constitute treating them as objects. However I would argue that this discussion may often still be conducted within a traditional dualistic framework. The issue at stake can be where to place the boundaries, not how to get rid oí them. For example, one of the criteria often cited for defining treating persons as 'persons' is that one should treat the Other as one would oneself wish to be treated. While an eminently humanistic sentiment, it nevertheless misses a key issue of dialogue and agency. If I define myself as an agent within a static, objective world, it implies that my action will have an

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effect that serves my own purposes. It does not necessarily assume that the 'object' has any agency with which I may engage in 'dialogue'. Consider the turkey and the pudding who talked back to Alice, and whom she therefore could no longer treat as 'objects' serving her 'purpose' of eating (Carroll 1872). Yet just such a shift is made in the move from a mechanistic to an organic metaphor that is inherent in ecological discourse. According to this, the living world, as an organic entity, needs to be treated with respect. Phrases like "the rape of the natural world" or "rescuing the rainforest" imply an engagement with that world on the same moral terms with which we engage with other persons; an interaction with, not an action upon. Furthermore, the living world is a system of which we are a part, connected to and in dialogue with. Our actions have dynamic consequences for the system as a whole - which includes us. We may feel unsure about the ontological status of the turkey and the pudding, but we understand the consequences if Alice cuts down the rainforest. In the shift from mechanistic models to organic systems, the discourses of ecology have explicitly brought in both the concept and the moral entailments of '1/ thou'. But it is not the only relevant terrain. Contrary, perhaps, to our conventional stereotypes, engineering has for a long time incorporated very similar idea, without recourse to an explicitly organic discourse. This is in control theory and the world of cybernetics and feedback (Gosling 1994). There are two ways of thinking about object-subject relations and agency in engineering terms. One fits the standard 'autonomy' model; the action occurs, the effect is achieved, and there is no comeback. This is termed the open loop-closed solution model; its exemplar would be firing a gun at a target. Not only is it very mechanistic, it also presupposes that there is one single solution (by extrapolation one 'correct' solution). The other model counters most of these assumptions. It is termed the closed loop-open solution model, and its exemplar would be virtually any situation in which feedback occurs and in which the 'agent' is therefore continually in negotiation with the object. Once a solution is found, it may be developed or modified continually. Further, there may be several equivalently useful solutions. A dialogue, in other words. This has extensive implications for how we deal with uncertainty. An open-loop-closed solution model presupposes that uncertainty is resolved by the action; the agent achieves 'closure'. In the closed loop-open solution, not only are there many possible solutions, there is continual uncertainty and flux. It may seem a large leap from Ί/thou' to control theory, yet the common element is attention to the dialogic nature of agency, and the implications of this for breaking down a predilection for crisp boundaries and hermetically sealed solutions. Control theory also shows us that while an organic model is inherently dialogic and systemic, one does not have to postulate an organic model to concep-

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tualise an iterative system. It is interesting, in this context, to look at the development of Gaia, and its attendant metaphors. In the hands of James Lovelock, Gaia initially had the mantle of a female, living organism, referred to as 'she' in Lovelock's lyrical prose (Lovelock 1979). Yet Lovelock himself, and other exponents of Gaia like Lynn Margulis, have been careful subsequently to describe Gaia as an organic system that is responsive and regenerative, rather than as a living creature (Margulis/ Sagan 1997). The frequency with which such models are dubbed 'feminine' — by their originators and critics alike - indicates the power of a metaphor that links the feminine with organic, holistic and '1/ thou' rather than Ί / i t ' . Yet the Invention feminist agenda does not claim the superiority of a 'feminine' perspective - nor claim that female persons have a privileged access to that perspective purely by virtue of their biological sex. Nevertheless, when we deconstruct the thinking that has dominated our conceptions of 'human' as 'generic rational agent', we reveal a synthesis of masculine metaphors with the metaphors of autonomy, closedsolution agency and boundaries.

My Body, My Self - the Problem I have explored the major problems of a bounded self that deals with threats to autonomy by negation of the Other. I have argued that we can only begin to tackle the question of what it means to be human when we can cut through the caricature of the feminine as the negatively Othered - and the penumbra of that, the idealised goddess O t h e r ' against which male failings can be polarised. I have described what I regard as the trap of denying difference, which leaves the dualistic metaphor intact, while relocating the actors. But the effort to identify 'the authentic feminine' self-definition can lead to other traps. What should be defined as 'the feminine', apart from those domains marked as traditionally female? One solution is to say, when I do such and such, it is salient that I am a woman; when I do so and so, it is not salient that I am a woman, only that I am human. But to do this one merely steps from one Venn diagram to another, or from a smaller Venn diagram into the larger - and it retains a boundary. And is it ever the case that being male, or female, is not salient? Let us consider some activities. When I write, is the act of writing gender neutral? O r do I write as a woman, is what I write a reflection of my being female and having feminine experience? Is there any experience in which my being female is irrelevant? When I teach, or broadcast, what I am expressing may be wholly unrelated to gender, yet those who listen to me are hearing a woman, and 'reading' their own perceptions of what it is to be a woman. Even if we resist stereotypes we still respond immediately to a person as gendered.

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Even more difficult than de-gendering others is de-gendering our own experience. We experience the world through our gender and we experience our world through a male or female body. Even if we choose to argue, that our physical being is gendered very largely as a social construction, we experience our bodies through these constructions. I raise my arm. I lift something. The strength required may be minimal and what I lift is a 'neutral' garden trowel. Yet that arm has a long history of doing things as part of my body; it is a female arm and I experience it as such. This is a much more problematic idea than saying that when I have sex, I experience my sexually responsive organs as 'female'. Yet our sexuality is just as much - or as little — constructed through cultural stories as any other part of our embodiment. Therefore, it would be most strange to say that my arm is 'less' female than my breasts. The problem is to find, not a happy set of Venn diagrams with either crisp or fuzzy boundaries, but both a fusion of the female and the human, and yet a sense of there being multiple states. When I attempt to explain the difference between feminism that resolves the Othering of women by allowing them to join the male version of the world, and feminisms which search for a more elaborated definition of both genders, I often use the metaphor of a two-way mirror, in which one can alter the illumination on each side. In one state of the lighting I can only see myself reflected, while you on the other side can only see me through the mirror — and cannot see yourself reflected. Altering the illumination on both sides reverses this effect. We are both then aware that there are two possible perspectives, in either of which only one person is visible and the other hidden. This unsettling situation can be resolved by you joining me on 'my' side of the mirror — thus losing 'your' perspective. Even more unsettling for those who like crisp boundaries, is to adjust the illumination so that both images are held on the screen, my reflection and yours, superimposed. Here, we cannot avoid the implications of multiple perspectives, we can hide neither behind a clear single view, nor by one of us joining the other's perspective. It is only by owning this psychologically disturbing state that we can ultimately resolve the question of female/human (and of course, male/human). Throughout this paper, I have been exploring the tension between reclaiming a feminine identity to fill the gaps left in a model of the human that is predicated on experiencing the world through a masculine lens, and going beyond this to synthesise and integrate feminine experience and feminine metaphors with human-ness. To do this, our first task must be to shed the quest for any new version of unitary, bounded self - merely a new set of Venn diagrams. The point and purpose is to open up opportunities for exploring dimensions of selfhood that go beyond the present boundaries and frames of reference. This means not so much new stories, as new stories about how we can tell stories. Staying within the present set of stories does not do this. In particular, stories neither of holistic nor of bounded selves enable us to

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play creatively with the fusion/multiple selves paradox, and so facilitate our movement amongst and between different dimensions of selfhood. Our starting point however must be that we are storied. We inhabit certain kinds of bodies, bodies that are culturally labelled and positioned in ways that affect how we experience the world through those bodies. One way to approach the question of how we might look afresh at 'human-ness' is to look in detail at one process through which we become human - tool use.

Tools R Us The human being as tool-user has been a major criterion of human-ness - until it was discovered that chimpanzees also use tools (Lieberman 1998). Certainly, this origin story gives tool use a crucial place in the evolution of cognition and agency. But there are different ways of thinking about tool use. One image of Man (sic) the Tool-user, which I will call the 'heroic', is entirely consistent with the agentic autonomy myth. In this image, the human being makes plans, and envisions the outcome of action. The tool mediates that plan, and gives the operator the strength, dexterity or information to carry out the plan. We design tools to meet certain requirements, and we modify them continually. With improved tools, the possibilities expand - in particular our adaptation to the environment becomes more effective. We teach our young the tool usage that will equip them for our culture. As Erik Erikson classically noted, we begin this around the age of six — whether it is hunting with arrows, or literacy (Erikson 1950). Learning such skills also generates a subjective sense of competence and agency. Learning the gender-appropriate tool skills is an inherent part of gender identity. This message is agency through tools. The tool enables the human to have an effect on the environment and on objects in it. In this model, tool use is about closure, fixing and controlling. The human is the agent over the tool, the tool is the agent over the environment. It is an Ί / i t ' relationship. This is not, however, the only possible picture. Another view is that tools mediate our actual experience of the world. Rather than being the interface between the cognitive agent and the environment, they are the means by which that agent's cognition can take the form it does. A particular proponent of this was the Russian psychologist Vygotsky, who argued that our tools (and he included language in this) are the primary way that we can have access to our environment. Most important, it is a dialogic process. We do not only act upon our environment agentically; it reacts with us. As with the model of feedback loops and open solutions, we are continually negotiating with, and adjusting to, our world. It is not a one way process (Vygotsky 1978).

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A particularly useful way of thinking about this comes from the work of Gerd Gigerenzer and Daniel Goldstein (1996) on the development of scientific concepts and theories. Their view is that the way our tools mediate our interaction with the environment shapes how we think about the environment. This is the 'tools-to-theories' hypothesis. It has two parts. First, how we interact with our world through our tools leads us to generate models of how things work (including models of how we think). O u r actual activity through our tools provides us with the metaphor. Second, acceptance of that new model will depend on our colleagues also having familiarity and experience with the tool. Gigerenzer and Goldstein explore this with many examples from the history of science. So, the invention of the clock led to conceptualising the universe as a kind of mechanical clock, with God as the divine watchmaker. This came about because scientists used the clock as a tool in astronomical calculations; it became the means by which the universe could be understood, and hence the explanation of the universe itself. Most recently we have seen the development of the 'computational model of mind' as the dominant metaphor of cognitive science. This arose, they argue, from the interactions that cognitive scientists had with the new developing computers. The theories of mental processes changed as the machines became more complex; as mental simulations became possible, it allowed the scientists to treat simulation not only as a way of modelling, but as a theory in its own right about how the mind worked. The symbiosis between scientist and machine was evident, they argue, in the way that scientists whose equipment was less than efficient and who therefore had less opportunity to experience the tool, were slower to accept the theory. This is one example of the dialogic relationship between tool and tool-user. It is about metaphors of mind. But metaphors themselves are tools of language, a lens through which we make sense of our world. In the use of metaphors we can see the dialogic movement between transformation and tool. W e can also see how the tool may mislead. The computational model of mind delineates basic neural structures as 'hardware' and mental processes as 'software'. The primary emphasis is on information processing and problem-solving. In the 'heroic' model, the computer is perceived as better than people at doing what people were already trying to do. As computers improve, their efficiency as information processors increases, and the human tool user can extend the range of tasks to which the computer is applied. It is not surprising that we try to make the analogy between our own efforts at problem-solving and the super skills of the wonder tool. In fact, this story is misleading. The computational metaphor itself is misleading, and the story of how we actually interact with computers in our everyday lives is misleading. T o model problem-solving as a parallel to the kind of linear logic

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that computer programmes do well, misses the point that humans solve problems rather more efficiently and frequently in ways that more closely resemble closed loop-open solutions. The computational model has also wholly omitted emotion - this fuels the metaphor of a bounded rational self (Gelernter 1995). In fact, the computer has transformed the everyday way we interact with the world - but not as a super problem-solver. Its wide-reaching effects have been on information retrieval, and on communication. The metaphor of information gathering as reading books, is being replaced with information gathering as scanning and targeting keywords - and having access to the world's libraries in one's own bedroom. A major metaphoric shift is the move from the telephone being located in a place, to being a prosthesis of our person - we now phone people, not locations. To open and close the boundary of privacy, we switch the machine, we do not leave the place. Our adaptation to these technological changes is in continual dialogue. It is because of this dialogic process that there is such flexible potential in our metaphors for self-world interaction. It is a model where the boundaries are always fluid; the adaptations that we constantly make through and with our tools would be impossible if we really were the objectified, cognitive planners that the model proposes. The 'hero' tool-user has little place in a model of continual dialogue between the person and the machine. Our tools are an extension of ourselves. We talk of 'indispensability' and feel - a little guiltily sometimes - that we have become dependent on 'gadgets'. We have — but this guilt misses the point; the 'gadget' is not a crutch, it is the lens through which we may experience the world in different ways. Consider our relationship with a motor car. At one level, it determines how we actually encounter the environment. For example, the 'cognitive map' of the town for a car-driver includes the one way system and parking opportunities; for a pedestrian, or a cyclist, it means something quite different — uneven paving, crossable or uncrossable streets, and different potential dangers. But the car as a person-machine experience can be very different in different contexts. On Monday my car may be a safe cage in which I can transport my family, and as I drive, I am sensitive to the protecting aspects of that enclosed metal box. On Tuesday I may drive alone, fast, on a clear road, enjoying the intense kinaesthetic experience of a fine responsive engine. On Wednesday I may drive in a difficult terrain - a crowded city, or a rally circuit - and my attention is on manipulating this machine through environmental hazards, and the pleasure of skill and fine judgement. Same car, same person, different dialogues multiple perspectives, in other words, between which I move fluidly. These examples are 'un-gendered' - both sexes experience what I have just described. In one sense these examples demonstrate the breakdown of stereotypes about gendered domains of agency; but the point of my examples is to underline

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the fluidity with which I can move through different activities, without having to move across the Venn diagram boundaries of gender. I am both female and human and female-human, in all these activities - because I am in self-body-machine dialogue. Donna Haraway has explored this with her work on cyborgs (Haraway 1991). A cyborg is the synthesis of the human and the machine, the integration of the self with the tool. We have become cyborgs because of the now virtually seamless, nonbounded relationship between our selves and our tools and machines. She argues that cyborgs subvert the traditional boundaries that sustain gender dualism - between the physical and the mental, between the human and the machine and between the agent and the subject. The cyborg metaphor also challenges the organic metaphors that have been attached to the 'feminine'. It offers us a model for 'fragmented' and 'dispersed' selves that are freed from the search for an organic unitary wholeness. A striking idea is that cyborgs do not have to be born - or reborn. Whereas an organic system recreates through birth or rebirth, a cyborg has prostheses. One transforms the cyborg's function by adding a new part. So it is systemic but not holistic. The cyborg is flexible; it can be created or changed to meet the immediate needs. Finally, a cyborg metaphor frees women to experience a joyous interaction with machines, without needing to translate a mechanistic metaphor (with all its baggage of autonomy, agency and masculinity) into an organic one. This, for me, expresses the essence of moving fluidly between unbounded, multiple perspectives.

Finale: Pantomime Dames In this paper I have not tried to define the human, but I have tried to show how one particular story of human-ness and maleness sets up a bounded world that is predicated on the Othering of the female. I have not tried to demolish this by saying that the categories are wrong, or ill-founded, I have instead shown how the story is told, and how understanding storytelling is a useful way of understanding how such a world-view is constructed, enacted and maintained. And to see it as located within a dialogic and cultural context. We cannot escape predication, but we can resist and redefine the present limiting predications. If we want to change things, we need a better story of human-ness. We are inevitably storied, and we experience our physical and psychological selves through a set of stories. I am not offering a better story; I am trying to offer a better way of approaching the creating and telling of the story — or rather, multiple stories, of multiple selves, fused by their superimposition in the multi-way mirror.

Anthropology, Literature and the Aesthetic

Redefining the Human. A Survey of Approaches to Literary Anthropology Aleida Assmann

Introduction Since 1997, the University of Constance in Germany has become home to an interdisciplinary research group bearing the name Literature and Anthropology. The cooperation in this research forum takes place within a conceptual design which, as far as I can see, rests on three pillars: the literary anthropology of Wolfgang Iser (Iser 1993), the American cultural anthropology for which the names of Clifford Geertz and James Clifford may stand (Geertz 1993; Clifford 1988) and the anthropological discourse developed within the field of German literary studies that may be associated with the name of Helmut Pfotenhauer (Pfotenhauer 1997; cf. Schings 1994). This last-mentioned German branch of literary anthropology is embedded in the field of German literary studies and is focussed on the anthropology of the 18th century and its consequences. Although emphatically historical in its orientation, it does not reach backward beyond Kant, Rousseau or Goethe. Its leitmotiv, "der ganze Mensch" (the human being as a whole) underlines an epochal change in the conceptualization of the human. For these scholars, modern anthropology begins with an integrated concept of man, who is no longer split up in the dichotomy of body and soul; instead, both components are conceived as integrated factors, organizing each other in a complex and conflictual exchange (cf. Koschorke 1998). This "modern" turn of an integrating approach is the object of German literary anthropology and the ways in which it was shaped in various specialized discourses. Although evolving in relative independence from each other, all three of these approaches to literary anthropology emerged in the eighties. They are, in other words, all products of a recent development. Therefore, it may be interesting to broaden the temporal horizon and widen the range of comparison by going back some fifty years, revisiting earlier approaches to literary anthropology, in order to view the present developments in a larger historical perspective. The focus of this survey will be on contributions to literary anthropology that arose in the field of English studies. Although chronology will be employed as a convenient mode of organizing the material, it is not a historical narrative that is aimed at, but the construction of a map. To present this material in the form of an historical narrative would imply a continuous process of innovation and obsolescence in the

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approaches, or a continuous track of evolution from less convincing to more sophisticated models. There is no such history, however, because earlier concepts may always be reactivated or return in new disguises. To choose the form of a map and to present these approaches as an inventory is to stress a certain relativism and pluri-perspectivism which is only appropriate for so wide a topic that allows of no exclusive access or king's way. This does not entail, of course, that our own perspective is equally relativistic; given our historical positioning and methodological preferences, we are bound to privilege certain approaches over others. The function of a map is precisely to counterbalance this necessary and unavoidable bias. While it enriches our sense of the multiplicity of approaches, it helps at the same time to sharpen a critical awareness of our own attitudes and options.

1. Archetypal Anthropology After the Second World War, the work of Northrop Frye was the first approach of note towards what today may be termed a literary anthropology. His theory is based on the concept of archetypes, which are certainly not Frye's creation, nor were they invented by Jung. The notion of psychological archetypes emerges already in writings at the beginning of the 19 th century and has a history in philosophy that dates back to antiquity. Before discussing Frye's work in more detail, I will briefly trace the career of this concept in the earlier decades of this century. 1.1 Maud

Bodkin

In 1934 there appeared a book on literature written by a psychologist, Maud Bodkin, entitled Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (Bodkin 1934). As is to be expected, the name of Dr. C. G. Jung is invoked in the very first sentence of this book. He is cited as an authority who has stressed "the relation of analytical psychology to poetic art". T h e missing link between those two domains is discovered in a deep emotional response which is stirred in the reader's mind by certain poetic structures. This effect, which lies much deeper than any conscious response, is attributed to "unconscious forces" which are termed "primordial images" or "archetypes". Archetypes are defined by Jung as "psychic residua of numberless experiences of the same type" which have produced a lasting impression in the neuronal organization of the human psyche. After having referred to the canonical master, Bodkin proceeds to illustrate this theory with the words of the Cambridge Classicist Gilbert Murray. In his book on the Classical Tradition in Poetry, Murray had also made use of archetypes, drawing on them to explain the underlying similarities in the themes of

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Orestes and Hamlet. Murray used metaphorical language to describe the lasting emotional impact of both plays. H e assumed that certain stories, images, patterns are "deeply implanted in the memory of the race, stamped as it were upon our physical organism". H e also speaks of "a strange, unanalysed vibration below the surface, an undercurrent of desires and fears and passions, long slumbering yet eternally familiar, which have for thousands of years lain near the root of our most intimate emotions and been wrought into the fabric of our most magical dreams" (Murray 1927, 239ff.). There is no doubt that a term like "the memory of the race" has long fallen into disrepute as a collectivist fiction and is not very likely to be exhumed again. Yet we should also be aware that in various disguises these concepts continue to haunt us and are not quite so easily dismissed as we might think (cf. Butler 1989). I am quoting Murray's description at some length to underscore an affinity between his ideas and those of the art historian Aby Warburg. Murray wrote these sentences two years before the death of Aby Warburg, whose life-long project was to explore the connection between works of art and the European cultural memory. Warburg, whose work has met with an enthusiastic and continuing renaissance in the 80s, did not speak of archetypes but of "pathos formulae", which he conceived as energetic inscriptions ("engrams") in the unconscious memory of the race. His metaphors were very similar to Murray's; the one spoke of patterns stamped upon our physical organism, the other of engramms imprinted in the collective psyche. Both were interested in exploring the connection between the artistic and the psychic domain, a relation that can be interpreted in different ways. T h e emphasis is either on the psychic structure which tends to reproduce recurrent artistic patterns (which would be the position of Jung), or on the artistic strategies and material artefacts that affect and recharge the psychic structures (which would be the position of Warburg). Through the archetypes, the individual is connected with an unconscious history and community. They charge the individual response with the accumulated experience of the human race. T o stress this unconscious and collective factor in the production of, and response to art is to establish an anthropological perspective in the domain of art. Poetic structures and works of art are studied as the objective correlatives of the intangible patterns that are called archetypes and are said to be inscribed and inherited in the structure of the collective human brain. T o identify and objectify such patterns in the visual arts was the project of Aby Warburg, as it was the project of M a u d Bodkin to identify them in verbal art. While Aby Warburg thought of works of art as "stored energy" ("Energiekonserven"), Bodkin speaks of poetry in terms of "stored symbolic content (that) can at any time become effective in activating the corresponding patterns in the minds o f members o f the group whose collective product and possession the symbols are". T h e archetypes provide a bridge between certain artistic patterns

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which can be investigated and certain psychic structures remaining purely conjectural, bringing them into a relation of mutual reinforcement. In this anthropological perspective, art is both affected by the primordial psychic impulses or archetypes as it is constantly recharging them. A literary anthropology built on archetypes focuses on persisting patterns both in poetic texts and in the human mind. It is decidedly transtextual in that it investigates the interaction between artistic patterns and emotional configurations. It is a theory of response rather than of reception because its aim is not to explain the sociohistorical conditions of changes in taste, but to explain why some poetic or artistic structures strike the reader/spectator with an unfailing, perennial force independent of individual dispositions and contextual circumstances. Contrary to the view of reception theory, this interaction is not one between text and individual reader or text and historical and social reading responses, but between text and the universal human psyche or collective memory triggered in the individual reader. In this anthropological perspective, literature (or art) is regarded not in terms of a fairly autonomous system with a conscious process of tradition but in terms of an unconscious process of psychic transmission. It focuses on the individual reader as part of an "environing larger life of the community, past and present, stored within the heritage of literary art" (Bodkin 1935, 330). Bodkin was influenced by the work of the sociologist Emile Durkheim, who created the concept of a collective mind in terms of an organic solidarity. The extension of such a collective body is not clearly specified by Bodkin. Her archetypal criticism does not discuss the question of the possible limits of this collective psyche and the problems of fundamental cultural difference. In her book, which was written in the spirit of Jungian psychology, the collective is easily fused with the universal.

1.2 Northrop Frye With this prehistory in mind, it is easier to assess the specific intentions and achievements of Northrop Frye. From 1950 onwards, the Canadian literary critic and former theologian worked on a project which was published in 1957 under the title Anatomy of Criticism (Frye 1957; cf. also Frye 1963). His highly ambitious project was to transform literary criticism into a hard science of the likes of physics, chemistry and biology. If the order of nature was the basis of the natural sciences, the "order of words" was to form the domain of systematic criticism. His first step was to draw a sharp dividing line between literature and criticism, that is between the object of study and the discipline itself, a dividing line that was to be "deconstructed" only one decade later in the work of Derrida and discourse theory. Frye's scientific bias and his drive towards a systematic approach to the order of words are typical of the structuralist approach of which Frye's work is a prime example. His aim was to go beyond "specific criticism", which focuses on

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individual poets and to establish a "pure critical theory", which lays bare the very roots or structure of the system of literature itself. He combines the impact of such modernists as Joyce and Eliot with that of Freud, Jung, Frazer and Cassirer when he excludes chronology from the field of structuralist criticism. His working hypothesis is that "total literary history gives us a glimpse of the possibility of seeing literature as a complication of a relatively restricted and simple group of formulas that can be studied in primitive culture" (Frye 1957, 16f.). As T. S. Eliot had already done in his influential essay on tradition (1919), Frye stresses a view of literature as a total structure and a systematic whole. His question is how this whole is organized, how to identify the basic principles and elements of this structure. It is in this context that he revives the concept of archetypes, although he carefully omits any reference to the psychological prehistory of the term. Frye transplants the archetypes from the psychological to the structuralist domain, retaining their anthropological importance. In this transformation, the archetypes are no longer immediately related to the deep structure of the human brain, but, instead, become elements of the deep structure of literature. This explains why for Frye literature has high anthropological relevance: it retains in ever more complicated forms the basic articulations of so-called "primitive" culture, which, however, are not merely residual remnants, but are recognized as the permanent generative matrix of texts. The complex synchronistic relationship between the sophisticated forms of modernity and the archaic patterns of ancient and "primitive" cultures had already been the poetological programme of artists in the first decades of this century, superbly illustrated by T.S. Eliot in his Waste Land{ 1922). Under the influence of this poetological programme, literature itself had become a branch of cultural anthropology. Three decades later, Frye transferred this anthropological impulse into the field of criticism. Bodkin's archetypes were meant to be universal in range: she discussed the pattern of rebirth, the archetype of heaven and hell, the highly generalized images of woman, of the devil or the hero. Frye's archetypes, on the other hand, which include symbols, myths and generic formulas, are much more narrowly defined as archetypes of Western culture. For Frye, it is the symbolism of the Bible and Classical mythology that constitutes the repertory of literary archetypes. Instead of a universalist expansion, Frye is interested in cultural boundary lines. He insists on the distinctive shape of Western tradition as it was created by works of literature and as it is enforced by reading and teaching. Frye's systematic criticism is also an educational programme: he reconstructs and teaches the archetypes as obligatory elements of Western "Bildung", thus reinforcing a model of Western cultural literacy. In other words: Frye's criticism enforces cultural memory in presenting a systematic body of knowledge which can be taught and learned. To teach his archetypal criticism in the institutions is to strengthen the programme of the humanities as the normative core of Western culture. Thus, Frye's "pure critical

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theory" is wedded to a pedagogical programme of humanist education which confirms and reinforces what Harold Bloom has since called"The Western Canon". T o sum up the first part of our survey: archetypal criticism looks for transhistorically permanent and repetitive patterns in art which are reproduced on a subconscious level. They can be sought in the structure of the universal human psyche or in the generative deep structure of the grammar of Western literature. In both cases, literature is studied in an anthropological perspective, which disconnects it from individual, social, historical concerns and reconnects it with a universal psychic memory or with Western cultural memory.

2. Abstract anthropology - definitions of man O n e of the possible ways of defining the human is to say that man is an animal capable of self-definition. Man is an animal that is endlessly defining and redefining himself. Some of these definitions are wryly reductionist, such as the "two-footed land-animal" from Aristotle's Topics or the "featherless biped" from Spinoza's Ethics·, others are more honorific, such as "rational animal", "homo faber" or "homo sapiens sapiens". The many definitions of man paradoxically counteract the undefinability of man (which is yet another definition). The undefinability is stressed in recent positions and concepts such as H. Plessner's "extra-positionality" (cf. Plessner 1970) or K.-H. Stierle's "negative anthropology" (cf. Stierle 1985). It is interesting to note, however, that to define man as undefinable is not a recent insight but one that is deeply embedded in Western myths and various cultural traditions. T o illustrate this point, I shall produce a Greek, an Arabic and a Christian example. In the dialogue entitled Protagoras, Plato tells the story of creation from the point of view of the creator, who fashions all the creatures by endowing each of them with its specific faculty or capacity (Prot. 321 a-322 d). There is swiftness for the hare, greed for the wolf, etc. As the creator lavishes all his gifts on the individual creatures, he forgets to leave something in his bag for man, who is waiting last in line to be furnished. When it is finally his turn, the creator discovers that there is nothing left to bestow on his last creature. Instead of a gift, he receives a lack, a vacuum. The paradoxical point of the story is that the very lack of a specific capacity turns out to be the supreme gift, because it enhances the unique process of self-creation. As an unfinished creature, man is charged with the unique task of completing his own creation in an active and ongoing process. In the middle of the 17 th century, the Anglican poet George Herbert wrote a beautiful variation of this anthropological theme from the Christian point of view. The poem is called "The Pulley" and describes the same setting as in Plato's story. When it is finally man's turn to receive his specific endowment, the Creator

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discovers that the last gift in his bag of goods is rest. This rest (remainder) in the shape of rest (quietness), however, he withholds from man because were he to endow man with this gift, he "would rest in Nature, not the God of nature, so both should losers be" (Herbert [1633]). So again man's specific gift turns out to be a non-gift, a gift that is withheld, thereby plunging man into the perpetual movement of yearning and restlessly recreating himself. According to a great Islamic mystic of the Middle Ages, God was in exactly the opposite position when he created man (cf. Chittick 1989). This process ended not in a lack but in a surplus. After having shaped man with a lump of clay, God discoverd that he had not used up all the clay but retained a small amount of the creative susbstance when the work was finished. What was God to do with the remaining clay? He decided to give the extra substance to man as an additional gift, a gift interpreted by the Islamic mystic as the gift of the imagination. At a time when Scholastic philosophers and Maimonides railed at the imagination as a corruption of reason and as the curse of man, this mystic praised it as the last and highest gift of God, with which man could transcend his human condition and rise to higher levels of consciousness. It makes little difference whether these stories are told in terms of lack or surplus; the point is that in all cases man stands out from all the other creatures as the self-creating being, sharing to some extent the power of his creator. These three examples from different ages and traditions can show that the definition of man is an age-old enterprise, and one that calls for ever new paradoxes. What is captured by these stories is man's nonspecificity, the imperfection, the indeterminability, the constant reshaping and restlessness. These anthropological myths define each in their way the indefiniteness of man. If we see things in this larger perspective, our recent anthropological definitions do not offer an altogether new picture. In emphasizing a constitutional lack or the plastic power of self-empowerment, they are continuing a long tradition of "negative" definitions of man. The anthropological approach via definitions of man is always aprioristic: the definition comes first, the evidence comes afterwards. As it is the aim of such a definition to be inclusive and general, it must be as sweeping as it is abstract. It cannot account for specificities, it must leave aside everything that is socially and culturally concrete and discard the realm of historical change. O n e cannot see both things at the same time. In order to focus on the anthropological dimension, one must close one's eyes to everything that is concrete and specific. This approach to anthropology via definitions is constituted by the elimination of particulars. T o speak in anthropological terms is to speak on the most general, most basic, most archaic, most fundamental, most universal level that is possible. I call this discourse abstract anthropology because it abstracts from social, historical, cultural questions as well as from questions of body, age and gender. It is rarely

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pursued for its own sake and usually combined with theological, philosophical, political and also literary arguments. Let us look at two examples of abstract anthropology that emerged within, and were combined with, the study of literature. 2.1 Kenneth Burke Kenneth Burke is a thinker who is not easy to locate in the topography of American academia. He was never affiliated with a particular school. He remained an outsider who cultivated his own branch of highly original thinking, writing books that became popular but never really influential, challenging the field of literary studies with a vigorous mind, that was also deeply immersed in sociology, psychology, politics and religion (Burke 1955; 1957; 1962; 1968). In the era of cultural studies, this multidisciplinary and integrative thinker deserves rediscovering. Burke is a contemporary of Frye's, but unlike most literary critics of the fifties and sixties, he swam against the common current of structuralism. His concern was not with the (ever more complicated) structure of the text, but with action. A text was regarded by him as a blueprint, a programme, a mode of action. Burke, who privileged the structure of action over and against the verbal structure of the text, calls his approach "dramatist" (from "drama = action"). This dramatist structure has nothing to do with the literary genre of the same name, but concerns the deep structure of man as an emotive and motivational being. Burke is interested in writing "a grammar of motives" in order to analyse the fundamental and permanent springs of human action. Poetry, language and symbolic systems in general are investigated with respect to this central category of action. As a dramatist, his primary question vis à vis a literary text is: what does a poem do? While the reception-theorist asks: what impact does a text have on its reader?, the dramatist asks: what kind of "symbolic action" does it perform for a guilt-ridden, a drugaddicted poet? (I am referring to an essay on Coleridge) or for a fanaticised audience? (I am referring to an investigation of the rhetoric of Hitler's Mein Kampf, cf. Burke 1967). As a dramatist, Burke studies literature within a larger conceptional, social, psychological and cultural framework. In this he differs from the New Critics who drew strict boundaries around the literary text and sought within the text ever more ingenious textual subtleties, ironies and complexities. Burke, on the other hand, was interested in laying bare the fundamentals of human actions, studying psychic mechanisms such as victimization and scapegoating. He can be compared to Frye in that both pushed the problems of literary criticism into the realm of anthropology. While the one was interested in recurrent themes and patterns as the basics of a generative grammar of literature, the other is concerned with the springs of human action and motivation as shaped by culture and articulated by literature.

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Burke's contribution to literary anthropology would merit a presentation and discussion of its own. At this point, I shall confine myself to the first essay of the important collection Language as Symbolic Action, in which he made his substantial contribution to the discourse of abstract anthropology. The essay, which is entitled "Definition of Man", offers five anthropological markers which are arranged in a series according to priority of importance (Burke 1968, 2-24). What follows is a condensed description of these markers. No. 1 : Man is a symbol-using animal. Burke is aware of the fact that the use of signs and symbols is not a human prerogative but is also quite elaborate in certain animal species. What he stresses, however, is that animals don't have access to all four dimensions of the use of symbols: encoding, communication, storing and transmission. While they can invent signs and communicate by means of them, they are unable to use them for the storage and retrieval of information. Although he does not put it in these precise terms, animals are unable to use symbols as props for memory.1 Another exclusive human property is the reflexive use of symbols, which entails such ensuing operations as rationalization, abstraction, and the aestheticisation of symbols. The use of symbols is in itself a highly complex operation, because symbols can never be identified with the things they represent. This implies a whole range of differentiating operations, including abstraction, abbreviation, generalisation, substitution, displacement and condensation. Burke has Freud in mind when he stresses that the relation between signifier and signified need not be neutral or conventional, but may be invested with emotional energy. According to Burke, the most general aspect involved in all acts of symbolization is what he calls "transcendence". Every symbol is a vector with which man enlarges the scope of his action. The symbol may take the user from me to you, from here to there, from now to then, from the literal to the metaphorical, from matter to spirit. Owing to this transcending force of symbols, their user is not confined to a closed world, but lives in one that is forever expanding. No. 2: Inventor of the negative. The second definition is a corollary of the first because negation is a special use of symbols. Burke makes it clear that in his five anthropological steps that add up to a definition of Man, he follows the dramatist and not the philosophical path. He argues the precedence of the injunction "Thou shalt not", which programmes man's moral being, over the cognitive determination "It is not". To be in command of negation, according to Burke, amounts to living in more than one world, negation drawing a dividing line between the factual and the virtual, between the true and the false, between the ideal and the real, between the moral and the immoral. Negation is a capacity inbuilt in language which can

1

It should be added that much of the current research in evolutionary biology, especially the learning experiments with primates, is designed to challenge such anthropological tenets.

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be turned to destructive uses; it is employed in creating lethal boundaries between communities, it is used as in dissembling, explored in irony, applied in laughter and elaborated in the creation of fictions. No. 3: Separated from his natural conditions by instruments of his own making. This means that man does not live in a first, but in a second nature, created by such tools as technology, media, institutions, and art. O n e could also argue for the priority of man as tool-using animal - homo faber or homo oeconomicus — over man as symbol-using animal - homo fictor or homo significane. However, Burke decides this question in favor of symbols because for him the use of symbols is inherent in the use of tools. While the first three maxims were to some degree expectable, the following two more directly express Burke's personal moral and political attitude. No. 4: Rotten with perfection — is an ironic way of describing a human obsession with completeness, an urge towards an ultimate goal, an inexorable drive towards utmost logical consequence. For Burke, "perfection" is an ambivalent term, it carries the connotations both of a laudable achievement and of a catastrophic obsession. The formula "rotten with perfection" suggests that Burke neither endorses a progressistic approach to human history nor subscribes to such concepts as "evolutionary achievements". In his state of mind, "perfection" refers not only to artistic and technical skills but also for instance to the creation of the pure and deadly stereotype of an enemy or the so-called "final solution". What entelechy is to animals and organisms, perfectionism is to the human species. It also implies that what can be done in terms of science and technology must be done; the route of exploration being a one-way street which, as Burke and many others feared in the period of the cold war, may lead to the nuclear self-extinction of the species. No. 5: Goaded by a spirit of hierarchy — In investigating the basic impulses of human motivation, Burke hits on rank, status and distinction as indispensable spurs of action. In the heart of democracy and in a country pervaded by the spirit of equality, Burke analyzes the structure of inequality as a fundamental motor of human action. Instead of focusing on the contingent inequality that is caused by money, he examines the deeper roots of hierarchy, a word that for Burke is almost synonymous with "order". For him, order and hierarchy are religious terms soaked with the cultural semantics of guilt and mystery. There are interesting similarities and differences in Frye's and Burke's versions of literary anthropology. Both are engaged in a kind of "basic research" for the field of literature, one investigates archetypal patterns, aiming at a generative grammar of literature as a whole, the other investigates motivational patterns, aiming at a grammar of human action, of which literature, rhetoric and texts in general form a significant part. Frye interprets the archetypes not as links between the individual and the collective phylogenetic mind, but as links between the

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individual and its cultural memory. To study and teach these archetypes is to enforce and reactivate these links, to re-connect the individual to Western cultural memory. For all its brilliant observations, generalizations and structuralist discoveries, Frye's approach to literary anthropology is at bottom normative, in its pedagogical spirit it belongs to the restaurative cultural milieu after the Second World War. Burke, on the other hand, is less of a teacher and more of a sceptic. He has a troubled, critical mind, which reacts against cold war tendencies such as McCarthyism or nuclear technology. His work is grounded on a pessimistic anthropology, not of the Hobbesian or Schmittian, but of the sceptical and ironic brand. This is why his "Definition of Man" is not consistently honorific and selfcongratulatory, but shot through with warnings and drawbacks. Both, Burke and Frye are interested in religion; but while Frye embraces Biblical tradition under a secularized perspective as "the great Code of Art" (William Blake), Burke studies religion as an anthropological archive and an elementary fund of primal motivations. Just to illustrate this one point: independently of the research of the Russian structuralist Vladimir Propp on the Morphology of the Folk-Tale, Burke investigated a similar complex in his Rhetoric of Religion, showing how in fairy tales and the Biblical story of Genesis it is the primary valence of negation or prohibition that inscribes man as a moral being. 2.2 Wolfgang Iser Wolfgang Iser signaled an important shift in his conceptual orientation when he subtitled his book The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (1993). In this book, literature and anthropology are yoked together with a new concept - the concept of the "imaginary". The imaginary is considered as a basic resource of human energy that informs not only literature, but also dreams, fantasy and cultural institutions. In literature, the imaginary reaches its reflexive and most complex objectivation. Yet the bond between literature and anthropology is even closer; both literary fiction and anthropology are built on one and the same principle: the transcendence of the given. Or to put it another way: the categorical imperative "Transform yourself!" holds true for both literature and anthropology. When defining human nature, Iser operates on two levels. There is the existential level of the finite being that is defined by history, heredity, gender, class, nation, culture, space, time and physical constitution, and there is the level of fiction, on which all of these limitations are at least temporarily suspended and overcome. The first level is present in the book only as a silent dimension and necessary background to the second. With the medium of literary fiction, man is able to transcend the status quo, virtualizing the given and thereby realizing his full anthropological potential. This is why for Iser, literature becomes the privileged index of anthropology.

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T h e basic opposition underlying Iser's definition of man is that between constraints and liberty. As a finite and limited creature, it is man's anthropological mandate to be free, and literature is the realm in which this concept of freedom is emphatically realized. Iser comments on the bond between literature and anthropology in the following way: "As an extension of man, fiction enables him to operate in a realm that is not restricted by limitations". In developing this idea, he introduces the category of play. Literature is discussed in terms o f play, play being the privileged realm where the given is transcended, extrinsic necessities suspended and the real virtualized. In the realm of play-as-literature and literature-as-play, limitations give way to acts of transgression, to infinite possibilities, to changes and constant permutations. While the imaginary is the basic form of energy with which man creates himself and his cultural institutions, it is the exclusive privilege of fictional literature to transform this energy into the reflexive form of textual play. We may say that Iser joins the via negativa of anthropology, adding a specific literary variant to the philosophical and theological versions. In his definition of man he is little concerned with mere anthropological characteristics, exclusively human or not, but addresses the most basic level of the human essence, which he then de-essentializes. While anthropological descriptions, such as Kenneth Burke's definitions of man, are merely descriptive, Iser's anthropological definition has a normative core. It tells us not what human beings are and how they act, but what they should be and how they should act. They combine a description with a prescription. Many anthropological definitions qualify human beings by the use of symbols, the capacity for negation, or the expression of laughter or mourning. Iser is not concerned with this level of anthropological definitions. His definitions of man converge in the imperative: "Transform your self into another!" This definition entails a designation, and as such it is a question of more or less. Although universal in scope, it does not invariably apply to all human beings under all circumstances, but provides a norm for the full realization of anthropological potential. Iser's anthropological norm, which demands a constant doubling, virtualisation and transformation of the self with the aid of literary fictions, turns anthropology into a virtuoso qualification. While Burke produces five definitions of man, Iser reduces them to a single feature, the anthropological imperative of self-transformation. While the one states what is the case, the other presents a goal. Both make use of the metaphysical category of "transcendence", secularizing it for their purposes. Burke associates the very act of symbolizing with transcendence, while Iser translates the term into a norm, which prescribes the constant "transcendence of the self'. While for Burke, literature is one of the archives which records fundamental anthropological functions, Iser praises literary fiction as the unique tool which man must embrace in order to live up to his full anthropological designation.

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3. Cultural anthropology 3.1 Textual It is the nature of abstract anthropology to produce anthropological "constants" or otherwise universal definitions of man. They aim at Man with a capital M. In their aim at describing "him" in the most fundamental and general way, they must discard all cultural specificities which shape and determine the concrete lives of individual human beings, such as body, gender, race, class, history, nation and location. These specificities have no place in the logic of abstract anthropological discourses. In order to focus on these circumstantial aspects, one must choose another mode of discourse, one which is inductive and starts from texts, artefacts, symbolic codes, modes of behaviour and other data imbued with culturally specific evidence. This approach is here referred to as "cultural anthropology". But even this approach is bifurcated, offering again vastly different options. I shall call them here the textual and the contextual approach. The textual approach was developed by cultural anthropologists who became critically aware of their own discipline, focusing self-reflexively on the problems of representation. Instead of passing as objective chroniclers of the tribes they visited and studied, they acknowledged their own active contribution by considering their own work as a fictional construction. The central category in this self-reflexive turn of anthropology is the text. What happened in this discipline may be compared with the textual turn in historiography as triggered by the axioms of Hayden White. Instead of producing "history" or a "culture", these scholars discovered that they were producing texts, texts that were made of words and followed certain rules of rhetoric and stylistic constraints, in other words: that were fictional at core. As the text was elevated into the central category of these disciplines, the differences between the fields of history, ethnology and literature were blurred. To the extent that these other disciplines discovered their textual basis, literary theory discovered ethnography, difference and the strategies to construct cultural identities. What followed was a productive strategy of making familiar things strange and strange things familiar, inspiring a methodological exchange between disciplines concerned with their "own" culture, such as literary studies or history, and disciplines concerned with foreign cultures. It opened up an innovative space for transdisciplinary studies, creating new links between literature and anthropology. As the importance of the textual approach is widely recognized and needs no further argumentative support here, I want to concentrate on yet another approach towards literary anthropology, which also takes as its point of departure the concreteness of cultural evidence, without, however, hypostasizing the category of the text. I shall call it the contextual approach. It does not subscribe to the radical hypothesis that "all is text, and that there is no outside of the text". Nor

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does the contextual approach neglect the text, which is also at the center of its interests, but investigates it from the point of view of its cultural context, that is, in the framework of of social institutions such as media and memory, communication and transmission, exchange and transformation. 3-2

Contextual

As an example of this contextual cultural approach to literary anthropology I want to present the work that has been done by the research group Archaeology of Literary Communication, which was constituted in the late seventies by a group of scholars including Jan Assmann and myself. There were two motivations involved in pursuing a new branch of literary anthropology. One was personally contingent; the familial constellation of Egyptology and English studies served as an incentive to involve the study of an ancient culture and advanced theory in a relationship of mutual challenge and exchange. The other was historically contingent; the end of the seventies was the high period of theoretical sophistication with the imminent danger of turning the disciplines into self-contained areas of highly elaborated terminology. The problem as it presented itself to us at that time was not simply one of complementing theoretical discourse with empirical data, but of regaining a historical perspective that would allow the formulation of new theoretical questions. An urgent need was felt to no longer treat large topics in the form of a one-man-project but to deal with them in a style of continuous multidisciplinary and multicultural exchange. The project of this research group, which has met regularly during the last fifteen years is best summarized by adapting a formula of Hans Belting. Belting proposed to study "the history of the image before the era of art" (Belting 1995). The aim of the research group ALK ("Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation") was to study the history of the (literary) text before the era of literature. The first step in this direction of literary anthropology is to extend the concept of literature beyond the fictional and aesthetic to written texts in general, which neither excludes an interest in oral communication, nor in the literary text in its more specific sense. Some of the problems to be investigated are: under which cultural conditions are texts generated, what functions do they serve, how do texts produce, shape and change cultural meaning, how are they transmitted, stored, communicated, how do they build up a cultural memory, how are they evaluated or censored, how are they read and explained, how do they develop in a changing system of genres? It is impossible to study the cultural history of the texts without taking into account the question of media, the networks of communication and the materiality of the text (See Assmann/Assmann 1987; 1995; 1997; 1998; Assmann/Assmann/Hardmeier 1983; Assmann 1991; Assmann/Gladigow 1995). The guiding hypothesis of an archaeology of the literary text is that in its earlier stages it is intimately entangled

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with the texts of other cultural domains such as religion, law, philosophy, history, to name only a few. The composition of the research group with specialists of different disciplines and cultures served a double goal: to transcend historically the ominous "Sattelzeit", that is the historical period around 1770 when the cultural domains were separated and, as a consequence, the institutional frame of autonomous academic disciplines was generated, which we have inherited and are trying to overcome; and to transcend the Eurocentric horizon, reaching out to cultures located outside the belt of a common tradition or a common set of values. These questions about the relation between text, literature, cultural meaning and memory turn into anthropological questions to the extent that they are studied in a decidedly comparative perspective. In this case, the anthropological perspective is not introduced as an apriori condition but is the result of a common transdisciplinary interest and transcultural effort of communication, comparison and cooperation.

Conclusion In summing up I want to come back to the idea of mapping the various approaches to literary anthropology and conclude with a few remarks about how these different approaches may be or may not be combined. The first approach presented was that of archetypal anthropology. In this case, the individual human being is considered as a member of a large human family, extending in space and reaching back in time. Archetypal criticism, which studies man as part of a collective group, culture, race or memory, may take a universalist or a culturalist turn. Scholars such as Bodkin, who was influenced by Jung, have stressed the unlimited unity of a common human psyche, while scholars such as Frye, Warburg or E.R. Curtius have stressed the distinctive boundaries of different cultural heritages. The second approach was based on definitions of man in the realm of deductive abstraction. In this case, Man is written with a capital M and treated as a generic type or representative of the human species. In this area, we also found different options, the descriptive approach of Burke and the prescriptive approach of Iser. The search for fundamental qualifiers is in both cases motivated by a philosophical interest. It should be added that the abstract anthropology of general definitions can also be studied in a historical perspective, reconstructing the various discourses in which optimistic or pessimistic definitions of man are registered. The third approach is in many ways the inverse of the second approach. What is excluded in the act of definition becomes the main focus of the cultural approach. Here also two options were distinguished, the textual and the contextual

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approach. In the first case, the text is the ultimate category that leaves no room for a rival or counter term. World and text become coextensive, because one cannot be approached without the other, because the one is constantly constructed and reconstructed in the medium of the other. In the second case, the term "text" is used in a much narrower and strictly non-metaphoric sense, confined to concrete verbal constructions as embedded in their social, historical and cultural contexts. While in the first case, the interest in the text is theoretical or metadisciplinary, in the second it is transdisciplinary and comparative. The aim of this paper has been to revisit and present in a survey some of the approaches to literary anthropology as they emerged in the field of English studies over the last five decades. The mapping of these approaches might serve several purposes: to sharpen an awareness of their variety as well as of their differences. The remaining question is: how are we to deal with the multiplicity of these options? It would be convenient if we could assume that these approaches neatly complement each other, providing their share in constructing an integral whole. Such an assumption would suggest that the study of anthropology is a unified field which can be distinctly mapped and investigated via a clear division of labour. My intention, however, was not to map the field of anthropology, but to map some of the existing approaches to (literary) anthropology, as they have emerged over time in their specific historical and institutional contexts. Even relatively short-term experience in interdisciplinary exchange and cooperation has shown that we are dealing with a subject that is constantly being restructured from various points of view, where one approach does not necessarily supply the missing information for the other. The various approaches are not so easily matched, but construct alternative and even sometimes incompatible perspectives which eclipse each other. The theoretical interests and methodologies explicitly or implicitly involved are far too different to be brought together in an easy convergence. This statement, however, is not meant as a destructive blow at interdisciplinary cooperation in the area of literature and anthropology. The impression of uncombinability and even incompatibility of the various approaches need not lead to a situation of cognitive fragmentation and incoherence. It could be, first of all, a sign that literary anthropology is not a unified area of research. Hence, the multiplicity of approaches may be taken as a signal for the irreducible heterogeneity of the project itself. T h e tension that is here implied can at best be strategically minimized, it can never be altogether dissolved. N o t should it be. It is itself productive, in that it reminds us that the project of redefining the human involves not only empirical investigation and philosophical determination but also participation and intervention. Stressing the difference of the various approaches is not a plea for mutual indifference. This survey has tried to point out the aims and interests, but also the limitations of each approach. T o review them and place them side by side is a way of highlighting the dimension that is neglected or

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reduced to irrelevance by the specific focuses. This partial blindness, which is both unavoidable and constitutive, may be the best reason to pursue different routes. And the capacity to continually remind each other of the mutually forgotten dimensions may not be such a bad basis for the growth of an interdisciplinary ethos.

Approaching Literary Anthropology. Comments on Aleida Assmann's Paper Gottfried Seebass

1. Is literature relevant to anthropology, and if so, in what sense? Of course, the answer to this question depends on what is meant by "literature" and "anthropology". The title of Aleida Assmann's paper suggests that the central task of anthropology is to "define the human". However, as is clear from the same source, Assmann does not believe that this can be construed as a joint, continued effort to work out the one and only correct concept of the human. Rather, definingúve. human is not an "achievement" or "performance" - in the sense of Ryle (1949, 45-51, 149-153) and Kenny (1963, 171-186) - at all, but an "occurrent", ongoing activity of redefinition which in principle cannot be completed. Accordingly Assmann does not try to elucidate the way in which the study of literature is, or should be, brought to bear on understanding the human. She confines herself to a survey of different existing approaches. These are not organized in a systematic or theoretically exhaustive manner, but are presented as a kind of "conceptual map" that allows for various placements or personal starting points and various directions to move. Each approach has its specific limitations. But although it is acknowledged that placing them side by side may help to counterbalance existing biases and to develop an "interdisciplinary ethos", there is no hope of combining them into a unified field, we are told (pp. 2l4fi). If not in the project of anthropology in general, at least in the project of "literary anthropology"we have to face up to a situation of irreducible theoretical heterogeneity. As a description of the present "state of the art", this may be adequate and acceptable, as an account of the project as such it is not. Even if we are willing to allow for some form of theoretical and methodological "pluri-perspectivism" (p. 220), if we are not convinced that different approaches complements ach other and converge on a certain point, however ideal, how do we know that they are addressed to the same question at all? How do we know that literature is relevant to anthropology? Fortunately, the theoretical situation is not as diffuse and hopeless as one might conclude from the end of Assmann's paper. The task of understanding and (possibly, eventually) defining the human, assisted by the study of literature, is sensible and fairly well circumscribed. Moreover, as I am going to show presently, some substantial lessons can be learned from surveying existing approaches. In doing so, I will not address the question of whether Assmann's description and classification of the authors referred to are correct or fair as inter-

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pretations. I shall simply take them as she presents them, and attempt to set out and comment on the systematically relevant points. 2. First I would like to clear up a very general, conceptual point. In contrasting "abstract" and "cultural anthropology" Assmann repeatedly describes the first as an "aprioristic"and "deductive"enterprise (pp. 205; 213), the second as "empirical" and "inductive"(pp. 212; 217). This is unhappy and misleading. Admittedly, to the extent that literary anthropology (re-) defines the human in a prescriptive or normative way, as is partially the case with Frye and Iser (pp. 203f.; 210), it may be taken as a position which starts from a priori premises. However, this is not necessary, as both authors can be interpreted simply as trying to set out certain normative convictions implicit in exemplary texts of Western literature or literary criticism. And if these convictions really have had the status of culturally invariant a priori norms, then the study of literature is scarcely more than a heuristic device for the formulation of an anthropological position which has to be justified independently. On the other hand, if literary anthropology is strictly confined to descriptive characterizations of man, it is quite unlikely that any approach whatsoever may be adequately represented as aprioristic, including "abstract anthropology" in Assmann's sense. Even the Islamic and well-known Platonic myths referred to (pp. 204f.), which at first sight seem to articulate an indisputably metaphysical position, gain the plausibility they may have entirely from the fact that their characterizations of man as a "self-creating being" matches empirical evidence. The same holds true of at least secularised versions of the biblical as well as Greek and Roman characterization of man as a "god-like ruler of the rest of the universe" (cf. Gen. 1, 26-28; Psalms 8, 5-9; Sophocles, Antigone, 332-375; Ovid, Met. I 76-88). There is no plausible way of defining, or redefining, the human independently of human experience. So I suggest that we drop aprioricity as a distinguishing mark of "abstract anthropology". What distinguishes "abstract" as well as "archetypical anthropology" from "cultural anthropology" in fact is their claim to unlimited, culturally invariant generality. They aim, as Assmann says with an overtone of slight scorn (pp. 211; 213), at "Man with a capital M". Now, it is indeed highly doubtful whether the more or less specific "definitions of man" which have been presented, e.g., by philosophers such as Scheler, Gehlen and Plessner have any title to universal validity. Yet this does not mean that a general notion of the human is dispensable. Quite to the contrary, if we could not know, or gradually gain some clarity about what "man" or "human" means, we could have no idea of what we are asking about in "anthropology" and "literary anthropology". Of course we do have this idea and know quite a few things about the species of man as distinguished, e.g., from plants and animals. Therefore the attempt to sharpen and refine our conception of the human successively is by no means a hopeless task. And even if we were

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to get no further than the general statement that "man is what he makes out of himself' with an indefinite variety of historical, cultural and individual specifications, this statement would still entail a claim for universal validity. Furthermore, we could not mark off historical or cultural differences if we were not able to work with concepts of general applicability, which can be affirmed in the one case, and negated in the other. It is the very point of predication to divide up the (open) universe of (possible) objects into pairs of classes that exclude each other logically (Strawson 1952, 1-12, Tugendhat/Wolf 1983, 50-65). Moreover, the very idea of conceptual or cultural relativity, if taken radically, turns out to be an idea without sense.1 For all our willingness to acknowledge individual and cultural differences, let us therefore not dispose thoughtlessly of conceptual tools we are badly in need of, if we are going to say something about these matters at all! 3. The foregoing project of "anthropological universalism" does not amount in the least to an uncritical endorsement of "abstract" or even "archetypal anthropology" as described by Assmann. As for the latter, it is well known that notions like C. G. Jung's "archetypes" or "the collective unconscious" are highly speculative and more than questionable as an instrument of any serious, verifiable psychological theory. I fear that the same must be said of much of their application to literary anthropology. Frye's claim for something like a "generative deep structure of the grammar of Western literature" is speculative, too, and highly implausible from the start. In fact, it seems to be just another example of the inflationary metaphorical use of linguistic terms in fields which they are not made for and simply do not fit. Even more problematic are A. Warburg's speculations about the determining influence of artistic on collective psychic structures, which appear to have all the charms of "cultural Lyssenkoism". Bodkin's and Murray's hypotheses are less implausible, as they keep to the regular causal order. If there are such things as universal "basic experiences" of mankind, it is to be expected that they are mirrored in a variety of works of art. Conversely, it should be possible to use literary texts of various form and origin as heuristic aids for detecting underlying "anthropological archetypes" of this kind, if there are any. The problem is simply that it is unclear whether, and by what reliable method, such archetypes can be uncovered and to what extent our findings may be generalized. So the lesson to be learned from a survey of existing conceptions of "archetypal anthropology" is that in its present state, at the very best, this is no more than a programme of literary anthropological research, a programme moreover which is badly in need of further clarification.

1

I have argued for this in Seebass 1981, 194ff..

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4. If we drop the notion of "archetype", the result will perhaps be similar to a clarified version of "abstract anthropology". If we also drop the claim that every predicate used to characterize "the human" in a broader sense must be affirmable of every individual independently of its historical or cultural condition, the result will come close to what might be brought out as the central, positive idea of "cultural anthropology". T h e "contextual approach "which Assmann herself favours might easily lend itself to the relevant task of conceptual and methodological clarification. Starting from a broad notion of "literature", which covers fictional and aesthetic texts as well as texts of other cultural domains, i.e. "concrete verbal constructions as embedded in their social, historical and cultural contexts" (p. 214), its theoretical outlook is neither speculative nor aprioristic in a normative sense, but decidedly empirical and historical. Though broader in scope, its methodology clearly rests on an extension and combination of classical philological and hermeneutic procedures, such as are well-established and have been in use for a long time in literary studies, history and archeology. What, however, remains unclear to me is its character as "anthropology" in the sense of Assmann's title. In what sense is the "contextual approach" devoted to defining or redefining the human? Assmann says that the anthropological turn comes with "a decidedly comparative perspective" (p. 213). Yet this is scarcely enough. So the essential steps towards a clarified, conceptually as well as methodologically promising account of literary anthropology still have to be taken. At least, one can see or guess how such an account might be provided in the case of "contextual" cultural anthropology. As far as the "textual approach" is concerned things are quite different. Its defining characteristics, I take it, are (1) blurring the distinctions between the fictional and the factual use of language and (2) "a certain imperialism of literary (or textual) theory", summed up in the ominous slogan "all is text" (p. 211). Taken literally this slogan is outright nonsense. First and foremost, predicates that are true of everything are not true predicates at all, as they do not divide the universe of objects in a distinctive manner (see above, § 2). Literally nothing is said by calling something an instance of "text" in this way. Secondly, generalizing the paradigm object of one discipline opens the gates for generalizing the paradigm of any discipline or theoretical approach whatsoever. With the same right as the scholar of literature, the mathematician might say that "everything is formula" or the musician, following the lead of German Romanticism, that "all is song" (cf. e.g. Eichendorff [1835], 103). Moreover, it is more than doubtful that literary theory, which is not exactly characterized by methodological rigour and has a vast number of open ends, should yield a paradigm case for better developed sciences such as physics, psychology or even history. In fact, the idea that this might be so is just another bizarre highlight of so-called "postmodernism", which will be ready for oblivion as soon as this marvellous achievement of human ingenuity goes out of fashion.

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O f course no one acquainted with problems of epistemologa will deny that theories, even the most sophisticated and reliable ones, are not "read o f f ' from nature, but are constructed and projected onto the world by humans. But no-one with any sense will mistake this basic epistemological observation for the claim that statements of fact are essentially on the same footing as statements of fiction. Fiction may help in the formation of interesting hypotheses. Also fiction may find a place even within anthropology, if this is understood in a prescriptive sense. But descriptive anthropology cannot itself be a fictional enterprise. Moreover, it is even less clear how the textual approach might contribute to the task of defining, or redefining, the human. So the lesson to learn from the survey of "textual" versions of cultural anthropology is simply that this approach leads to a dead end and should be dismissed entirely. 5. Among the approaches reviewed by Assmann, surely the "abstract anthropologies" of K. Burke and W. Iser are the most explicit and refined attempts at defining, or redefining, the human. Man is characterized here as a "being of freedom" which actively has to "create itself', individually and socially, by choosing among as well as expanding or transforming a given set of possibilities. Moreover, it is claimed that the use of symbols, language and literature, including various forms of fictional and imaginative textual play, are an essential, indispensable means by which man "realizes his full anthropological potential" (p. 209). Stripped of its partly prescriptive aspects, which I believe (pace Assmann, p. 213) are accessorial even in Iser, this is a bold, substantial and highly interesting hypothesis. 2 It could be, and should be applied to and tested not only on the most general level, i.e. "humankind as such", but also on a variety of levels below this, trying to define (or redefine, as it were) historically or culturally regionalized types of human "selfrealization". O f course, the problem is how such a demanding idea of literary anthropology, which up to now has restricted itself to a highly abstract level, could be transformed into a concrete, workable project of research. Once again we are confronted with quite a number of serious conceptual and methodological problems. I take it that Iser himself has despaired in the meantime of being able to solve them. Others have been pessimistic from the start. Whether this is realistic or wise I cannot judge here, though I am inclined to be more optimistic. At any rate, if the necessary classifications were to turn out to be impossible, the study of literature could not contribute very much to the central anthropological task of defining, or redefining, the human.

2

In fact it has a close affinity to theses, advanced e.g. by Herder, Humboldt, L. Weisgerber and B. L. Whorf, concerning a general dependence of human thought on language. I have analysed these in detail elsewhere (Seebass 1981).

A Reply to Gottfried Seebass Aleida Assmann

It is always enlightening to find ones thoughts purged and refined by the keen and perceptive reading of another mind. I am grateful for the attention Gottfried Seebass has focused on my remarks and the ways in which he has elaborated some points in need of further clarification. I shall condense my response to his response in a few points in which I hope to make the drift of my argument a little clearer.

1. Who defines whom? The project of re-defining the human differs from other scholarly projects in that the subject of the researcher and the object under investigation are intimately interwoven. From that point of view, it is important not to abstract from the circumstantial evidence of the definitions themselves, but to relate them to social, political and gendered context. W e need, in other words, a contextual approach to this branch of scholarship, which takes into account the bias and aim of the respective definition. I will provide a few examples which might help to elucidate this point. When St. Augustine invented the doctrine of original sin and incorporated it into the framework of Christian anthropology, he provided a definition of the human which stresses the dependence of men on divine grace and the institution of the church. When Thomas Hobbes defined man in such a way as to justify the claim "homo hominis lupus", he stressed the aggressive potential in human beings that calls for a strong institutionalisation of state power. When the 18 th -century Scottish moralists defined man as a sociable and benevolent being, they were arguing for a democratic society that would overcome the martial construction of absolutism. When in the 19th century men defined woman as "the angel of the house", they severely restricted her social space, excluding her from the domains of politics, economy and science, limiting her to private and "invisible" activities. And when, in post-second world war Germany, humans were defined as "extrapositional" beings, which resist definition in terms of social roles or cultural traditions but are continuously reshaping and recreating themselves, what was stressed was the human capacity to create an ever new and individually satisfying future. A brief survey of this kind, which could be easily continued into our own times of identity politics, tells us that all definitions of the human are construc-

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tions of human beings by human beings whose aims and designs are shaped by specific historical situations.

2. Constructivism Literary studies, which is my own angle of approach to the questions of anthropology, lacks, alas, the methodological rigour which is the pride of the analytic philosopher. His methodology draws on logic, logic has to do with predication and predication involves dividing up the open universe "into pairs of classes that exclude each other logically". Seebass offers a number of such classes with which he hopes to introduce conceptual order into a"forest of symbols", such as: "apriori versus experience" or "universalism versus relativism". Aware as I am of the philosophical renown of such distinctions, I cannot but feel that they create false polarisations in the area of our consideration. What from my perspective seems to be lacking in the conceptual tool-kit of the philosopher is the awareness of the constructive element that is involved in our descriptions and characterisations. My point is precisely that the dividing line between description and prescription, as I have indicated in my examples above, cannot be drawn quite so succinctly as the philosopher would have it.

3. Literature and Anthropology Even if, as I argue, it is impossible to organise the topic of anthropology in the shape of a distinct hypothesis, which is then to be tested by empirical evidence, it is certainly indispensable to organize it in the shape of "a concrete, workable project of research". In order to provide some hints in this direction, I shall summarise some of the ways in which the study of literature may support the study of anthropology and vice versa. There are important works of literature that explore the definition of the human in terms oî essentials, going beyond fixations of rank, role, function, ethnic status or gender. I am thinking of Shakespeare's play in which king Richard II, stripped of the emblems of his power, discovers himself as a naked human being, or the Jew Shylock, despite his ethnic markers, pleads for admission into the solidarity of human beings. Such texts directly contribute to the discourse which I have labelled "abstract anthropology"; abstract not as the opposite of concrete, but in the sense of the abstraction, elimination of what are then considered "accidentals". Another literary approach to anthropology could be called the type of the comédie humaine or vanity fair. In this case literature opens its Pandora's box to

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shed a multifarious plethora of distinct experiences, perceptions, shapes, models, phenomena. It is an essentially literary aim to present mankind in this irreducible multiplicity, and the case of Shakespeare shows that the first and the second mode do not necessarily exclude each other. Literary texts, however, may also have a normative core which contributes to the shaping and canonisation of ways of being human, which in turn may be highlighted or dissolved in the genre of commentaries. Or, to put it in another way, literary texts have a strong tendency towards idealisation, which implies a rigid selection of factors considered appropriate and a dismissal of those that are not. This does not mean, however, that the traits that are effaced disappear from consciousness. Thanks to the variety of literary genres, there is always a co-presence of the normative and idealizing forms of literature and the inclusive type of the comédie humaine. W e may say that in the domain of literature, the selection of one path does not necessarily imply the negation or negligence of another. Instead, the complex economy of heterogeneous genres allows for multiplicity and dissonance among the literary constructions. Yet another contribution of literature to anthropology lies in the self-reflexive potential that continually explores and destabilises existing definitions of the human. Literary texts, and this is a feature that has been particularly stressed in the works of Wolfgang Iser, have developed a special competence in the transformation of the given and the exploration of the possible and impossible. In this constant drive towards reformulation and reorganisation, literature has become a powerful instrument for laying bare, examining and checking our cultural foundations.

Understanding Homer: Literature, History and Ideal Anthropology Bernard Williams

I should like to start with some assumptions about anthropology, which I shall state dogmatically and most of which I should like to think are banal. In the peculiar case of homo sapiens, ethological accounts of the species inevitably lead into cultural descriptions of various social groups; this is a version of the old truth that it is the nature of human beings to live under convention (cf. Williams 1995). Cultures, moreover, display a high degree of secondary elaboration, and while it is true - indeed, blindingly obvious - that significant ranges of human behaviour are to be explained in terms of natural selection, this is for the most part true at a level of fairly general description and in relation to environments which are equally rather broadly identified. For much of human behaviour, cultural description (in the sense in which different societies display different cultures) is going to be an essential element in understanding. Every society has a past, in the sense that what happened earlier has shaped what is present, and virtually every society has some stories or other to tell about its past. Some societies — in particular, literate ones - have critical views of these stories about their past, views which both provide further evidence for our own enquiries into their past, and are themselves predecessors of those enquiries. In reading those and other written records, and interpreting artefacts or traces of earlier peoples, we have to use some of the same skills as we use in physically encountering peoples who live in a culture unfamiliar to us. In the case of those whom we actually encounter, we have to achieve an understanding of what they say, of what they believe, and of what their aims are, by a process of triangulation that involves all these three elements, and it is a constraint on this process being possible at all that those people's concerns and interests and perceptual powers should be taken not to be too radically different from our own. However, we need not and should not assume that the processes of interpretation require us to find an equivalent to what they say in terms that we are prepared to use ourselves. It is true that in order to understand social transactions and interpret them in this spirit, we need to "get inside" them and to have a sense of what it is to act for the kinds of reasons that these agents have; but this does not imply that these are reasons that we ourselves have. Someone who has the sense of another culture can imagine, improvise, enact and respond appropriately to situations in which he finds himself, and in that sense he has internalised the

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reasons of people living in that culture; but this does not make them his reasons, any more than the actor's capacity to become an enraged ancient king makes him, even temporarily, into such a king. This is the capacity to take up what I have elsewhere called "the ethnographic stance", and it is a feature of our general understanding of human beings and of the various parts that culture can play in their lives that we should understand that such a stance is possible. 1 This capacity plays its part also in understanding the past. This is part of the content of the cliche that the past is "another country" — to a certain extent, our approach in historical understanding must share something with our approach to unknown peoples. In some ways historical enquiry is harder. There is, above all, no participant observation: we lack the sight of their doings and the sound of their utterances. O n the other hand, we get to the past not just in the ways in which we are figured as getting to exotic peoples, that is to say, by simply arriving in a state of total ignorance. This image of what it is to encounter a previously isolated people, which assimilates it to the entirely schematic situation of "radical translation" that has so interested philosophers, is itself in almost all cases a drastic exaggeration, 2 but it does make a difference that we are linked to the historical past by a self-conscious set of traditions. We reach the past by a route each step of which, in the favourable case, stands in explanatory relations to the steps before and after it. For these and other reasons, the case of historical cultural understanding is different enough from the situation of the social anthropologist as participant observer for it to be foolish to regard the past simply as another country. Nevertheless, there is enough in common in the ideas of interpretation, coming to see how things went in another cultural situation, for us to signal the connection by calling certain kinds of historical understanding "ideal anthropology". It is anthropology, because it shares these forms of understanding, and it is ideal, not because it is perfect, but because it does not have the kinds of evidence which are central to the paradigm examples of social anthropology in action. Some of our evidence from the past consists of physical objects, artefacts and other similar traces. Some of it consists of documents. Some of it, as we have already seen, may consist of documents in which a past society sought to record its own history. Some of it, which is the present concern, consists of what we may call works of literature. W e do not have to assume that the society we are studying

1

2

T h e general idea of interpretation I am using is of course familiar from the work of Donald Davidson. For the "ethnographic stance" and the possibility of understanding without identification, see Williams 1986. It no d o u b t also carries heavily ideological presuppositions about the relations between "scientific" investigators and "primitive" peoples. T h e purely philosophical concentration on radical translation need not in itself carry such presuppositions: it is a device for isolating what is taken for granted in interpreting anyone.

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had a notion of "literature" or applied it to these documents. If they did not, then manifestly we have to take extreme care in using any such notion. However, in the case of a self-conscious society with a developed critical stance, there may be enough in the local practice to back up our seeing these writings as works of literature, or something like that. Literature can provide evidence for ideal anthropology; as we might also say, the interpretation of literature can be part of the interpretation that is the business of ideal anthropology. There are familiar and enormous problems in this process. For instance, in the case of the ancient Greeks, which is the example that will be my concern here, there is a well known problem with regard to using the surviving tragedies as evidence about the society in which they were written. Greek tragedy tended to adopt a "high", archaising, manner, which means that as direct evidence of the ethical or other concepts of its audience, it has to be taken with extreme caution. This is the reason why Sir Kenneth Dover, in writing about popular conceptions of Greek morality, relied more on comedy (because it had to make people laugh) and legal speeches (because they had to persuade a jury) than on tragedy or epic (Dover 1974, 1-45). However, it is still true that tragedies had to be intelligible to their audience. Indeed, they were produced in competition to impress and engage that audience, perhaps to overwhelm them, and that should be able to tell us something about the relations between the ethical conceptual structures of Greek tragedy and the outlook of such an audience. In the case of Homeric epic, however, there is a still more radical displacement involved. It is not merely that the Homeric poems are expressed in formulaic language which no-one ever spoke. In addition, the people in classical Athens who read and discussed these poems when they had been written down knew that they belonged to an earlier time, that they had in some way or another been transmitted from an earlier society. The actual history of the poems is, of course, a very complex and still unresolved question, and I am not competent to discuss it, any more than I can discuss their relations to the archaeology of archaic Greece. However, if we assume, uncontroversially, that they stem from an oral tradition, we have to suppose an earlier non-literate audience to whom these poems, or parts of them, were recited; and to this audience, too, they already spoke of an earlier time. This means that anyone who is engaged in interpreting the concepts used in these poems, or, as we may say rather vaguely, the "outlook" of the poems (though we should not assume that the outlook of the poems is always the same, in particular between the Iliad and the Odyssey) has a complex task. Indeed, there is more than one possible task. We may be concerned with the world or worlds represented in the poems, for instance with the kinds of concerns, motives or beliefs that Achilles or Odysseus is represented as having. Or we may be interested in the outlook of the poems' original audience, something which for more than

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one reason is very difficult to recover: one thing that we should not assume is that this is just the same as the outlook of the poems, any more than we can believe that their artefacts or their social organization were the same as those represented in the poems — as I have already said, the poems spoke even to their first audience about a past time. Yet again, we may be most interested in the outlook of the poems' readers in classical Athens, and in what the poems meant to them. The first of these undertakings is importantly not independent of the third. We can hope to recover something we could call the outlook of the poems only by reconstructing what they meant to some audience, and that audience must be the first recipients of the poems about whom we know anything very much. In the light of what we know, we can try to "lay o f f ' for the elements in the poems which that audience would have found different from their own life, as opposed to those that they found familiar. It may seem that there is an impossibly circular task here, of constructing the audience from the poems, and reading the poems in the light of what they might mean to such an audience. But this is to neglect the fact that about this audience there is a lot of extra evidence, and it also overlooks the vital point that, with regard both to this extra evidence and to the Homeric poems themselves, this is very far from a situation of radical translation, even in the fairly attenuated sense of this in which it applies to our encounters with previously unknown people. These poems are linked to us by an enormously complex and powerful tradition, in which the business of reading and understanding them has been transmitted from one historical period to another. People certainly disagree on the question of how far we understand "the world of Homer". But, unless they are being exceedingly cautious or provocative, they are usually prepared to admit that there is such a thing as understanding Homeric Greek, something which informed Greek scholars mostly do rather well, and beginners do badly. W e can, to a considerable degree of agreement, translate the poems into English. The firm conviction that we can do this is supported by the historical traditions that link us to the ancient world, by the fact that informed readers today are not arriving at these texts by historical parachute, but have learned ancient Greek from someone who learned ancient Greek from someone who . . . . This does not, of course, guarantee "correctness", or remove huge interpretative and historical problems, but it does provide the absolutely essential foundation of conducting the operations of ideal anthropology on these works at a level at which they can produce results and make some sense. A jokey classical scholar of my acquaintance, in parody of the methods of deconstruction, cheerily suggested that the word "album" in a poem of Horace might be taken to mean a book in which you stick photographs; it is quite instructive to consider how many reasons, of how many kinds, there are why this is not a good idea. In my book Shame and Necessity (Williams 1993) I tried to reach an understanding of certain ideas in the Homeric poems, in particular ethical ideas such as

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agency, responsibility, shame, and constraint. In the case of some of these ideas, I argued that they were more like ideas that we ourselves possess than many commentators have supposed. It is important that it was not implicit in the method of enquiry that this should be the result, or at least to this extent. I in fact concentrated on those ideas about which I was convinced that they bear a rather close relation to our own, in particular because I was concerned with using those ideas to help us understand ourselves, but there are of course many other conceptions employed by the ancient Greeks (some of which I discussed) which are much more alien to us, and I did not in any way wish to deny it. While all this is true, there are some ideas which we share with the ancient Greeks, and in particular with the audience of the Homeric poems, which are so basic to the understanding and construction of human action that one would need very powerful evidence (to put it mildly) to make one believe the claims made by some previous scholars that these concepts were lacking in the Greek world. The claims made by Bruno Snell, for instance, that "Homeric people" (a concept which he used in an unclear way to provide a bridge between Homer's characters and Homer's readers or listeners) lacked any idea of a unitary agent capable of making decisions, or even of an agent who had a unitary body - such a suggestion runs up against a very strong presumption that unless one ascribes some such notions to the people represented in these poems and to the people who heard or read them, one would not be able to make sense of the poems at all. It is not offered as a dogmatic universal claim. As with other kinds of natural history, it is exceedingly rash to anticipate the marvels that one may encounter in the way of cultural development: or, to put the point in a rather more sophisticated way, while there must be common materials that we ourselves and those under study share, one must be aware that they may present themselves in quite unexpected forms and combinations. However, with regard to notions which are as central to our understanding of human activities as the idea of a decision, or that of a human being's purposively moving his or her limbs, one should try a number of other explanations before one concludes that they are absent from the world that one is trying to interpret. In the case of Snell and those who thought like him, there are at least four reasons why he arrived at these mistaken conclusions. One is simply a failure to read the text carefully enough and to think consequently about it. For instance, with regard to motivational elements such as thumos, which on Snell's view were regarded in the Homeric world as virtually autonomous sources of action, the text itself makes clear that a bodily agent is needed if an action is to spring from such a principle: the primary idea is not that thumos does things, but that an agent does things in or with his thumos. Second, there is a failure to allow for the "literary" distance between the epic style and its audience. "We should be cautious about moving ... from poetry to culture" as James Redfield has well said (Redfield

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1975, 22), and some of the inferences about the supposed psychology of Homeric characters, in particular of Homeric heroes, are based on an artefact of style, a refusal of the anecdotal which lends a certain dignity and inevitability to the narrative. O n e example of this is the development of Achilles' willingness to reach an agreement with Agamemnon; another, perhaps, is the postponement of Penelope's recognition of her husband (cf. Williams 1993, 46-48). In such cases, it is naive, not merely to read off an implied psychology from the structure of the narrative, but even to suppose that there is anything that could be read off simply from the narrative and taken to be an implied psychology. Another mistake has been to impose on the Homeric poems, or indeed any other work of ancient literature, the misguided conclusions of modern philosophies. In particular, in the case of agency and the psychology of action, it is a crudely Cartesian philosophy that is to blame. This is particularly so with regard to the absence from Homer or other Greek writers of a (supposed) concept of the will. This is an area in which there is a peculiarly sensitive relation between similarity and difference, between materials that have to be taken for granted in making sense of the text at all, and materials which are the subject of specific cultural elaborations, as the notion of the will quite certainly is in our own history. Some of that local history is involved with the Cartesian philosophy, which has both influenced people's conceptions of what action might be, and is itself the product of previous constructions, some of them (such as those of Augustine) of considerable ideological power. If one tries to interpret conceptions used in the ancient world by reference to these ideas, one will misinterpret them. The misinterpretation, in this kind of case, consists in more than anachronism. It is part of the argument against the Cartesian misinterpretation of Homer that it forces us to neglect or deny phenomena which are basic to our making sense of human action at all, and hence basic to our making sense of human action as it is described in the Homeric poems. But to the extent that these phenomena are basic to making sense of action at all, then they are basic to making sense of action in our own cultural context as well, and the Cartesian misinterpretation is not simply an historical misunderstanding, but a philosophical mistake, a misunderstanding of ourselves. Another error that can be cured by reflection on the principles of ideal anthropology is that embodied in Snell's so-called "lexical principle", which is to the effect that the Greeks had a particular idea only if they had a word that expressed it. O n e particularly strong version of this is that if the Greeks had a certain idea, then they had to have a word which expressed this idea and nothing else, and in these terms it has been argued that the Homeric poems contain no idea of practical deliberation. This cannot survive the very obvious reflection that equally in modern English there is no expression that means practical deliberation and nothing else, except the expression "practical deliberation"

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itself, which is first of all virtually a term of philosophical art, and secondly not an expression likely to turn up in a poem. But even if it is more liberally construed, the principle is naive, because it elides the distinctions between the relatively untheorised language of everyday transactions, and the more theoretical kind of vocabulary that will be needed if we are going to compare the categories used by one society with those used by another. Yet another problem with the lexical principle is the question of what direction we should look in for the expression in question. It has been remarked, for instance, that in the Homeric poems there is no word that means "intention", or "intentional" as an attribute of actions. This may well be true. However, there is an adjective, hekon, which almost always means "intentionally", and indeed, though it is an adjective, effectively functions as an adverb. It is a very striking fact that in the Iliad and the Odyssey it occurs only in the nominative singular, a phenomenon which ties it very firmly to the sense of "intentionally"; its negative counterpart, aekon, by contrast, occurs also in other cases, and this is appropriate to its sense, which is more often "unwillingly". Such straightforward philological facts as these are a basic part of the evidence on which ideal anthropology must depend in studying a society from which we possess written texts. 3 O f course, it is only in the light of certain philosophical presuppositions, which help to form the assumptions of such a method, that the evidence can be identified as evidence, as telling us something relevant about the conceptual structures that belonged to a past society. Several of the points in this discussion have related in one way or another to issues of what may be expected to be universal in our understanding of human societies, and what is culturally variable. I have already said that we should be cautious in dogmatically asserting that some given elements must be universal: in assuming, as one might put it, that philosophical reflection on the methodology of an ideal anthropology can yield a body of synthetic necessary truths. Much of the history of philosophy, particularly in the last two centuries, is littered with the rubble of constructions that have aimed to achieve such results. I said earlier that we are well advised to preserve our willingness to be surprised by the natural history of human conventions. However, even if we do not offer any rich body of what are claimed to be substantive universal necessities, there is, in the area of action and its ethical surroundings, a set of very basic ideas which, at the least, lay an extremely heavy burden of proof on anyone who claims to find a society in which these conceptions were not operative. Until that proof or argument arrives, as it notably failed to do in the case of the Homeric Greeks, we may claim that everywhere: 3

As has already been explained, the relations o f the written texts to " H o m e r i c society" are more complex than this formulation implies.

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1. there are actions - people do things, and are recognised by others as doing things. 2. actions are understood to lead to outcomes, some of which are intended and some not. 3. sometimes the outcomes are bad, to be regretted by the agent or by someone else or both. 4. when there is an outcome regretted by someone else, there can be a demand for a response. There is another item which might be added to these, though it is perhaps less utterly banal than the others: 5. people are sometimes in unusual or untypical states which affect their actions and their intentions. This last idea relates particularly to the interest that members of a society have over time in their fellow agents, and in the extent to which they can be expected to behave in a steady or an unreliable manner. 4 It may be that in most places there is some interest in such a consideration, though certainly the ways in which it is understood, and also the factors that may be understood as affecting an agent's actions or intentions at a given time, will be very different in different societies. These are the materials of something like an idea of responsibility, and it is reasonable, until we meet firm evidence to the contrary, to expect that they will be found in every society. However, what is quite certain is that there is no one idea of responsibility to be found in every society, but rather a range of notions that vary between them. These notions interpret the materials in different ways, and give them very different emphases in relation to one another. This is the kind of account that I tried to give, in outline form, m Shame and Necessity (cf. Williams 1993, 50-74), considering the Greek and specifically the Homeric case, about which it has often been asserted that ideas of responsibility in anything like our sense were missing. The present point is that, if anything like this account is correct, it represents a clear, but also an untypically simple, example of the relations between the universal and the local. Certain materials or elements are universal; what is local and various are the ways in which the materials are arranged, emphasised and interpreted. It is perhaps unlikely that in general the universal can be identified and deployed in such a simple way: indeed, it may well be that such an account is too simple for this case itself. However, if, as I have suggested, anthropology must involve itself in an interpretational task; and if the study of past societies must, in part, consist of a kind of anthropology without participation, which I have called "ideal anthropology", which applies, though with special features, to those societies from which we 4

For some speculations in this area cf. Williams 1990, 1-10.

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possess written, and in particular "literary" remains: then certainly we have to reflect very keenly on how strong the assumptions of the interpretational activity must be, and how far they do yield universal elements. It remains a pressing task for the philosophy of anthropology and, as a special case, for the philosophy of history.

The Implications of Human Picture Making: The Articulation of Visual Space Andrew Harrison

Introduction: pictures and being human Most speculation concerning what it is that makes us tends to rush to explanations such as more or less plausible Darwinian just-so stories which assume the haziest idea of what it may be that might be explained. Any speculation about the causes of the pictorial within human life presupposes an answer to the more difficult question of what it may be that making and recognising pictures amounts to. The problem is not to do with the content of pictures, with important questions concerning why we depict what we do, but with what pictures are. What might making and recognising pictures contribute to an understanding of humans? A dispute that seems to have irritatingly dominated recent philosophical accounts of the pictorial seems to have stalled over the question of whether we should explain our recognition of pictures "causally" as an extension of our perceptual capacities, or "cognitively" as in some ways continuous with the ruleconstrained coding capacities of language. This seems to me to be misconceived. Far the most plausible view, I suggest, is that the pictorial makes use of genuinely cognitive devices but ones which are quite different from linguistic ones. I do believe that all the evidence suggests that such devices are both universal within the human record and in important ways more complex than is often supposed. Most of the earliest records we have of human communication are pictorial, and often, quite disturbingly, as directly recognisable as any pictures with which we are familiar in our everyday lives. Other deliberately marked surfaces are, of course, as deeply mysterious. Despite the fact that, wherever we look, the range of styles of depiction is bewilderingly vast - sketches, cartoons, monochrome line drawings, pictures that make use of non-linear washes of colour, naturalistic photographs — most are directly recognisable for what they depict and seem to be recognisable to all of us. Yet at the same time others may be quite baffling, may seem to hover on borderlines between pictures and maps, iconic signs, often a mysterious interface between pictorial and linguistic signs. Even to recognise such puzzles is to pose questions concerning what it may be that such borderlines demarcate. The ancient record is no different. It is as if we were presented with a random collection of doodles from a bored lecture audience, marks, scribbles and

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patterns that seem pictorial but for which we have no access to the code, and at the same time directly recognisable pictures. Despite the huge differences that divide us from ancient humans or other cultures, pictures in all their variety seem to leap across these divides with the ease of mountain goats. Yet, whether in their universal recognisability or their stylistic motley and mystery, we tend to take pictures for granted. If ever there was a case for a universal human institution, untrammelled by the limitations of cultural divisions whether of time or space, the human practice of easy-to-recognise pictures would seem to provide it. The problems of classification and demarcation are dramatic. Picturelike marks clearly lie at the heart of ancient and modern written languages and what seem clearly to be pictures take off in directions of the strangest abstraction, yet none of this seems to threaten a paradigm of easy-to-recognise pictures. 1 Moreover, this astonishing ease of recognisablity seems to relate to no clear independent standard of visual similarity between the marked surfaces that embody pictures and what they depict: as any student of the history of art knows, as any reader of Gombrich will have reflected (cf. Gombrich 1960), the history of the pictorial is the history of an almost bewildering array of forms of depictive success and failure, capturing as much human variety as the most desperate relativist could wish and as much capacity to cross these apparent barriers as any committed universalist could desire. T h e search for a "common nature" is not a rejection of variety, but a search for an explanation of it.

Human nature and aesthetics Interest in pictures has been distorted by the association we tend naturally to make of pictures with Art. So the pictures that are found in ancient or "primitive" sites are standardly referred to as rock-art. But most pictures require no more direct linkage with art than most sentences we meet have essentially to do with literature. Yet no theory of either pictures or sentences that would make either visual art or literature baffling could be of any value. Moreover, a traditional idea seeks to locate the core concept of our humanity, not as it connects with particular aesthetic reactions, but in terms of the very nature of an aesthetic judgement itself. In the Critique of Judgement Kant famously, or notoriously, sought for the core nature of what it is to be humans, as "beings at once animal and intellectual" (CJ §5, Β 1 5 / A 15), first in our capacity for the inter-communication of what would otherwise be irreducibly subjective aesthetic judgements, judgements which without a priori hope for universal agreement would be not merely subjective but 1

See Harrison 1997, 1 Iff., where I discuss the category of "easy pictures" at greater length.

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irreducibly private, and then in what he speculated was the a priori grounding assumption for that hope, the assumption of a sensus communis — a "common sense" which provided, in his peculiarly awkward way of putting it, a "supersensible substrate of common humanity" (CJ §57, Β 2 3 7 / A 234). For Kant what is at stake is "universal communication without recourse to concepts" (CJ §21, Β 65-6/A 64-5). His thought here is serious, but is highly tangled and also slightly half-baked. It is a curious mixture of very traditional ideas (many of which we have lost fashionable sight of) and quite new, perhaps half-developed ones. But the motivation behind it is not silly. In his accounts both of pure theoretical or pure practical reason he is laying down principles for any intelligent beings whatsoever, not merely for "us humans" - as if his ethical theory would have to do for intelligent cabbages on Mars and his account of pure understanding for equally exotic, if rational, beings. Yet Kant's four projects for philosophy are to answer the questions, what can I (we) know? what ought I (we) to do? what may we hope? and what is man? (Logic A 25) The last two questions invoke a different philosophical style from the first. It is, startlingly, his account of humans as capable of aesthetic judgements that links them. For this centres on the thought that our sharing of our aesthetic responses with one another is constitutive of aesthetic judgement (however subjective), for here we celebrate a hope in a common humanity. In such contexts, as Kant puts it, we are merely "suitors" for agreement (CJ §19, BA 63). The point is that a suitor's plea, while not grounded on predictive certainty nor on any obligation for the object of his desires to comply, must still be grounded on a reasonable hope. Here the hope is that specifically human communication may survive without "recourse to concepts". This search for such a common sense, pre-dates Kant (cf. Summers 1987; Guyer 1997; 1993) and has nothing to do with Lockean "common sense" or with that common sense appealed to by Anglo-American philosophers in the '60s. It is a search for a non-conceptual, even non-cognitive, form of communication, something that lies outside the scope of coding, and thus undercuts differences of individual or cultural beliefs or desires. We might suppose that this would be easy to provide — as if any non-linguistic gesture or "body-language" would do — but what he is seeking should be more than that, something which at the same time has a much richer reflective content than any of this could even seem to provide. There might be two possible candidates for this type of "communication". It is as if the vague thought of both tends to influence a great deal of apparently quite ordinary thinking about pictures. Neither is very convincing, but there is something in the opposition between them that we need to reconcile if we are to get the point of pictures. One is what Kant calls the "form of finality" (CJ § 1 1 , BA 34-5) imaginatively understood, "grasped" without any theory of it depending on the "end", the external function or purpose of the whole, as we might grasp

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the workings of a watch or a steam engine as if it were a dynamic abstract sculpture. In this way we may understand a symphony or an abstract painting - or for that matter an ecological system - without having to make that understanding dependant on what the whole thing is for. This is dramatically different from the deliberate irresponsibility often associated with the rhetoric of aesthetic formalism. In the arts we might expect music to provide the best candidate, but this seems not to have been Kant's preferred example and it is not the one which has played the largest role in Twentieth Century hopes. One only has to think of the poignant political hopes associated with the Russian formalists immediately after the revolution, to the high idealistic hopes often associated with traditions of abstract art. Few are influenced by specifically Kantian thoughts, 2 but all seek something that a universal response to visual power seems to provide. The search here may baffle theory, but that is not a sufficient reason to think it foolish. Archaeology is a discipline, like detection and unlike many of the human sciences, where what fascinates is the dramatic paucity of evidence. Accordingly archaeologists have to be specially careful about what could count as data. Yet it is not obviously silly to suppose that when the aesthetic power of the ancient record strikes us, the aesthetic qualities of grace, mystery even, or especially the decorative aplomb of how what is represented is presented to us may be as significant as data as its discernible content (cf. Harrison 1992). Ancient art, as clearly as later art, celebrates the ways it represents and how such ways may embody further content beyond the mere recognition of what is depicted. Of Aristotle's many slogans for the nature of the human, the one that tells us that man is that animal that delights in mimesis (Poet. 1448 b 5-9) suggests not merely that humans imitate a lot but, more to the point, is peculiarly fascinated by the nature of imitation and celebrates that within the content of art. 3 This is not aesthetic formalism; it is, rather, a peculiar sort of aesthetic reflectiveness. Both Aristotle and Kant find that something at the heart of aesthetic activity connects a peculiarly human capacity for reflective rationality with a specific kind of sociability. It would be an unconscionable scepticism that located such things merely in the mind of the beholder. An alternative candidate is equally far from formalist. This is that simply, easily, recognisable pictures (perhaps, if less clearly, other non-linguistic forms of 2

There is evidence that Malevich was influenced by Islamic traditions in which perhaps very much the same universal, since in this case non-representational, communicability of quite abstract visual art is a central concept.

3

Aristotle's famous slogans concerning the human — that man is that animal that is rational, that man is that animal which is political, that man is that animal which delights in mimesis - are best thought of, I suggest, as a family whose mutually reinforcing connections are worth re-constructing.

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communication and representation, such as mime or gesture) are recognisable in their own right, thus "without recourse to [linguistically articulated] concepts". The most natural way of thinking about pictures that links these two candidates is the following: pictures have no direct linguistic equivalents,4 pictures not only depict but have their own essential compositional organisation, their "pictorial space". In all serious drawing and painting in art, pictures communicate not merely what they depict but irreducibly achieve that by at the same time celebrating the process of their own making. Any theory of pictures — for any culture — must address at least these concepts: ofpictorial representation, of composition and offacture and must at the same time show how these become re-integrated within the task of pictorial understanding, if it is to begin to do justice to the question of what pictures are (see Harrison 1991).

Defeating Babel In the modern "imaginary museum" of pictures, the most dramatic and best known examples of what seem to be universal communication are the animal rock paintings of Western Europe. There on the rock walls are recognisable animals manifestly seen by their makers as we would see them! (It is easy to overlook other quite baffling graffiti in the ancient record). The fact of ancient cave painting has at least as much significance for modern European thought as for the very ancient world. For it seems to have shaped or to have confirmed some quite deep assumptions about communication and thought. But are these pictures communications? The question seems odd. It seems improbable that such pictures were not intended to be seen by others (even if, sometimes, with restricted access to, perhaps, magical places), so by that token they were certainly artefacts of communication — of representation and recordmaking. They were far from being mere natural objects of wonder. They show us something about people. But mostly we can only guess at any fiirther purposes. If we ask what it is that they communicate beyond what we can see that they depict, we are at a loss. Frequently, when concerned with the non-linguistic arts, the idea that they "communicate" is tied to the idea that they communicate what could otherwise be put into words, that is to what only in words could encapsulate belief, desire or intention. The very success of these pictures seems automatically to rule this out. The very common belief, for example, that the large animals depicted in European ancient rock art serve the functions of sympathetic magic

4

See Baxendall 1985, where he argues for the non-equivalence of specifically pictorial content and what we may say about pictures. For further discussion of this, see Baxendall 1991; Lord / Benardete 1991.

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can only be conjectural, since we have no direct way of knowing such magical beliefs of the picture makers or perhaps any other beliefs. For that we would indeed (at least) require a language we could read and understand. It is as if some pictures — perhaps most — are so dramatically recognisable by us that their very obviousness causes theoretical problems. Others seem to be more obscure and difficult, and some of the "pictorial" records we find seem to be language-like and thus, more often than not, beyond our ken — to be untranslatable. Then first, we can suppose that what is "purely and simply" pictorial raises no problems of translation or interpretation. In recognising what it is that such pictures depict we not only do not need to have access to the beliefs of their makers, but via pictures alone could not have such access. We may, to be sure, be aware that we share similar beliefs concerning how things look, but pictures no more express such beliefs than the carefully constructed hand prints we find express the belief that their makers hands were very like ours. Graphic signs that encode beliefs are thereby not pictures, however blurred the borderline between the two may be. Consider the depiction of a saint with a halo: the halo is an iconic sign, equivalent to the words "this person is holy". One cannot directly picture that the saint is holy any more than one may depict that the saint lived so many years ago, or that he might not have been so holy had things been different. Such things are simply beyond the power of pictures to convey. The myth of the tower of Babel may be interpreted as a dramatic consequence of the fact that so long as translation is possible, if, in other words, meaning is encoded, then radical raw-translation is also possible. But, if we adopt a wellentrenched philosophical doctrine, semantics — that is to say the core of linguistic meaning — is a matter of belief, so then it would also seem to follow that the core concept of linguistic meaning can have no place in the pictorial. Hence, we might conclude, to be free from Babel's curse, as dramatically recognisable pictures seem to be, is to exclude a route for the transmission of belief. Moreover, the possibility of the "curse of Babel" is inherent in whatever it is that language is. The possibility of systematic misunderstanding (or of radical linguistic divergence) is the price language pays for embodying the possibility of understanding. By contrast the apparent core of easily recognisable pictures is recognisable to any of us, just so long as we are properly equipped with the standard visual senses and powers of common recognition. If "meaning" is a matter of the complex web of our beliefs,5 a web that characteristically changes over time, the readiest explanation of the power of the pictorial apparently to communicate over time and culture is that the pictorial has little or nothing to do with beliefs. We are not liable to misunderstand pictures of this sort, since they present no question of understanding one

5

The term is of course Quine's. Cf. Quine/Ullian 1978.

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way or another. What then we need for a theory of pictures would be, in this sense "causal" rather than cognitive. 6

Pictures as the extension of experience T h e most radical form of such a "causal" theory more or less amounts to thinking of pictures as an extension of visual experience. It deserves to be taken seriously, for its temptation is powerful. The universality in recognition of a standard sort of pictures might be very easily explained on the apparently simple basis of two more or less simple sorts of biological facts, one, our capacity for a certain dexterity in making, greatly enhanced by modern technology, the other our having (doubtless in common with many other animals) common visual perceptual abilities. This would certainly diffuse any problem of pictures being beyond Babel. It is important to contrast this idea with the far more naive one, famously attacked by Goodman (1976), that pictures represent via their perceived visual resemblance to what they depict. His arguments are familiar. Visual resemblance, by itself, is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for picturing and is, moreover, the wrong sort of concept to explain that which holds between a picture and its referent, since resemblance, unlike depiction, is a symmetrical relation. (If A depicts B, clearly it does not follow that Β depicts A). It does not follow from any of this however, as Goodman's rhetoric sometimes seems to suggest, that visual resemblance has nothing to do with depiction. For what any successful picture does establish in the recognition of what it depicts is a relevant visual resemblance. A monochrome line drawing, however it may manifestly differ in appearance from what we see it as a picture of, brings to the forefront of our attention-in-recognition just those visual aspects of the depicted object that capture the "look o f ' the object-as-depicted. What the power of the pictorial achieves is the establishing of relevant resemblance. Moreover "relevant resemblance" is in one appropriate sense symmetrical between picture and depicted object, for to recognise what a picture depicts is to recognise the object-as-depicted (or imagined) and conversely. The intentional object of successful depiction is then a relevantly recognised visual aspect. A deeply naturalistic strategy (radically different from Goodman's) might take off from this point. Consider photography. Photographs after all are pictures, and the technology of photography may, far from rendering hand-made pictures otiose, show us something newly apparent, yet essential to the very idea of pictures.

6

This use of the term is characteristically Wollheim's and is fashionable elsewhere. It is apparently intended to exclude a certain idea of the "encoded", rather than to endorse any particular theory of causation.

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For it is not unnatural to think of naturalistic, "photographic" pictures as something very like a sort of visual prosthesis, an extension of visual power.7 As mirrors enable us to see round corners, so photographs, videos or films enable us to see passed time (cf. Walton 1989). We might readily dismiss this out of hand for the simple reason that such a theory of pictures could only apply to those pictures which are directly causally related to whatever they depict in such a way that, like photographs and footprints, they are referentially transparent. (So it would directly follow from the fact that there is a photograph of someone or footprint of some foot that there was some foot or someone whose print or photograph it is). But this is too simple. It misses the point for just the same reason that it could not be an objection to a causal theory of perception that we may sometimes imagine what we do not directly perceive. In the case of pictures of imaginary objects, while causally guaranteed referential transparency is lost, the possibility of it in exactly comparable non-fictional cases would still provide us with a relatively simple set of "pictorial truth conditions": that this is how what is depicted would look if (by the appropriate extension of visual power) it were visible. This counterfactual thought, for which we can find precisely parallel thoughts for naturalistic linguistic fiction, is what captures the kernel of the idea of the primacy of naturalism for pictures. Such a concept of naturalism, paradoxically, cannot be restricted to the visually familiar. Extensions of sensory ability achieve what they do despite the extension often being dramatically unlike the sensory capacities they extend. They would have little value were it otherwise. Many such devices, while picture-like, we would not normally regard as pictures. Pictorial reproductions and photocopies of documents are not pictures of pictures or manuscripts. For all that, "extended seeing" certainly seems to overlap with what we are happy to think of as pictures. If a mirror enables us to see round corners, a set of mirrors in a periscope to see over the heads of those in front of us in a crowd, it is no very great extension of this idea to think of a video camera as a further device for this with the added advantage of enabling us to stop frames, play back and record. So by such devices we can use a camera to see "through" the barriers of past time as we may use a mirror to enable us to see across the more limited restrictions of space in face-to-face seeing. Then an X-ray camera enables us to see through normal optical barriers, and an infra red-camera or one sensitive to the ultra violet, enables us to see in a wider optical spectrum than our eyes are normally sensitive to. This use of pictures as sensory prosthetics depends on a well-entrenched concept of cause as tied to a particular sense. A white stick may, for example, enable a blind person to locate himself as his eyes might have done; it does not extend his

7 This has become a fashionable topic in recent discussions of pictures. See, for example, Lopes 1996.

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sight, but substitutes for it. By contrast, compared to bees we humans are all colour-blind in the ultra-violet spectrum and this is a sense we can extend our vision by new instruments. However, perception simpliciter is notperceptiveness. People may, for instance, be said to lack a sense of humour, of beauty, or justice, or be unable to see the point of a joke. We may have different views concerning the degree of subjectivity we might ascribe to these categories of judgement, but it is sufficient to show that these concepts of "sense" are not, like those attached to the normal five senses, simply causal conceptions of perception to observe that the very idea of a sensory aid to overcome such disabilities is manifestly absurd. (The suggestion of H u m e and certain modern followers of H u m e that the Lockean idea of secondary qualities might be usefully employed for the "moral sense" thus fails at the first hurdle.) Similarly, if the chance of an increase in perceptiveness is inherent in the pictorial, as it certainly must be, no account of pictures as sensory prosthetics could in principle provide an adequate account of it. Rather loosely connected with the idea of pictures as extensions of the visual sense is what is a rather obviously outrageous, magical, thought of pictures, the ghost of which nonetheless seems to haunt the pictorial and which shows a few signs of coming back into fashion as people become over-excited by the idea of "virtual reality". A quite proper acknowledgement of the imaginative power of the pictorial and its phenomenology may seduce us into strange belief. The traditional idea, often associated with Alberti (cf. Alberti [1540]), though perhaps for him it was no more than an illuminating metaphor, is that via a picture we are enabled to perceive beyond the limits of face-to-face seeing, to perceive into a different world of visual imagination, so that the boundary of a picture is a window on an imaginary world. We may render that thought far less magical by reiterating the qualifier "imaginary", to say that the "window" is itself imaginary but, since the most obviously powerful capacity of pictures is to depict visually imagined, fictional objects, the magical thought remains that via the power of depiction we may visually reach beyond mundane reality into a further, different, even "higher" domain. Perhaps it is not over-fanciful to suppose our remote ancestors tempted in the same direction. As if those ancient cave walls were the direct ancestors of the seductive computer screen and its adjuncts. Plato's cave would be somewhere along the way. Follies and their attendant fears may be as persistent among humans as anything else. However this view of the pictorial, in this respect like naive resemblance accounts, reverses the proper order of explanation. From the fact that pictures and picture-like devices may be used prosthetically, it does not follow that such uses could explain the pictorial. It is the pictorial itselfú\a.t has to explain this possibility, which after all applies at best only to a very limited variety of pictures. To rely on the "facts of perception" together with appropriate facts of dexterity alone

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leaves us with the absurd conclusion that familiar, easy-to-recognise, pictures belong to two quite different categories, despite the fact that in making pictures, in the process of building up a finished work from its beginnings, the transition between the two varieties of picturing is seamless.

Projective seeing W e need right at the start an appropriate account, not merely of perception and recognition but also of imagination. T h e question is then: what concept of imagination could in principle explain the variety and ubiquity of pictures? In many ways the best and most sophisticated account of the "causal" power of the pictorial is Richard Wollheim's (cf. Wollheim 1987). Here I shall merely sketch it. This derives the general phenomenon of our being able to recognise pictures from "projective" imagination. Idiomatically, seeing one thing "in" another, castles in the air, animals in a marked surface, is the starting point of Wollheim's account of pictures. In Wollheim's idiom: if "seeing as" involves (visually or imaginatively) identifying one thing with another, whether illusionistically or fictionally or factually, "seeing in" carries no such implication. If, as Leonardo recommended, we imaginatively see landscapes or painting of battles in crumbling surfaces of walls8, we do not - even as an act of the wildest fictional imagination - think of the wall surface as a landscape or battle scene. Wollheim has it that to recognise a genuine picture with appropriate understanding is to engage with projective seeing - with a primitive capacity for "seeing-in" - not as in the case of seeing images in the clouds as the free play of imagination but, in the case of pictures, with "criteria of correctness". T h e strength of Wollheim's account is that this connects with what he has dubbed twofoldness. That is to say that, since at no point are we required to think of the beholder of a picture, whether on canvas or ancient rock surface as even - however fancifully - imagining that surface as what it depicts, it follows that we can, and often must, think of the beholder, whether ancient rock-painter or modern interpreter of paintings, as being able to attend at one and the same time both to what the surface depicts and to how the surface is marked and handled and to integrate both forms of attention in his understanding

8

T h e discussion of this passage as it moves between Gombrich and Wollheim is instructive. O n e of the ambiguities in the debate is whether Leonardo recommends seeing compositions, or ideas for composition, in crumbled walls or rather recommends seeing landscapes or battles: as we might consider the difference between seeing pictures in the clouds or objects that might be pictured, i.e. how far this kind of "projective" visual imagination presupposes pictures or is a primitive beginning for depiction. T h e distinction only matters so long as we attempt to place a large theory on such foundations. See also my review of Wollheim's Paintingas an Art (Harrison 1989), where I discuss this at greater length.

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of the picture. 9 The consequence then is that a proper, informed, response to a picture will inevitably be an experience liable to have these two aspects of attention. In my view, the corresponding weaknesses of his account all connect with his need to use a relatively unexplained concept of "criteria of correctness", 10 for this idea must surely demand a far greater stress on "cognitive" concepts than he wishes to place. Specifically pictorial thought requires defending in its own right.

Drawing What archaeologists find ranges in style from the dramatically recognisable to the impenetrably abstract - the outcome of drawing. Drawing is activity whose cognitive content is a process of realisation. What is communicated via the pictorial medium, what is made, is how what is depicted is seen, recognised. The communication may enable others to realise this and normally enables the maker to realise it. If drawing is the heart of the matter, this conception of the core concept of the pictorial is thus of a process of knowledge - a process conducted in the development of a marked surface, rock, paper, canvas as it becomes a depiction. The concept of knowledge here is however of a peculiar sort. W e might think that, if drawing is picture-making, all that could be sought as the object of knowledge could be how the depicted object looks and (implicitly) how that may be recorded. Pictorial "truth conditions" would then be simply whether the result was visually recognisable for what was intended. A witness may describe an assailant to the police artist, who tests the result against a drawing of the accused, then recognised as a "good" drawing by the witness, so that further enquiry may proceed towards fully identifying the criminal in court. But in fact the situation is inevitably subtler than that. The co-operation between draftsman and witness splits into a dialogue what in other cases may go on within one agent's processes of depictive exploration. For what the process of drawing explores (rather manifestly as the police artist co-operates with the witness who lacks the graphic skills) 9

What we might, in contrast, call the thesis of differential attention - that we cannot both attend to the marked surface of a picture and at the same time to what it depicts — is central to Gombrich's account. See [1959], 154ff. It is central to the role he gives to a concept of illusion in his account of pictures. 10 The passage in Painting as an Art is instructive: if the cave painter is successful, Wollheim tells us, "so that the bison can be seen in the surface as he has marked it, then the community closes ranks in that someone who does indeed see a bison in it is now held to see the surface correctly ... now, the marked surface represent a bison" (1987,48). This type of pictorial "social contract" seems hard to believe even as a kind of metaphor: it lacks any corresponding appeal to the necessity for a form of agreement. For one thing it makes it hard to understand why we are so sure that the picture represents a bison. Whatever we may have in common with ancient painters, it is hard to see how we have closed the same ranks with them.

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is not simply "what the assailant looked like" but rather how the assailant looked in terms of the drawing. If all the police artist has is a grey pencil, it would hardly do for the witness to object that the perpetrator was not a mass of grey lines. It matters that there is here no reason to assume that she has a ready-made visual representation of what she saw, for it is the activity of drawing itself that makes this for her and in doing so establishes that representation. To a large extent all processes of description, whether those that use language or the development of pictures, work in this way. Drawing establishes its own methods of representation as it goes along in quite radical ways. Unlike language, pictures do not depend on prior vocabularies and definitions. The word "realise" seems to pun more than it does. For the concept of "realising" is in all sorts of ways the most readily available concept for the cross-linking of psychological or phenomenological ideas with ideas of reality. Mostly, what one may come to realise is what one knew, but did not know that one knew, or believe but not have been reflectively aware of believing, see but not have been fully aware of seeing. In this sense realising occurs at the successful points in a process when what we realise is what becomes real, vivid for us. These ideas tend to be naturally opposed to one another, except when the context for this thought is a concept of knowledge. For what seems real to us is surely a matter of subjective imagination; we take ourselves to be mostly rather dimly aware of how things really are, and it is unquestionable that what we are most vividly aware of, even when correct, is most likely at best to be a mere portion of how things are. But also incorporated within this family of ideas is the thought of something being made real, being made apparent to public inspection by being embodied, fleshed out, fully formed into a performance or an artefact: what is thought, hoped, believed or experienced is realised in this sense within a work, a public object. This cross-connection of concepts is perhaps too familiar to labour at within the context of linguistic communication and expression: it is the core and root of the very idea of understanding and thus of knowledge being what is communicable, open to public sharing and inspection, and at the same time of thought, awareness, reflection, being indissolubly linked to concepts of language. As Dennett (1985) and others have put it, realising what you want or believe, forming an opinion, rather than merely having a belief, seems to be one of the things that specifically contrasts human cognition with what we are more readily prepared to ascribe to animals. Animals may have beliefs on a friendly view of our dogs. On the friendliest of views, as Dennett reminds us, it is hard to ascribe opinions to them. Opinions are the outcomes of realising and the world of realising seems to be too rich for the kinds of cognitive capacities we, on present evidence, seem happy to ascribe to even the higher animals. The ideas we have of realisation tie the conception of knowledge and language being public together with the idea that "self-communication" (the process of understanding and recording ones own

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thought) is not a contrary conception of this but a complement to it. Much the same must apply to pictures also. 11 What is required is a cognitive account of pictures that captures this but does not conflate the cognitive with the potentially, or tacitly, linguistic. For many it is simply obvious (and has from time to time been a doctrine of faith for analytic philosophy) that the very idea of thought that cannot be expressed in language is an absurdity. For supposing there was essentially pictorial thought, how might a n y o n e ^ , (or write) what that thought was? The "thought" becomes irreducibly elusive. This is a bad, because circular, argument, but a hard one to exorcise. For what, among other things, is peculiar to language is that only linguistic communication is capable of comments on it own content (cf. Harris 1996a). One cannot have a picture which "says" (that is depicts) of another picture, or of itself, that it is fictional, accurate, interesting or arresting, any more than one can have a picture of three blind mice that depicts the thought that if there were enough cats, these might well be the very last three blind mice there would ever be. The "meta-language" for both language and for any other forms of communication must be language. The content of the purely pictorial remains at an irreducibly "primary" level.

Non-arbitrary signs The most familiar contrast between pictures as signs and sentences is that pictures are not arbitrary signs. 12 In a sense there is nothing wrong with this. A picture of a cat, either via relevant resemblance or direct recognition, is non-arbitrarily a sign for a cat, whereas we require learned conventions, codes and rules to connect the word "cat" with the animal in question. It matters, however, how we make that contrast. For on the one hand there is a perfectly good sense in which the grammatical distinction between subject and predicate in the phrase "black cat" is non-arbitrarily connected to a "natural" distinction between things and their properties at the level of more complex signs; similarly on the other hand, if we deconstruct even the simplest pictures, the marks we are left with may be as arbitrary as we like. 13 Consider how a drawing "works", whether as we may construe it or as it gets made, as it develops into an adequate depiction. The simplest adequate, that is to

11 Roy Harris ( 1996) has, to my mind convincingly, argued that this form of "self-directed" realisation or communication lies at the centre of any linguistic capacity for public communication. For an account of the idea of a process of practical knowledge, see Harrison 1987. 12 An account of this as far as it concerns pictures is Summers 1991. 13 See Wollheim 1993. I think this is a bad argument. See Harrison 1997, 56ff.

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say just recognisable, drawings, which are far more familiar as doodles, the depictive marginalia of representational systems, are drawings of those things for which we do seem to have more or less ready-made recognitional expectations. Faces in this way come first in the order of simplicity (for good evolutionary reasons: any species needs to recognise members of its own species) though surprisingly, not in the order of children's pictorial development, where whole bodies seem to come earlier than mere faces. A face can be drawn adequately with just four marks, two "eyes" a "nose" in between and a "mouth". What matters is the overall pattern. Within the structure each mark carries the look of an eye, nose or mouth and, again within that pattern the mouth can be varied to make a smile or an unhappy mouth. No outline is needed, no distinction, of which psychologists of recognition are so fond, between figure and ground. The schema of the pattern will do the trick, and is, moreover, essential for the trick. Outside the pattern none of the marks have any depictive power, or, more precisely, they have that power just so long as we, the beholders of the picture, can retain the overall sense of the pattern. This is how it is possible for the Cheshire Cat to fade away leaving his grin behind him. In this sense a propensity to see ghosts as the residuum of the familiar seems part and parcel of a capacity to construe and construct pictures. It is worth experimenting with the cat's face (to be a full-on cat-face ears seem to be necessary), erasing all the marks except the grin and asking people how long it takes the grin to "fade". Most people report about thirty seconds for the ghost to sustain itself, which is presumably how long we can retain the peculiar kind of short-term memory of the overall drawing's structure. Once the smile has faded, all we are left with is a curved horizontal line which has as arbitrary a connection to a cat's smile as to anything else. The principle here is perfectly general, though its application may be quite dramatic in its particularity. It makes pictures to be a sub-species of that kind of representational modelling system of which maps, diagrams and models are other species. These different species overlap and frequently blur into one another, but the general principle is simple. It is that a picture is a. structural analogue, such that in terms of a recognised common visual pattern between the marked surface and its referent we can pair elements in the marked surface with corresponding elements in what it (fictionally or otherwise) depicts. The corollaries of this are fairly obvious but their significance is frequently overlooked. A consequence of the fact that the "elements" within the structure have no depictive force on their own is this. We may think of any picture (or sometimes part of a picture) as having its own depictive mesh. The idea of a picture's "mesh" is simple enough. This is that if we take a more or less elaborate picture, we may begin by breaking it down into details, so a whole figure will permit an isolated detail of a hand or an eye, a complex landscape a house, path or tree. Any detail of a picture is a perfectly intelligible picture fragment which is itself a picture. But

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below the mesh of a picture there will be fragments that are not themselves pictorially significant, since too much of the structure which provides the significance will be lost.14 Language, too, is a system of signs which requires an adequate structure to "work". Where theory becomes more detailed and theories collide is over questions such as what it is that grounds that structure, whether it is learnt, somehow built in for all language users, and what its overall or "deeper" nature is, and indeed whether such a search will yield a plausible "human universal".15 Just as sentences within paragraphs are perfectly intelligible as small bits of a larger linguistic significance, so phrases within sentences are similarly intelligible, but below a given level of fragmentation linguistic significance is lost: we have mere letters or syllables. Pictures share this too, even though the "structures" of significance are different. If deep within grammar there is a chance of finding a human universal, by the same token we would have the same chance of finding a parallel instinct within pictorial competence. Here, I am prepared to be quite agnostic concerning what such an "instinct" would amount to. I am less sceptical in the case of pictures concerning the chance of locating quite general cognitive regularities. Pictures are not a kind of language. Certainly their content is not reducible to language, for if pictures have a "syntax", it will be radically simpler than any linguistically grammatical forms. Simply put, the "syntactic structure" of a picture will be relational at one level only: so the form of a picture will be more or less equivalent to the sign pattern "aRb", where our grasp of "R", the relational pattern (in the case of a face: how the salient features are arranged) at the same time indicates what the relata are. Subject-predicate patterns, elaborate bracketing, thus modal contents which essentially depend on scope rules will be beyond the limits of purely pictorial representation. In consequence, if narrative requires concepts of cause, consequence, possibility or responsibility, the irreducible linguistic ingredients for telling a story, it follows that narrative must be strictly beyond the power of the pictorial. Pictures may illustrate stories, but by themselves they are unable to tell them. If archaeologists of ancient art have only pictures to go on, while they may guess at appropriate narrative, they can in principle only do this. The simplest way to diagnose the underlying "syntax" of a system of communication is to see how it may be radically ("grammatically") misunderstood. For instance if we see a set of logical symbols "aRb" 16 (or in more usual notation

14 I enlarge on this in various publications, most recently in Harrison 1997, 71. 15 A popular account of how such theories may be defended is Pinker 1995. 16 This form of symbols is of course Wittgenstein's in the Tractatus. It is the heart of his "picture theory of meaning". My view has always been that in effect Wittgenstein was, there, essentially correct in his account of pictures, and that his error was to assimilate language to that model.

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"R,a,b") as representing a triad rather than a triple we have thereby misunderstood the (conventional) fact that the lower case "a" and "b" indicate symbols for what is related, "R" the relation. Much the same applies to drawing, with an important difference. Powerful drawing depends on a concentration of the maximum of depictive resources with the most economical graphic devices. Good drawing, like poetry, concentrates its resources. For example, marks may indicate objects that, as we grasp the sense of the drawing, we see as standing in a relation to one another (as in the case of the dots for eyes in the schematic drawing of a face), relations between one seen object and another (as in the case of the simplified drawn outline of profile or a teacup) or the directions of planes (as with "constructional" cross hatching). More frequently, as in the drawing of a hair line or the fold of an eyelid, the lines may play multiple roles: that of indicating seen "objects" - here a physical fold or crease and that of depicting an organising relationship - such as the changing direction of a surface in the bony structure of the face. These depictive possibilities are not reducible to linguistic equivalents. If a drawing is made before an object, this forces the maker of the drawing to seek those features of the object that permit this in terms of the materials used. Hence to see the drawing in the object to be drawn is a developing process of attention that cannot be separated from its apparent converse. To draw in pencil, coloured wash, oil-paint or charcoal requires that what is seen-to-be-drawn is seen as much in terms of those media as that the developing marked surface is seen in terms of the depicted object. Methods of drawing do not only select for what they can depict (as for example monochrome media rather trivially "select out" colour) but more subtly they select for what can be depicted with the greatest economy, the richest use of multiple roles of depictive marks. A second corollary is metaphysical. It depends on the weak metaphysical assumption that reality is inevitably more complex than any model, map or picture of it may be. For any structural analogue will "work", however simple, just so long as it provides a possible recognition-aspect for what is depicted. Almost all pictures, like any maps, will be radical simplifications of what they depict. There will be innumerable ways in which a picture may be an adequate depiction, as well as a limitless number of ways in which it may fail. The construction of a depictive model, in this case a drawing, is the construction of patterns of salience for the imaginative grasp we may have of its referent. In the case of pictures it is the drawing which in this sense creates how we may make visual sense of what it depicts: drawings establish, do not, that is, merely record the recognisable "looks" of things. There are two consequences of this. One is that salience in depiction (like salience in all modelling systems) is a product of the material practice of drawing, of the medium adopted, of what in a quite deep sense we may call the depictive style. "Style" in this sense does not refer to a way of doing something

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(say, make a picture of a large animal) which could have been done differently, but to what determines different depictive enterprises (see Harrison 1992).

Beyond depiction A final corollary relates to all this and we may see it as explaining the role of Wollheim's "twofoldness" in our response to visual art. This is that the pictorial mesh size (which will vary from picture to picture, even from one part of a picture to another) will in different ways invite attention to the made qualities of the marked surface: its "facture". T h e pictorial mesh scale is, of course, an actual physical size that has its own relation to the visual size of the marked rhythm of the drawn or painted surface. In the case of a "highly finished" painting the brush strokes, will, for example be very much smaller than the lower limit of the picture's mesh. In the case of a painterly "expressive" picture the relation may be the other way about, so that a whole brush stroke may depict a body-part or outline. Normally in most drawing the mesh is smaller than the marked rhythms. In some cases it may be that virtually the whole object may be depicted in a manifestly continuous line. These relationships between the pictorial pattern and the overall pattern of the picture's facture control our simultaneous attention to what is depicted and to how it is depicted (thus "twofoldness") and at the same time establish the depictive authority, the direction of salience in recognition, in terms o f the picture's overall composition - what in Kant's terms we should call its "form of finality".17 A more radical consequence is this: only those things for which we can construe an internal pattern can be directly depicted in this way. This means that simple "qualities" cannot be depicted. This can seem to be quite counter-intuitive. Surely not only the simple colours and textures of things can be pictorially represented, but equally importantly their aesthetic qualities can be. Such qualities as the gracefulness of a nude, the graceful or massive quality of a tree, or the relaxed or vibrant nature of a landscape feature are central to the resources of depiction. Visual art would be unintelligible were this not so. T h e only possible "answer" to this is, I suggest, of considerable importance for aesthetics. This is that projective depiction - the devices by which we identify the object-as-depicted - permits a further, quite different, form of representation, what G o o d m a n has called "representation by exemplification" (1976; 1978). As engineers' models exemplify the properties they represent for investigation, so pictures or sculp-

17 Wollheim's concept of stylistic "thematization" (1987, 20-27) has far closer links to a Kantian account than he might acknowledge.

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tures may exemplify aesthetic properties they explore. (It matters that they also need not do so). Both are ways of isolating and investigating such properties in their own right. The relaxed, graceful quality of a nude, the energy of an embrace, has to be represented in so far as those qualities are exemplified in the "abstract" qualities of the depiction itself. If we take pictures seriously, we cannot evade the implication that to achieve this such qualities of marked and depicting surfaces have to be accepted as data quite as firmly as the apparently better entrenched qualities of colour or form. 18

Simple drawing devices — in a system? How do the devices of drawing fit within the context of other forms of communication? Gombrich famously placed at the centre of Art and Illusion an account of visual and pictorial schema for kinds of objects (cf. Gombrich 1960). I suggest that we should not attend to schematic patterns in this way, but rather to schematic patterns as "drawing strategies". Drawing, then, by its nature, quite independently of its content, has the implicit power to integrate a variety of forms of communication. This power to go beyond the visually given, to "construct a structure" for it, is peculiar to the power of drawing itself. We may refer to it in language, but it has no real linguistic equivalent. Attempting to describe essentially drawing virtues in purely linguistic terms without at least tacit access to recalled cases will be as hopeless a task as attempting comparable linguistic equivalents for the marvellous use of musical structures. For example, what we see as optically given contains no marks for the direction or recession of planes on the surface of a solid. Similarly, while what we see as discriminable objects within the visual field must present horizons, such horizons rarely present outlines as linear drawing presents them. The laws of optics and of perception may make outline shadows or contrasts directly apparent, but drawing goes far beyond this. It is possible, though rare, to "misread" a picture's "syntax" in this way, as one might misconstrue a monochrome pen drawing of an unflawed face which celebrates the direction of surfaces as a depiction of a wrinkled face, or a heavily emphasised outline drawing as a picture of an object with dark lines round it. What ought to surprise us is how rarely we do this. Pictures are often described as if their simplifications are "driven" by recognition devices we have for the familiar ingredients of the world, so that the depictive style of a drawing may provide evidence of how the world of the picture maker is

18 I expand o n the implications of this in Harrison 1993. It is important for m y argument that "entrenched" aesthetic qualities of this sort are not ascribed metaphorically, as G o o d m a n would have it, to depictive devices, but literally. I argue for this in Harrison 1987a.

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seen or even conceived. But while prior recognition schema may play an important part, the simplest evidence seems to be against it being anything like the whole story. Just as often recognition patterns derive as directly from drawingstrategies. Consider, for example, how humans (those most recognisable of objects for other humans) may be drawn, not with skill and artistry but as any more or less competent amateur may be inclined to. What emerges is something far closer to general depictive strategies than to any mere recognition patterns. H o w might simple depictive strategies inter-connect as if there were an analogue not with language as such but with the patterns of linguistic grammar? Here is a simplified, and highly speculative story of how four very simple depictive devices may inter-connect with each other, then with two more sophisticated ones, to produce the full richness of pictorial possibility. It has, I suggest, some chance of being a sketch of what is correct and, if so, universal. It is this type of depictive regularity we should seek within the variety of human picture-making rather than the various patterns of perceptual recognition-schema outside the constraints of depiction. One simple strategy I have mentioned already, namely, the minimal fourmark picture of a face, two marks for the eyes, one each for the nose and mouth. In this case we construe the relevant structure from the relations of the marks to each other (see Fig. 1). A second example might be a quite different drawing of a face which is virtually all outline, a profile in which we may locate the features. Closed outlines of this sort will then permit figure-ground contrasts, but this is not the heart of the matter, which is, rather, the representation of the "structure" of visual space as opposed to the elements within it (Fig. 2). A third, which seems to be quite generally characteristic of the drawings of young children and which seems to be so stylistically constant that it is remarkably hard for most adults to successfully imitate, essentially consists of "blob" areas, more reminiscent of lumps than outlined shapes, one for the head, another for the body, with highly schematic arms and legs "stuck on" at places made appropriate by the mere relative position of the blobs (Fig. 3). The different strategies here may be integrated with one another. The first kind of schematic face may then be placed within the upper blob. Normally, this simple blob-pattern permits a wide range of scribbles or more or less free paint handling that celebrates the blob-making itself. What is interesting about these pictures, beyond their ubiquity, is that they seem to have no direct connection with how their makers recognise individuals. N o child would be expected to mistake her mother for a chrysanthemum (or a chrysanthemum-potato hybrid) on the grounds that that is how she draws her. A fourth example, however apparently simple, goes further. This is the familiar, highly schematic pattern of stick-figures that represent not the characteristic outline of a body, but more simply and more analytically, how the ridged limbs

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Figure 2:

Figure 3:

Figure 4:

Four simple drawing strategies, in this case of the most standardly recognisable objects we haveourselves. It is important that such drawings can succeed even when done very unskilfully. They are not inter-reducible to one another but can always be integrated with each other. As drawings they 'take o f f ' from recognition patterns towards a depictive life of their own that is not tied to how we 'see' types of things — in this case ourselves — (nor, normally, our beliefs about them).

articulate with semi-rotating joints (Fig. 4). Here, how the drawing is constructed seems to depend on a dynamic understanding of the body's engineering. In this last case (unlike the others) it is much as if such drawings illustrate an underlying theory of bodily motion, as a picture may illustrate a story or, indeed, as a model may illustrate a theory. Stick figures are cognitively sophisticated. Unlike other strategies, they make a connection with what is the proper domain of language, with explanatory theories of actions. Each of these strategies is radically different from the others, but they may be integrated together to generate more sophisticated depictions. If we add just two more, very much more sophisticated, depictive devices, it is not unfanciful that we have a virtually sufficient repertoire for much of the range of drawing and painting we can find anywhere. O n e addition would be that set of devices that explore the patterns of three dimensional volumes, the direction of planes as they retreat towards horizons, so that the system of marks may modulate from plane-

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indicators to horizon indicators and thus permit salient features such as shadows, creases, junctions to be incorporated within the same depictive search. The other is, of course, perspective in its various forms. A far more sophisticated concept of a drawing-system comes into play as we consider drawing as requiring a more and more exact projective geometry, so that the system that "connects" unit areas in the depicting surface with corresponding units in the depicted world can be given more or less precise mathematical precision. For example parallel-oblique drawing, which corresponds more or less precisely with how a sun-cast shadow on an upright wall may relate to the object that cast the shadow, will provide a rule for visual foreshortening, but no rule for how seen objects appear to diminish with distance. If the imaginary projection lines converge, as it were by an inversion of the visual cone for an eye point, the varieties of optical perspective can be geometrically developed. Perspective is not ubiquitous in picture-making and should not be confused with the simple use or the representation of occlusion, even of the occlusion of distant objects by nearer if smaller ones. It is far more precise than that. And it depends in all its varieties on a theory of optical perception together with partial replication, and in the history of visual art seems to be dependant for its introduction on the presence, and pressure, of a quite specific question, namely: how would the object-depicted look from a given point of view? In standard perspective, that point of view is normally, but not inevitably assumed to be occupied "in theory" both by the picture's maker and by the beholder, much as in a certain sort of story the imaginative point of view of the narrator may be taken up by the reader or listener. The point hardly has to be laboured that there is nothing inevitable about this, nothing in the very idea of describing or depicting something, that requires that it be depicted or described as imagined in this way. Wollheim's insistence on the primacy of the visual in picturing, as well as on the non-interpretative nature of pictorial recognition, leads him to reject very firmly any connection between pictures and maps (one of Gombrich's nagging themes is that pictures can be thought of either as maps or as mirrors; cf. 1982). We need, he insists, to learn to read a map; we do not need to learn to read pictures to recognise them for what they are. In the case of sophisticated maps it is certainly true that many of the signs for such things as parish boundaries and rights of way certainly do need de-coding via the key of conventions, normally published with them. But such highly conventional de-coding (where maps overlap with and integrate their significance with linguistic signs) need not be regarded as basic. There is no reason why drawings need not be seen as maps of the visual world of the kind that do not normally require such decoding. 19 19 See Alpers 1983.1 am here especially indebted to her chapter o n "the mapping impulse in D u t c h Art" (119ff.).

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For the form of the drawing strategies identified above more or less exactly parallels those found in all sorts of informal sketch maps, including those found in other and more distant cultures. The form of these drawing strategies, however various the style of facture, can be found quite generally in both maps and pictures. Ease of recognition may be lost as we depart from the familiar features of our visual space. Strategies for representing them in the modelling of drawing do not need to be. The minimal salient object strategy seems to be effective not just for those familiar objects for which we do seem to have some "ready-made" recognition pattern, but also for those things that we do not, but for which it may be plausible to suppose their makers did have. Landscape pictures, depictions of the look of a landscape from a point of view, are rare in the ancient or distant record. More "abstract" mapping representations of landscape seem to be far commoner. Similarly, if someone casually asks in a pub for you to show them the way to somewhere it will be far easier, as well as more appropriate, to make a sketch map than to provide a topographical drawing, which would possibly show you how to recognise a place when you arrived but would hardly help you to get there. So a sketch map of a group of significant objects, dwellings, perhaps may simply be a pattern of salient marks arranged in such a way that the group is thus depicted. A different sort of map may depict salient areas, corresponding more or less to the child's "blob" drawing to how a wood or boggy area may stand to other significant features in a landscape. Salient outlines of coastlines or horizons profile recognisable areas of space as in the familiar form of a desert island map. What corresponds to the schematic dynamic drawing in "stick figures" is characteristic of many early travellers', especially seafarers', maps and charts, where the lines drawn to connect salient places (ports, small islands) correspond not to features of the earth's surface but to what in terms of such space a traveller or sailor may have to do, to the direction, if not reliably the distance, a sailor may have to turn to go from one landfall towards another or to the significance of specific landfall clues. The use of marks to represent not horizons but contours is familiar in most modern maps: they only remotely correspond to captured appearances or to the looks of landscape, yet that departure from appearance is already inherent in all drawing, thus in all pictures. We do not normally think of maps developing in the direction of optical replication. But this is a mistake. If perspective presents a view from somewhere, a map may present a view from (effectively) anywhere, or what may do as well: from an effectively infinite distance, as in a parallel oblique projection of a landscape, from above. By lowering the horizon until the "view-point" is both above and then so high above that it might as well be at no particular point above the landscape, we can trade quite smoothly between mapping projections of landscapes and pictures of them. The familiar (so apparently trivial) fact that maps

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may be made by geometrically reconstructing views from aeroplanes or satellites shows dramatically how from quite simple drawing strategies of mapping visible space, we may converge quite naturally on that sort of depiction that may plausibly be seen as sensory extension: we can be got to "see" from where we cannot normally be. What the connection of pictures with maps shows is how the power of drawing is a capacity to develop either towards visual "naturalism" or towards the extremes of abstracted visual space. T h e corresponding "disconnection" from maps may be obvious enough. It occurs when maps require conventional (linguistic) de-coding. But that need not apply to all maps. What seems to be a deep gulf between the cognitive and the causal in recognition, drawing thus traverses smoothly. The motley of picture-making does not simply derive from visual perception, however central that must be, but in how we can make organised, spatial sense of it. It is this which on the one hand itself establishes the aesthetic potential of pictures to communicate independently of encoded systems of belief, and on the other enables pictures to integrate with other non-linguistic systems. Picturemaking (drawing) belongs in a continuum with all those graphic processes, including those kinds of directional, "drawing in the air" gestures we make with our hands when asked directions. We draw, map, model the spaces in which we find ourselves, in pictures the visual space. Making this kind of organised spatial sense of these aspects of our experience is also part and parcel with what it is to make it communicable, since realising what we see is to make the experience communicable to ourselves, by making a new reality of it. But what pictures cannot do - notably, depict that "something might be possible if so and so", report cause, consequence, or responsibility, all of which is the stuff of explanation and narrative (and thus of ethics and morality) - is irreducibly linguistic. 20 A consequence of what I am here suggesting is how more widespread a human grasp of aesthetic values must be (within the possibilities of systems of communication) than a corresponding grasp of ethical values may be, however great the variety of agreement. For the former category is inherent in both systems, the latter only in relatively sophisticated linguistic ones. Drawing is but one strand in human mental lives, which are not and cannot be purely and simply linguistic. So where should we go from here? If it is really true that "we" as humans must be seen to possess irreducible pictorial cognitive capacities then we will be faced with a further set of questions that belong to a wider domain of theory than that pursued here, namely how we then adopt further devices for integrating such different modes of representation. Some such devices are dramatically familiar in the visual arts and have become 20 I say more about this in the final chapter of Harrison 1997, 149ff.

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central to art historical interpretation at least since Panofsky ([1927]). Such questions have inevitable parallels in archaeology and anthropology. A very trivial example would be the use of graphic devices such as haloes to indicate the saintliness of a depicted person or the use of scale or other compositional devices to indicate status. W e might think of the dramatically different pictorial styles used for depicting humans as opposed to animals within the record of ancient European rock art. In essence such devices work "propositionally", are virtually equivalent to linguistic expressions such as "here is a holy (humble or special) person". However, such devices notoriously trade on the borderline between the linguistic and the pictorial and seem to require, moreover, that beholders may both understand and in some ways be able to reflect on that. For example, while it would be a manifest mis-reading of a picture of a Byzantine saint to see him as wearing a soup plate on his head, it would not be such a misreading of a Leonardo Virgin to see her as so holy that we are presented with the "optical fiction" that she has a visible aura. In the case of pictorial art from strange or remote cultures, it will be as difficult to interpret such forms of representation as it can be to interpret remote languages. W e may simply not have access to the relevant conventions. O n a plausible Panofskian view, even pictorial "projection devices" such as the use of optical perspective may have this "symbolic" function over and above a purely pictorial one. Clearly an account of written languages that in any way emerge via pictograms, towards linguistic ideograms will involve all the complexities of this sort of cognitive negotiation. A second, more philosophical, and more speculative set of questions really centre on the question whether our human "thought" about space, as opposed to its representation, must be essentially pictorial in my sense. A further set of questions centres on whether, if we have a human cognitive "universal", it is confined to humans. Since, manifestly, spatial cognition seems to be well within the capacities of people, and perhaps many other animals, who cannot draw or make very good pictures, a sensible answer to this question might seem to be a resounding "no". But the issue is not quite as simple as that. T h e underlying suggestion in what I have to say is that pictures stand to pictorial thought much as sentences stand to linguistic thought. I am personally not highly persuaded by the idea that theory of an underlying "language of thought" or "mentalese" is required to explain human language. All I could say is that if a case can be made for it, an equally good case may be made for a parallel, and different, pictorial "mentalese". What tempts me far more is the idea that our capacities to render our cognitive articulation of space, then of visual space overt to ourselves and public to the shared reflections of others, resides in our parallel capacities to make, behold and interpret maps, diagrams and then, to complete the parallel, pictures. What makes even this more modest proposal difficult to handle is that it still remains that our reflections about such abilities must be inherently linguistic. A consequence of

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this will be that pictures then invite negotiations with language which language need not invite with the pictorial. H o w far we might share such capacities for what I have called "realisation" with some other animals still seems to me to be a further, and quite proper, question. But it is not a question we could begin to answer so long as we are unsure quite what it is that human picture making and understanding really is.

Universality and Cultural Particularity in Visual Aesthetics Wilfried van Damme

Human beings capable of vision share the experience of perceiving visual stimuli that provide them with pleasure, whereas others cause them displeasure. But what else do they share in terms of visual preference? Are there perhaps "aesthetic universals" — and what do we in fact mean by that? Rather than addressing this topic, many contemporary scholars dealing with aesthetics, influenced by postmodern claims of radical relativism, would insist on the cultural specificity or indeed uniqueness of evaluations of visual beauty, up to the point of considering the whole subject of universals in aesthetics anathema. But do the available data really allow us to give no serious thought to universal dimensions that might on several levels be involved in assessments of visual attractiveness? This essay will explore questions of universality and cultural particularity in aesthetics by drawing on data from several disciplines, with an emphasis on empirical research carried out by anthropologists and art scholars in various of the world's cultures. The universal patterns which I suggest exist will then be tentatively interpreted within an evolutionary framework. 1 A systematic discussion of visual aesthetics from a global perspective - panhuman and pancultural - might profit from an analytical differentiation between several types of universals. W e may begin by drawing a distinction between transcultural and pancultural in aesthetic universals. 2 One may then suggest that aesthetic universals of the transcultural type concern those stimulus properties which as such would seem to appeal to all human beings, regardless of cultural background. Such properties or qualities may thus be appreciated across {trans) cultural boundaries. By aesthetic universals of the pancultural type I mean principles that are found to be operative in evaluating stimuli in all {pan) cultures. The actual stimulus features interpreted as instantiating these principles in the context of a given culture may or may not be recognized as such and admired in 1 2

This essay was written while the author was a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Fund for Scientific Research Flanders, Belgium. This distinction would seem to correspond to the distinction that some philosophers make between material and formal conceptions of universality. See also Donald Brown (1991, 43), who observes that both Noam Chomsky (in linguistics) and Robin Fox (in anthropology) "distinguish 'substantive' universals ... from universals at a deeper level. For Chomsky these are 'formal'; for Fox they are universals at the level of'process' ...".

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another. If they are indeed recognized on a universal scale, then the stimulus properties involved belong to the category of transcultural aesthetic universals. So there may exist universal (i.e., pancultural) agreement on the aesthetic relevance of certain principles, but no universal (i.e., transcultural) agreement on the attractiveness o f stimuli which instantiate these principles in terms of a particular culture. This suggests that certain culturally relative visual preferences may on closer inspection turn out to be based on what are essentially the same principles. As we proceed, I hope to show that there are at least two types o f non-transcultural aesthetic universals, with the first type involving one level of relativism, whereas the second involves two such levels. Before elaborating on the idea of universal regularities underlying cultural differences in visual preference, I shall turn to the possible existence of what most people would seem to regard as "real universals" in aesthetics, namely those of the transcultural type.

Transcultural Aesthetic Agreement T h e question of whether people from different cultural backgrounds concur in their assessment of the attractiveness of certain visual stimuli has inspired several psychologists to carry out cross-cultural experiments in aesthetic evaluation. This type of research, employing such stimuli as geometrical shapes, designs, and sometimes reproductions of paintings and sculptures, was initiated in the 1950s and gained some popularity in the 1960s and 1970s. Recently, a similar type of experimental research has become popular again among scholars who - without referring to these earlier studies - use photographs a n d / o r line drawings in their investigations of evaluations of human physical attractiveness within and across cultural boundaries (see, for example, Jones 1996). Most well-known among the experimental studies in transcultural aesthetics are the inquiries made by Irvin Child and his collaborators, and those conducted under the guidance of Hans Eysenck. Child and his assistants compared the aesthetic ratings made by "art connoisseurs" from N e w Haven, Connecticut, U.S.A., with the evaluations of people from Congo-Brazzaville, Greece, Fiji, Japan and Pakistan. In these studies they generally found what is referred to as "a tendency towards transcultural agreement" in the evaluation of visual stimuli. A statistically significant transcultural accord in aesthetic assessment is also reported in the studies of Eysenck and his collaborators, who subjected people - mostly students - from England, Germany, Egypt, H o n g Kong, Singapore and Japan to a test consisting of designs and polygons, and, later on, more specifically " T h e N e w Visual Aesthetic Sensitivity Test" (e.g., G ö t z / B o r i s y / L y n n / E y s e n k 1979). In the cross-cultural experiments carried out by W. A. McElroy (1952) and M . Lawlor (1955), however, no transcultural agreement was found.

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W e may briefly consider the best-known example of these cross-cultural comparisons of aesthetic response coming from the field of experimental psychology, namely Child and Siroto's "BaKwele and American Aesthetic Evaluations Compared" (1971). This study employed thirty-nine photographs of masks of the African Kwele (or neighbouring peoples carving in the same style). The authors admit that the photographs were "unfortunately not of uniform quality", since some were made from qualitatively poor illustrations (1971, 276). The thirtynine masks were rated in terms of preference by thirteen "experts" (advanced art students and others) from New Haven as well as by sixteen Kwele of CongoBrazzaville, including four sculptors, four cult leaders, and eight other men who displayed an interest in masks. When the ratings of the two groups were compared, Child and Siroto found "significant agreement" among them (1971, 288). Richard Anderson has already pointed out several of the experiment's "serious methodological flaws" (1989, 192). A major shortcoming of this study, not explicitly mentioned by Anderson, concerns the fact that the investigators merely requested their respondents to indicate preference and did not ask what motivated the ranking. This implies that even if one assumes that the subjects' choices were based on visual qualities, we do not have any direct clues as to which such qualities, if any, underlie the shared preferences expressed. As Child and Siroto themselves acknowledge, we can indeed only speculate as to the visual basis of this agreement (1971, 285ff.). The Child and Siroto investigation has nonetheless been repeatedly cited as convincing evidence for the existence of a "universal aesthetic". Thus, even if we accept that this investigation and similar studies point to a certain degree of transcultural agreement in aesthetic evaluation, we still need to know which visual features are actually considered attractive across cultural boundaries. In wondering which stimulus properties would appeal to all human beings, one may be inclined to think of the famous "golden section". From Antiquity onwards, great claims have been made in the West for the special aesthetic value of this golden section or proportion, which refers to a division of a line or figure whereby the smaller section stands to the larger one as the larger section stands to sum of both, a : b :: b : {a + b). If a (say, the shorter side of a rectangle) = 1, then b (the larger side) = 1.618. In order to investigate the golden section hypothesis, during the last century several experimental studies have been carried out which employed Western subjects. However, the first question that comes to mind from a cross-cultural perspective is whether or not the claim in question can be supported by experimental evidence from outside Western culture. I know of only one study in which the golden section hypothesis has been experimentally tested with respect to non-Western individuals. By means of this study, the psychobiologist Daniel Berlyne wanted to find out whether the assumed - aesthetic appeal of the golden section "depends on certain deep-seated universal characteristics of the human nervous system and optical apparatus or

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whether it may be a cultural and therefore learned factor characteristic of certain social settings" (1971, 229). In collaboration with G. Hatano o f D o k k y o University, Japan, he carried out an experiment which concentrated on Japanese highschool girls from a rural area. As Berlyne summarizes their findings, "There was no sign whatever that the golden section rectangle has a special attraction for this population. O n the contrary ..." (1971, 230). Surveys of the research that has been carried out in the West appear to indicate that the golden section does not unambiguously present a privileged aesthetic proportion for Westerners either. In one such review of the literature, Eysenck notes that it has been frequently found that rectangles of the golden proportion type are considered quite attractive, "yet the golden section does not stand out all that much from rectangles having other ratios ... and the square provides another high point usually equally well-liked as the golden section type of rectangle" (1988, 128). H e additionally reports that it has also been shown that "the golden section was not preferred by either renaissance painters or modern painters when choosing the shape of a canvas. O n the contrary the preference was stronger for the shorter and more compact shapes". Holger Höge is more nuanced when in his recent survey he observes that the golden section hypothesis is confirmed in some conditions while in others it is not. H e concludes by urging scholars to find out "what kind of circumstances and what kind of purposes call for the divine proportion" (1995, 87). Höge's findings may not come as a surprise to evolutionary psychologists and other scholars who proceed from a so-called modular vision of the mind. O n this view, the human mind is not to be compared to a "general-purpose computer" that processes information on the basis of a few very general principles. Rather, the mind is considered to be made up of numerous neural circuits, referred to as mental modules or psychological programmes, which have evolved to serve functionally specialized purposes. According to Donald Symons, in the case of aesthetic evaluation this implies that "humans have been designed to assess different kinds of objects for different purposes according to different criteria" (1995, 87). Although there do appear to exist, as we shall see, some universal criteria that on a basic level are applied to a broader range of visual stimuli than Symons' remark might suggest, we should indeed consider that the application of certain panhuman principles may be related to specific contexts of evaluation, such as the human body, without necessarily holding true (and if so, perhaps not for the same reasons) in other such contexts. Concerning the possible existence of universal preferences for certain proportions or ratios in a given context of evaluation, the research of the psychologist Devendrá Singh suggests that a particular characteristic of female body shape may turn out to appeal to all human beings. Singh (e.g., 1993) is concerned with people's assessments of the attractiveness of the ratio that obtains between the

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circumference of the waist and the circumference of the hip in human females. He finds that, when asked to choose between line drawings of women with a waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) varying, in decimal steps, between 1.0 and 0.70 (or 0.60, depending on the test), respondents of both sexes generally prefer a ratio of 0.70 (or 0.60), i.e. they prefer a so-called hourglass-shaped figure. Singh's investigations are mainly concerned with the evaluations of American college students, but there are indications that people from non-Western cultures - both men and women - share the same preference (e.g., Singh and Luis 1995). O n the basis of reports in the medical literature, a low W H R in females (which turns out to be related, for example, to certain hormonal levels conducive to fecundity and which shows negative correlations with risks for major diseases) is considered an indicator of youth, physical well-being and fertility, and is therefore held to be an index of reproductive potential (the W H R of healthy, reproductive-age women is reported to range between 0.67 and 0.80). Interpreting these data in an evolutionary context, it is subsequently proposed that ancestral males who happened to prefer mates with a low W H R will on average have produced more numerous and more healthy offspring. In terms of evolutionary aesthetics, the preference for a low W H R is then considered to be "selected for": it is an initially arbitrary preference - the result of a random change in mental programming, ultimately due to recombining or mutating genes — which, since it favours reproductive success, is inherited by an increasing number of individuals and finally becomes characteristic of the species as a whole. 3

Empirical Research in Non-Western Cultures Another way to explore the topic of aesthetic universals consists of considering the results of the empirical research which anthropologists and art scholars have carried out in those cultures that have been traditionally studied in Western anthropology. Throughout the twentieth century, and especially in the second half of it, there has been an increased scholarly attention to the standards that are used to evaluate visual beauty particularly in African, as well as in Oceanic, Native American and several other cultures. Incidentally, analogous empirical research would by and large seem to be lacking for Western and Oriental cultures. Unlike their colleagues in psychology, anthropologists and art scholars involved in empirical 3

T h e interest in aesthetics within the new and challenging field of evolutionary psychology, to which we shall return, has until now been largely limited to the evaluation of the attractiveness of the h u m a n , especially female body (for reviews, see Symons 1995/Barber 1995 and Etcoff 1999), with some attention to preferences for landscapes (e.g., O r i a n s / H e e r w a g e n 1992, and Kaplan 1992). Both Symons (1995, 109) and Barber (1995, 420) argue that future research in h u m a n physical attractiveness needs to be more cross-cultural (for a recent example of such research, see Jones 1996). For a general survey of "Darwinian aesthetics", see Thornhill 1998.

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research in aesthetics generally go beyond merely recording likes and dislikes, and focus on verbalized comments in an attempt to establish the criteria that underlie the expressed visual preferences. Indeed, in what follows I shall be mainly concerned with the possible existence of pancultural aesthetic principles or standards, leaving aside for the moment whether or not the instantiation of these principles in terms of a particular culture results in stimulus properties that themselves have a transcultural aesthetic value. A comparison of the available data, drawn from several dozen cultures, suggests that a number of aesthetic standards are indeed applied universally.4 To be more on the safe side, one should say that these standards are foundpluriculturally, i.e., that they are applied in many cultures. However, the virtual absence of counterexamples to these basic standards would make an extrapolation into a pancultural occurrence seem reasonable.5 The criteria to be discussed below may then turn out to belong to what Donald Brown, in a discussion of human universale generally, calls emic universals which are "part of the conceptual systems of all peoples" (1991, 49), as opposed to etic universals, whose existence is inferred or postulated by analysts. Among the aesthetic standards that would seem to be applied panculturally we find first of all what in Western terms would be called symmetry and balance. These two terms are frequently bracketed together or even used interchangeably, and yet they do of course have their own nuances. Symmetry may in a general sense be said to refer to the more or less exact match along a — usually vertical — axis between two sides that are the same in both size and shape or which present each other's mirror image. The term balance, on the other hand, would generally seem to pertain to a less tangible type of equilibrium, and is commonly employed to designate what is felt to be an equilibrated relationship between two or more non-identical forms or between unequal sets of visual characteristics.6 Reports on empirical research into the aesthetics of non-Western cultures do not always provide local terms used to indicate symmetry or balance. When they do, the terms in question would occasionally seem to correspond to the idea of 4

For more details and bibliographic references, see Van D a m m e 1996, 71ff.

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C o m p a r e also Brown, who observes that in demonstrating a universal, one does not set out "to show that it occurred in all societies but that in none of the societies sampled is it found not to exist, which allows the reasonable inference that if not universal it is at least nearly universal" (1991, 51). In fact, the standards or criteria to be enumerated below would seem to belong, in their elemental form, to what Ellen Dissanayake has referred to as '"naturally aesthetic' or protoaesthetic" principles (1992, 55). In a more specialist circumscription, Paul Locher describes pictorial balance as follows: "In paintings, a balanced composition results when pictorial elements are grouped or organized in such a way that their perceptual forces compensate one another. Stated another way, balance is achieved when the elements of a pictorial field are pitted against each other about a balancing center so that the parts seem anchored and stable" (1996, 144).

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symmetry rather than balance. Nelson Graburn thus relates that the Canadian Inuit employ the word idluriik ("two equals as a pair") in positively evaluating visual stimuli which display bilateral symmetry (1976, 54). However, if local concepts are provided, they are usually translated as balance rather than symmetry. In these instances, the latter would frequently seem to be regarded as one possible manifestation of the former, but the standard in question then also encompasses other types of visual equilibrium. Thus, among the Yoruba of Nigeria idogba may point to symmetry, but the term should additionally be interpreted more broadly as designating balance, since it may also indicate the equilibrium between, for example, light and dark zones in sculpture or between areas that are smoothed and those that are incised with designs (see Lawal 1974, 245; Drewal 1980, 15). In the case of the Trobriand concept of gula, emphasis would clearly seem to be on balance rather than bilateral symmetry. Giancarlo Scoditti (1990) points out that carvers on Kitawa - one of the Trobriand Islands in Melanesia — use the term gula to refer to the visual equilibrium that should obtain between the two objectively asymmetrical sides of a canoe prowboard, one relatively large and light, the other comparatively small and dark. In the Trobriands, moreover, visual balance appears to be intimately related to the idea of conceptual or ideational balance, referring to a desired state where opposites are equilibrated (Beier 1974, 39). Similarly, among the Fang of Gabon the concept of bibwe, balance, designates an ideal equilibrium between so-called male and female qualities, which the Fang regard as contradictory yet ultimately complementary. As James Fernandez ( 1971 ) reports, bibwe is also used as a standard in evaluating anthropomorphic figures and other visual forms. However, unlike in the case of the Trobriand criterion of gula, among the Fang bibwe is held to be present when a statue, for example, displays a bilateral symmetry. We should thereby consider that according to the Fang the left and the right side of the body refer to female and male qualities, respectively, so that to a Fang beholder symmetry in an anthropomorphic figure - nonetheless - counts as an instance of bibwe or balance. These examples already suggest that a given aesthetic criterion which, when abstractly formulated, would seem to belong to the category of pancultural standards, should always be considered in light of the actual sociocultural setting in which it occurs, both in terms of how it is conceptualised and as concerns the way in which it manifests itself visually. In the case of symmetry and balance, the need for such a contextualisation is also clearly demonstrated by Gary Witherspoon's analyses of Navajo aesthetics, which include examinations of the way in which these qualities are conceived and brought about on a visual level in terms of this Native American culture (cf. Witherspoon 1977, ch. 4; Witherspoon/Peterson 1995). A second widespread standard is that of clarity. Research in African cultures, for example, has shown its importance in aesthetic evaluation among the Bamana,

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where the term jayan expresses clarity and discernibility (McNaughton 1979, 43); among the Mende, who use the expression maja-sahein (Boone 1986, 160); among the Yoruba, who employ the term ifarahon (Thompson 1973, 33ff.), and in a dozen or so other West and Central African peoples. The notion of clarity or visibility has also been reported to play a major role in aesthetic assessments among several Melanesian, Aboriginal Australian and Native American cultures. Among the Alaskan Inuit, for instance, Hans Himmelheber found clarity to be considered so important that in visual compositions objects are sometimes depicted in a place where normally they should not be, if by doing so the clarity or visibility of the composition is enhanced (1938, 102). The criterion of clarity may be summarized as denoting a preference for easily recognizable visual compositions, made up of readily perceptible parts. Thus, in sculpture, people generally favour clearly defined volumes, sharp renderings of line and mass and a distinct use of colour. In view of the latter, it may be additionally observed that colour contrast — between adjacent areas or between figure and ground — is often appreciated and striven for, since it contributes to the clarity or perceptibility of a visual stimulus by enhancing the discernibility of its constituent elements. In the same way that views on balance are culturally embedded, the local interpretation and significance of a criterion of visual clarity will of course be much more culture-bound than is suggested by a comparative treatment which uproots this criterion from its sociocultural context. As an example, I may refer to Anthony Shelton's analysis of clarity in Huichol culture, where this quality is regarded as "an essential component of the idea of beauty" (1992, 238). The importance of clarity in this Mexican Indian culture can only be fully understood in terms of Huichol ontology, which distinguishes between an outer world of appearances and a hidden realm of intransmutable essences. Within this worldview, the Huichol regard beauty as "a form of revelation which explicates what is implicit and reveals what is occult" (1992, 236). As a cardinal component of beauty, then, for the Huichol the notion of clarity "does not refer solely to their perception of the objective environment, but also to their recognition and understanding of the essences underlying perceptual phenomena" (1992, 237). One of the most frequently noted criteria employed in assessing visual appeal is smoothness, which may sometimes entail an additional emphasis on shininess. The standard of smoothness appears to be applied especially when judging the attractiveness of the human skin. Among the Melpa of the New Guinea Highlands, for example, a body is admired when it is mbongena, without blemish or scars, thus suggesting youth and health. Ulli Beier adds that in comparison with an old, wrinkled or loose skin, moreover, a smooth, tight and youthful skin better reflects the light and thus obtains the admired shiny quality which the Melpa call kuki ndaep, meaning "the gleam or bloom of the skin" (1976, 16). To enhance this quality, people rub their body with pig grease or tree oil.

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Smoothness has in numerous other cultures been reported to be admired, not only as a property of the human body or as a characteristic of its rendition in sculpture, but also of several types of made objects other than anthropomorphic sculpture, although a relationship with the human body can in some instances still be perceived. Suzanne Blier thus points out that the Batammaliba of Togo and Benin identify houses with human beings. And just as the Batammaliba consider a smooth skin attractive in people, so they finish and beautify their dwellings by adding a smooth silt plaster (1987, 127). In anthropomorphic sculpture, the rendition of a smooth skin is one typical feature resulting from the application of the more comprehensive standard of youthfiilness that in several cultures has been found to be employed in evaluating depictions of humans. This criterion, which has been observed especially in African cultures, refers to a preference for the portrayal of people who are physically in the prime of life. The standard of youthfulness can be held to more generally express a predilection for vitality and energy. W e have seen that the preference for smoothness may include an appreciation of shininess or even brightness. The quality of brightness is also found to function as an aesthetic standard per se. This is the case, for example, among the Australian Yolngu where bir'yun, brilliance or brightness, is considered the most important criterion in judging paintings. Howard Morphy observes that to be successful a Yolngu painting should possess a shimmering brilliance which is produced by completing the work through cross-hatching. For the Yolngu, however, bir'yun is much more than just a pleasurable visual quality, "it is the shimmering effect of finely cross-hatched paintings which project a brightness that is seen as emanating from the wangarr (Ancestral) beings themselves — this brightness is one of the things that endows the painting with Ancestral power" (1989, 28). T h e Yolngu example again illustrates - and Morphy points this out as well - that although a particular visual quality, as in this case brightness, may well appeal to all human beings, we should always take into account the culturally determined reasons which contribute to informing the appreciation of such a quality in a given context. A last widespread standard to be mentioned here, namely novelty, clearly demonstrates that in considering pancultural aesthetic criteria we may have to add a culturally relative dimension not only to the level of appreciation, but also to the level of application, i.e., to the level of visual qualities that are interpreted as manifestations of a given standard. The admiration for novelty and moderate innovation in the arts has been observed in many cultures all over the world. However, precisely which visual characteristics are experienced as novel will no doubt depend to a significant extent on the perceiving subject's previous experiences, not only as an individual but also, importantly, as a member of culture. Therefore the property of novelty is largely an attribute which in a culturally

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determined manner is ascribed to certain visual forms. Among the Pakot of Kenya, for example, Harold Schneider (1971) found that the idea of novelty plays a major role in the evaluation of visual attractiveness. Thus he observed that the rim of a wooden milk pot was considered to be visually pleasing (pachigli), the rim at the time of the research being a recent innovation. A basket that has an uncommon weaving pattern or originates from another area where the pattern of weaving is different is similarly regarded as pachigh, as is, for example, a house that introduces new elements of style. Novel objects or features which are considered to be extraordinarily attractive are more specifically called wechigha. The notion of novelty thus illustrates well the difference between the pancultural adherence to certain aesthetic principles and the transcultural appreciation of particular visual features per se. In view of this distinction, it may then, on the one hand, seem reasonable to argue that — with the exception of novelty - the application of the above-mentioned standards in terms of a given culture is likely to be recognized across cultural boundaries, which may subsequently lead to transcultural appreciation. Given our shared perceptual apparatus and common basic experiences as human beings, this may in many instances indeed be the case. On the other hand, some of the examples discussed above suggest that it would nonetheless be advisable always to pay attention to the actual cultural forms that are assumed by those aesthetic standards which as such would seem to be adhered to universally. This not only applies to the more obvious example of novelty, but may also hold to varying degrees for several other criteria mentioned. For instance, precisely which lines, shapes and colours with their in part culturally determined associations does a Navaho artist employ and how does he or she arrange them so as to create balance? How does this relate to Fang or Trobriand notions of visual equilibrium? And so on.

Accounting for Universal Aesthetic Standards Having established the widespread adherence to the above-mentioned standards, we may briefly and partially consider the question of how the human preference for the visual correlates of these standards can be accounted for on a fundamental level. We may begin by considering the universal appreciation of smoothness, especially in the context of the human skin. The most straightforward account is suggested by evolutionary psychologists like Symons. Very briefly, in evolutionary psychology one approaches mental and behavioural phenomena from the (neo-)Darwinian principle of evolution by natural selection, whereby selection is seen to work on ultimately gene-based physical and behavioural variations that occur in a given population living in a particular environment. Evolutionary

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psychologists thereby concentrate on the adaptive mental mechanisms that evolution has created in the mind of Homo sapiens, whose species-typical characteristics are assumed to have been chiefly designed during the time that human beings lived as Pleistocene foragers (see, e.g., Cosmides/Tooby 1997; Pinker 1997; Plotkin 1998; Buss 1999)7 According to Symons (1995, 103), the human appreciation of a smooth skin is innate. The human brain may thus be conceived to have become "wired" in such a manner that when this visual property is perceived, it automatically triggers a neural circuitry that provides what Steven Pinker has called "pips of microsatisfaction" (1997, 527). In illuminating how this appreciation has evolved in our species, it is subsequently pointed out that a smooth skin is arguably an index of health. It is important to stress that in the "noncognitive" evolutionary line of reasoning at issue, this does not mean that the human mind interprets a smooth skin as a sign of health. It does mean that ancestral people who happened to acquire an ultimately gene-prescribed preference for this visual property proved more successful in reproduction (they tended to chose healthier mates), which over many generations has led to the dissemination of this hereditary predilection among the human population. 8 Arguing from a contrastive culturalist perspective, emphasizing the involvement of interiorized knowledge and evaluation, one could invoke the existence of "experiential universale" in providing a parallel account for the panhuman appreciation of a smooth skin. 9 It may then be suggested that during their life time all human beings come to attach positive value to the idea of health. This shared favourable assessment of physical well-being may then be called an experiential universal in the axiological realm. It would similarly seem plausible to assume that because of their shared experiences all people come to associate a smooth, unblemished skin with health, and hence to regard the former as a sign of the latter. W e are then dealing with an experiential universal in the semiotic realm. A smooth skin is thus able to evoke favourably assessed meaning in anyone, regardless of

7

I should like to thank Johan Braeckman for many insightful discussions on the approach that evolutionary psychology offers to the study of the h u m a n mind, and for providing valuable comments on the first draft of the present paper. I am also grateful to the members of the multidisciplinary evolutionary psychology reading group organized by Johan Braeckman at Ghent University, namely Walter Verraes, Dominiek Hoens, and especially Marc Meuleman, for discussing the second draft of this paper with me.

8

A similar line of reasoning, as we have seen, is applied in accounting for the appreciation of a low W H R , and is also used to account for other indexes of health - such as bodily symmetry, which is seen as an indication of developmental stability - and for indexes of such related qualities instrumental to survival and reproduction as youthfulness and fertility; see Symons 1995.

9

As Brown points out, Aram Yengoyan (1978) has suggested a distinction between "innate universale" and "experiential universale". Brown adds that "An example of the latter is that all people have the experience of seeing that blood is red and, hence, that symbolic equations of red with blood are very widespread if not universal" (1991, 47).

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cultural background. The perceiving mind's positive appraisal of what is signified by this stimulus may then be held to be accompanied by a feeling of gratification or pleasure. The mental process briefly suggested here may thus in its own way result in a panhuman appreciation of a smooth skin, thereby strengthening any preference that is innate. Moreover, in considering appreciatory perceptual processes, it would seem possible to integrate the culturalist or environmentalist emphasis on the involvement of interiorized knowledge with the evolutionary emphasis on the innateness of pleasurable responses to certain visual stimuli. It should then be observed that in addition to dealing with such "unmediated" mechanisms of the type discussed above, evolutionary approaches are also concerned with more complex innate programmes, whose algorithms may involve the decoding of input data against the background of stored knowledge. What seems important is that such programmes, which are thought to be frequently affectively guided, are considered to bias the processing of information in one way or another. In view of the present discussion it is interesting to observe, for example, that evolutionary scholars thus posit the existence of specialized psychological programmes or "epigenetic rules" that predispose us to learn some things more readily than others, commonly being those things that have proven useful in our evolutionary history.10 In an attempt, then, to integrate elements of an evolutionary and a culturalist perspective, one might suggest that, given the importance of health for survival and reproductive success, natural selection has favoured people who have evolved some special sensitivity to what experience teaches them to be indications of health. In other words, we may speculate that the human mind is equipped with mental programmes that predispose us to be especially attentive and to favourably respond to what are interpreted as signs of health. Once certain visual properties

10 Indeed, rather than focusing on dichotomous discussions of "innateness versus learning", or nature versus nurture, etc., evolutionary approaches to the h u m a n m i n d "topicize" the whole idea of learning itself, asking how this p h e n o m e n o n can be accounted for in the first place; see C o s m i d e s / T o o b y 1997, 19, 23f., and Wilson 1998, 149f. As a matter of fact, while talking about epigenetic rules, conceived in the sense of hereditary precepts that bias mental operations, Edward O . Wilson suggests an analytical distinction between primary and secondary epigenetic rules that would seem to correspond to the differentiation made above: "The epigenetic rules, I believe, operate, like emotion, at two levels. Primary epigenetic rules are the automatic processes that extend from the filtering and coding of stimuli in the sense organs all the way to perception of the stimuli by the brain. T h e entire sequence is influenced by previous experience only to a minor degree, if at all. Secondary epigenetic rules are regularities in the integration of large amounts of information. Drawing from selected fragments of perception, memory, and emotional coloring, secondary epigenetic rules lead the mind to predisposed decisions through the choice of certain memes and overt responses over others. T h e division between the two classes of epigenetic rules is subjective, made for convenience only. Intermediate levels of complexity exist, because more complex primary rules grade into simpler secondary rules" (1998, 151).

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are identified by means of invoked interiorized knowledge as presenting such health cues, the postulated innate programme may then be held to trigger some positive response. The ultimately "non-cognitive" favourable response that would thus be prompted could thereby be considered to supplement or be supplemented by the more "cognitive" positive appraisals of signs of health that we have considered above. The latter type of appraisal may be called cognitive since, unlike the former, it draws on favourable assessments of physical well-being that are provided by experience and enculturation and which may thus in themselves be regarded as forms of interiorized knowledge, albeit of a valuational nature. (Although the differences between the former and the latter processes seem clear, it may be briefly observed that if there is any awareness of pleasure in experiencing what one has learned to favourably assess, and if one accepts that any experience of pleasure or gratification is ultimately based on electrochemical activity in the brain, then in the end this positive "cognitive evaluation", too, must activate some positive "non-cognitive" response — which poses its own problems, in an evolutionary context and beyond.) If we add to all this the "unmediated" favourable reaction to the perception of a smooth skin with which we began this discussion, we end up with at least three possible processes that may account for the panhumanly found appreciation of this visual property. 11 Although this may sound confusing, it would indeed seem reasonable to assume that several mental mechanisms may be involved in eliciting a certain response to a given stimulus. The two types of reasoning that focus on the involvement of interiorized knowledge thus suggest the existence of panhuman mental regularities, according to which visual characteristics that are decoded as signs of health are considered attractive. As such they enable one to offer an account on a universal basis for certain cultural differences in visual preference by proposing that these concern properties that in a culturally determined manner are interpreted as references to health (see also below). To be sure, in these approaches one draws upon human experiences and can therefore only take into consideration visual characteristics that the — enculturated - human mind identifies as signs of health, which are unlikely to include (or even to always correspond with) all the "objective" health indexes that are involved in an "unmediated" evolutionary account. Still, this does not preclude the possibility that the processes concerned are universally operative in determining preferences related to the human body. The above discussion suggests that the perspective offered by evolutionary approaches is not only applicable when it comes to accounting for the panhuman 11 T h e topic could be further complicated by adding a tactile dimension in considering the attractiveness of a smooth human skin.

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preference for such actual visual features as smoothness that, owing to their "direct" pleasurable effect on human beings, necessarily have a transcultural aesthetic value. It may well also shed light on the pancultural adherence to certain aesthetic standards or principles, whose culturally determined instantiations do not necessarily involve properties that have this transcultural value. In these cases, one should indeed allow that visual stimuli first have to be interpreted in a culturally or environmentally conditioned manner before they can trigger a mechanism or sensitivity that in itself is "hard wired". This may be illustrated by tentatively considering an evolutionary type of clarification of the panhuman appreciation of novelty— a culturally determined attribute of objects, the perceptual identification of which requires the involvement of interiorized knowledge concerning the stimulus properties that are conventionally encountered in the perceiver's culture. Psychobiological research in aesthetic preference suggests that visual aesthetic appeal depends in part on the neurophysiological "level of arousal" that is engendered by stimuli characterized by the so-called collative or related variables of novelty, complexity and surprisingness (see Berlyne 1971, 181 ff.).12 Human beings would then experience this pleasurable feeling particularly when displaying "exploratory behaviour". Now in evolutionary terms it could be proposed that a certain measure of exploratory behaviour may well be beneficial for survival and reproduction, since it may be instrumental in finding such essentials as water, food and mates, in spotting predators and other dangers, in discovering escape routes, and so on. If so, how could the pleasure that may result from displaying exploratory behaviour be seen to enter the picture? Some scholars may then be tempted to argue that by releasing a feeling of pleasure upon the confrontation with novelty, the human mind "rewards" a type of behaviour that it somehow perceives to be selectively beneficial. In that case, the evolutionary advantage which accrues from exhibiting exploratory behaviour could be interpreted as the ultimate cause of the experience of pleasure in perceiving novelty, which is then seen to motivate the individual to behave in this way.13

12 Experiments have s h o w n that arousal or pleasure increases w h e n t h e degree of novelty, complexity a n d surprisingness is raised u p to a certain saturation p o i n t . W h e n the a m o u n t of stimulation induced by t h e stimulus exceeds this p o i n t , the level o f arousal decreases. T h i s p h e n o m e n o n is graphically represented by a so-called inverted U shape. 13 Such a line of reasoning w o u l d seem to be in keeping w i t h t h e a r g u m e n t of w h a t Leda C o s m i d e s a n d J o h n T o o b y , contrasting t h e a p p r o a c h offered by evolutionary psychology w i t h other evolutionary perspectives, call "those approaches to h u m a n behavioral evolution in which it is assumed (usually implicitly) that "fitness-maximization" is a mentally ( t h o u g h n o t consciously) represented goal, a n d that t h e m i n d is c o m p o s e d of d o m a i n general mechanisms that can "figure o u t " w h a t c o u n t s as "fitness-maximizing behavior" in any e n v i r o n m e n t - even evolutionary novel ones . . . " (1997, 24). See also Pinker's discussion of w h a t he calls "bad, teleological, backward causation" (1997, 157).

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However, in continuing the evolutionary line of reasoning that has been outlined above, a different picture arises. One could then argue that precisely because some ancestral people randomly acquired a relatively strong feeling of gratification in encountering instances of novelty, these people tended to display more exploratory behaviour than others. If an increased display of this behaviour may, up to a certain level, indeed be conceived to provide an evolutionary edge, it follows that people endowed with this tendency were more likely to pass on their genes. As a result, the mental programme that prescribes a relatively strong feeling of pleasure in experiencing novelty has subsequently become characteristic of our species, together with the type of behaviour it inspires. (Importantly, this line of reasoning, like the previous one, assumes that people have an innate drive to experience pleasure or gratification - a basic motivation [which in some cases might be better phrased as a drive to avoid displeasure] that would seem to be of considerable significance in an evolutionary sense more generally. Such an assumption also appears to underlie the evolutionary account of the universal appreciation of smoothness and other bodily characteristics, since this account involves a reference to mate choices based on preferences, preferences which are in turn based on the relative amount of pleasure elicited by certain visual properties.) A similar evolutionary perspective may be illuminating in view of the pancultural adherence to the standards of symmetry, balance and clarity, as applied in the evaluation of material objects. It could be argued that the presence of these criteria contributes to bringing about order and regularity in visual forms. Perceptual psychologists have suggested that in perception humans tend to seek such visual order and regularity. The discovery of these qualities in a stimulus is then said to be experienced as "pleasant and highly gratifying" (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1989, 668). It is subsequently pointed out that, once discovered, order and regularity contribute to the perceptibility of a stimulus,14 and thus facilitate the process of extracting information from that stimulus. Casting these data in the mould of evolutionary logic, one could suggest that those ancestral humans who, through random changes in mental programming, derived more pleasure than others from perceiving order and regularity, and therefore became more attentive to these qualities in perception, were better able to make sense of incoming stimuli. Since the ability to extract information from the stimuli in one's surroundings can be easily seen to be valuable in terms of survival 14 T h e quality of perceptibility would also seem to be enhanced by the properties of smoothness and brightness. In this context of accounting for aesthetic universals, it may be observed that Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, while apparently invoking "experiential universals", has proposed to clarify what he calls the "environment-dependent" preference for brightness by referring to the human "diurnal habit", arguing that "We tend to attach positive value to brightness and negative value to darkness. W e fear the night, where dangers lurk unseen, and this seems to be the basis for our negative evaluation" (1988, 48).

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and reproduction, the increase of this ability is likely to be selectively advantageous. As a result, the neural circuits or programmes that innately link the sensation of a relatively high amount of pleasure to perceiving order and regularity will be inherited by future generations. So, again, the evolutionary advantage of being able to make sense of incoming stimuli is not the ultimate cause of the experience of pleasure in perceiving order and regularity (although it is the cause for the survival of the neural circuits involved). Rather, we are dealing with a type of pleasure that originated randomly, and which has persisted and spread since it inspired a tendency or behaviour that has proven to be selectively beneficial. Indeed, the accounts offered by the perspective of evolutionary psychology would seem to suggest that our basic visual preferences ultimately derive from initially arbitrary proclivities which, since they led to behaviour which turned out successful in an evolutionary sense, have procured their own survival.

Unity within Diversity The example of novelty demonstrates that different stimuli may in different cultures be regarded as appealing for the same reasons. This suggests that one may uncover unity within the cultural diversity in visual preference. In what follows I shall further explore the possibility of laying bare universal regularities that can be held to underpin culturally relative aesthetic predilections. I begin by briefly considering a rather well-known regularity that appears to underlie culturally varying preferences for body size (not to be confused with body shape). In many of the world's cultures there would seem to be a preference for what, given the lack of standardized cross-cultural definitions (cf. Jackson 1992, 172; Singh/Luis 1995, 62), may be called relative obesity or plumpness in people, especially females. This preference is particularly found in societies that regularly suffer from food shortages (see, e.g., Brown/Konner 1987; Anderson/ Crawford/Nadeau/Lindberg 1 9 9 2 ) . To the enculturated minds of members of these societies, relative obesity could then be held to signify such interrelated qualities as material and physical well-being, qualities that we may assume to elicit a favourable response (leaving aside here the question of whether the source of this positive response is enculturation, particular innate programmes, or a combination of both). In contemporary Western societies, on the other hand, there appears to be a general preference for a more slender body type. It could, however, be argued that this culturally relative visual preference is significantly based on the same principle, since in the West today it is relative slimness in people which signifies prosperity and physical well-being, with obesity standing rather for illhealth and lower socioeconomic status. 15 15 See the empirical research referred to by Jackson 1992, 55f.

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In this example certain cultural differences in visual preference appear to be engendered by a universal regularity, according to which human beings find attractive those visual stimuli that, in terms of their culture, signify qualities which are favourably assessed in all cultures, namely health and material wellbeing. One could then argue that, whereas in this case there is not necessarily transcultural agreement on the evaluation of the signifier, there is pancultural agreement on the positive appraisal of the signified. Looking from an intercultural, comparative perspective, there would seem to be another universal regularity at work in informing visual preference on a cultural level, yet one that entails an additional level of relativism in that it does not necessarily involve pancultural agreement on the favourable evaluation of the actual signified. According to this regularity, people in a particular culture find attractive those visual stimuli which in terms of that culture aptly signify its sociocultural ideals.

Visual Preference and Sociocultural Ideals Throughout the last century, anthropologists consistently emphasized that aesthetic preference is to a significant extent culture-bound. Yet they have been slow in trying to account for this phenomenon. Some empirical and contextual studies suggest, however, that a given culture's visual preferences are inspired by that culture's sociocultural values or ideals. 16 If so, then cultural relativism in aesthetics may be clarified by arguing that differing sociocultural ideals lead to differing aesthetic preferences. In the remainder of this essay I shall try to demonstrate the plausibility of this thesis by briefly considering three West African case-studies. While suggesting an underlying regularity in the formation of aesthetic preference on a cultural level, these case-studies can at the same time illustrate the idea of cultural particularity in visual aesthetics. We may begin by looking at the sociocultural values and aesthetic preferences of the Baule. T h e following analysis draws mainly on the work of the art scholar Susan Vogel, in addition to the writings of several other students of Baule culture, art and aesthetics (cf. Vogel 1977; 1980; Boyer 1982; 1983; Guerry 1975; Ravenhill 1980 1 7 ). Numbering about half a million, the Baule inhabit large parts of central Ivory Coast. Their society has been described as democratic and egalitarian. It has also been typified as highly collectivistic. This has as a consequence that the stress on equality is accompanied by an emphasis on the average, meaning that indi16 By sociocultural values or ideals I mean those qualities which, in a given culture or society, are more or less communally conceived to be worth striving for individually and collectively, and which as such are explicitly or implicitly held up as guidelines or objectives. 17 For a more comprehensive analysis of the Baule data, see Van D a m m e 1996, 213ff.

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viduals are expected always to conform to the mean as defined by the community. In fact, being regarded as different from the average community member has been called one of the greatest fears of a Baule, who thereby risks becoming isolated from the group. This brings us to a first sociocultural value or ideal among this people, namely displaying moderation in behaviour, always observing the mean in one's conduct. The Baule are first and foremost agriculturalists, with both men and women being involved in the labour in the fields. Against this background one can understand that the ability and the willingness to work hard are highly praised. This work ethic is another major value in Baule society, which in itself relates to several other sociocultural qualities. Thus, there is the value placed on an excellent physical condition, which is evidently necessary to work hard. Good health is also a prerequisite for fertility, yet another sociocultural value in the life of the Baule. Like so many other African peoples, the Baule feel that having children is one of the greatest goods in life, and something that is in fact necessary for a person to earn respect and esteem in the community. Good health, in turn, depends in part on taking care of the body, and on other types of cleanliness. Indeed, a Baule highly values personal hygiene and, more generally, attaches much importance to a well-cared for appearance, with special attention being given to hairdo and scarification. These forms of body decoration are considered signs of "civilization", or, as the Baule would have it, they characterize the individual as a klr sran, a "person of the village", meaning an honorable man or woman who ideally embodies a whole cluster of qualities, including such sociocultural values as restraint and conformation to the mean, health, cleanliness, fertility and the ability to work hard. The Baule produce finely carved anthropomorphic statues. These figures are made in connection with two kinds of spirits that may be diagnosed as the source of a variety of misfortunes. T o put an end to this, a diviner may advise having a statue carved for the trouble-causing spirit. The figure should be as beautiful as possible, and hence attractive to the spirit. The attractiveness of the statue is thereby judged according to the same standards that are used in evaluating the beauty of the human body. It should then be asked according to which criteria or on the basis of which visual qualities the Baule evaluate the beauty of human beings and statues. It was to answer this question that Vogel (1980) carried out empirical research into Baule aesthetic preference. She asked a total of forty male informants to rank a series of Baule figures according to personal preference and to explain why they preferred one statue to another. 18 The rankings of these

18 Vogel regrets that she did not have the opportunity systematically to consult female evaluators. " W o m e n bystanders, however, often expressed their opinions, which did not seem to differ significantly from men's" ( 1 9 8 0 , 3 7 , n. 1).

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informants showed great consistency and there was a general consensus about the visual qualities that make a figure beautiful. It turned out that the Baule regard exactly those visual properties of a statue as attractive which aptly refer to the sociocultural values held high in their community. T h i s is shown, for example, in the appreciation o f a well-finished and polished surface, depicting a smooth and glossy skin. T h e Baule associate such a skin with a whole series of interrelated sociocultural values. A smooth and shiny skin is said to indicate cleanliness, demonstrating that the individual takes care of his or her personal hygiene. In close relation to the latter, a smooth skin, being unblemished by traces o f tropical skin diseases, is also held to signify health. Health and the related notion o f fertility are a m o n g the qualities which are associated predominantly with youthful people. S o it does not c o m e as a surprise that according to the Baule critics an anthropomorphic carving should depict a person in the prime o f life. It is also healthy, youthful people who possess the ability to perform hard physical labour. In this respect, the critics almost invariably c o m m e n t e d upon the calves of figures, consistently preferring calves that are full and round. Such muscular calves indicate that the person is strong and able to perform the exacting tasks in the fields. T h e value of hard work also informs the assessment o f the neck of a figure. In both people and statues the Baule prefer a straight, relatively long and strong neck. Such a neck suggests, for example, that the person is able to transport heavy loads, which are traditionally carried on the head. N o w the preference for a smooth and shiny skin, or for full calves and long, strong necks, can be related rather easily to sociocultural values, since the semantic components o f these visual features become quite evident in a contextual analysis. It appears, however, that the same linkage between preferred form and sociocultural qualities can also be established with respect to a more abstract, allegedly purely formal criterion o f beauty. Both Vogel and Philip Ravenhill (1980), an anthropologist who studied Baule art and aesthetics as well, conclude that the most important aesthetic standard a m o n g the Baule is s ESS, a term which refers to the "golden m e a n " in visual stimuli. For example, although scarifications should be present in a beautiful figure, their number should be moderate: not too much, not too few. Similarly, hairdos should be ornate, but never over-elaborate. Also, in the execution o f the different parts o f the body of a figure, the Baule stress m o d eration or the mean. T h u s it is said of buttocks that they should be neither too flat, nor too developed, just as a neck should be neither too short, nor too long. W e have seen that the mean or the average is o f central importance in the sociocultural value system o f the Baule as well. It could therefore be argued that, like full calves or a s m o o t h and shiny skin, the presence o f sese in a figure elicits culturally significant and positively evaluated meaning in the m i n d o f a Baule beholder. Indeed, it could even be proposed that a stimulus displaying this most

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abstract and most dominant criterion of beautiful form signifies what in the egalitarian and collectivistic society of the Baule can be considered the most general and most important sociocultural value, namely moderation or the mean. This brief examination of Baule aesthetic preference in its context has introduced us to the thesis that those visual features are considered aesthetically pleasing in a given community which in terms of that community aptly refer to its sociocultural values and ideals. If this contention is valid, then we should be able to demonstrate that a differing sociocultural value system gives rise to a differing aesthetic preference, or in other words, that a different view of beauty can be accounted for by drawing attention to a different sociocultural ideal. In order to do so, we may take a closer look at aesthetic preference among the Igbo, which has been the subject of several publications of the art scholar Chike Aniakor (1974; 1982 19 ). The Igbo live in southeast Nigeria and number about twelve million. Their economy is based on agriculture, but trade has always been of great importance as well. The Igbo are subdivided into several hundreds of so-called village groups, which are governed by different types of associations, and especially by title holders. There are several hierarchical title systems in Igboland, which place political and moral authority in groups of mature, relatively wealthy men. Indeed, among the Igbo, authority combines with wealth in that a man can move from lower, inexpensive grades which present little power, to more costly and exclusive ones that allow for exercising considerable influence. Among the Igbo titles are not inherited, but acquired by individuals who through personal efforts gain enough wealth to purchase the titles that provide political power and social status. From here it already transpires that personal success, whether in farming, trade or other activities, is much valued by the Igbo. Indeed, several scholars, both Igbo and non-Igbo, consider the notion of individual achievement to be the central sociocultural value of this people. 20 The attainment of this ideal presupposes physical and mental strength as well as determination. The application of force and perseverance to one's activities may then lead to an increase of resources and finally wealth, which via the title system is translated into high sociopolitical status, influence and privilege. This pursuit of personal wealth and status also implies a considerable amount of socioeconomic competition and rivalry among individuals. Thus, whereas the Baule lay stress on restraint and conformation to

19 For general information on the Igbo I mainly rely on the extensive survey of Igbo art and culture that Aniakor wrote in collaboration with the art scholar Herbert Cole (Cole /Aniakor 1984). For additional details and bibliographic references, see Van D a m m e 1996, 265ff· 20 Achievement is additionally seen in terms of groups such as families or villages, who may in fact profit from an individual's accomplishments, since a successful person is expected to reciprocate the support received from these groups in his own strivings.

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the mean, the Igbo encourage individuals to excel and distinguish themselves from the average. O n the basis of the writings of Aniakor it would seem that for the Igbo the quality that above all others makes a stimulus visually attractive is igwogo ngwogo, which may be translated as "curvilinear elaboration". In fact, the term igwo means "curve" or "coil". Curvilinear forms and ornaments are indeed characteristic of many Igbo art forms such as particular sculptures, body paintings and house decorations. The Igbo also show a clear preference for elaboration or even complexity, features that are typical of the superstructures of certain face masks and several other visual art forms. Structural complexity and decorative elaboration often combine with curvilinearity. This can be seen, for example, in stools that serve as emblems of title holders. W e should then address the question of why it is that curvilinear elaboration is so much admired by the Igbo. From the perspective that is proposed here, this means that we should try to connect the preference for curvilinear elaboration to the Igbo ideal of individual achievement and the qualities it encompasses. W e may first consider curvilinearity. Curvilinear forms are typical, for example, of Ikenga sculptures. These wooden carvings show an anthropomorphic figure, frequently seated on a stool, who is crowned by two upthrusting and coiling motifs. The figure carries objects in its hands and may have a more or less elaborate superstructure, in which curvilinear forms frequently dominate. The sculptures are used in individual cults which celebrate a man's - and sometimes a woman's - personal achievements. In Ikenga figures, curvilinear forms actually depict or would often seem to be inspired by horns. Among the Igbo, as in so many African cultures, horns signify vital force and strength. In addition, the curves or coils of a horn are considered to refer to growth and increase. Horns could thus be said to signify vital, expansive strength. The horns of an Ikenga sculpture, moreover, are usually identified by the Igbo as those of a ram. This animal is known for its stubborn determination, a characteristic it shares with a man of achievement. Curvilinear forms that are inspired by horns could thus be said to signify what are important prerequisites and characteristics of the Igbo ideal of achievement, namely strength, perseverance and expansion. In terms of Igbo culture, the same qualities are evoked by the curvilinear designs which decorate houses and the human body. For these uli designs are inspired by such organic forms as young, growing leaves and especially plant tendrils. They thus likewise signify vitality, tenacity and growth. To understand the Igbo praise of that other characteristic of pleasing form, elaboration, we must consider what Aniakor calls an "all-important factor" in Igbo aesthetics, and which he formulates as follows: "The less time a work takes, the less money it costs and less elaborate is the structural range. Conversely, the more time, the higher the cost and the more complex is the range of sculptural elabora-

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tion" (1974, 12). Because they are time- and money-consuming, sculptural elaboration and complexity thus become signs of riches and prestige. Indeed, it is only men of achievement who can afford elaborately worked out artistic objects. We may then conclude that the Igbo would seem to prefer exactly those visual stimuli which by displaying curvilinear elaboration tellingly signify their sociocultural ideal of achievement. Curvilinearity thereby signifies the vitality and tenacity needed to gain success in farming, trade or any other human endeavour, and at the same time refers to the ideas of growth or expansion that accompany the notion of achievement. Elaboration then signifies the wealth, status and prestige which result from the successful application of energy and determination to one's enterprises. If it is maintained that in a given community those stimuli are regarded as visually pleasing which aptly signify that community's sociocultural ideal, it is implied that when this ideal changes, aesthetic predilection will change accordingly. A consideration of Asante visual preferences which were recorded in a period of ideational change suggests that this is indeed the case. The following analysis is primarily based on the research of the anthropologist Harry Silver (1979; 1983). 21 The Asante (or Ashanti), who number about 2,5 million, inhabit large parts of what is today central and southern Ghana. Centering around gold, and later slaves, trade has traditionally been of considerable importance to Asante economy. When, at the end of the sixteenth century, European merchants became involved in the business networks, trade not only provided iron tools, thereby increasing agricultural productivity, but also supplied the Asante with firearms. Both factors contributed to the Asante conquest of surrounding territories. Around 1700, the Asante headed a confederacy of small states and towns, which gradually expanded and was to dominate central and southern Ghana for the next two centuries. Being interested in slaves and the large gold reserves of the Asante territory, European nations, and Great Britain in particular, tried to establish peaceful relationships with the powerful Asante empire. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, British efforts led to an Anglo-Asante Treaty. British interference increased, however, and around 1900 the Asante territory and surrounding areas became a British crown colony named Gold Coast. In 1957 the Asante and other peoples, who had been unsolicitedly united by the British into what was from now on called Ghana, became independent under president Nkrumah. Following half a century of colonization, modernization forces itself upon post-independence Ghana. However, opinions on the ways in which to respond to changing circumstances and needs diverge considerably. (In what follows, I 21 For Asante history, I mainly draw on Malcolm McLeod's book, The Asante (1981). See Van Damme 1996, 285ff. for additional details and bibliographic references.

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shall use the "ethnographic present" in dealing with the situation in the mid1970s, when Silver carried out his research.) According to official government policy, modernization should be seen in terms of what is called "intertribal homogenization", meaning the elimination of all ethnic distinctions within the borders of present-day Ghana. N o w the Asante, whom the anthropologist Malcolm McLeod calls "fiercely proud of their past and confident of their own innate superiority" (1981, 9), appear to be strongly opposed to the intention of the national government to blend the Asante and neighbouring groups into one homogeneous national unit. The prospect of becoming merged with peoples who once were their subordinates or with peoples living farther to the north (who, unlike the largely christianized Asante, are generally Islamic) is experienced by the Asante as a threat to their strongly-felt ethnic identity. Rather than following the official policy of intertribal homogenization, the Asante face the challenge of modernization in terms of their own history, in which the West has generally played a positively evaluated role. Indeed, in spite of the negative sides of colonization, in the twentieth century the Asante have continued to display a sympathetic attitude of openness towards the West, adopting new technologies and cultural traits. When confronted with the need to modernize, then, the Asante opt for an incorporation of Western influences and values that should be harmoniously assimilated into traditional Asante culture. The contemporary Asante sociocultural ideal may thus be phrased in terms of a smooth indigenous blend of traditional Asante values and modern Western ones. In order to learn about Asante aesthetic preferences, Silver conducted an experiment which involved 25 contemporary Asante sculptures, which were rated and commented upon by more than one hundred respondents. The test items may be grouped into four categories. The first category consists of traditional Asante carvings such as akuamma or so-called fertility dolls. Akuamma (sing. akuaba) are carried on the back by women to help induce conception and to ensure the birth of handsome children. The dolls emphasize important characteristics of ideal human beauty as conceived by the Asante, namely an oval-shaped face with a broad forehead and full eyebrows, in addition to a straight, long neck with a series of rings or folds running around it. These neck rings represent rolls of fat and are considered a sign of prosperity. Traditional akuamma display these features of head and neck in a highly stylized manner. The emphasis is clearly on the flatly rendered head that usually occupies more than a third of the figure, whereas the rest of the body is abstracted into a slender tubular form with two short horizontal extensions representing the arms. Asante sculptors have also come to produce more naturalistically executed fertility dolls, retaining an emphasis on the proportionally large head, but rendering facial features and the body in more anatomically correct detail. For the Asante, naturalism in style is definitively a Western borrowing. They have become acquainted with this manner of represen-

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tation by means of photographs, advertisements and Christian religious iconography. The modern akuamma fall into the second category that encompasses innovative treatments of traditional themes. The third group is made up of carvings that are inspired by several West African mask styles and which are mainly sold to tourists. The fourth category consists of so-called genre carvings, such as the depiction of a woman pounding^«/«, a favourite Asante food. These are not traditional art forms, but unlike the sculptures based on other African art styles, they do draw upon the indigenous Asante experience. Reporting on his aesthetic ranking test, Silver observes that "the most consistently popular pieces are those that translate traditional themes into new, naturalistic forms. As a result, genre figures and naturalistic akuaba both receive high ratings . . . " (1983, 101). One of the two favourites of the Asante critics was a genre carving depicting a seated man in traditional robes who holds an open book. The figure is that of a Westernized man, quite naturalistically portrayed. Asante critics praised his literacy and said that he is clearly a man to respect, the type who will play a central role in Ghana's future. Yet this modern leader is also a traditional man: he sits rigidly in his African robe, displaying the dignity and composure of an Asante chief. The figure thus signifies enduring qualities of traditional Asante culture and at the same time refers to the West and its values. In other words, the Asante appear to prefer precisely that figure which, by offering a harmonious synthesis of traditional and Western elements, pithily signifies their contemporary sociocultural ideal. The same applies to the other favourite of Asante respondents, which presents a rather naturalistically rendered akuaba doll. On the one hand, critics appreciated such traditionally valued features as a broad forehead, prominent eyebrows and a layered neck. On the other hand, they praised the modern appearance of the figure, especially the naturalistic details. As with the figure of the modern chief, the sculpture succeeds in aptly signifying the sociocultural ideal of merging traditional Asante values and modern Western ones. In visual terms, this fusion is to a large extent achieved by smoothly blending stylization, which is a hallmark of traditional Asante culture, and naturalism, which is seen as distinctive of Western culture.

Accounting for the Favourable Response to Visual Metaphors of Sociocultural Ideals The above examples would seem to indicate that visual stimuli which succinctly and suggestively signify a community's sociocultural ideals are considered visually pleasing for members of that community. If so, it should subsequently be asked why these visual metaphors of the local value system are able to prompt such a

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pleasurable response. According to one line of reasoning, on which I have elaborated elsewhere (Van D a m m e 1996), the gratification or pleasure involved may be seen to derive from the fact that visual metaphors of sociocultural ideals are able to elicit a condensed manifold of meaning that the enculturated mind of the perceiver has come to favourably assess. The intensified experience of such a range of positively evaluated meaning, cogently signified by a visual stimulus, may then be regarded as particularly gratifying. Having been introduced to evolutionary approaches during the preparation of this essay, I may now also briefly and tentatively suggest the following line of reasoning. H u m a n beings have evolved to live in groups and can be typified as social animals. For most of their evolutionary history - the time in which the majority of mental programmes characteristic of present-day Homo sapiens were developed - humans lived as hunter-gatherers in bands that on average comprised several dozen people. Group living requires of individual members at least some elemental form of conformity to the behavioural principles or values that the group in question has developed in a certain environment. Some minimal type of endorsement of collective values or rules is then necessary, for example, for the effectuation of forms of cooperation which include such activities as the gathering of food and the warding off of danger, forms of cooperation which may be held on average to confer advantages to the survival and reproductive success of the individual members of the group. N o w we have seen that evolutionary scholars posit the existence of evolved, functionally specialized psychological programmes or mental modules that predispose us to react in a certain manner to a given input. I introduced earlier Wilson and Lumsden's notion of epigenetic rules, regularities that are ultimately gene-prescribed and often emotion-guided and which have evolved to bias mental and behavioural development to take particular directions. Wilson and Lumsden emphasize that in human beings the evolution of these epigenetic rules occurs within an environment that is not merely natural but sociocultural as well, a process they call gene-culture co-evolution. This means that in considering the selection of epigenetic rules, we should also take into account their adaptation to sociocultural conditions (e.g., Wilson 1998, 127). Given the pressure in humans to conform to some extent to the values of the group into which they are born and raised, and considering that individuals and those sharing their genes - may in turn benefit from compliance with these values, we may speculate that selection has favoured people possessing epigenetic rules or specialized mental programmes that innately predispose them to respond favourably to what enculturation teaches them to be collective values. 22

2 2 It may be observed here that, for all their cultural variation, these values have themselves been developed within the constraints of pre-existing rules of mental and behavioural development. Compare also Wilson 1998, 245, 247, 253.

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If so, a visual metaphor which pithily signifies local sociocultural values may be able to trigger a relatively intense positive response that as such has an innate basis. T h e enculturated mind of the perceiver is thereby considered to interpret such a stimulus as densely signifying a certain range of meaning that it more specifically decodes as representing collective values. Once this identification has been made, an epigenetic rule or inborn programme may be activated that prescribes a favourable, affective response to instantiations of these values, presented here in a concentrated manner. Be this as it may, I hope this essay has demonstrated that however idiosyncratic one's aesthetic predilections may in important respects be, as human beings our visual preferences seem to a significant extent to be based on regularities that relate each one of us to the rest of humankind, its evolutionary history and its development of varying cultures with their respective value systems.

IV Humanity, Morality and Politics

Learning to be Natural Ronald de Sousa

A squirrel is best suited to search for and store nuts for its survival. T o the contrary, humans are better suited to grow crops, raise animals or buy food for their survival. This is just one of many ways in which the two species differ in their natures, (student paper) The normal state for human beings is to be white, male heterosexuals. All others do not participate fully in human nature. (David Hull, 'On Human Nature', 7 1 )

1. Why there is no human Nature Let me start by proclaiming outright: there is no Human Nature. But the nonexistence o f their subject has never deterred philosophers from talking about it: we have this much in common, at least, with theologians. Let us then start with the perplexities raised by the phrase itself. W h a t could "Nature", in the phrase " H u m a n Nature", possibly refer to? You might think that Nature is natural if anything is; but Human Nature has been thought partly or wholly divine, or spiritual, and "divine" and "spiritual" are among the terms with which "natural" contrasts. Even if all such talk is interpreted as poetic metaphor, entirely free o f any implications about anything supernatural, unnatural, or counter-natural, perplexities still abound about how to understand the term "Nature" itself. T h e cause o f these perplexities is that "nature", which appears to contrast with "norm", is itself burdened with two sorts o f normative implications. 2 T h e first 1 2

Needless to say, this represents not Hull's own view, but his reductio of certain views of human nature. Just how the term "normative" is to be understood is itself not uncontroversial. In the present argument, I understand a term to have normative force if its correct ascription depends on a comparison between a privileged class of non-facts deemed "standard", with a relevant class o f facts (including statistical facts) involving non-Cambridge properties of the subject to which they are ascribed. For a somewhat more elaborate try, see Andler 1998, 11-13. Andler distinguishes between a "strong" and a "weak" sense of normativity. The strong implies the impossibility of a naturalistic reduction, the weak does not. In Andler's strong sense, normativity is supposed to inhere in a conscious mind. But one needn't see this as entailing anything about the prospects of naturalization, unless one is antecedently persuaded that no naturalistic account of consciousness can ever succeed.

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relates to happiness and the choices conducive to it: one is often told that the secret of happiness is to live according to human nature. T h e second is concerned with distinguishing what is essential from what is accidental among the characteristics of living human beings. The first is normative in the sense that it implies counsels of conduct, comparisons of value between ways of behaving. The second is normative in a different way, nicely implicit in the slide of meaning undergone by the term "essential" from belonging to the essence, to of great importance.3 But while the two enterprises seem different in stressing, respectively, the practical and the epistemological point of view, we shall find that the two can scarcely be disentangled.

2. The problem of Active Passivity T o make this vivid, let me stay with theology for a moment. In his recent book about Pantheism, Michael Levine rejects Schopenhauer's rather plausible complaint that Pantheism is a doctrine without content, since it simply amounts to renaming the universe "God". Citing Spinoza and the Daoism of Lao Zi as paradigms of Pantheism, Levine objects that both regard nature as a divine and active unity (Levine 1994, 27). To think of the universe as a whole as divine, then, amounts to more than simply relabeling it "God". While Spinoza's natura naturans and natura naturata are facets of the same substance, the former contrasts with the latter precisely in that it has ethical implications, or at least implications about how one should live. What we must do is be natural, which implies the possibility of being not natural. But how are we to understand this alternative possibility? W e might call this the problem of active passivity. As Mill put it, "While human action cannot help conforming to nature in one meaning of the term, the very aim and object of action is to alter and improve nature in the other meaning" (Mill 1978, 378). The problem is to say just what belongs in these two senses of nature, and to explain

3

Michael T h o m p s o n has argued that all talk of life belongs in a separate logical category all on its own. His argument is that simple statements in biology ("the horse is a quadruped", say) are equivalent neither to universale, nor to statistical statements. N o r can they be simply assimilated to normative statements, for no relevant norms can be specified without circularity as applicable to horses as opposed to (say) their butchers or their riders. (See T h o m p s o n 1995). In fact, T h o m p s o n ' s is a mysterian take on the facts about biological functions most plausibly accounted for in Millikan's etiological view of the normativity of functions (of which more below). O n his view, biological statements would not be strictly speaking "essentialist" in the sense disparaged by modern biologists (see Mayr 1996), since they are not committed to any universal necessary truths. But T h o m p s o n ' s view clearly countenances talk of importance, which bears its normative character on its face.

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how to assign events to one or the other class.4 What can this mean in practice? How are we to set about being natura/? The very question already suggests that we are in for a long apprenticeship of which the principal difficulty consists, we might say, in learning not to fight our nature. Learning to be natural doesn't come naturally. Levine suggests that the appropriate practical maxim of the pantheist who aspires to follow Nature is something like the Daoist wu wei. This is usually rendered: Do nothing, but it seems to me that Don 'tact focuses better both on what the point of the slogan might be and on what is paradoxical about it. The point is this: action, we say, alters the course of nature. (Hence we "can't alter the past" — which wrongly suggests that we can alter the future.) But in fact that is precisely what is paradoxical, since there's nothing more natural to a living thing than action. The course of nature is the sequence of all events that actually occur, including acts performed by natural creatures. Whatever I do is part of nature (in Mill's first sense) and cannot alter it. Now you may say: "Well yes, you do alter it, in the sense that if you hadn't done that, the course of nature would have been different". But the same goes for any counterfactual: had it not rained today, the course of nature would also have gone differently. Yet the rain was not anyone's action. In one of his provocative little essays, Lewis Thomas advances the view that most of the ills of complex system, whether they be cities or societies, arise from "meddling", that is, from interventions designed to improve them. "It makes a much simpler kind of puzzle. Instead of trying to move in and change things around, try to reach in gingerly and simply extract the intervener" (Thomas 1979, 90). This seems an appealing thought, until we realize that everything we do can be construed as meddling, and that doing nothing would be fatally unnatural. Still, one can do better at understanding wu wei. The Daoist precept is best contrasted, I suggest, with the Kantian-Existentialist insistence on the asymmetry between the first and the third person. Sartre proclaimed the doctrine that we cannot escape from freedom. I cannot choose not to choose, for if I did, then that too would be a choice (Sartre [1943]). This striking thought is a variant of a doctrine familiar from Kant 5 : there seems to be nothing incoherent about considering others to be determined by causal forces - except perhaps, as Strawson has pointed out, in the heat of the moment when we are reacting to what they do (Strawson 1962). Yet it seems absurd to view myself as so determined at the moment of decision, though I can, of course, take this view of myself in the past. However much I believe that I am determined by causal forces, I can't just not

4

I have discussed this problem more extensively (in de Sousa 1984).

5

Kant's twist o n this is that "it is sufficient for our purpose that rational beings take merely the idea of freedom as basic to their actions, in order to avoid having also to prove freedom in its theoretical aspect". ( F P M M , 66 fn.).

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act, letting those forces sweep over me, for if those forces are at work, what they will do is precisely cause me to act. O f course there is a sense in which one can avoid action: it is the sense expressed in the phrase: "letting oneself go". Equivalent phrases such as "going to seed", or "going to pot", describe a process of letting nature take its course; they are metaphors derived from plants. Only in plants do we envisage the course of nature as being passive, or at least as not presenting the usual contrast between the active and the passive. Wu wei, then, might be more or less the prescription: be ye like the plants.6 In his discussion of wu wei, Levine strives to read the phrase sympathetically, yet grants that if rightly understood, it "may mean more 'non-action' than makes sense ...". (Levine 1994, 353). But perhaps our prescription for being natural could stay as close to this as possible, while allowing for the fact that unlike plants I face the problem of endorsing my nature. 7 In order to do this, I must know what my nature is; thus the epistemological form of the problem becomes closely tied to its practical form. Suppose, for a moment, that some omniscient angel revealed to me my essential human nature. And imagine that I vowed, in gratitude for this knowledge, never again to do anything not specifically enjoined by my nature. It is obvious that my project would be a hopeless one. It may be inscribed in the list of my essential properties that dry food is good for me, or that I am to eat greens, but it won't tell me which to choose between dried spinach and dried broccoli. It may even tell me that I should strive to fulfil my nature, develop my talents, find myself, achieve something in life; but it won't decide what that consists in for me. For what the angel revealed was H u m a n Nature, and even if there were such a thing, it would have to be realizable in countless different ways: my Human essence won't tell me which option is right for this variant of it, me.

3. The reality of possibility Underlying these puzzles, are the ambiguous relations between the possible and the actual. Ab esse ad posse valet consequentia, said the Medievals: If anything is real, it is also possible. The way things are is just one of the many ways they could be. Since 6

7

It's interesting to recall that the Christian corpus, while not generally considered very close to Daoism, offers at least one well-known text that sounds like it might have come out of Lao Zi or Zhuang Zi: "Consider the lillies of the field, how they grow: they toile not, neither doe they spinne ..." {KingJames Bible: Matthew III 28). And therefore also, one might add, of struggling against it. But my rebellious ambition may be thwarted if, unbeknownst to me, such a struggle is precisely what it lies in my individual nature to attempt.

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Possible-World Semantics became fashionable, this is often expressed by saying that the actual world is just one of many possible worlds. In David Lewis's extreme version, in fact, the actual is just where we happen to be. The word "actual", in "the actual world", is a kind of token-reflexive, functioning like "this" in "this country" or"present" in "the present moment" (Lewis 1970; 1988). We can express this by saying that the actual is contained in the possible. But that way of talking obscures the fact that, from another point of view, the possible is contained in the actual.8 The most obvious way in which the possible is contained in the actual is that many properties are dispositional. The actual microstructure of glass is such as to make it possible for light to pass through it; on the arrangement of molecules in water above freezing, supervenes the property of liquidity. And so on. But there are also possibilities that cannot be reduced to the actual dispositions of any substance. These are flagged by a grammatical test: if there is no χ such that we can say "it is possible for χ to p", then "it is possible that />" expresses such a pure possibility. "It is possible that it will rain tomorrow" doesn't say that the world has any particular propensity to that effect, but merely that the properties of the world do not exclude it. And while merely possible facts can, as such, play no causal role in the natural world, yet even facts about pure possibility play a determining role in the life of humans. 9 In the words of Goodman, "a thing is full of threats and promises"; (Goodman 1973, 40) in the literal sense, however, it is typically humans, or at least biological entities, that issue threats and promises, harbor intentions, regrets, resentments, or desires - all of which states are by their very nature penetrated with non-actual possibility. In short, the boundaries of the natural stretch well into the non-actual. So how should one set about distinguishing between the natural and the unnatural among nonexistent facts and things? If we are to delineate a Human Nature, that is what we shall need to do. Aristotle had a way of doing this. Biological entities are potentially what they are before they attain actuality, and while Aristotle holds that some actuality is always prior to any potentiality, any particular actuality is preceded by potentiality. Every oak was first an acorn. If possibility is interpreted in the sense of Aristotelian potentiality, the natural course from possible to actual defines the nature of each biological entity, whether or not this particular one attains its

8

Cf. G o o d m a n 1973, 55: "the only possible entities are actual ones". T o say that possible world semantics tends to obscure this is not to say that it cannot express an equivalent truth. T h u s it is a truth about any world w¡, though perhaps not in w¡, that Wj is or is not accessible from w¡, where w | contains what we would ordinarily say is or is not possible in w ; .

9

At least, at the level of macroscopic object not susceptible to the paradoxical antics described by Q u a n t u m Mechanics.

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natural end. The Aristotelian program, in fact, is the only one that makes sense of the dual project of discovering our essence and using the result as a guide to how to live.10 Unfortunately, Aristotle's is no longer a believable program. Whatever other problems may be posed by the notion of intrinsic teleology, the Darwinian revolution has made it impossible to take seriously either the idea of a human essence or its application to ethical practice. The process of Darwinian evolution is inconsistent not only with the fixity of species, but with the idea that species membership might be defined in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions on shared properties. An individual organism is a member of a given species not in virtue of its properties, but in virtue of its relation to other members of a species, and particularly its lineageWe have the word of biologists that the lineage of humans carries with it no interesting set of defining human characteristics. No set of genes, no set of phenotypic characteristics, is necessary and sufficient to define a human; and if one were to take as defining human nature the impossibly long disjunct of all living human genomes, the next human birth would bring a counterexample. "If evolutionary theory has anything to teach us, it is that variability is at the core of our being". (Hull 1986, 6).

4. Emotions as nature's pivot All that being said, it must be admitted that the temptation to continue talking as if there were such a thing as human nature is hard to resist. I myself must plead guilty, for I've argued in the past that there is a specifically human sort of emotion which gets built up on the basis of innate reactive dispositions. These dispositions may be common to all mammals, or to all primates, or on the contrary they may be idiosyncratic in each human being. But what makes human emotions specific, I argued, was that animals without language are unable to fit their emotional reactions into the framework of a story or "paradigm scenario". The essentialism involved in this theory is rather weak: we shall see why in section 7 below; but recently there have been other more stringent attempts to define the essence of

10 Note, however, that in order to handle what I have called "pure possibility", Aristotle would have had to think of the universe as a whole as an organism, of which such possibilities constitute the potential nature. The scholarly consensus, however, appears to be that he did not take this view (see Broadie 1990 and Cooper 1982). 11 This is not to deny that important properties are in practice derived from facts about lineage in human societies. But these properties, such as suitability for marriage or the prerogatives of kingship, ironically owe little to nature and almost everything to convention. Even for the concepts of kinship involved, as anthropologists are quick to point out, biological lineage is not the prime concern: invented notions of what constitutes lineage are (see Sahlins 1976).

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emotions. Both Paul Griffiths and Mohan Matthen claim to downplay analyses based on functional analogies, preferring to anchor their views in the biological notion of homology}2 In that sense, they might be seen as claiming that certain human emotions can be strictly identified in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. But even if their theories are viewed as strongly essentialist about emotions, they give no comfort to essentialism about the human beings that have them. For true homologies posit common ancestors for the homologous structures and their bearers. It follows that homologies are no respecters of species boundaries, since according to one of the dogmas of modern biology any two individuals, of the same or different species, have some ancestor in common, however distant. A search for the essence of a homologous trait, such as a particular emotion, is therefore not bound to discover any species essence. Essences, where they can be discovered, are of interest because they make a crucial contribution to the explanation of the behaviour of objects belonging to a natural kind. But once one has cast off the classical view of species as natural kinds, and replaced it with something like Ernst Mayr's "biological concept of species" based on lineage and reproductive isolation (Mayr 1996), the contribution of species to explanation gets drowned out by the contributions of other levels of explanation, from demes to genes. Any explanatory power that belongs intrinsically to species fades into relative insignificance. Nevertheless, the emotions remain, in my view, the nub to focus on if we want to salvage something useful about that non-existent Human Nature. To see why, let us return to the contrast between the activity of humans and the passivity of plants. I said a few moments ago that insofar as it recommended the passivity of plants, the aspiration to wu wei seemed impossible to achieve. Yet the one phenomenon in human life which may be perfectly suited, by its ambiguous position between the active and the passive, for just that impossible task, is precisely human emotion. Emotions are experienced as undergone rather than as chosen, and yet, at the same time, few if any or our actions fail to be influenced by them. Emotions are, moreover, widely held to be natural. To follow nature, then, might mean to act only as dictated by emotion. The passivity implied in wu wei would then reside in the fact that emotions are experienced as passive, but we wouldn't fall into the absurdity of identifying wu wei with inertness. My passions are frequently endured as alien forces wresting control from my own self. Yet they just as often guide me in what is felt as the exercise

12 See Griffiths 1997; Matthen 1982. A brief reminder: a functional analogy exists, for example, between the eyes of mammals and the eyes of insects, insofar as they serve the same function but derived by different evolutionary routes from different ancestral structures. By contrast, the wings of birds and the forelegs of mammals are homologous, despite serving different functions, in that both are literally descended from identical structures in some common ancestor.

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of my greatest freedom, the freedom to be myself us opposed to following rules and conventions laid down for me by a tradition or by the expectations of a community. This ambivalence inherent in the perception of reality was beautifully illustrated in Joanne Greenberg's novel about schizophrenia, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (Greenberg 1984). T h e protagonist lives in the elaborate imaginary world of her psychosis, and her psychiatrist promises that while for her to "get well" will mean leaving that alternative world for the "real" world, no one can or will force her to abandon her world. She can leave it only of her own free will. When that transition comes, what is striking about it is that she experiences it both as inevitable and as completely free: as if inevitability were not the opposite but the very condition of freedom. In that ambivalence, at least some passions are akin to perceptions of reality, a reality that reflects at least my individual nature, and at best something shared with others. 13 If perception, then, is a species of knowledge, and if the passions are akin to perception, then one could expect that they too would be passive without being experienced as forced. The passivity of emotion is analogous to the passivity of perception rather than to the passivity of something endured (Gordon 1986). We don't choose what to see or hear - except in self-deception. Yet in perceiving we are doing what is natural, and it is not perception but the deprivation of perception that is experienced as imposed on us against our will. There is more to say than can be said here about the hypothesis that some emotions constitute perceptions of objective reality. Suffice it to note, for present purposes, that if there is a part of reality that is thus apprehended by emotions, this will comprise facts about values. I will adopt without further argument, as a working hypothesis, this view of emotions as at least sometimes apprehensions of axiological facts.14 It promises an alternative way to deal with the problem that Aristotle's notion of intrinsic teleology would have solved, if we could only accept it: the problem of delineating those merely possible states which can be classified as natural, and therefore worthy (for whoever wishes to lead a natural life) of being pursued. That problem, as we saw, merges into the practical problem of how to practice active passivity. First, though, I need to say a word more about that protean term, emotion. The characterization alluded to above implied that typical human emotions have a certain dependency on language and on the stories that language can be used to tell; but pleasure and pain represent, as it were, the degenerate case of stories, and 13 T h e view of emotions as passive lies at the heart of the traditional hostility of moralists to the passions (see Nussbaum 1994). It was notoriously challenged by Sartre ([1939]), and more recently by Solomon (1973). Against these Robert G o r d o n (1986) has persuasively reinstated and clarified the claim that the passions are passive, in a sense to be addressed below. 14 1 sketched such a view in de Sousa 1987. For some recent and more detailed arguments, see Tappolet (forthcoming), and, for a rather different variant, Mulligan 1998.

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for present purposes they must count as emotions. As I use it, then, the term emotion does not exclude pleasure and pain; pleasure and pain are limiting cases of emotion. Learning as an expansion of the scope of happiness "Human beings desire above all to know", said Aristotle, "and particularly to see". (Met. 980 a 21). More broadly, we derive pleasure from the exercise of a competence: we might think of all learning, then, as extending our scope for pleasure and happiness. Spinoza too defined joy as the conscious aspect of an increase in power (Ethics III, def. 2-3). From the evolutionary point of view, this is just what we would expect, since our survival depends at least in part on the variety of tasks we are equipped to perform. So it is not surprising that every child (at least until such time as school trains her to turn away in disgust from everything called "learning") displays a passion for learning to do and to know. This fact illustrates some ways that the passions of pleasure and pain act as our guides to "what nature intended". But there are two obvious problems. O n e is the problem of perversion; the other, which will be the topic of the next section, is the complexity of emotional determination of behaviour.

Perversion Aristotle famously described happiness in terms of virtuous activity in accordance with nature (NE 1175 b 23). To exercise your essential nature, then, is what you should do if you are interested in happiness. But it is anyway part of our nature that we are all interested in happiness. Or at least we all normally should be. W e shall see in a moment to what extent these Aristotelian thoughts may be translated into the language of modern evolutionary biology. The hypothesis would then be that evolution, rather than some metaphysical principle, has established that convenient pre-established harmony between our passions and what is most likely to fulfil our natural essence. Indeed, now that we need no longer aspire to conformity with any species essence, each of us can understand our own essence as pertaining only to our individual nature (see de Sousa 1998). That pre-established harmony however, can be disrupted. O u r character can be distorted to the extent that what we pursue no longer conforms to our nature. (Alternatively, we may even lose the natural disposition to pursue happiness in any form. But I'll ignore that problem here.) If our character is distorted, our pleasures are perverted. This can matter even if there is no God to offend. Many moralists have insisted that perverted pleasures give no lasting satisfaction and don't really make you happy. But unless we have a theory of human nature that is independent of our subjective feelings, that

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hypothesis is quite vacuous. For the only available test of the natural or perverted character of a given pleasure is whether it gives us lasting satisfaction. And by most reports the pleasures that some regard as most perverted sometimes provide others with their most lasting satisfactions. That doesn't mean the definition is useless in practice. O n the contrary, "what gives me satisfaction" can usefully replace all pretense of talking of what is natural. But to be driven to that is once again to give up on any sort of objective and general characterization of human nature. Does this matter? W e may begin by noting one political advantage. (Although to call it that is to admit that not everyone will regard it as an advantage of any kind). If there is no human nature, then no argument of the form: "it's bad, and you ought not to do it, because it's unnatural" is acceptable. A fertile source of human oppression is undermined. But does it leave us with any guidance at all? Does it mean, for example, that we no longer have any good argument against the practice of footbinding or clitoridectomy? N o t at all. For those practices hurt, which is prima facie argument enough. The doctrine under consideration has agreed to rely on the verdict of emotion, including pleasure and pain, replacing, rather than providing a criterion for, the concept of "conforming to nature". But here is the rub. A prima facie argument does not end the matter. Education hurts too. (Indeed, the advocates of footbinding or clitoridectomy are likely to think of those practices as improvements on a par with other requirements of a responsible upbringing.) Learning to read involves many painful hours. Yet few loving parents would agree, on that ground, to exempt their child from the toil of learning to read. Much the same can be said for the trouble of adapting to social life itself — a skill that is hardly likely to be managed without any unpleasant moments. Even if we reject Aristotle's claim that sociality is a necessary part of H u m a n Nature (Pol. 1253 a 1), we are unlikely to regard that as undesirable or even optional.

5. Behaviour's Determination by Emotion Though the exercise of skills and knowledge typically provides pleasure, skills and knowledge must be learned. In the early stages of mammalian life, the process of learning appears to be wired in: infants' play is not very different from scientific inquiry (Gopnik 1996). But later the games of learning must compete with easier pastimes. Where does the guidance and motive power for such efforts come from? I suggest that it lies in emotion. In the rest of this essay, I shall first sketch some simple examples, and then work up to speculate about some more comprehensive and complicated ways that emotions determine our attempts to learn how to be

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natural. Emotions, I shall argue, are indispensable guides in our quest for appropriate values in the changing context of our lives. Some of the ways that emotion governs learning seem fairly straightforward. In the simplest cases of all, emotions facilitate learning without motivating any particular effort. They work in a purely causal mode. In these cases, the effect is produced rather by the intensity of the emotion than by its nature or its content. Any strong emotion has a tendency to fix concomitant events in memory. (All Americans of my generation are said to remember the precise moment when they heard about the assassination of President Kennedy.) Such anecdotal evidence is confirmed by solid research: without activation of the limbic system, which is typically implicated in emotional states, there is no possibility of the kind of conscious experience that can leave a trace in memory (Rosenfield 1988, 165). This link between emotional experience and memory retention may well serve some adaptive purpose, but it has nothing to do with the instrumental intentionality of the individual: it can't properly be called motivation of any sort. Yet emotions are typically thought to motivate. Curiosity, emulation, and some less admirable emotions such as envy, pride, humiliation and fear have the power to motivate the often painful effort required to learn new skills. In these cases, the emotions motivate effort in an instrumental or intentional mode: to say that the threat of humiliation induces me to study for my exams, for example, is to say that I calculate that studying for my exams is a necessary means to avoid humiliation. In this type of case emotions certainly involve desires, and sometimes amount to little more. In fact, however, to speak of emotions as motivating effort is misleading, in suggesting that there is no significant distinction between emotions and desires. It is desire that typically motivates (some, though not all desires can also be motivated [Davis 1986]). And some have indeed thought that emotions were nothing more than a species of desire (Marks 1982). But the category of emotions is much broader than desire, and the role emotions play in our choices is different and more fundamental. T o see why, consider first a kind of case that cannot easily be accounted for either in terms of the purely causal model or in terms of an assimilation of emotion to desire. The Marshmallow

Test

Shoda, Mischel and Peake offered a group of four-year-old children a marshmallow with the following choice: You may eat this right away; but if you wait for me to come back, in a few minutes, you can have a second one. A dozen years later, those same children were tested for their social skills, emotional adjustment, and scholastic ability. One might have expected the temptation resisters to have become

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more efficient, better able to master frustration, and generally better adapted to social life. That did indeed prove to be the case; but more surprising was the fact that the group of resisters scored over 200 points higher on their Scholastic Aptitude tests. The marshmallow test proved twice as reliable for the prediction of scholastic performance at the end of high school as I Q a t the same age. 15 W e must infer that the capacity to resist temptation is related to the capacity for learning. It might be objected, however, that the role of emotion in the marshmallow test is not distinct from the modes already described. Or, on the contrary, it might be claimed that emotions aren't actually involved at all. If the first objection is correct, the case must be classed either with the instrumental-intentional or with the merely causal. But whatever emotions were involved, their effect can't have been purely causal, since it was manifestly the content of a thought - the expectation of a reward - rather than its affective intensity alone that was relevant to the result. It is less obvious that the fortitude that allowed the resisters to hold out couldn't have acted in the same way as in the instrumental-intentional case. There would then be two alternative accounts of the case. W e could either say that the two groups managed the ends-means calculation differently, or else that they differed in their actual desires. The first suggestion, however, seems gratuitous: the calculation is hardly one which could have escaped either group, particularly when we recall that their difference was uncorrelated with IQ. The children's problem was not to calculate a suitable means to a pre-established goal, but rather to hold by the result of such a calculation. What they required, in other words, was something like a capacity to avoid "weakness of will" or acrasia. In cases of acrasia, as Aristotle pointed out, the reasons are already in: adding more reasons won't help: "When water chokes, what will you wash it down with?" (NE 1146 a 35). But this still leaves the possibility that the resisters were simply subject to a stronger desire for the second marshmallow. It is a plausible principle of folk psychology that only wants can fight wants. Despite Kant's insistence that acts motivated by "inclination" can claim no moral worth (FPMM, 14), even the dictates of the pure Rational Will must be transmuted into wants if they are to mount an effective resistance to temptation. The application of that principle here, it might be claimed, is that my desire for the immediate consumption of one marshmallow is curbed only by the greater desire to get another. But this principle too runs into difficulties before the ancient problem of acrasia. If acrasia exists,

15 See S h o d a / M i s c h e l / P e a k e 1990, quoted by Goleman 1995, 81-83. This may even underestimate the intended correlation, since the experimenters do not say whether they controlled for the possibility that some four-year-olds "resisted" only because they were aware of the objective repulsiveness of marshmallows, and were therefore not tempted.

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the principle must be false, insofar as acrasia consists in acting on the weaker desire. If, on the other hand, the principle is true analytically, it rules out the existence of acrasia. N o one ever acts on the weaker desire, and so the two groups were simply distinguished by the different strengths of their desires: the first group had a stronger desire to consume the first marshmallow at once, the second a stronger desire to acquire a second. But is it really plausible to suppose that future scholastic ability is correlated with the strength of a desire for two marshmallows rather than one? 16 The capacity to resist acrasia is obviously important for the accomplishment of many an enterprise. It is a major component of what used to be called character, and it seems to have been lacking in Phineas Gage and "Elliott", the patients described by Damasio (1994). After a frontal lobe lesion, these patients seemed unchanged in their intellectual abilities and even in their personality as measured by written tests such as the MMPI, yet they became systematically acratic. 17 Their lives fell apart, as if they had lost the adult equivalent of the capacity to pass the marshmallow test. And what is most striking in the clinical descriptions that have been given of these characters, is that their capacity for instrumental-intentional calculation appears to be unimpaired. W e might say they have not lost their ability to reason practically in theory, they are just incapable of applying this skill in practice. But if that is the case, then why not say that perhaps emotion has nothing to do with the matter at all? That was the second objection. What distinguished the resisters, the objection goes, isn't any special emotion, but on the contrary some altogether different disposition, amounting to the capacity to overcome emotion. 1 8 16 Very large alterations in the cost-benefit balance, however, may make a difference: a large increase in the cost of the acratic action may tip the balance after all. Changing the balance in the other direction, on the other hand, may result in the act no longer counting as acratic. And in the spirit of the present quest for ways to live u p to our individual nature, we may do best to minimize, among the acts we are likely to choose, the range of those we count as acratic, rather than looking for better weapons with which to overcome our own natural inclinations. Luc Bovens (1999) drew m y attention to this point. 17 This is not to imply that the four-year olds in Shoda et al.'s experiment were exhibiting fullblown acrasia. Full-blown acrasia I take to require two conditions: (i) a two-level judgment structure, in which a distinction can be made between the evaluation of prospects A and B, on the one hand, and the evaluation of the choice-of-prospect-A against the choice-of-prospect Β on the other (see de Sousa 1998), and (ii) an emotional disposition more complex than a simple confrontation of desires (see section 5 below). T h e volitional structures of four-year olds may be insufficiently developed to allow for a clear distinction of levels of preference. But the development of such structures must presumably have its roots in a rather simpler structure which, it seems plausible to speculate, is responsible for the crucial difference between the two groups of four-year olds. 18 See Wallace (1978, 114-116), who observes that most vices have the names of specific emotions, while several of the traditional virtues (fortitude, courage, chastity etc.) are defined in terms of the ability to master or resist emotions (sorrow, fear, lust etc.).

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A knock-down argument is not to be expected against this second objection. But a broader view of the role of emotion in our mental and behavioral economy may help to see why the objection is misguided. As the case of acrasia suggests, emotions do not typically act on behaviour merely in the manner of desires. T o get a more comprehensive sense of the role of emotions in solving our problem of how to learn to be natural, we must first return to the question of natural thriving, and face a problem I have so far barely hinted at.

6. Emotions and Axiological Norms I have so far spoken as if thriving in accordance with one's nature were something I can do, as it were, all by myself. I have left: out the social and the moral. Yet among the skills one is expected to learn is the skill of living among other people. That too must be learned, but it must be conceded that it is not a skill the exercise of which invariably leads to an increase in the range of one's pleasures. This regrettable fact commonly gives rise to the claim that morality is opposed to nature: "Nature", says Katherine Hepburn to Humphrey Bogart in African Queen, "is what we are put in the world to rise above". Yet we do generally manage to learn some social skills and moral norms, and that we do not necessarily regard the process whereby we do so in the same light as footbinding or clitoral excision. Those distasteful examples, however, serve to remind us that even in the most sceptical mind, some measure of conviction remains that the wickedness of some practices relates to their being in some sense unnatural. Can we, after all, make that good? Certain recent arguments about the notion of function might nourish some hope. If we can give sound biological reasons for thinking that certain dispositions have natural functions, then perhaps those dispositions can be ranked more highly, in our striving for the natural life, than those that reflect no such utility. The leading attempts to define in a naturalistic spirit a normative notion of function have advocated an etiological account of the normativity of biological function (see Wright 1973; Millikan 1984; 1993; Neander 1991). The common core of these proposals is that while the causal powers of functions might be explained in terms of proximate causes leading to the elaboration of structures that underlie dispositional properties, there is nothing in any particular case, considered in itself, that differentiates those effects of an organ or device which constitute its function, from others which are mere effects. A device may have many effects; but only those that it is meant to have count as its function including, not infrequently, effects that it fails to bring about. The classic example compares two effects of the heart's functioning: the circulation of the blood, and the production of beating sounds. Both can be seen as playing a part in the

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orchestration of some larger system (The Symphony of the Human Body, perhaps, in the case of the heart sounds), so no analysis that rests solely on their present causal powers to contribute to some larger system (Cummins 1975) can account for our intuition that the first, but not the second, is the function of the heart. The phylogeny of the heart, by contrast, can justify our calling the former, but not the latter, a (or the) function of the heart. For hearts exist in virtue of the advantage conferred, on the ancestors of the organisms they now inhabit, by other hearts circulating the blood. Could we then not extend this account to emotions, asking what their respective functions are, and thus gain relatively direct access to the value of their axiological verdicts? The function of fear is to protect us from danger, that we may survive and procreate; the function of love is that we may increase the likelihood of procreation; the function of curiosity is to enhance our learning curves. And so on. If this view can be made out, we can jettison metaphysical teleology, and still rehabilitate the Aristotelian program. The norms of our lives are built into our emotional makeup by the process of evolution, and our emotions do indeed give us direct access to objective values. These values are not, of course, absolute in the sense of existing independently of the contingent facts of human nature. On the contrary, they derive from facts of human nature, they are axiological facts for humans. Unfortunately, it won't work quite so readily, for two very different reasons. First, while one may classify a particular emotion as of a certain type - a case of grief, a case of jealousy, a case of fear — and while one may think that grief, jealousy or fear in general may have a biological function, it seems entirely incredible that just any particular token of that type should have, in every case, just that function. Similarly, one might say, one might have some vague notion as to the adaptive function of language - to conceal one's thoughts, was a good guess attributed to Talleyrand (Nyberg 1993, 115) - yet it would stretch credulity to suggest that every occasion of speech served just that purpose. Every occasion of speech is different, and has its own purposes to serve. So it may be with emotions: each emotion is different, and if it serves any purposes at all, those are determined uniquely for a particular individual by the context at hand. Second, the legacy of evolution includes all too obvious examples of emotional dispositions whose functional credentials leave little doubt, but which most moralities find repugnant. Murderous jealousy, ethnic hatred, unbridled lust and greed, are surely solidly in place because their effects favoured the propagation of our ancestors over those might-have-been-our-ancestors whose dispositions were tolerant, humane, gentle and modest. Yet few would infer that they should invite the first rather than the second set of emotions to dictate their axiology.

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Some have criticized the approach of Millikan et al. because of its focus on historical facts, and suggested a forward looking variant of the same naturalizing strategy. The forward looking variant stresses, again very roughly, the contribution of some feature of an organ or mechanism to the propensity (the intrinsic, one-time only probability) of the organism to propagate, in relation to the average propensity for other members of the population. W e can be pretty sure that the heart's sounds, unlike its capacity to circulate the blood, leave this propensity unaffected (see Bigelow/Pargetter 1987; Proust 1997, 252-263). This variant therefore appears to account for the fact that circulating the blood, but not producing sounds, is a function of the heart, without requiring that we look to the past for it. But the problem won't be solved by turning away from the past to the future. For what is objectionable about jealousy, ethnic hatred, lust and greed is not that they are no longer likely to lead to reproductive success. They may or may not; but we're not willing to let their status rest on the answer. The point is not that they don't now serve our reproductive ends, but that they no longer serve our moral ends. But if emotions are, in general, the last court of appeal for morality, what can it mean to condemn certain emotions on moral grounds? Are we not threatened with a descent into the bear-pit of emotivism, where somehow our different emotions must just have it out by brute force?

7. A proposed resolution Two moves can come to our aid here. O n e is a crucial refinement introduced by Millikan in the etiological view of functions, which enables us to meet the first objection. The other I'll call axiological holism, which serves to protect us from the second. When taken together, these considerations will support the conclusion that some sense can, after all, be made of the concept of living naturally under the guidance of our emotions. Particular emotions as derived functions I have argued elsewhere that human emotions typically involve more or less elaborate stories, the plots of which are traceable to paradigm scenarios adapted from the earliest dramas lived in our childhood (de Sousa 1987, 181-184). O n this view, mere desires are, like pleasures and pains, degenerate or zero-level cases of emotions. (Even here there can be two basic plots that will affect the quality of the emotion: want and expect to get, and want and expect frustration!) But the implication is that in the general case the role of emotions in motivating behaviour will be more complex than that of simple desire in this way: when motivated by an

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emotion, we have not just some specific goal, but a goal that fits into a larger pattern to be emulated: the total scenario that identifies the particular emotion. These scenarios, like the occasions of our learning words, with their resulting associations and the value paradigms which they embody, are indefinitely varied. The result of this process is that no two persons' emotional repertoires are identical, any more than any two persons share an identical idiolect. Our individual natures are the outcome of unique genomes meeting unique environments, and the different emotional repertoires thus generated determine the options we see as live ones in our lives. The useful concept of a live option comes from William James, who points out that a nineteenth century New England gentleman felt no need to make a serious comparison between, say, Protestant Christianity and Islam (James 1979). Whatever its objective virtues, Islam was not a live option for him. In the different context of the twenty-first century, altogether different options may be experienced as live, not only among religions but in very aspect of our social lives and individual choices. Moreover, two contemporaries may differ in the options they apprehend as live. This is enough to account for the fact that our emotions frequently lead us to different conclusions in the face of apparently identical "facts": we cast ourselves as actors in those dramas derived from our idiosyncratic paradigm scenarios, and expect others to join us in roles of our devising. (So no wonder disappointment is all too frequent.) But if I'm right in my argument so far, a world of axiological unanimity is neither more likely to be achieved nor more intrinsically desirable than a world of universal factual agreement. Paradigm scenarios were built on innate capacities for affect and reaction, but they are (with the possible exception of a few more or less hard-wired "basic affect programs" (Griffiths 1997) as far from being simple applications of stereotyped dispositions as our sophisticated utterances are far from the innate articulatory capacities on which language learning rests. They are shaped, both in their origins and in their re-enactments through our lives, by the increasingly complex contexts in which they occur.19 Millikan's notion of "adapted proper functions" or "categorial functions" is designed to apply to thought and language rather than emotions. But it is easily 19 Note that the view of emotions sketched here is inimical to the idea that our emotions are blends or compounds of the elementary emotions in some basic set. For a forceful argument in favour of acknowledging an indefinitely large number of emotions far beyond what is encompassed by our "emotional vocabulary", see Campbell 1997. The analogy of language is again useful here: language is, to be sure, built on a limited number of capacities, and utterances are composed out of a very small number of phonemes. But the cocktail metaphor is inappropriate in both cases: emotions and the stories they incorporate may be composed of a limited number of basic capacities; but those capacities are no more to be thought of as basic emotions blended together, than phonemes are to be thought of as basic utterances of which the works of Shakespeare are blends.

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adapted to our purposes. W e can explain, in terms of it, how we can think of psychological items such as emotions as biological despite the fact that individual tokens can be entirely novel. "Heredity", she notes, "does not directly dictate traits but rather patterns of interaction with the environment, thus controlling development"; thus "to have biological functions an item need neither have the same categorial properties, e.g. the same absolute structure, as items that participated in the life cycles of ancestors, nor need its functions, when categorially described, be functions performed by any of its ancestors". (Millikan 1993, 173). When applied to emotions, this means that a token of an emotion, like a token of an utterance, can be utterly novel without weakening the claim that it has a biological function. As an instance of the exercise of dispositions the capacity for which is was shaped by natural selection, it exhibits a Millikian "proper function". But in the present context, the possibly unique function that it is "meant" to serve in its particular context is enabled by a proper function which evolved precisely to allow such appropriate responses in novel environments.

Axiological Holism Even if that is right, it doesn't establish that each emotion as currently experienced embodies an axiologically correct apprehension. It leaves intact the second of the problems just raised, of the manifest nastiness of many particular emotions. Two considerations can help to ease this worry. The first consists in granting the point. T o say that vision has the function of providing distal information about our environment is not to say that visual illusions never occur. Similarly, to say emotions in general constitute apprehensions of axiological reality is not to say that every emotion is equally to be trusted. Emotional mistakes don't show that there is nothing emotions are supposed to be getting right. So how do we tell which is right and which is wrong? Much in the same way as we test the veracity of perceptual information: by appealing to other perceptions or, mutatis mutandis, to other emotions: that is the second consideration. Something like the method of reflective equilibrium is commonplace in science as well as in ethics; what is less often noticed is that in the case of ethics, the items that need to come to equilibrium are typically not ordinary empirical facts, but emotional responses. Without such responses, even the most persuasive argument in favour of painful effort in aid of learning and change will remain powerless to move us. O n the other hand, no single response in isolation can claim to deliver a definitive verdict. T h e analogue of a belief that is reasonable but false is an emotion that is reasonable in the light of the resemblance between the situation that elicits it and the paradigm scenario that defines the axiological property of which it constitutes the perception, and unreasonable in the light of other, more inclusive scenarios of which the present one can be conceived as a mere fragment. Among available theories of

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truth, the pragmatic theory may in the end be the most plausible, in its appeal to an objectivity rooted in the settling of opinions at the end of inquiry. Similarly, we might envisage an (equally Utopian) summation of all emotions, in the light of all relevant apprehensions, not excluding all the comparative judgments, rational calculations, and thought experiments, that rationality can provide. Against that Utopian sum all more partial emotional states will be judged, just as all opinions will be judged against the state of knowledge at the end of inquiry. Meanwhile, the best we can do is mess about looking for reflective equilibria in the local environment of thought, knowledge, reason and feeling. Even a novel emotion experienced in a novel context may provide axiological guidance. Once we come fully to take stock of this possibility, we are on the way to solving the most puzzling of the problems we've encountered: how to make sense of active passivity in a world that is constantly changing in consequence of our own intervention. Earlier in this essay I dismissed Lewis Thomas's suggestion that we could refrain from "meddling": the choice of not meddling does not exist. All that people do, as complex emotional and psychological systems, and all that societies "do", as higher-order complexes of people, is nothing but meddling with the inextricable result of infinite earlier meddlings. Despite soothing clichés about how nothing is new under the sun, the fact is that the chances are vanishingly small that even a system of relatively low complexity, such as a cell, should ever find itself twice in precisely the same state. N o two animals, even clones, will ever be identical. Both technological change and social change present us with worlds that are strictly new. It is all perfectly meddled with, and all perfectly natural. How, then, comes the question again, can we expect an emotional equipment built for other worlds ever to guide us in this one? Axiological holism, together with the sort of two-stage functionality of emotions that I've borrowed from Millikan, holds some promise for an answer. We are forever launched into a dialectical dance: our emotional dispositions respond to, but also create, entirely new contexts. We obviously can't judge new situations with anything other than our old dispositions; but if we apply ourselves to take as comprehensive a view of the new context as possible, the totality of our emotional reactions will generate new paradigm scenarios, from which emerge fresh axiological judgments. T o make this claim a little more concrete, let me cite three examples. The first bears on our capacity to countenance certain philosophical possibilities: it lies in the reflections of this very essay. The possibility of viewing the philosophical problem of the sources of value in the present light is one that did not exist, say, before Nietzsche and Darwin. This is not, I suggest, because such thoughts would have been unthinkable: it is rather because Nietzsche and Darwin have changed the emotional dispositions that set the framework of our philo-

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sophical vision, in such a way as to make such thoughts into live options. It is easy to imagine cultural contexts in which they would seem blasphemous, depressing, or mad, and arouse corresponding emotional reactions. But to me, and doubtless to any reader who shares the feeling that there is nothing original about them, these reflections seem simply nothing less than natural. For now, for me, to live in accordance with Nature is to live in accordance with these thoughts. Perhaps the example of a philosophical vision seems to far removed from concrete emotional life. So here are two other examples, derived from the fact that Western countries have seen, in the century that is ending, the emergence of radically new norms governing the nature of families and family life. One consequence of that process is that for educated members of liberal societies, it is difficult even to imagine what could justify or even explain the hostility traditionally evoked by what used to be called "unnatural relations". Those who still find repulsive the idea of homosexual marriages, for example, can only do so at the cost of wearing, as the common metaphor aptly puts it, "blinkers" which prevent them from bringing together all the values that form the separate fragments of their own axiology. For I surmise that most of those who live in the context of liberal and democratic assumptions would find that, when probed separately, their own direct emotional reactions would place individual love, freedom, tolerance, and certain forms of equality high on their axiological scale. But they may be unable to bring these together, and apply them to a situation that they have learned to code in terms of an unquestioned paradigm scenario. The supreme moral value of literature and art, particularly movies, stems from their power to bring such emotions to bear on situations previously judged in the light of rigid stereotypes. Here is one last example. Nothing seems more "natural", I venture to surmise, than the assumption that children are best raised by their own natural parents. Yet our century has seen several experiments, such as those of the Kibbutzim, in which alternative arrangements have been tried. These were - naturally enough frequently attacked as unnatural. But whatever their measure of success, the present perspective raises the possibility that such alternative arrangements cannot be judged solely in terms of their conformity with the past o f our species. Their naturalness can only be judged in the light of the total context in which they arise, a context which is, of course, itself a historical product. T h u s the changing relations between the sexes, the demands of modern economic life, and changing assumption about the relation between the various ages of life may engender a situation where very different patterns of child raising come to seem not only normal, but natural. Perhaps that will bring us, in the twenty-first century, the flourishing of a pattern once familiar in a very different context of historical China, where the actual upbringing of any given child is entrusted not to her parents, but to her grandparents. For consider the naturalness of the following

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facts, in the context of modern Western life: First, women have the highest chance of giving birth to healthy babies in their twenties. Second, both men and women are most likely to be at their intellectual peak between their third and sixth decades. Third, both are less likely, when young, to be emotionally stable and mature, and therefore less fit to raise children. Fourth, men and women in their fifties and sixties are still vigorous enough, as well as likely to be more patient and wise. Does it not seem natural, then, that women should give birth to one generation of children, but that men and women together should bring up not their own children but those of the following generation? It seems to me at least conceivable that the verdict of our emotions considered globally should one day be that such arrangements would indeed be the most natural.

8. Conclusion I have argued that we must abandon the idea that our emotions, including but conceived far more broadly than pleasure and pain, are mere indicators of some independently existing naturalness. The sum of our emotional reactions to the worlds we create is all there is to "Human Nature". These global dispositions to emotional response constitute, if only by default, that Human Nature, and if they are brought into intelligent and comprehensive dialectical conversation with one another and with the changing contexts of our lives, they constitute all there is to know of moral value. But emotions can provide reliable guidance only in the context of the totality of their axiological verdicts. That we should ever attain such comprehensive emotional vision is, of course, Utopian; but no more so, after all, than the traditional phantasms of moral theory, the Kingdom of Ends, the Original Position, the Greatest Happiness. Such a conception is, I suggest, as close as we can come to the object of our quest: a solution to the problem of active passivity, and a way of forming rational judgments about what is relevantly natural, which make some sense of a notion of living in accordance with nature, even while that "nature" never stands still. Emotions both determine the live options before us, and shape our responses to those options. They do this, in part, in terms of the stories we are able to tell ourselves. As history changes, so do those stories. One of them, which flourished in the Enlightenment and will, I hope, survive the twenty-first century, is a story that prizes coherence and comprehensiveness of vision. This ideal of comprehensiveness, applied to the dialectic of emotions, yields a distant but perhaps still recognizable picture of life lived naturally, even as we create ourselves as the universe's most perfectly functionless artefacts.20 20 I am grateful for much valuable advice on an earlier draft of this paper from Neil Roughley, discussants at the University of Konstanz Philosophy Seminar and Wayne Sumner.

Emotion, Moral Value and Being Human. Comments on Ronald de Sousa's Paper Wolfgang

Friedlmeier

De Sousa's central claim is that emotions are apprehensions of axiological facts. If human emotions do indeed fulfil this peculiar function, then they are good candidates for distinguishing features of the human life-form. However, de Sousa also argues that there is no such thing as human nature. In an attempt to come to terms with this apparent contradiction, I want to discuss three central, related issues in his paper from the perspective of developmental and cultural psychology: first, his conception of emotion, second, the status he attributes to emotions within morality, and third, the question of human nature.

1. Conception of Emotion According to de Sousa, emotions determine human behavior in a dialectical way. On the one hand, they have a biological function that is rooted in reproductive success. On the other hand, the specificity of human emotions is that they are grounded in "paradigm scenarios". In other words, the biological function of human emotion is transformed into a subjective process of meaning. The idea that emotions have an adaptive function for the survival and reproduction of the human species is emphasized in theories of psychology that focus on universal structural features of emotions. Ekman (1972) and Izard (1978) conceptualize the fundamental emotions (like joy, sadness, anger) as "basic affect programs", which consist in universally and genetically determined connections between neurophysiological reactions, feelings and expressions. The person him/ herself has only a modifying influence on these basic and natural processes, these programs guaranteeing the person's adaptation to the environment. According to these approaches, expression and subjective experience are isomorphic, i.e. feeling (subjective experience) is also determined by biological function. In contrast to these approaches, de Sousa develops a different perspective on biological function, taking his lead from Millikan's notion of "proper functions". He argues that, although biological function may be a necessary condition for the development of emotions, the subjective experiences involved are far from "simple applications of stereotyped dispositions" (p. 303). What the individual experiences is, instead, grounded in "paradigm scenarios", i.e. concrete situation types

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embedded in specific stories, calling forth specific responses (cf. de Sousa 1987, 182f.). It is by this means that biological function is transformed into individual meaning. Feeling an emotion thus involves the reactivation of particular experiences, and the number of emotions tends towards infinity. For de Sousa, such idiosyncratic reactive dispositions are at least in part constitutive of a human being's "individual nature". There are interesting parallels here with the conception of emotion in recent psychological research on emotions ( C a m p o s / C a m p o s / B a r r e t t 1989). According to these approaches, emotions are symbolically charged and based on subjective processes of evaluation. An emotion consists in (a) an evaluation of the present environment with respect to its capacity to satisfy the person's motives, (b) an affective reaction, and (c) action tendencies (Frijda 1986). An emotion prescribes the way in which the present person-environment relationship is to be transformed. From the perspective of developmental psychology, we need to ask how an individual comes to acquire such meanings. In de Sousa's terms: how can we explain the genesis of "paradigm scenarios"? According to developmental psychology, the neonate is provided with a basic system of pleasure and pain and temperamental factors like reactivity. In the first months of life, proto-emotional reactions are mere distress reactions, as they do not yet contain the central features of an emotion. In particular, action readiness is not yet oriented to the cause of the affective reaction and there is a lack of strategies for regulating the state of distress (cf. Sroufe 1996). At first, the caregiver regulates the infant's emotional reactions externally, providing a framework within which the child develops his/her own subjective meanings and self-regulating strategies through processes of internalization (cf. Holodynski/Friedlmeier 1999). Socialization is thus a central mediator of emotional development. Parents start to interpret the proto-emotional expressive behavior of the neonate on the basis of their own individual abilities to decode emotions, as well as on the basis of cultural meaning-patterns. Within this process, culture-specific patterns of emotions and emotion-regulation have effects on the child's emotional development. For example, Kornadt (1989) demonstrated empirically that the lower rate of aggressiveness in Japanese as compared to German children is related to differences in parental beliefs and child-rearing strategies. In conflict situations with their child, Japanese mothers tend to react with empathetic responsiveness, because they believe that the "child is still a child". German mothers react more aggressively, interpreting the child's behavior as an intended attack. T h e lack of an aggressive model and the positive consequences in anger-evoking situations decrease both the child's affective experience as well as its tendency to react aggressively. It is plausible to assume that these differences have long-term consequences in regard to a person's experience of anger (Kornadt 1989; Kornadt/ Eisler 1998).

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The child's internalization of cultural meanings mediated in the process of socialization is not completely determined by its environment, but also depends on the child's active reconstruction of such meanings, a procedure which in turn depends on biologically determined characteristics like temperament. According to the co-constructive perspective sketched here, emotions have a cultural origin which is personally transformed through specific experiences (see Friedlmeier 1999). De Sousa's emphasis on the two sides to emotionality - its foundation in biological function and its individual concretization - appears to neglect the intermediate cultural dimension of emotion constitution. However, if one fills in this dimension for him — and certain passages in The Rationality of Emotion suggest this (1987, 182f.) - then his conceptualization appears compatible with the findings of developmental and cultural psychology.

2. Significance of Emotions for Morality For de Sousa, the moral significance of the emotions lies in the passivity of their microgenesis, i.e., emotion tokens are less subjective constructions than undergoings which befall the person. It is because of their passive character that they can be the medium through which a person apprehends something about "objective" reality. Emotions thus have a specific epistemic function, namely the apprehension of axiological facts. It is worth confronting this idea with developmental psychology's findings about the crucial role emotions play in moral development. Zahn-Waxier et al. (1983) documented that 2-year-olds already provide help for their peers. The subjects displayed moral behavior at a developmental stage at which the internalization of moral standards cannot yet be assumed. Such behavior is explained by the emotion of empathy, which develops out of affective contagion, a phenomenon that appears a short time after birth. The child's development of a first global self-concept (self-other differentiation) transforms affective contagion into empathy - the child recognizes roughly that its affective state does not reflect its own situation, but rather the situation of the other. This is a primary precondition for the development of prosocial behavior. However, according to our studies, the relation between expression of empathy and engagement of prosocial behavior decreases in middle childhood (cf. Friedlmeier 1993). This has led us to conclude that empathy, like all other emotions, takes on a more and more active quality, i.e. it can be evoked, regulated and controlled by the child. The question then arises what the point is of maintaining or adopting an empathetic stance, if this does not correspond to the child's felt need. In other words, the critical question is: how do children come to recognize moral standards as valid? De Sousa assumes that this recognition is a personal

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experience resulting from the competence that is inherent in the emotions. However, according to developmental psychology and in contrast to de Sousa's assumption, the acceptance of such standards has to be conceptualized as a developmental task in its own right that is mediated in the process of socialization. Verbal argument and explanation, the observation of positive and negative examples, and reward or punishment are means of this process of mediation. Emotions thus both serve as precursors of moral development and play a crucial role in the successful internalization of moral standards, i.e., emotions can be seen as causes of the individual's acceptance of moral values. In this light, the conception that emotions provide epistemic access to axiological facts appears highly problematic. It is here that the dangers of leaping directly from general biological conditions to the personal meaning-system expressive of individual natures become most clear. The personal evaluations based in paradigm scenarios are not necessarily moral. On the one hand, there appears to be no reason to speak of "moral values" unless we are speaking of intersubjectively shared standards. On the other hand, there must be a conceptual possibility that the internal standards of a particular culture might themselves be morally wrong. And in neither case does the "fit" with individual emotional dispositions - even the totality of an individual's dispositions ("axiological holism", pp. 304ff.) - provide a sufficient condition for this correctness. A person who is possessed of an all-pervading hatred of (certain of) her fellow beings is going to perceive different "axiological facts" from others. These "facts" are not only going to be unpleasant, but also very weird.

3. "Human Nature" De Sousa argues that since the Darwinian revolution we can no longer take seriously the idea of a human essence (p. 292). This is, he says, because being human is a matter of having a specific lineage, and not particular properties. In making this claim, de Sousa appears to be assuming that a property belonging to human nature has to be one which all members of the species possess timelessly. He argues that, even if we were to succeed in defining human nature as it is now, "the next human birth would bring a counterexample" (ibid.). There is, however, something rather bizarre about this conclusion. It hardly makes much sense to talk as if there are no universally human-specific features (e.g. features like achievement motivation) just because human properties may change over thousands of years. On the contrary, it is plausible to see human nature as involving properties to which there are significant analogues in other species. Indeed, de Sousa's conceptualization suggests that this is precisely the case with emotions. A plausible candidate for such a feature is the need for attachment, which has been thoroughly investigated in developmental and cultural psychology.

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Attachment is conceptualized as an inborn social need to create an emotional bond with the caregivers. It has a biological survival-function and can be also observed in other species. However, ethological theories cannot explain the human-specific feature of attachment. This is expressed in the symbolic representation of the attachment figure that develops in the first year of human life and the varying, but not unlimited, forms that are documented within and across cultures. Attachment can be clearly observed in early childhood and there is strong evidence that its form has life-long consequences for personality development. T h e fact that a person is incapable of emotional bonding is interpreted as a consequence of having been rejected in early childhood, i.e., the avoidance of attachment is functionally adaptive for such an earlier relationship, but may have dysfunctional consequences at a later age. As long as we have no reports of a lack of attachment behavior in young children in any culture, there is no reason not to take it that the need for attachment is a universal human feature. In psychological research, as in other social sciences, we assume that there are universal characteristics of human beings, without insisting that such properties be necessary and sufficient conditions of "the human essence". Within the process of research, the universality of the feature under investigation and its importance for an understanding of being human may be revealed over time. Finally, the example of attachment has interesting parallels to the concept of emotion, because, on the one hand, emotions also appear in other species but, on the other hand, human emotionality also has unique features, in particular, idiosyncratic meaning-constellations. And although the variety of emotions may be great, nevertheless, as long as a pattern of the same phenomena can be identified, there is no reason to doubt their universality.

A Reply to Wolfgang Friedlmeier

Ronald de Soma Friedlmeier's perceptive comments concern three issues: emotional development, the question of the moral emotions, and the content of the notion of human nature. I will respond briefly to each. 1. As one who indulges all too readily in the philosophical vice of armchair psychologizing, I'm always pleased to find my hunches confirmed by those who do the hard work of checking things out. Most of the work referred to by Friedlmeier was done after I had first indulged in the relevant speculations in my The Rationality of Emotion, and while I am utterly confident of my complete lack of influence on the psychological research community, it is gratifying to be told that my way of conceptualizing emotions is not incompatible with the recent findings of developmental psychology. Despite verbal differences, I suspect there's even less difference between us than Friedlmeier notes. For example, there is no "contrast" between the adaptive function of "affect program" emotions of the sort studied by Ekman and Izard and an approach in terms of Millikan's "adapted proper functions". As Paul Griffiths (1997) has recently argued, there is a great distance between the "affect program" emotions and the more complex ones he calls "cognitive emotions". One key difference is one that Millikan's notion is designed to capture: just as a linguistic expression can refer to an unprecedented situation, an emotion can be novel both in the situation type that evokes it and in phenomenal quality. In both cases, nevertheless, the capacity for a thought or emotion to be uniquely tailored to a non-recurring situation is itself a biological adaptation. As I see it, the cognitive emotions can continue to serve functions similar to those of the affect program emotions; but they do it in a different way that needs to be conditioned on the scale of individual development. This is what I meant by stressing the fact that complex emotions are "far from the simple applications of stereotyped dispositions". I am grateful, however, for the opportunity to correct the impression that I regard the "intermediate cultural dimension" as dispensable in the transformation of "biological function ... into individual meaning". Indeed I do not: on the contrary, the paradigm scenarios that define the cognitive emotions are fashioned out of the raw material of innate dispositions (including "affect-program" emotions) and cognitive development, and this is a process thoroughly imbued with the social and the cultural.

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2. Culture, I must however confess, is not something I regard with the benign complacency with which it seems to be viewed by most social scientists. Tradition and culture are used as often for ill as for good. As Friedlmeier rightly says, we need to allow for the "conceptual possibility" (I would prefer to say: for the historical certainty) "that the internal standards of a particular culture might themselves be morally wrong". Indeed, I am tempted to think that tradition and culture are offered as justifications for a practice only when the practice is indefensible. If it could be defended on grounds of justice or utility, it would be: the resort to culture as a justification is therefore most likely to shield some unconscionable practice. This brings us directly to the central question, which is the role of emotions in morality. Friedlmeier attributes to me the view that it is because of their passivity that emotions "can be the medium through which a person apprehends something about 'objective' reality". But this is not an idea I wish to endorse without qualification: passivity is surely not a sufficient condition of epistemic warrant. Much more is required; but it remains a suggestive analogy between perceptions and emotions that both generally present themselves to consciousness as undergone rather than chosen. It certainly doesn't follow that the deliverances of either faculty are invariably sound; but it raises the possibility that they might sometimes be. Friedlmeier relates the interesting discovery that the "relation between expressions of empathy and engagements of prosocial behaviour decreases in middle childhood", and plausibly infers that emotions can be increasingly regulated as children mature into adults. But what is it to "regulate and control" an emotion? Is not the process in part dependent on the existence of other, rival emotions, as well as on the kind of meta-emotions exemplified in the "marshmallow test"? In any case, this highlights the problem that I raised in my paper, namely that emotion cannot be taken at face value as apprehension of axiological fact, even if axiological facts are indeed apprehended by emotions, and even if we wish regard 'Nature' as the best guide to life. We need to choose between the putative values offered us by different emotions. H o w do we sort the valid from the misleading ones? The answer is again, of course, socialization; but the most amazing and appalling fact about socialization is that it has the power to enforce all kinds of attitudes and behaviour, from the most humane to the most abhorrent (Sober/Wilson 1998, ch. 8). So the question merely arises once more: how are we to sort these out? Compare the development of our capacity to apprehend 'facts' by perception and reasoning. Surely we need to be socialized into rational thought, too. And people can be socialized into the most irrational forms of belief and reasoning: witness the absurd religious beliefs that can be found in all cultures. I agree entirely that "the personal evaluations based in paradigm scenarios are not neces-

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sarily moral". In the face of the fallibility of cultural standards, Friedlmeier doubts that some form of "axiological holism" can provide us with sound ways to discriminate merely apparent from genuine moral values. But what does he propose to put in its place? He doesn't say Western philosophy has given three sorts of answers: the Aristotelian, in which insight into the inherent purpose of human life enables us to differentiate those emotions that do from those that do not fulfill it, the Kantian, in which the criterion of value is found in some purely rational principle, the Categorical Imperative; and the Utilitarian, in which the balance of pleasure and pain, weighted with certain considerations of justice, provides the necessary criterion. But in the last twenty five hundred years, these principles have carried little theoretical conviction and been of not much practical use. It might as well be conceded, therefore, that the control we seek to exercise over our emotions is grounded in nothing else than the systematic mutual confrontation of plausible principles and individual emotional reactions to particular situations. This is what is sometimes called Reflective Equilibrium, and it is essentially what I have called Axiological Holism: I submit that it is the best we can do. 3. Finally, on H u m a n Nature. I am willing to concede that my standards for calling something part of H u m a n Nature are impossibly high, since for me nothing short of necessary and sufficient conditions will do. (But impossibly high for what purposes? I return to this question in a moment.) As Friedlmeier points out, human nature involves properties to which there are significant analogues - or even better, I would say, homologues - in other species. And investigations, such as Franz de Waal's (1996), of proto-morality in our near-relatives among the apes do indeed, it seems to me, promise to add insight into our own morality. Attachment, which Friedlmeier stresses, is, of course, an excellent case in point, and Harlow's studies of the importance of attachment in monkeys (Harlow/Harlow 1962) provided powerful inter-species confirmation of Bowlby's psychoanalytic approach (Bowlby 1982, vol. 1). So why should I say that, insofar as a trait is shared with other species, it can no longer be considered definitive of H u m a n Nature? There are some traits that we share with our family but not our neighbours; some that we share with neighbours but not with our co-nationals; some that we share with our co-nationals but not with other humans; and also much that we share with our neighbours as well as with our more distant cousins the apes, or even other mammals. I suspect that what this leaves for all humans and no others to share is not very interesting. Friedlmeier rejects my "necessary and sufficient conditions" as too strong a condition for characters to belong to H u m a n Nature, but wants to assume there are "universal characteristics of human beings". This is literally false: cite any character you like, and I'll find you some member of the species who lacks it. But not a normal member of the species! you'll say: quite, so what we have are not univer-

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sal characters, but normative ones: what you must mean by "universal" is not that everyone shares it but that everyone ought to share it. And what would be the point of arriving at such normative criteria? T h e contexts in which judgments of normality can be of interest are all too likely to be contexts of exclusion: all too often criteria of normality have been used to deprive some humans, in theory or in practice, of their status as fully human. Given the minimal gain in theoretical understanding, the game doesn't seem worth it.

Politics and the Unnatural Infirmity of Being Human Christopher J. Berry

What is it to be, to be human? The possible answers to that question are myriad largely because it is not self-evident what the question itself means. Perhaps greater precision could be obtained by asking the supplementary question, 'being human, as opposed to what?' If the answer is 'the gods' then mortality might demarcate the human or if 'God' then (in the Christian version) sinfulness might suffice or, again, if 'chimpanzees' then being human might mean having either twentythree pairs of chromosomes or a language. But as is apparent merely from this sample even this strategy scarcely narrows the field. Indeed maybe that is the point; as the existentialists or post-modernists claim, humans cannot be defined - to be human is to elude closure. Ostensibly against the spirit of that last sentence I adopt a traditional approach toward answering the initial question. I do this by taking 'human' in the sense of a distinctive way of acting in the world. Summarily, what is distinctive is that humans act both diversely and uniformly. In the traditional language to be human is to be both a creature of convention {nomos) and of nature (phusis). Of course in the light of what has already been said I am not claiming that this is the answer. What I do want to claim is that being human requires naturallyframing conventions to deal with circumstances within which humans naturally find themselves. As Hume puts it — in a phrase from which I coin the term-of-art in my title — humans, compared to other animals, suffer from an "unnatural conjunction of infirmity and necessity" (Treatise, 485')· While humans, like animals, are necessitous, have basic (natural) needs, they do not possess to the same degree the (natural) behavioural mechanisms to satisfy them. Not being provided by nature with ready-made (evolved) solutions, it has been left to humans themselves to provide them. This is especially acute because, as Aristotle had observed, humans are a species of "herding animal" (Pol. 1253 a; Hist. An. 488 a 7ff.), so that there is a need on their part to make their naturally social or group life possible. They realise this possibility by regulating themselves. These rules comprise nomoi — they are not behavioural/natural responses like (say) shivering when

1

Hereafter, Hume's Treatises referred to in the body of the text as T. The following abbreviations are also inserted when citing Hume's work: U = Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, M = Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals·, EPD = 'Of Polygamy and Divorces'.

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cold. However, humans have to form conventions; convention-forming is not itself a matter of convention — it may even be said to be kataphusin. There are two dimensions to this — a generic indispensable requirement to regulate in order to maintain group life and the particular regulations which effect that maintenance. It is in this latter respect that Lewis declares a convention to be arbitrary, that is, because there is an alternative regulation that could have been the convention (Lewis 1969, 70). Relatedly there are different types of convention ranging from bureaucratic convenience (a uniform voting age) through niceties of social intercourse (use of a handkerchief) to markers of shared experience (wearing poppies in remembrance of war-dead) and on to what Stuart Hampshire has called "primary moral customs" (Hampshire 1983, 97). As will become apparent, and as intimated by the earlier references to the maintenance of group-life, my focus here is on the last type. These moralised customs are identifiable as indispensable responses to (in my term-of-art) 'unnatural infirmity' and, as such, there has to be some set of possible conventions of this type. For example, humans (like all organic life) die but it is part of their evolved natural behavioural repertoire not to regard this with indifference. This natural concern with their mortality, unique to humans, establishes at the same time a 'space' in which to express this concern. I choose this ambiguous way of putting it because it enables me thereby to make three clarificatory points. Firstly, it permits these conventions to be thought of as 'filling' that space. But, secondly, because space is a dimension, then it is not something tacked-on but is integral to the concern. This is why these conventions are indispensable and constitutive, not some bolt-on extra. Thirdly, 'space' can be construed as an opportunity or capacity, so that there is nothing pre-determined about the way conventions fill the space; they are arbitrary in Lewis' sense. Thus it is that all humans, in the form of moralised customs, have conventions about how to treat the dead — bury not cremate them, bury them in a particular position, bury them with their possessions and so on. This same analysis can be applied to other conventions of this type. I will mention three. Humans naturally must eat, but there is a conceptual space so that how and what they treat as consumable is not uniform (like the confinement of the Panda's diet to bamboo) but is subject to conventional diversity (like the confinement of Jews to kosher meals or Jains to vegetarianism). Or, second, humans have sex, but this natural fact is saturated with conventions such that, for instance, a bride must live with her husband's kin. Thirdly, the fact that "the truly natural state of the adult human is dressed and decorated" (Hollander 1988, 84) means that the 'meaning of clothes' is inseparably natural and conventional (senators alone should wear purple, prostitutes must wear red shoes). In each of these cases a group of humans has fashioned a response to some ineluctablefeatures of their existence. The ineluctability of these features means that

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no group fails to fashion a particular response to death, sustenance, sex and apparel. The form of the response is the establishment of conventional rules of conduct. H u m a n life is made 'orderly' by these rules. Whereas 'order' among primates is established by cues which trigger (to a greater rather than a lesser extent) deterministically or immediately a particular behavioural response, the unnatural infirmity of being human produces in virtue of these conventional rules a mediated order, with the further consequence that there is no one particular form of order. This is not to reduce chimpanzees to automata, merely to observe that their proven responsiveness both to environmental changes and to the dynamics of group-living is still quite restricted; they are confined to certain parts of the globe and to an upper-limit of group size. By these criteria they are less flexible than humans. 2 It is by imposing these mediated rules (diversely) upon themselves that humans establish what are usually termed 'cultures'. The clothes worn, the food consumed, the familial relations experienced, the respect owed to the dead are all 'social facts'; they are not willy-nilly at the individual's discretion. In short, what conventions do in virtue of the space yielded by unnatural infirmity is establish a distinctively human form of order. What I wish to explore further is this idea of'order'. More particularly, I am interested in the sense in which the 'order' thus established may be said to be 'political', whether there is indeed a case for Man (anthrôpos) as a political animal. This remains an open question because to say that humans are creatures of convention is not conterminous with their being political. Accordingly, my exploration attempts not, as is the case with Aristotle, to beg the issue but seeks to elicit whether 'politics' is implicated, if only as a by-product, in the distinctively conventional order that humans have fashioned. 3 In the light of this the most apt way of proceeding is to adopt an indirect or oblique strategy. I earlier mentioned sex as an example of a natural behaviour that, in humans, is also an arena or space filled with conventions. In other words, it is a marker of their characteristic combination of nature and convention that humans have to self-regulate their sex lives. Consistent with the analysis thus far, this regulation can take many forms but of these I want to concentrate, for simplicity, on the institution, practice or virtue of chastity. While chastity might at first sight seem to be a parochial, intellectually uninteresting, even morally dubious, phenomenon it is, rather, better understood as an instance of a universal human concern to regulate sexual relations. In addition, given the widespread acceptance, at least in general terms, of the argument that within all (sexually reproducing) organisms there are mechanisms or behaviours that focus on reproductive 'success' then this

2

For the relative inflexibility of primates see, for example, D u n b a r 1988, 323-4.

3

I have discussed Aristotle's argument in a companion piece to this essay (Berry 1999).

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is an area where the distinctiveness of being human should be detectable. To assist in this detection I have chosen to exploit Hume's brief account of this virtue. I say 'exploit' because I am less interested in the substantive tenability of his discussion than I am in using it for my own ends. From that perspective Hume is especially useful for two reasons: not only does he put his finger on a crucial aspect as to why there are sexual conventions but also does so within a context (liberally construed) that recognises the distinctiveness but not complete separateness of humans from other animals.

II I start by elaborating upon that last point. Certainly it is a well-worn strategy to attempt to fix human nature by means of a comparison with the behaviour of animals. Many thinkers have used this strategy to emphasise the gulf or difference between the human and the animal. For Hegel, for example, it is axiomatic that there is an infinite difference between them. Humans are geistig since all that they are (and thus all that they do) presupposes self-reflective free will. According to Hegel, animal nature is identifiable precisely as that which human nature, with its self-consciousness, has transcended (because Man knows he is an animal he is for that very reason not an animal) (Ästhetik, 120). By contrast, the important general thrust throughout the discussion of animals that Hume includes at several points in his writings is an assimilation of human and animal behaviour and processes. Of course there are limits to this and Hume identifies two differences in particular: animals have less imagination (T 307-8, Τ 397) and have inferior reasoning abilities (T 467-8, Τ 610, U 107n). In both cases the difference is of degree not kind but, that said, this general human superiority is most decisively manifest in the fact that "all the advantages of art are owing to human reason" (T 610). Animals do not possess these advantages, that is, they do not establish conventions or artifices. Why not? Because they don't need to. Hume aptly illustrates this line of thought in his essay Of Polygamy and Divorces. There he remarks that "among the inferior creatures, nature herself, being the supreme legislator, prescribes all the laws which regulate their marriages". There is, he continues, a precisely attuned adjustment so that where the new-born animal is independent, then "the present embrace terminates the marriage" and where there is a period of dependency (where, for example, food is more difficult to obtain), then "the marriage continues for one season", that is, until the offspring can fend for itself, whereupon the "union immediately dissolves". In humans, however, nature has not "so exactly regulated every article" of the marriage contract; they have to adjust their marital arrangements according to prudence and circumstances. These adjustments take the form of municipal

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laws which, although they may differ from place to place (such that polygamy may be allowed), are yet "equally conformable to the principles of nature" (EPD 183). In this passage Hume draws attention to a distinctive quality of being human. Like (most) other animals, humans naturally have sex and produce thereby offspring but, unlike in other animals, in humans these natural sexual and filial relations need supplementing. This 'need' manifests their unnatural infirmity in the face of necessity and, as such, typifies the human predicament. The characteristic way of being human is how they contrive diversely to escape this uniform condition. The requisite supplementation comes from humans creating rules to regulate their relations. The rules are 'created'; they are not conjured from thinair but constructed from natural materials. Hume's account of chastity is just such a conventional or artificial construction. That is to say, chastity is one particular response that some human cultures have developed in order to render more 'exact' the regulations governing their sexual/filial relations. Hume defines chastity as "fidelity to the marriage bed" (M 207) and thinks it obvious that it has no "foundation in nature" but arises "from education, from voluntary conventions of men and from the interest of society"(T 570; cf. M 207). However, the explanation as to why these conventions are needed in the first place does have a naturalistic foundation. This foundation comprises the passions. Hume identifies two. The first is that there is "natural appetite betwixt the sexes" (T 486), which is a "passion evidentally implanted in human nature" (T 481). While no particular human need engage in reproductive sex, nevertheless if reproduction is to occur then the fusion of sperm and ovum is necessary (though of course this may now be in vitro as well as in utero). For Hume to call this a 'passion' carries with it the further point that it has motivational force: sex is fun, a source of pleasure. Indeed, as we will see, here is an instance of unnatural infirmity for unless humans in some way regulate their pleasure-seeking, then the stability of their group-life will be adversely affected. By contrast in bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees) the very frequency of, and indiscriminate participation in, sex is a group bond. Hume's second natural foundation is that "both sexes naturally" have a concern "for their offspring" (a concern that is bound up with the natural fact of the "length and feebleness of human infancy") (T 570; cf. Τ 352). The reference to 'both sexes' means that fathers love their children naturally (T 478, Τ 519). The crunch issue is the problematic character of the possessive 'their' as the object of the love. The source of the problem is the "trivial and anatomical observation" that "the principle of generation goes from the man to the woman" (T 571). In other words, a woman always knows she is pregnant, a mother-to-be, but a man cannot be as sure that he is the father-to-be. Though 'trivial', this difference has far-reaching consequences.

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This epistemological divide between male and female is only decisive because of two natural facts: in contrast to the way that bleeding follows a cut, birth does not immediately follow fertilisation and fertilisation does not necessarily follow from each act of copulation. It is the quality of sheer ineluctability, of the inescapability of the way the world just happens to be, of these two facts that makes precise paternity naturally uncertain. This is true of most animals; however, they have evolved a variety of species-specific means to deal with it. They are not unnaturally infirm, because their natural behaviour expresses those means. Hence, for example, the multifarious sex-life of the bonobo serves to neutralise paternal uncertainty by generalising it, since no male can 'know' which offspring he has in fact sired, while for gibbons, because they associate as isolated pairs, there is a lack of opportunity to create uncertainty. But it is part of the unnatural infirmity of being human that, although they exist in groups like the bonobo, their socio-sexual behaviour is closer to that of the gibbon, which means that the uncertainty is not resolved (cf. Ridley 1993, 209). This needs resolving in order to enhance the survival of the naturally feeble human infant (a point to which we shall return) .With no natural resolution available, humans have to turn to artificial means. In Hume's own account, paternal certainty can only come from artifice in the form of chastity. Chastity, in the guise of 'educating' girls so that the convention to be sexually faithful becomes 'second nature, 4 helps to close the epistemological divide. Chastity makes it more certain, from the man's point of view, that he really is loving his children. The convention of chastity can thus take its place alongside such other cultural phenomena/conventions as harems guarded by eunuchs, infibulation and domestic confinement or claustration. 5 If we except for the moment matrilineal systems, which have their own set of conventions, then despite all such elaborate precautions, the inescapability of the two natural facts mentioned above, means the male may indeed have been cuckolded, so that he is loving a child that shares none of his genetic history. For the woman's part, she too, if she has broken the "laws of chastity" (M 207, M 238-9), may be uncertain who the father of her child is but she is, nonetheless, secure in the knowledge that her genetic history is present. 6 It does not follow though that a mother's love is 4

As he puts it in the chapter on Chastity, "education takes possession of the ductile minds of the fair sex in their infancy" (T 572). T h e power of 'education' (or socialisation as we might now term it) is frequently invoiced in H u m e ' s writings such that sentiments rooted in "tender minds" become "deeply radicated in our internal constitution" (T 501; cf. Τ 116 etc.).

5

According to Wilson and Daly, harems are only an extreme version of "the repeated convergent invention of claustration practices ... [which] reflect the workings of a sexually proprietary male psychology" ( W i l s o n / D a l y 1992, 301). Cf. also Dickemann 1981, 417-38. It is perhaps one of the deeper issues generated by surrogate motherhood and reproductive technologies that the balance between belief and affection, especially o n the part of the female, is capable of a fundamental shift in emphasis.

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necessarily greater than a father's. Though men know they will, as a natural fact about themselves as human, love a child on the belief that (biologically) it is theirs, yet they might also know enough to know that if they do not believe the child is theirs — if it is "directed to a wrong object" (T 570) — then they may not love it. (Wicked step-parents are a staple of fiction and are a phenomenon that have some support in fact. 7 ) Chastity thus helps to establish through artifice a link between fathers and offspring. T h e establishment of this linkage, as we will suggest in Part III, is crucial. T h e relative differentiae that H u m e had identified between humans and animals now come into play. These two — imagination and greater reasoning powerare simultaneously an exacerbation of the human predicament of unnatural infirmity and its solution. They make matters worse by the fact, as H u m e remarks, that "reflecting" on sex "suffices to excite the appetite" (T 396). T h e very thought of you can be sexually arousing and 'you', thanks to the imagination, may be anybody. T h e artificial virtue of chastity is thus a way of policing or regulating 'acting on the thought' promiscuously. T h e regulation attempts to ensure that it is an authorised 'somebody' and not just 'anybody' who is the sex-object. (As we will see in Part IV, the idea of 'authority' lies at the heart of the 'order' that is distinctive to humans and supplies the link to politics.) Just as, on Hume's account, possession needs affixing, through the conventions of justice, to an owner, so that it becomes his 'property', so a particular woman needs affixing through convention to a particular man so that she becomes his wife and any offspring theirs. In this way chastity can, in Hume's analysis of artificial virtues, take its place alongside justice, obligation and other conventions as an anti-solvent, a socially cohesive agent. (Just as it makes no sense for animals to be chaste, so it is conceptually inappropriate for them to act justly, honour promises or own property.) Like these other virtues, chastity imposes a stability and predictability that is naturally absent from human affairs and, by thus making future commitments feasible, it redounds to the overall benefit of civil society. T h e way this is done is through the invention of general rules. All conventions or artifices are inventions (mankind is an "inventive species" ( T 484)) and, traditionally, 'invention' is closely related to imagination. Imagination has an important role because, firstly, men "are mightily govern'd" by it (T 534) and, secondly, this governance is extensive; indeed "when any phenomena are constantly and invariably conjoined together they acquire such a connexion in the imagination that it passes from one to the other without any doubt or hesitation" ( T 403). Hence the role attributed to habit or custom as the cement of the universe. T h e regularity in habitual associations is an expression of the human 7

See the literature cited in Wilson/Daly 1992, 307. H u m e juxtaposes "the care of a step-mother" to "the fond attention and concern of a parent" (EPD 188).

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capacity to generalise their experience (cf. Τ 147). For H u m e this is largely unconscious. Accordingly he can say that it is "a principle of human nature" that "men are mightily addicted to general rules" (T 551). Addictions we can say are both artificial and powerful. They are artificial in the sense that their source lies in some human action as opposed to behavioural response. Pavlov's dogs were trained to salivate on hearing a bell, girls are trained (ideally) to foreclose the possibility of marital infidelity. Whereas the dogs are not the source of the rule that governs their behaviour (Pavlov is), humans (males?) are the source of the rules governing girls. What this indicates is that some human groups have learnt this particular way to regulate their sex lives in order to produce order, just as, according to Hume, they have, through "slow progression" and "repeated experience of the inconvenience" of transgressions, conventionally established stability of possession, language and money (T 490). The power of addictions, in the guise of general rules, is felt in their ability to restrain such "common principles of human nature" as "avidity and partiality" (T 532-3). Since 'avidity' could reasonably describe the natural sexual appetites that chastity is presumed to restrain, then it means that it is these (artificial) rules that constitute the virtue. As we have seen, these 'rules' serve to regulate (for women especially) the outlets for sexual pleasure and thus, as the essay on Polygamy stated, bring order and greater exactitude to a universal aspect of human affairs that is left naturally inexact.

Ill What to take out of this account of Hume? To repeat the point made earlier, the substance of Hume's discussion is less what is at issue than the formulation of both the problem and its solution. What is most significant for our purposes is the role played by the imaginative generation of rules as the way to resolve the human sexual predicament. Extrapolations from primatology and conjectures about hominid life seem to have established that humans are group animals. It is now a commonplace that the evolutionary success of homo sapiens is related to the size of their brains. That capaciousness is made possible by their continuing, postnatal, development — at birth the human brain is 25% of its adult size, the corresponding figure for a chimpanzee is 46%. As a consequence, as H u m e remarked, the human infant, compared to other animals, necessarily experiences a lengthy period of dependency. This, as Gehlen among many others has stressed, gives the environment a formative role (cf. Gehlen 1988, chs. 3 & 4). It follows that 'environment' here is as much cultural/human as it is natural / extra-human (it thus incorporates much of what H u m e meant by 'education'). The infant is dependent on a nurturer, who typically but not necessarily is the mother.

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To this fact of dependency is to be added the fact of the 'loss of oestrus' in the human female. While this is not uniquely human (it is true to some degree of about half the species of primate, though only the case in one ape - the Orang-utan), it is the crux of the distinctiveness of human group life (society).8 Because of the concealment of ovulation, human females are sexually receptive at all times and, correspondingly, human males (unlike other group living apes) maintain a continuous interest in sex with them. This "generalization of sex", as P. J. Wilson terms it (1983, 579) sets up a potentially destabilising dynamic. Sex may well be fun, but permanent promiscuity would endanger the consequences of that enjoyment — the survival of offspring. Humans do as a matter of natural fact, care about their progeny; their survival is not a matter of indifference. The consequence is that all human cultures seek to regulate the link between sex and its outcome; as Rom Harré says categorically, "there are no promiscuous systems" (Harré 1993, 17).10 The survival of the human neonate requires, as we have already noted, nurture. As an empirical generalisation it might well be the case that this task is most directly and immediately provided by the mother. But, even allowing for the occurrence of maternal desertion, that of itself is not sufficient. The mother has to survive child-birth, which, in humans, is especially dangerous owing to the combination of their bipedality, which restricts the size of the pelvic opening, and the large head of the about-to-be-born. Even if she survives the birth, and commits herself to nurture, she still needs, especially in the early weeks of the infant's life, assistance. Nor is this a necessarily temporary condition. Again the unnatural infirmity of humans comes into play. This time it appears in the guise of the conjunction of the fact of prolonged dependency with the fact that the female can conceive again before the previous child is independent. In practice, therefore, the need for assistance is liable to persist. Since, as just noted, child-survival is not a matter of indifference to humans, then it is improbable that this assistance would be left to chance. It can, accordingly, be conjectured that means will be found to procure the requisite assistance and, it can be reasonably supposed, that this will be accomplished by somebody assuming it as a responsibility. Because there is no immediate (natural) candidate for that role, it means that rules or conventions have to be established such that nurture and support for the nurturer is reliably forthcoming. Of course, these 'rules' need not be formal but can exist as customary patterns of expectation. Additionally, as a convention, a variety of arrangements to establish a responsible nurturer are possible — from the husband in a

8

Many theories have been put forward to account for this evolved trait. For a survey see Diamond 1997, ch. 4 and more fully the same author's earlier work (Diamond 1991, ch. 3). 9 I am indebted to Wilson's analysis. 10 "In no human society are all sexual relations casual and impersonal" (Daly/Wilson 1978, 266).

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monogamous marriage to, in matrilineal systems, the mother's kin (often her brother). 11 In each case the relationships are constituted by rules that function to establish responsible agents. In line with this, three key relationships in the sexual/reproductive life of humans can be identified: female (mother) /child, male/female and male (father [responsible agent])/child. However these are not on a par. T h e first two, parturition and coition, can be identified as 'immediate' because in each case there is a direct biological link. In the third case this link is absent, the tie is mediated: the male relates to the child through the female/mother. This third relation is 'artificial' in Hume's sense (cf. Τ 497). Just as for Hume justice though artificial is necessary, so the survival of offspring is an indispensable requirement of human social life. This survival requires nurture. Whether or not the mother survives the pregnancy, this requirement, because it is not sufficiently underwritten by natural mechanisms, needs conventional support or assistance. This assistance is artificial, because it is the product of rules/expectations affixing responsibility, while at the same time it is, in Humean terms, not 'arbitrary', for artifice is compatible with what is "inseparable from the species" (T 484). T h e provision of this assistance is also thus an indispensable ingredient of being human. In addition, as products of evolution it matters not simply that offspring survive, but to particular humans that this child survive. T h e received wisdom of neo-Darwinism is that this specificity is 'programmed' or 'hardwired' into the human genotype. This gives a steer (so to speak) to where to look for maternal support. Sexual regulation is the social construction built from these natural bricks. This regulation has a dual character. Just as sexual reproduction involves two cells making one, so the regulation concerns the 'one' (the product of sex — the child) and utilises the fact that 'it takes two' in order to enhance the product's survival by identifying the most likely source of reliable assistance. Hence, to generalise, in patrilineal systems a male attempts, through artificial regulation of the female's mating, to make sure the child is his and to make his relation to the child approximate the natural certitude of the mother/child tie. While in matrilineal systems the uncertainty of biological paternity is accepted 12 (or as in Malinowski's famous

11

T h i s diversity in fact echoes a basic Humean argument. H u m e firmly held that the variety o f human conduct still supposed uniformity. And what accounts for the variety? T h e answer is "the great force o f custom and education" (U 8 5 - 6 ) . I f we further ask, 'who educates the educators', then the answer to that can only be the particular cultural conventions o f a sub-set o f humans. Moreover, this analysis can take fully on board the concreteness or meaningfulness o f these conventions; they are not being dismissed as epiphenomena. Nor conversely does the uniformity amount to uninformative abstract universalism. For an elaboration o f this point see Berry 1 9 8 2 .

12

For an account that supplements a 'theoretical' explanation o f the 'mother's brother phenomenon' in terms o f kinship selection with cross-cultural empirical surveys, see Flinn 1 9 8 1 .

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account of the Trobriand islanders its relevance may be denied 13 ), but female reproduction is under the control of 'brothers' and 'uncles', so the offspring is (proximately) t h e i r s . 1 4 (The reference to 'control' intimates the political dimension to which we shall shortly turn.) This regulation establishes mediated bonds which, as such, are independent of the immediacy of biological relations. These bonds are conventions (primary moral customs) that inhabit the conceptual space opened up by unnatural infirmity. As proposed at the start of this paper, this space as a capacity can, once 'opened', be extended. What this means concretely is that humans have evolved the capacity to establish wider non-biological bonds or what has been called (unwittingly echoing Hume's account of imagination) "fictive kin" (cf. Pinker 1998, 436). 15 This now captures a critically distinctive facet of being human. It is not group living but the ability to live together in groups larger than the immediate breeding pool that marks out the human, as manifest in the fact that human society is more extensive both in numbers and territory than that found among any primate. Manifestly, humans have been able to associate as kin, as 'dialectical' tribes, as p o l e i s , as nations and as co-participants in an abstract formal order. However, as mediated — conventional, rule-governed — associations or forms of order, they lack the certitude of more immediate relations. Recalling that conventions are a space that can be alternatively filled, it means that one particular form of community can (to co-opt aptly Benedict Anderson's phrase) be 'imagined' to be otherwise. This establishes an ever-present possibility of a tension between the human ability to live in large groups and the stability of such groups. Politics, it may be conjectured, is (at least in part) about the management of this tension.

IV I wish in the remainder of this paper to pursue this conjecture and, in the light of the (oblique) discussion in Parts II and III, recur to the association between 13 B. Malinowski in fact attributed ignorance of biological paternity to the Trobriand islanders (cf. Malinowski 1929). That attribution was contested and Malinowski himself became more circumspect. See Leach 1969. 14 In theory there is nothing to prevent an Amazonian society. Women clearly can and do assist in nurture and it is conceivable they could retain the girls and despatch the boys to a corresponding band of males. Mating between the two could be contractually arranged. In fact, despite the speculations of early anthropologists, no such set of social organisation appears to have existed (cf. Fox 1967, 113). O f course this does not contradict the practice now of individual arrangements that mimic the theory - as when a lesbian couple arrange for one of them to become inseminated. 15 The term is an anthropological commonplace.

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'order' and 'politics' and the sense in which Man may be a political animal. Chastity, we recall, was defined by Hume in terms of fidelity and if we take trust or promise-keeping, as examples, we can see that they are integral components of the human capacity to exist socially beyond immediate or face-to-face relationships; as Hume says a "promise always regards some future time" (T 516). At the heart of sexual regulation is an attempt to control the future - who will effect and/ or assist in the nurture of the particular child that the female is bearing? Since in humans this is naturally underdetermined, it means, in this vital area, at least, the human future is 'open'. This openness generates the need for 'closure'. Artifices or conventions like chastity are set up (culturally evolved) to meet that need. And it is because this need itself is occasioned by their unnatural infirmity that the order established by this regulation is different from that which obtains even among other primates; it is, as Nietzsche put it, das eigentliche Problem of being human to be an animal that Nature paradoxically has allowed to make promises and thus control the future (Geneal. 799-800). Furthermore this location of the difference between humans and animals in the future-orientated notions of trust and promise-keeping enables the distinctiveness of the human utilisation of symbols to be accommodated without strain.16 To link being human with symbolic communication is, of course, one of the most venerable of all associations. This can be, and very often has been, used to demarcate sharply the human from the non-human. Bearing in mind Hume's remarks on the difference between humans and animals being one of degree, and in view of the rapidly shifting intellectual scene on human pre-history and primatology, it seems prudent not to be dogmatic about this. Accordingly, in this paper I have merely attempted to indicate how the need, by humans, to regulate their sex-lives provided one particular context within which the symbolisation could have occurred. To help develop this argument (albeit only vestigially) and investigate its bearing on the place of politics in human life, I utilise selectively sundry remarks of other scholars. John Searle provides an instructive starting-point. He postulates that the biological capacity to symbolise is the root of'culture', understood as the manifestation of'will and intentionality" (Searle 1995, 228). Searle expresses this

16 Wilson argues that it is with the arrival of kinship structures that symbols are necessitated (Wilson 1983, 106-7). T h e similarities with H u m e are perhaps more than coincidental, since Wilson cites H u m e ' s account of the invention of promising (and the related significance of trust) as vital to the maintenance of h u m a n social relationships (101). Language and ritual, prime cases of symbol use, have been linked to the h u m a n ability to live in larger groups than those of primates, where reciprocal relations are established through the time-consuming and numerically-restricting exercise of grooming (cf. D u n b a r 1996). As always, the story is likely to be more complicated. See Dunbar's more technical article and the subsequent discussion in D u n b a r 1993.

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by means of a formula — 'X counts as Y in C' where X refers to certain physical properties, Y to a status conferred upon X and C to the context or circumstances that situates that status (1995, 43f. 17 ). He refers in passing to marriage as an example of an 'institutional fact' so constructed and we can spell this out such that X refers to human co-habitees, Y to their symbolic status as married and C to the legal and / o r religious bodies that are recognised as authorised to confer that status. 18 What I want to focus on is the 'C' term — the recognition of authority. It is through the operation of authority that a significant set of the rules of conduct that characterise human order are established and maintained. This order is not reducible to the hierarchies of (say) the chimpanzee band; ultimately it is because they do not experience 'unnatural infirmity' that chimpanzees only metaphorically practise 'polities'. O f course, that judgment might be thought to depend on the definition of'politics'. Hence Frans de Waal interprets chimpanzee behaviour as Machiavellian because it is based on opportunistic and manipulative powerseeking (de Waal 1989, 212 19 ). Yet what distinguishes that behaviour from Machiavelli's account is that for him politics - even in its princely manifestation — is not about power as such but the 'goods of fortune' (glory and riches) (II Princ. ch. 25). However, because the power-struggles among de Waal's chimpanzees could be viewed as also instrumental (for increased opportunities to copulate with receptive females), 20 there are more telling differences. T o be successful the prince has to seem to be 'good' but that success free-rides upon the common acceptance of certain standards. 21 While acknowledging that matters are far from clear-cut, it does seem that at best chimpanzees may be

17 Searle had used this same formula in Searle 1969. 18 This is consistent with Searle's own most used example of money where for pieces of paper (X) to count as currency (Y) they must have been issued by the authority of the US Treasury (C) (1995, 46). Later Searle emphasises that status-functions are matters of power and he treats 'authorization' as a source of power (1995, 94ff.). This is not in substance, I think, significantly deviant from my own argument (see text infra). 19 In the Epilogue (added since the 1982 edition) de Waal quoted Lasswell's definition of politics as 'who gets what, when and how' and declares that "there can be no doubt that chimpanzees engage in it" (1989, 214). The more general term 'Machiavellian intelligence' has been coined to identify the hypothesis that intelligence evolved in social circumstances and incorporates within it social manipulation and deception. Cf. Byrne 1995, ch. 13. (Byrne was one of the editors of the original volume Machiavellian Intelligence, Byrne/Whiten 1998). 20 De Waal reports that the dominant male was responsible for three-quarters of all matings and once 'deposed' his proportion dropped dramatically (de Waal 1989, 168). Arguing from the opposite direction, as it were, this same instrumentality has been attributed to humans. De Waal himself makes passing reference to droit seigneur and Wilson / Daly and Dickemann (see above, note 5) have argued systematically that human males compete to attempt to monopolise female reproductive capacity. 21 Cf. Arnhart 1990, 527, for a similar critique of de Waal.

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interpreted as capable of deceiving one another discretely, but the 'episodic' character of their experience effectively precludes them from systematic exploitation (cf. Donald 1991, ch. 5 22 ). Another significant difference is that Machiavelli's prince is above all characterised by his exercise of virtu to offset the fickleness of fortuna. To be successful at politics requires exhibiting audacity, vigour and decisiveness (all characteristics of what Weber termed 'charismatic authority [Herrschaft]') and it is because the political world is unstable that pre-emptive action and flexibility of response are needed per mantenere lo stato (Il Princ. 305). There is, another words, an awareness that the 'environment' is not a given but liable to shift unpredictably and, again, the 'chimpanzee-world' lacks the perception that 'the future' may always be unlike the present. What these cases invoke is what Bernard Williams has called the 'representation problem', that is, here, how the phenotypical behaviour of chimpanzees (such as domination hierarchy) is represented in humans as a species with a capacity for conceptual thought (Williams 1995, 10223). Williams goes on to claim that what gives rise to this problem is the fact that human communities embody norms. This brings us back to the artifice of authority. The point made in the earlier analysis of sexual regulation was that the distinctive human order is mediated not immediate like that experienced by other animals. This difference exemplifies a lack of certainty. If, as seems reasonable, we regard the survival of offspring as a salient and significant feature of society, then this lack of certainty must be addressed. Authoritative regulations, such that this female properly belongs to that male, are put into place to that end. In this way the ubiquity of kin relations and lineage systems in human society is explicable together with the fact, as the anthropological evidence testifies, that these relations establish the patterns of obligation (cf. Mair 1962; Balandier 1970). Though 'established' in this manner, these patterns are not set in concrete. Rather they mark the expansion that is manifest in the human ability to associate in large groups. Consistent with a source in sexual regulation, and this expansionist trajectory, politics may now be identified as the attempt at keeping order by increasing certainty or in Gordon Schochet's, from my perspective more congenial, definition, "[politics is] the establishment and maintenance of order, the management of change and the intrusion of authoritative intention and control in human affairs" (Schocher 1993, 349). Authority is the key. It is through its operation that politics maintains order. The lynch-pin of authority is that, as in Hobbes' seminal analysis, it turns the many into one, whereby the confusing, uncertainty-inducing, babble of many voices is transformed into the clarity and certainty of one voice (Lev. XVI, XVII). 22 See also Donald's riposte to critics (Donald 1993). 23 Williams in fact mentions Hume's discussion of chastity in this regard.

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Without the C, then there is no way of picking out from among the many cases of X which are truly Y. By in this way conveying a socially objective (interpersonally recognisable) 'truth', order is created so that all those who specifically recognise C ipso facto recognise that truth. In virtue of this shared recognition, these specific individuals are able to develop between themselves stable expectations, such as the reliable provision of assistance in the nurture of offspring. Moreover, this same analysis can consistently accommodate the fact that other specified individuals are able to develop formally similar but substantively different sets of expectations — such indeed are the markers of cultural differences (like patrilineal as opposed to matrilineal kin-systems). This stability in expectation conveys consequently the ability to negotiate the future which itself is maintained through the artifice of authority for, as Schochet further puts it, the "political process ... superintends for the entire society the determination of how much like the present the future should be" (Schochet 1993, 351). It is though a vital component of the unnatural infirmity of being human that the future is 'open'. Chimpanzees because of their relative inflexibility are not confronted with that possibility, humans because of their relative flexibility are. Politics in the guise of authority is one seemingly indispensable set of conventions that humans have developed to make the infinity of possible futures more finite, to make the uncertain more certain and thus more controllable and more humanly liveable. But there is no one indispensable conventional set that creates that control. That conclusion is compatible not only with Hume's recognition, in his essay on 'Polygamy and Divorce', that alongside monogamous chastity polygamy is an equally 'natural' human way of regulating sex, but also with Aristotle's dictum that Man is naturally political and yet lives under a variety of constitutional forms. Of course, despite at one level there being some convergences between Hume and Aristotle, there are significant differences.24 Perhaps the most vital is the latter's teleological perfectionism and that prompts some familiar questions. If there is a connexion between being human and practising politics, then is there a particular way of conducting that practice that is better, more human, than other ways? Not only latter-day Aristotelians, like Martha Nussbaum or perhaps Alasdair Maclntyre, might think so, but also some of those deeply sympathetic to neo-Darwinism. Roger Masters is a notable example of the latter tendency. Masters puts forward a "new naturalism" based non-reductively on evolutionary biology that "provides objective criteria for preferring a constitutional regime in which citizens are subject to the law and play a legitimate role in political life" (cf. Masters, 1989, 183; 227). 24 L. Arnhart links Aristotle with H u m e , and both with Darwin, as 'naturalists' (Amhart 1995, 527).

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However, the 'objectivity' to which Masters here appeals, like that to which the Aristotelians would have recourse, seems misplaced. Just because humans have to construct conventions and an important set of these are 'political' in the sense of embodying authority, it does not follow that one particular construction is of itself and for that reason superior to another. There are both conceptual and empirical grounds to support that claim. Conceptually, as we have seen, conventions 'fill space', but what matters is the form not the matter of the 'filling'. It is not that the space consists of pre-shaped 'holes' into which only some particular 'pegs' will fit but, rather, that it is able to accommodate without predesignation a range of formally equivalent alternatives. Empirically it seems exceedingly suspect to assume that a set of human arrangements that have only recently and locally existed fits 'human nature' better than any other set that has existed throughout recognisable human history. Perhaps fittingly only an 'idealist' view of Hegelian or some other historicist provenance, with a commitment to an inherent yardstick by which human 'progress' can be gauged, could judge (some) chronologically more recent arrangements as a 'good fit'. By extension, references to some hypothetical account of Pleistocene hunter-gatherers, much used by sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists, does not establish a definitive context. Precisely because, and in so far as, these individuals are human, then they had to establish conventions but these (even if we could know what they were) cannot be preemptively judged as more securely founded than others that humans have developed.

V It would be a mistake to conclude that this resistance to privileging a set of political conventions renders 'nature' irrelevant. Rather it has been the guiding thread of this paper that the range of nomoi are neither free-standing nor infinite. Given that the only sustainable account of 'nature' is neo-Darwinian, then the particular evolutionary niche occupied by humans is such that they are unnaturally infirm and they have accordingly to formulate conventions to achieve an ordered group-life that other group-living animals attain through nature alone. This is why I initially characterised 'being human' in terms of both nomos and phusis. I attempted to convey this through my oblique strategy of utilising Hume's account of chastity as an example of the way humans have regulated their (natural) sexual relations. As a matter of natural fact humans reproduce sexually, and given further natural facts about male/female behaviour patterns, it was necessary, for the sake of offspring survival, that they developed conventions to regulate their sex-lives. And in order to increase certainty, to stabilise these regulations, it

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was also necessary to establish an authorised set of relations. In so far as authority is a constitutive component of the political task of managing the tensions of group life, then being human requires the exercise of politics and Man to that extent may be regarded as a political animal. Of course these tensions increase with the increase in social complexity and concomitant divergences in interest but, because 'politics' is easily accounted for in this context I have, in this paper, taken this as given. I have tried to dig deeper. I have sought, within some strict (or minimal) parameters of what is indisputable about being human (their unnatural infirmity), a source of that easily recognisable characterisation of politics. It is the absence of that source that debars chimpanzees from participating in the world of politics. The fact that my source lies in the indispensable formation of conventions has a further consequence which here I can only state. If chastity is thought to express an unacceptable view of sexual double-standards, or if constitutionalism is judged preferable to despotism, then the focus of the discussion should be on the relative tenability or cogency of that particular convention vis-à-vis some alternative. Within these discussions some appeal will almost invariably be made to 'human nature'. However, the argument of this paper helps explain why it always has been, and conceivably always will be, the case that no one appeal is conclusive enough to trump others on the ground that it is uniquely in accord with human nature. 25 In the end being human does mean living in diversely conventional ways according to nature. 26

25 I attempted a more systematic articulation of this point in Berry 1986, esp. ch. 10. 26 I am grateful to Neil Roughley for his comments on an earlier draft of this paper. I have also benefited from observations by Preston King as well as from the remarks of my colleagues at Glasgow Politics Department's Senior Seminar.

Rationality, Autonomy and Basic Needs David Copp

Human beings have basic needs for a variety of things. First are the necessities of life, such as food, water, air to breathe, and shelter and clothing to protect us from a variety of hazards, including inclement weather. Second are certain social and psychological requirements. These are things that, although not necessary for life, are still necessary in almost every case for a life that is worth living. Included in this second category are such things as companionship, education, the ability to use the local language, security from coercive interference, and, perhaps, a minimum of privacy. These needs will be met in different ways by different people in different contexts, both cultural and physical. You might have allergies to various kinds of food, and for this reason you might need different kinds of food from the kinds I need. You might live in a different culture from the culture I live in, and for this reason you might need to learn a different language or to learn different skills from those that I need to learn. Described at an appropriate level of generality, however, the basic needs are common to all humans. They are in this respect quite unlike the needs we have for the various specific things we require in order to satisfy our varying idiosyncratic desires, or to achieve our personal ends, or to realize our special projects. Very few people need to have a toboggan, but I might need one, because I might want to play in the snow with my friends. Unlike needs of this kind, all of us have the basic needs. I shall argue in this paper that we have reason to secure for ourselves the things for which we have basic needs.1 More specifically, and more controversially, I shall argue that it can be rational for a person to secure for herself the things she needs even in circumstances in which doing so conflicts with achieving her most valued ends, or what she most desires, all things considered. This position raises a number of questions. First, what are the basic needs? What do they have in common, in virtue of which we categorize them as "basic"? Second, what does rationality consist in? Third, what links the basic needs to rationality? Why is it that it can be rational to act against one's own ends, in order to secure one's basic needs, even if one does not value doing so? Finally, does my thesis about rationality and the basic needs conflict with any important platitudes about rationality? I believe that it does not. As we will see, however, it does conflict with a kind of "subjectivism" about practical reason. I will argue that this is no objection to it. 1

I have proposed this thesis before. See C o p p 1995, ch. 9; also C o p p 1993.

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The Rescue Example It will be useful to begin with an example that illustrates the kind of conflict there can be between serving our basic needs and serving our values. I require a case with the following four key characteristics. First, I need a case in which a person's values, ends, and desires clearly argue for doing a particular thing, and the person realizes this. Second, the person's values, ends, and desires are coherent. Third, no matter how much additional information the person were given, and no matter how much more she reflected on matters, she would still have the values, ends, and desires that argue for doing the thing. Moreover, no matter how much additional information she had, she would not desire herself, as she actually is, to have any different values, ends, or desires. Fourth, and finally, the person's basic needs argue decisively against her doing this thing. Doing it would undermine her ability to serve her basic needs, or it would put at risk her ability to serve her basic needs, not in a merely temporary or minor way, such that she could later compensate for neglecting her needs, but in a permanent and decisive way. T h e best kind of case would therefore be one in which a person's values argue for her doing something highly dangerous. T h e following example is based on a true story. A woman is driving with her child along a road that parallels a deep and fast flowing river. She loses control on a curve and the car flies off the road and into the river, where it quickly sinks until it can barely be seen below the surface of the water. T h e woman escapes from the car, but she cannot free her child from its safety seat. Fortunately, another driver has seen what happened and he rushes to the woman on the riverbank. She cries that her baby is in the car, and he quickly dives into the water to rescue the child. It is difficult getting through the car window, and he cannot undo the safety straps. H e is forced to come up for air, but as he attempts this, his clothing catches on the car. H e manages to free himself, and he surfaces coughing and gasping. H e tries again, and this time manages to get the child out of the car. T h e child's mother and he are extremely distressed and frightened, but they are lucky enough to revive the baby after several minutes of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. T h e man risked his own life to save the life of a child who was unknown to him. H e acted without a great deal of reflection, but we can assume that what he did was the action most recommended by his ends and values. O n e might dispute this on the ground that he risked his life and therefore risked his ability to do anything else in service of his values. But it is not impossible that his values most recommended attempting to rescue the child, despite the risk to himself. Since we are constructing the example, we can stipulate that he values human life, and he especially values children and families. H e has already raised a family, and we may stipulate that he is a widower and his children are well launched in their own lives. In recent years, he has often told himself that if necessary he would trade his own

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life for the life of a healthy child. Since these are his values, or so we stipulate, we can assume that, all in all, his values call for him to attempt to rescue the child, even at a significant risk to himself. He surely was rational to attempt to rescue the child. His values are coherent and admirable and they are not based on misinformation, nor is the judgment that his values support rescuing the child based on misinformation. Even if he were given more information and more time to reflect, he would not have had any different values. Nor would he have wanted himself to have had different values. So it is surely correct to judge him as rational to attempt the rescue. However, the point that interests me is that despite his values, given the risk to himself, he would have been rational to have declined to attempt the rescue if his reason were the risk to himself. His values dictated attempting the rescue, and he chose to act on his values. But suppose he had chosen otherwise. Suppose he had declined to attempt the rescue because he did not want to accept the risk to himself. He would not then have acted on his values, but by minimizing the risk to himself, he would have minimized the risk to his ability to act on his values in the future. If it is rational to act on one's values, other things being equal, as I am assuming, then it seems equally rational to avoid serious risk to one's future ability to act on one's values, even if at the cost of failing to serve one's values in the case at hand. Ex hypothesis if the man declines to attempt the rescue, he fails to do what is dictated by his values in this instance. But if he declines to attempt the rescue because of the risk to himself, he thereby preserves his ability to serve his values. If serving one's values qualifies as rational, then I say that preserving one's ability to serve one's values ought also to qualify as rational. But let me consider three objections. First, it might be objected that in the case I have described, only weakness of will could have led the man to decline to attempt the rescue. He would therefore have been irrational not to have attempted the rescue. But this is a mistake. Weakness of will is action contrary to one's own judgment as to what would be most rational or would make the most sense. So to decide in the rescue example whether the man's declining to attempt the rescue would have exhibited weakness of will, we need to know which of the relevant alternatives, attempting or declining the rescue, he judged to be most rational or to make the most sense. Now he might have judged that attempting the rescue made the most sense, for we have stipulated that he saw that his values called for him to attempt the rescue. If this was his view, then he would have been weak of will to have declined to attempt the rescue. But we do not need to think of the case in this way. Let us instead stipulate that the man judged merely that attempting the rescue made sense in light of his values. For we have also stipulated that the man saw that his needs the risk to himself - called for him not to attempt the rescue. If he had declined to attempt the rescue, it would have been because he did not want to accept the risk to himself. He would have regretted very much being unable to save the child,

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but he would have viewed the risk to himself as a sufficiently good reason to justify his decision. In this case, he would not have been weak of will, for he would have recognized that declining to attempt the rescue made sense, given the risk to himself. 2 O n e might now object that to make sense of an imaginary counter-factual scenario in which the man declines to attempt the rescue because of the risk to himself, we must suppose that he values preserving his own life more than he did in the original scenario. Since he values preserving his life more than he did in the original scenario, he might have been acting to best serve his values after all. Accordingly, we can explain the rationality of his declining to attempt the rescue in terms of the rationality of serving one's values without assuming that there is an independent reason to avoid risks to oneself. This objection depends on confusing desiring with valuing. It is true that if the man had declined to attempt the rescue because of the risk to himself, he must have desired to avoid risk to himself. But this does not mean that he must have valued avoiding the risk to himself. It is quite possible to pursue something we do not value. The objection also seems to confuse acting for a reason with acting for the specific reason that we want to do the thing that would best serve our values. In the rescue case, I am stipulating that the man might have declined to attempt the rescue because of the risk to himself even though he realized that attempting the rescue would best serve his values. Third, it might be objected that only the man's ignorance of the fact that he would be successful and safe from harm if he attempted the rescue could make his declining to attempt the rescue seem rationally defensible. This is perhaps true, but it is no objection. It is true that if the man knew when he arrived at the riverbank that he would succeed and be safe from harm if he attempted to rescue the child, and certainly if he had no doubt at all about this, then he would have been rationally required to rescue the child. His values call for rescuing the child, and under the new supposition about his knowledge, his needs do not call for him not to rescue the child. There is no risk to himself. 3 But my thesis is merely that in cases of conflict between serving one's values and serving one's basic needs, it can be rational to serve one's basic needs even at the expense of failing to serve

2

I am grateful to David Sobel for helpful discussion of the weakness of will objection.

3

This is not the place to discuss the nature of risk. T h e magnitude of a risk is a function of the seriousness of the harm that might eventuate together with the probability that it will eventuate. If there is no chance of harm, then there is no risk of harm. And if we know and are entirely confident that we will not be harmed, then the subjective probability of our being harmed is zero. So there is no risk, at least not from our epistemic point of view. In the revised rescue example, we suppose that the man knows and has no doubt that he will succeed safely in rescuing the child if he tries to do so. In this case, there is no risk that he will be harmed. T h e case is therefore relevantly different from the original case in which the man faces a significant risk.

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one's values. In the new case, where we assume the man knows the rescue will be safe and successful, there is no conflict between the man's needs and his values. Therefore, with the new supposition about the man's knowledge, the example is no longer to the point. This can hardly be an objection since the original example, where we suppose that the man faces a serious risk, is sufficient to illustrate my thesis. In any event, we can change the example. W e can suppose that the man died while attempting to rescue the child. His attempt was still rationally defensible, since it was dictated by his values, given his epistemic situation. But his declining to attempt the rescue was also rationally defensible, since it was called for by his needs.

The Basic Needs It is tempting to think of the basic needs as all-purpose means, things we need in order to achieve our ends, no matter what our ends might be. For example, I need air to breathe if I want to write an essay about the basic needs, and I also need air to breathe if I want to walk downtown to buy some coffee. I need air to breathe in order to achieve virtually anything. Still, with imagination, we can conceive of a variety of ends, including highly admirable ends, the achieving of which would deprive me of the air I need. The claim I want to defend implies that, in at least some such cases, it would be rational for me to forgo achieving my ends in order to continue to be able to breathe. Perhaps I have reached the point in my life where, given my physical condition and my values, it would be best for me to commit suicide. And perhaps I have decided to drown myself. Still, I want to say, I would be rational to balk at the last moment and decide not to kill myself, provided that I could continue to serve some of my values if I continued to live. In any event, the present point is that examples such as this one, as well as the rescue example I discussed before, illustrate that the basic needs are not all-purpose means. They are not things we need in order to achieve our ends, no matter what our ends might be. For in the suicide example, depriving myself of the air I need to breathe is a means to achieving what I value, given my physical condition. And in the rescue example, the man must put his ability to serve his basic needs at risk in order to serve his values. There have been a variety of proposals about how best to understand the basic needs. 4 Most of the proposals agree that, with respect to anything we need, there is something we need i t f o r ? In one example of a need that is not basic, I imagined 4 5

I discussed some of these proposals in Copp 1993 and in Copp 1995, ch. 9. David Wiggins appears to deny that this true of basic needs. See Wiggins 1987, 9.

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that I need a toboggan in order to play in the snow with my friends. In another example, we may suppose that I would need snowboots in order to walk downtown in the snow to buy some coffee. The things we need in this way - the "occasional needs" - are needed relative to our ends, given our circumstances. But the basic needs do not depend in this way on our own specific ends or desires or on our idiosyncratic values or on circumstances that can vary from person to person. What then are they needed for? As I said in the introduction, we all need to learn to use the language of our community. 6 It is obvious that we need language in order to communicate, so perhaps communicating is the basic need. But what do we need to communicate for? If it is the case, for anything we need, that there is something it is needed for, then what are the basic needs needed for? What is the "ground" of the basic needs? One might propose that the basic needs are grounded in our nature as human beings. Just as plants need water and light, we need water and nourishment. O f course, we have needs for things that are not strictly speaking necessary for survival, such as companionship, security from coercive interference, and the ability to use the local language, but it might be argued that these things are necessary if we are to flourish biologically. Similarly, a kind of plant might need soil that contains a certain mineral in order to flourish biologically even if it could survive in less hospitable soil. This reasoning suggests that the matters of basic need are the things needed by humans in order for them to survive and to flourish biologically. I doubt, however, that there is a strictly biological conception of a flourishing human being that is suited to ground the basic needs. 7 I doubt, for instance, that companionship is necessary for humans to flourish biologically. Most humans might need companionship to flourish biologically, but, although it is an empirical issue, it seems compatible with the facts of biology that a human might flourish in all biological respects even if he were deprived of companionship. Moreover, suppose that mechanical hearts became very much more reliable and that their installation became quite routine. Even in that case, other things being equal, a person with a healthy biological heart would presumably have to count as doing better biologically than a person with a mechanical heart. Yet, other things being equal, the basic needs of the person with the mechanical heart would be being served just as well as the needs of the person with the biological heart. So it is doubtful that the basic needs can be grounded in a conception of biological flourishing. Most important, I am looking for a ground for the basic needs that would help to explain why it can be rational for a person to satisfy her basic needs in at least some cases in which doing so would require her to forgo achieving her ends. In the suicide example, I need air to breathe even though, given my physical condition, 6

Let us not forget sign language.

7

For discussion of a related idea, see Kitcher 1999.

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I will not flourish biologically if I continue to live. Perhaps the biological theory of the needs can account for the example, since I need air to breathe in order to stay alive. But I want to explain why I would be rational in this situation to attempt to stay alive. In the rescue example, it is plain that attempting the rescue would put this man's biological survival at risk. But what is not plain, and what I need to explain, is the intuition that he would be rational to refuse to attempt the rescue in order to avoid the risk to his life and to his ability to flourish biologically even though his ends support attempting the rescue. The biological theory of the basic needs does not help us with this problem. David Braybrooke (1987, 31) proposed that normal life is what grounds the basic needs. We need to communicate because doing so is necessary for a normal life. The trouble here is to determine what counts as "normal" life. In some circumstances, starvation is normal, at least it is statistically normal. But we would not want to say that in such circumstances we have a basic need to be deprived of food, even though being deprived of food is necessary to live a statistically "normal" life. Presumably, then, Braybrooke had in mind a normative rather than a statistical understanding of "normalcy". Perhaps he would propose that the basic needs are the requirements of a good life. I agree, as I said before, that the things for which we have basic needs are necessary in almost every case for a life that is worth living, but there are exceptions. In the suicide case, for example, it might be argued that, unless I commit suicide, my life will not be the best it could be as a whole, and perhaps that it will not be good as a whole. But committing suicide is not something for which I have a basic need. The proposal seems to expand the idea of the basic needs beyond its intuitive boundaries. It is possible, for instance, that a good life for me would have to include the opportunity to do philosophy, but it would not be plausible to suppose that the opportunity to do philosophy is a matter of basic need for me in the way that learning English was for me a matter of basic need. Garrett Thomson (1987, 8) has proposed that the basic needs are grounded in avoiding a life that is blighted or seriously harmed. This is more plausible. In the rescue example, the man needed to decline to attempt the rescue in order to avoid risk of serious harm. To be unable to use the local language is to suffer a serious harm since it prevents me from communicating. The problem with Thomson's proposal, however, is that the concepts of harm and blight are not specific enough by themselves to isolate the basic needs. In the case where I need the opportunity to do philosophy in order to live a good life, I am harmed if I am deprived of the opportunity to do philosophy, but, again, it would not be plausible to suppose that the opportunity to do philosophy is a matter of basic need for me. In the suicide example, there is a sense in which I will suffer a blighted life if I do not commit suicide. Of course, in the relevant sense, I harm myself if I do commit suicide, but this is what needs to be explained.

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I propose that the basic needs are best construed as the things that we need in order to be, or to sustain ourselves as, autonomous agents. I am not suggesting that the concept of a basic need is the concept of a requirement of autonomy. Plants have basic needs, but the needs of plants are not the things that plants require in order to be autonomous. Plants need water and sunlight. They do not need to be able to act, even though being able to act is a requirement of autonomous agency. M y suggestion is rather that the basic needs are such that, for autonomous agents, the matters of basic need are the requirements of autonomy. T o be sure, I am not entirely confident that all the things that we would intuitively think of as matters of basic need can be explained in this way as grounded in autonomous agency. But I think that the bulk of our basic needs can be explained in this way. More important, as I will argue, the significance of the basic needs for the theory of rational agency can be explained if we link the concept of a basic need in this way to the concept of autonomy. For this reason, I shall adopt the revisionary policy of using the term "basic need" to refer to the necessities of autonomous agency. That is, I shall say, Ν is something for which an autonomous agent has a "basic need" just in case Ν is needed in order for that agent to be or to sustain herself as autonomous. 8 Consider, first, the necessities of life, things such as food, water, air, shelter, and clothing. T o the extent that we do in fact need these things in order to sustain our lives, we also need them in order to sustain ourselves as autonomous agents, for we must sustain our lives in order to sustain our agency. O f course, agents with a quite different physiology from ours would also have quite different basic needs. T h e basic needs of humans are the requirements humans must meet in order to sustain themselves as autonomous. Martians might not need to breathe air in order to stay alive. If not, then the basic needs of Martians would differ from the basic needs of humans. Yet, given my proposal, if there are Martian autonomous agents, their basic needs would be the requirements they must meet in order to be or to sustain themselves as autonomous. T h e social and psychological basic needs are more difficult to bring under the umbrella of my proposal. Social and psychological needs include needs for such things as companionship, education, the ability to use the local language, and security from coercive interference. I need to argue that these things are required for autonomous agency. But to make the argument, I need to explain what is involved in autonomy. Given the limitations of this paper, I can offer only a brief and simplified discussion of autonomy.

8

In C o p p 1995, 176ff„ I proposed that the basic needs are grounded in "minimal rationality" rather than in autonomous agency. But the concepts of rationality and autonomy are closely connected, as I explain briefly below. I explained "minimal rationality" there largely in terms I would now use to explicate autonomy.

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Autonomous agents are "self-governing". W e can distinguish three aspects of this. First, in order to be self-governing, an agent must have values or ends in light of which she forms intentions and plans, and she must then act from these intentions and plans. Hence, autonomous agency requires the ability to form intentions, to have values, and to make plans, no matter how rudimentary. But second, to be self-governing, an agent must act from plans and values that are "her own" in some important sense. There is, of course, a trivial sense in which all the values and plans of an agent are "her own". But an autonomous agent has the capacity to evaluate and revise the values she acquired as a result of her upbringing. She has the capacity to revise her plans and to change her values in light of considerations that appear important to her. There are formidable difficulties explaining precisely what is involved here in a way that does not either trivialize the idea or make it impossible to realize in practice. But we can say at least that to have the capacity to revise her plans and to change her values an agent must have the ability to represent to herself the plans and values that she has, as well as to conceive of and represent to herself various alternatives, and she must also have the capacity to evaluate the alternatives. She must also have the capacity to change her plans or values on the basis of her evaluation of the relative desirability of salient alternatives. Her plans and values must not be fixed, they must be under her control at least to some extent. These are the "internal conditions" of autonomy. Finally, third, are the "external conditions" of autonomy. 9 To be self-governing, an agent must be free from various kinds of external interference. For example, a slave is not autonomous even if she has values and plans, even if she acts from her values and plans given the circumstances she must endure, and even if she has the capacity to evaluate and to revise her values and plans. The reason a slave does not qualify as autonomous is that other agents coercively control the circumstances of her life. Of course, everyone's circumstances are affected by the decisions of other people, and everyone is subject to certain kinds of coercive threats, such as those of the law, to take one example, but slaves, indentured servants, prisoners, children, and the like, are under the coercive control of others to a degree and in a manner that makes them not (fully) autonomous. Given this characterization of autonomy, let me now briefly consider various of the social and psychological needs. Consider the ability to use the local language. Without language, we might be able to have certain rudimentary values and plans, but we would not be able to represent these plans to ourselves and to compare them to alternatives. And without the ability to use the local language we would not become aware of the wide range of alternatives that there are. Nor would we be able to compare our values to those of other people in the local community and to assess and evaluate our values in light of the values other 9

For a discussion of external conditions, see Oshana (1998).

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people have.10 We would therefore, in the relevant sense, lack the ability to revise our values and plans.11 The need for education can be explained on the same basis. At issue here is a basic education, not a formal education in schools, but although we need merely a basic education, we do need one that goes beyond merely the teaching of language. What we need, in order to be autonomous, is to learn something of the various alternatives that are open to us in our lives. Consider now the needs for companionship and for security from coercive interference. We need some degree of cooperation from others, which we can term "companionship" in a broad sense, in order to be successful in our plans. Lack of companionship will tend to undermine our ability to pursue our plans. Moreover, lack of security from coercive interference with our plans is a direct impediment to autonomy. I believe, then, that the bulk of the things that we would intuitively think of as matters of basic need can be explained as grounded in autonomous agency. In any event, I have adopted the policy of using the term "basic need" to refer to the necessities of autonomous agency. The chief problem that remains is to explain why I believe it is rational to secure for oneself the necessities of autonomous agency.

Rationality and Autonomous Agency Some philosophers would use the term "irrational" as a label for a person who is open to any kind of rational criticism. In this sense, if there are moral reasons, then an immoral person is irrational, and if there are ideal ways to live one's life, then a person who falls short of such a life is also perhaps irrational in that respect. I think of irrationality, however, as a specific and restricted kind of failure. I would argue that there are many kinds of reasons. There are moral reasons, aesthetic reasons, reasons of etiquette, legal reasons, and so on. But I do not think that it is necessarily irrational to act contrary to such reasons. In the first place, a person might not recognize some of the reasons that exist. For instance, she might not see that the color of her shirt clashes with the color of her scarf and that she therefore has aesthetic reason not to wear the two things at the same time. This is not an instance of irrationality. It is not a failure of rationality. Rationality is a 10 Will Kymlicka has stressed the importance of culture to autonomy on the basis that without exposure to one's culture, one would not have access to a variety of alternative values. See Kymlicka 1995, ch. 5, 82-84. 11 The notion of ability is slippery. In one sense, a person with talent might have the "ability" to play the piano even if she lacks a piano. In a more robust sense, to be "able" to play the piano, one must not only have the talent, but one must have a piano and have learned to play. I am interested in a similarly robust "ability" to revise our plans and values.

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matter of choosing well given the limitations of one's epistemic situation. In the second place, even if the person does see that the colors clash, it seems to me that it is no failure of rationality for her to continue to wear the clashing colors if, for instance, she herself does not value paying attention to aesthetic considerations in deciding what to wear. This does not mean we cannot criticize her for her poor taste. It simply means that I do not hold her up to the charge of irrationality. Rationality is a matter of choosing well in light of one's own standards for choice. Suppose that a person intentionally says certain things that cause pain to a friend of hers. She might not have realized that saying these things would cause her friend pain. Or if she understood this, she might have attached greater value to honesty than to avoiding causing pain. In either of these cases, we might criticize her for insensitivity, but I would not charge her with irrationality. That is, I do not use the term "irrational" in talking about these kinds of failure. As I use the term "irrational", it refers to a failure of a significant kind that virtually any agent would be concerned to avoid. 12 Rational agents govern themselves to the best of their ability given their actual epistemic situation. Irrationality occurs when an agent fails to be rational in this respect. I will argue that the concept of rationality, so understood, is closely related to the concept of autonomy, which I explained before as the concept of being self-governing. Indeed we can begin to explain rationality in terms of autonomy. Autonomy is a matter of governing oneself on the basis of one's own values and plans. But governing oneself is also what rationality consists in, at least in part. To see this, notice that a person who typically acts on impulse rather than on the basis of values or plans is a clear example of an irrational agent. Such a person does not govern herself but instead merely reacts to the urges and whims that assail her from time to time. Matters would be different if she had a plan to be spontaneous, or if she valued spontaneity, and if this were the reason she gave license to her whims and urges. For in that case, in acting on impulse she would be governing herself on the basis of her values or plans. In stopping herself from reading one book in order to pick up another, and in stopping herself from reading in order to mow the lawn, and in stopping mowing the lawn in order to smell a rose, and in stopping herself from reaching for the rose in order to pull a weed, she would be responding to her impulses, but the underlying reason for which she would do these things would be that she values being spontaneous. This is not irrational. But an agent who acted in a similar way on the basis of each

12 I believe that m y use of the term accords with a c o m m o n usage, but nothing in my argument turns on whether I am correct about this. In his recent book, T . M . Scanlon argues for a narrow construal of irrationality that is similar to mine, and I have benefited from seeing his arguments. See Scanlon 1999, 25.

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and every impulse that assailed her would be irrational if on each occasion she were acting simply because of the impulse or whim and not out of any larger plan or value. This is because she would not in that case be governing herself at all. O n each occasion there would be a reason for which she acts. But these reasons would simply form a disunified cluster of impulses. They would not stem from any deeper coherent plan or value. In most typical situations, rationality requires governing oneself on the basis of such values or plans. 1 3 But now imagine an agent who is in an "emergency" situation in which, if she acts on her values or plans, she will put her autonomy in peril. T h e man in the rescue example is in this kind of situation. If he acts on his values, he will attempt to rescue the child who is trapped underwater in the car. Doing this will imperil his autonomy, for it will imperil his life. An agent in an emergency situation of this kind faces a conflict between her values and her basic needs. Such an agent faces a situation in which her values call for an action that would be precluded by the goal of sustaining her autonomy. T o sustain her autonomy, it would be best for her to do something that would otherwise be rationally excluded, since rationality ordinarily calls for the action that best serves one's values and plans. Why is it that it can be rational in such a situation to act against one's own values and plans in order to secure one's autonomy, even if one does not value being autonomous? In this paper, I can only begin to sketch my answer to this question. 1 4 T h e content of any conception of rationality can be expressed by a standard or a rule, such as a rule calling on us to govern ourselves by our own values. W e can view a conception o f rationality as offering some such standard and as proposing that rationality requires compliance with it. T h a t is, a conception of ration-

13 Scanlon limits his use of the term "irrationality" to cases in which, as he says, "a person recognizes something as a reason but fails to be affected by it in one of the relevant ways" (1999, 25). I think that Scanlon and I are pointing to the same concept of irrationality but that Scanlon's understanding of it is overly intellectualized. Scanlon would say that the person in my example who acts on impulse is fully rational because she takes each of her impulses to give her a reason and she acts accordingly. I think, however, that this person is irrational because she acts on impulse rather than on the basis of her values or plans. She is not governing herself well, even though she is acting in accord with her judgments, because her judgments are ungoverned by her values. Her judgments are an intellectual superstructure. Similarly, on my usage, the person who does not value paying attention to aesthetic considerations in deciding what to wear is not irrational to wear colors she recognizes as clashing. She is not irrational even if she judges that the fact that the colors are clashing means that she has reason not to wear them. (Of course, matters would be different if these people valued acting on their judgments about the reasons they have.) In short, I agree with Scanlon that a narrow usage of "irrational" is appropriate, and I suspect that Scanlon would agree with my vague formula that rational persons are self-governing. But to me the important thing is compliance with one's values, not compliance with one's judgments about reasons one has. 14 My answer alludes to a theory of normative concepts and of normative propositions that I develop in C o p p 1995.

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ality is a proposal regarding the content of the "standard of rationality". Understood in this way, my proposal is that the standard of rationality is roughly to the following effect: Govern your behavior by your own values and plans to the best of your ability given your epistemic situation except that, in emergency situations, you may instead secure your basic needs. Call this the needs and values standard. The challenge posed at the end of the preceding paragraph is to explain why it can be rational in an emergency situation to act against one's own values and plans in order to secure one's autonomy. In effect, the challenge is to show that the needs and values standard is the standard of rationality, or that rationality requires compliance with it. To show this, I need to show that the needs and values standard has some status in virtue of which a person who fails to comply with it is, by that very fact, liable to criticism as "irrational" and a person who does comply with it is, by that very fact, not liable to criticism as "irrational". But nothing turns on the word "irrational". I could hardly answer the challenge merely by stipulating that I shall count a person as "irrational" if she fails to comply with the needs and values standard. What I need to show is that this standard has an authoritative status, or a justification, such that those who fail to comply with it have thereby committed a significant kind of failure, and those who succeed in complying have thereby succeeded in avoiding such a failure, even if they do not value being autonomous. I need to show at least that the standard is not arbitrary or pointless. Consider, for instance, a standard calling on us to stand on our heads in the street for a minimum of five minutes beginning at midnight on every night of a full moon. This standard has no authority or justification. We do not think that it has any bearing on how we are to act. Now consider a standard that calls on us not to wear hats indoors. We might think that it is equally arbitrary or pointless and that it also has no bearing on how we are to act. We might think this even if we understand that compliance with this standard is locally taken to be a matter of politeness, for we might think that politeness, like standing on one's head by the light of a full moon, lacks any point or basis. We cannot avoid the issue about arbitrariness merely by introducing second-order standards that call on us to comply with standards such as the standard about wearing hats. For second-order standards can also be arbitrary. Consider the standard, which we could call the "standard of politeness", that calls on people to comply with the local standards of conventionally acceptable behavior, such as the standard about wearing hats. We cannot suppose that this standard has a bearing on how we are to act if we think that it is just as arbitrary and pointless as the standard about wearing hats or the standard about standing on one's head under a full moon. Those of us who do think that politeness has a bearing on how to act must therefore think that the standard of politeness has some authority or basis. Perhaps we think that compliance with the standard of politeness — that is, compliance with the local standards

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of conventionally acceptable behavior - helps to make for comfortable and pleasing social interaction. The key idea is that if we think that a failure to be polite is a significant kind of failing, unlike a failure stand on our heads in the street on every night of a full moon, which is not a significant kind of failure at all, we must think of the standard of politeness as having some relevant justification or authority or status. But it would be a mistake to think that a relevant justification would have to refer to something that everyone values. It plainly is not the case that everyone values comfortable and pleasing social interaction. Yet it is coherent to hold that the standard of politeness is not merely arbitrary, that it is authoritative, in virtue of the fact that compliance with it helps to make for comfortable and pleasing social interaction. Of course, a philosopher might not be attracted to this view unless he valued comfortable and pleasing social interaction, but this is merely a psychological fact about people who accept the view. The view itself implies that anyone has reason to comply with the standard of politeness in virtue of its status as facilitating social interaction. The theory I am proposing about rationality has a similar form and a similar purpose to the social interaction theory of politeness. On anyone's view, rationality requires acting in certain ways, ways that could be expressed in a standard calling for us to do such and such in such and such circumstances. Any proposal about what the standard of rationality calls for is incomplete unless it is accompanied by some account of the basis or authority of the standard. What then is the point of the needs and values standard, or what is its justification, such that there actually is a requirement to comply with its demands? My proposal, in brief, is that rationality serves autonomy. The point of rationality is to manifest or secure autonomous agency. And autonomy consists in governing our actions by our values and plans to the best of our ability given our epistemic situation, at least in so far as the internal requirements of autonomy are concerned. The point of the standard of rationality, or its justification, is that to comply with it is to be autonomous. Irrationality is a kind of failure to serve our autonomy. But if this is so, then in a situation in which acting in accord with our values and plans would undermine our autonomy, or put it at risk, rationality must not require us to act on our values or our plans. In such a situation, autonomy pulls in two directions. We would serve autonomy by governing ourselves in accord with our values and plans. But we would also serve it by acting to sustain our autonomy, which means declining to act in accord with our values and plans. Given my proposal about the basis of rationality, then, in emergency situations of the kind in question, rationality must permit us to act against our values and plans in order to secure our autonomy. In other words, the standard of rationality is the needs and values standard. It calls on us to govern our actions by our values and plans to the best of our ability given our epistemic situation

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except that, if doing so would put our autonomy seriously at risk, it permits us to secure for ourselves the requirements of autonomy. In an emergency situation where serving our values would put our autonomy at risk, rationality permits choosing to sustain ourselves as autonomous agents, by seeing to it that we are able to meet our basic needs. Many of us do not value autonomy, and there presumably are cultures that do not value autonomy. My claim is that we are rational to manifest and serve our autonomy even if we do not value autonomy, because manifesting and serving our autonomy is what being rational consists in at root. The term "irrational" refers to a failure to manifest or to serve our autonomy. I now need to argue that this is a significant kind of failure that virtually any agent would be concerned to avoid. The needs and values standard ordinarily requires us to govern our actions by our values and plans, and it always permits this. Because of this, we will tend to be motivated to do the things that the standard requires us to do. The things we value are things like spontaneity and a pristine environment. Most of us do not in addition value promoting our values. But a person who values a pristine environment will tend to be motivated to do things, such as to pick up litter, that the standard of rationality calls on her to do in virtue of the fact that she values a pristine environment. To be motivated to do these things, it obviously is not necessary that she have the additional value of governing herself in accord with her values. Hence we tend to be motivated to do the things that the standard of rationality requires. Moreover, our motivation to do these things will tend to be rather deeply embedded psychologically. Our values tend to be aspects of our identity. That we value spontaneity or a pristine environment would tend to be part of our view of ourselves. We tend to feel guilt or shame if we knowingly fail to comply with our values, which means that our record of compliance with them affects our self-esteem.15 This explains why failures of autonomy are a significant kind of failure that agents typically are concerned to avoid. It also explains why it is not necessary that we value autonomy in order to be motivated to do the things that are called for by the standard of rationality. The question I have been considering, however, was specifically about the rationality of acting against our own values and plans in order to secure our autonomy in an emergency situation. Consider then the obvious rival to my needs and values standard, a standard that requires us always to govern ourselves by our values and plans. Call this the "values standard." The idea that this is the standard of rationality would need to be supported by some account of the point

15 I explain the relevant notion of identity in terms of self-esteem in Copp, unpublished. My discussion in this paragraph makes contact with views developed by Christine Korsgaard ( 1996). At a deeper level, however, I disagree with fundamental aspects of Korsgaard's position (see C o p p 1999).

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or status that the values standard has which would explain what kind of mistake or failing is involved in failing to comply with it. The most obvious thing to say, it seems to me, is that to comply with the values standard is to be self-governing. Compliance with it serves autonomy, and failure to comply with it is a failure of autonomy. But this account pushes us in the direction of my needs and values standard. For a person who acts to secure for herself the necessities of autonomy in an emergency situation where her autonomy is at risk does of course serve her autonomy, even if she fails to govern herself in accord with her values. It would therefore be out of place to charge her with irrationality, if irrationality is understood at bottom to be the failure to serve one's autonomy. Human beings do of course tend to have a visceral motivation to secure for themselves the necessities of autonomy, for these are the things for which they have basic needs. For instance, we would expect the man in the rescue example to have some motivation to avoid drowning. In any event, it is plain that even in emergency situations of the kind faced by this man, the needs and values standard does not require us to act contrary to our values. It merely permits us this. According to my proposal, the standard of rationality requires us to serve our autonomy even though many of us do not value our autonomy, but it never requires us to act contrary to our values.

"Subjectivism" about Practical Reason My thesis about the rationality of serving our basic needs conflicts with a familiar form of "subjectivism" about practical reason. Bernard Williams holds, for example, that all reasons are internal to our motivations, broadly understood. For Williams, there is a reason for a person to do something just in case the person's "subjective motivational set" is such that there is an error-free path of deliberation, or a "sound deliberative route", that she could follow that would lead to her be "motivated" to do the thing (Williams 1995, 35; see also Williams 1981, 105109).16 A person's motivational set includes her desires as well as dispositions to act, aspirations, life projects, commitments, values, and the like. Williams has argued that there is not in general a reason to satisfy basic needs since it is not in general true that a person can led by deliberation to be motivated to satisfy her basic needs (Williams 1981, 105-106). 16 Williams formulates the idea in different ways in different passages. H e writes of a sound deliberative route from the agent's existing motivations to (a) his doing the thing in question, or to (b) his concluding that he should do the thing, or to (c) the conclusion to do it (see Williams 1981, 35-36). I think it is clear that his idea is that, if an agent has a reason to do a thing, then deliberation would lead him to be motivated to do the thing. But my concern is not primarily textual.

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The basic intuition behind subjectivism is expressed by David Hume's remark that "reason is the slave of the passions." (Treatise, II.iii.3, 415). Subjectivists disagree about the details, of course. But they agree on the basic idea that a reason is a kind of motivational state of a person. It is a kind of "passion", broadly understood. Williams's view counts as subjectivist since, at root, it is the view that reasons are motivations that deliberation could lead a person to have, given the motivations with which she begins. This is a special case of the basic subjectivist idea that propositions about reasons are complex propositions about the motivations of agents. Now the thesis I have been defending about the basic needs is a thesis about rationality, not about reasons as such. But, of course, I think both that it is rational to serve one's basic needs in an emergency situation in which serving one's values would undermine one's autonomy, and that there is a reason to serve one's basic needs in such a situation. Given my argument, reasons to comply with the needs and values standard can be called "reasons of autonomy", or, since these reasons stem from one's own values and needs, they can be called "self-grounded reasons". N o w my thesis that there is a reason to serve one's basic needs in an emergency situation of the kind described does conflict with Williams's subjectivism about practical reason. For facts about what one basically needs are logically independent of facts about one's motivations. It is not logically impossible to need something but to be psychologically such that there is no process of deliberation that would lead one to be motivated to secure it for oneself. This is not the place to attempt a thorough discussion of subjectivism. But this paper does give me the opportunity to address, even if briefly, the central argument that Williams gives in favor of his form of subjectivism. Williams's argument turns on the premise that any reason there is for a person to do a given thing could be that person's reason for doing the thing, so that it could be cited in explaining her doing the thing (Williams 1981, 106). 17 That is, it could be the reason for which she does the thing. Put in other terms, the idea is that nothing can count as a reason for someone to do something unless it could be that person's reason for doing the thing. If the person knew of the reason, and if she performed the action, the reason there is could be her reason for performing the action. She could do it for that reason. Williams's premise connects claims about the reasons there are for acting, claims about "normative reasons", with claims about "agent's reasons" for acting, or "explanatory reasons" or "operative reasons". 18 I will call this premise "Williams's Principle". 17 T o describe something as "an agent's reason" for doing a thing is not to make a normative claim. It is not to imply that there was a "normative reason" or a "good reason" for the agent's action. It is simply to explain the agent's action. Something may be an "agent's reason" for doing a thing even if "there was" no reason for her to do it. 18 T h e term "operative reason" comes from Scanlon 1999.

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It is important to see the attractiveness and plausibility of Williams's Principle. In acting intentionally, we act for reasons. If I walk downtown, I have some reason for doing so. Perhaps it is to buy some coffee. If there is a reason for me to go downtown, such as that Cosmos' has a new roast of coffee available for sale, then it must be possible in principle for me to learn of the reason. It must be possible for me to be given evidence or an argument such that, if I make no mistake in deliberation, I could come to understand that there is a reason for me to go downtown. Moreover, to the extent that I am rational, I would take that reason to be a consideration for which I might walk downtown. I might go downtown, and if I did, my reason might be that I want to buy the new roast of coffee. Any tenable theory of the reasons we have must make sense of these phenomena. It must make sense of the fact that, to the extent that a person is rational, and - I believe we need to add - to the extent that the person is autonomous, if there is a reason for her to do something, then there is an error-free process of reasoning that she could in principle follow that would lead her to believe that she has reason to do the thing, and, if she did come to believe that she has reason to do the thing, she could do it for that reason. These intuitive considerations might appear to support Williams's Principle. However, there are different ways to interpret the Principle. There are interpretations under which the Principle is plausible, but under these interpretations it is compatible with my thesis about rationality and the basic needs, and it does not support Williams's subjectivism. There are also interpretations under which the Principle supports Williams's subjectivism, but under these interpretations it is question-begging. Let me explain. Return to the rescue example. A child is trapped underwater in a car. A man jumped into the river in an attempt to rescue the child. The burden of my argument has been that the risk of drowning faced by the man was a reason for him not to attempt the rescue, quite independently of his values and motivations. I constructed the example so that the man's values argued decisively in favor of his attempting the rescue. But I have been arguing that, despite this, his needs argued equally decisively for him not to attempt the rescue. So far there is no conflict with Williams's Principle. For it is obviously plausible to suppose that if the man had declined to attempt the rescue, his reason would have been the risk to himself. He could have declined to attempt the rescue, and his reason could have been the risk. A person called upon to rescue a child who is trapped underwater would naturally tend to be frightened for himself. We can therefore quite easily imagine the man declining to attempt the rescue because of the danger to himself. I am committed, however, to the proposition that the man would have had a reason to decline the rescue even if he had not been frightened for himself. I am committed to this because I hold that there was a reason for him to decline to attempt the rescue regardless of his motivations.

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To test this view against Williams's Principle, we must therefore stipulate that the man in the rescue example is not at all frightened and that he has no desire whatsoever not to attempt the rescue. We must also stipulate that there is no process of deliberation that would have led him to be motivated to decline to attempt the rescue. What kind of person are we imagining? Perhaps the man works for a Coast Guard emergency rescue unit and often finds himself faced with dangerous situations. He has learned to steel himself in such situations so that he in fact feels no fear at all and has no desire whatsoever to hold back when he is called upon to perform a rescue. Hence, when he comes upon the car that is submerged in the river, he has no desire whatsoever not to attempt to rescue the child. He understands the situation quite well. He sees the risk to himself and understands that it gives him a reason to decline to attempt the rescue. Yet he has no motivation not to attempt the rescue, and there is no process of deliberation that would lead him to be motivated to refrain from attempting the rescue. Now I want to claim that even though there is no process of deliberation that would lead him to be motivated not to attempt the rescue, the man nevertheless has a reason not to attempt the rescue. The question to ask at this point is whether my claim conflicts with Williams's Principle. The Principle requires us to test a putative reason for an agent to do something by considering scenarios in which the agent comes to understand that the putative reason does exist, and in which he does the thing in question, and by asking whether, in those scenarios, the person's operative reason might have been the putative reason. So to test my thesis about the rescue example, we need to consider counter-factual scenarios in which the man understands that the risk of drowning is a reason for him to decline to attempt the rescue, and in which he does decline to attempt the rescue, and we need to ask whether, in these scenarios, the man's reason for declining the rescue might have been the risk to himself. So let us imagine a possible scenario in which the man declines to attempt the rescue. Suppose that the man's nerve fails him just as he is about to jump into the river. He declines to attempt the rescue, and the reason he gives is the risk to himself. Perhaps he feels ashamed of himself. But he confesses that he couldn't face the risk. In the original scenario, the man steeled himself successfully and there was no process of deliberation that would have led him to refuse to attempt the rescue. Nevertheless, if the man had declined to attempt the rescue, it is plausible that this would have been because he lost his nerve. It is plausible that his reason would have been the risk to himself. It appears, then, that my thesis about reasons and needs does not conflict with Williams's Principle. At least, it does not conflict with the Principle if we take the principle to require, of a putative reason for a person to do something, that if the person were to do the thing, the person might have done it for that reason. So understood, the Principle seems plausible, but it does not support subjectivism.

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It is compatible with the claim that people have reason to satisfy their basic needs regardless of their actual motivations. 1 9 Williams must be reading his Principle in some different way since he thinks it supports his subjectivist thesis that our reasons depend on our actual motivations. I think he must be giving the Principle an "actualist" interpretation whereby it requires us to consider scenarios in which a person does the thing for which there is a putative reason, but without any change in his psychology other than changes that might be brought about by deliberation leading him to see the putative reason to do the thing. O n this construal, to test my thesis, we cannot consider scenarios in which the man in the rescue example loses his nerve. W e need to hold his psychology constant. But of course, in the original scenario, although the man recognizes the risk, he is steeled against fear, and he could not be led by any process of deliberation to be at all motivated not to attempt the rescue. Hence, if we hold the man's psychology constant except for changes that could be brought about by deliberation, then in scenarios in which he declines to attempt the rescue, his reason for doing so could not be the risk to himself. His reason must be something other than the risk. Perhaps he learned at the last minute that the child was suffering from a terribly painful disease and that death by drowning would be merciful. W e can imagine a variety of scenarios. But it is clear that if he had declined to attempt the rescue, he must have had some reason other than the risk to himself. It seems, then, that given the actualist reading of Williams's Principle, the Principle does conflict with my thesis that the risk to the man is a reason for him to decline the rescue. But so interpreted, the Principle begs the question in favor of subjectivism. O n the actualist reading, the Principle amounts to the following: A consideration R is a reason for a person to do something only if, were the person to do the thing without there being any change in his psychology except for changes that

19 So understood, Williams's Principle is also compatible with my claim that there are many kinds of reasons in addition to reasons of autonomy. I imagined, for example, a person who intentionally says certain things that she takes to be true but that cause pain to a friend of hers. Suppose we claim that there was moral reason for her not to have said those things because doing so caused unnecessary pain to her friend. Williams's Principle suggests that we test this claim by considering scenarios in which the person comes to believe that there is this reason not to speak her mind, and in which she refrains from speaking her mind, and by asking whether, in those scenarios, her operative reason might have been to avoid causing pain to her friend. It seems plain that this might well have been her reason. In the scenario I imagined, the person's values and beliefs supported her saying what she did because she valued honesty more than friendship. She was rational to say what she said. But if she had come to see that she would be wrong to speak her mind, and if she had then refrained from doing so, it is plausible to suppose that her reason would have been to avoid causing pain to her friend. O n the reading we are considering, then, Williams's Principle is compatible with the claim that there are moral reasons in addition to reasons of autonomy.

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might be brought about by deliberation, R could be his reason for doing it. The counter-factual supposition that the person does the thing in question without any change in her psychology (except for changes that are brought about by deliberation) means in effect that either the person is already motivated to do the thing or she is led to be motivated to do the thing by some process of deliberation. Hence, in effect, the Principle is that a consideration R is a reason for a person to do something only if the person's "motivational set" is such that either the person is motivated to do the thing or could be led to be motivated do the thing as a result of deliberation. But on this actualist reading, the Principle is too close to Williams's subjectivist thesis to lend it any support. W e should not accept the actualist reading of the Principle unless we are already persuaded to accept Williams's subjectivism. I conclude, then, that there is a plausible reading of Williams's Principle on which it does not conflict with my thesis about rationality and the basic needs. O n this reading, the Principle does not support Williams's subjectivism. There is also an actualist reading on which the Principle does conflict with my thesis. O n this reading the Principle does support Williams's subjectivism, but it is questionbegging. Christine Korsgaard has proposed an "internalism requirement" to the effect that "Practical reason claims, if they are really to present us with reasons for action, must be capable of motivating rational persons". (Korsgaard 1996, 317). 20 I do not need to disagree. For in the rescue example, the man certainly could have declined to attempt the rescue because of the danger to himself. If he had declined to attempt the rescue, then assuming him to be rational, his reason likely would have been the risk to himself. Hence, to the extent that he is rational, the fact that attempting the rescue would put him at risk is capable of motivating him. I have argued in this paper that we have reason to secure for ourselves the things for which we have basic needs. More specifically, I have argued that a person can be rational to secure for herself the things she needs even in circumstances in which doing so conflicts with achieving her most valued ends. In the course of the argument I discussed an example, the rescue example, which I think makes my view plausible. I also proposed an argument for my position that turns on the idea that, as I attempted to explain, the point of rationality is to manifest and secure our autonomy. Given this, rationality ordinarily requires that we govern ourselves 20 Later in the essay, she says the requirement is that "rational considerations succeed in motivating us insofar as we are rational" (ibid, 321, my emphasis). This requirement is stronger than the one I discuss in the text. It is an implausible claim to make about considerations that are merely permissive, such as the consideration in the rescue example that attempting the rescue will put the man's life at risk. T h e man is not irrational not to be motivated by this consideration since the risk does not put him under a rational requirement not to attempt the rescue.

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in light of our values. But I argued that the basic needs should be construed as the requirements of autonomous agency. Given this, I argued that, in emergency situations, where governing ourselves in light of our values would put our autonomy at risk, rationality permits us to seek instead to secure our autonomy by securing the things for which we have basic needs. In conclusion, I argued that this thesis does not conflict with the plausible idea that reasons are considerations that are capable of motivating rational agents. It is no surprise that human beings are capable of being motivated to secure for themselves the things that they need. 21

21 I am grateful to David Sobel for helpful discussion of many of the ideas in this essay and also to Neil Roughley for helpful comments on an earlier draft.

Hedgehogs, Foxes, and Persons: Resistance and Moral Creativity in East Germany and South India Michael

Carrithers

In this essay I sketch two life stories, one of a woman in South India, the other of a woman in East Germany. I take these as illustrative materials, opening onto two different ways of living, two cultures, two moralities - and, more important for our purposes here, opening onto a single view over what it is to be human. I aim to stress the similarity between the two cases, a similarity that makes them fall pointedly across a gulf which influential anthropological thinkers have made to divide us human beings into something like two species. On one side of the putative gulf lies an occidental or modern species, possessing a 'rather peculiar' idea about the person 'as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe...organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background'. The quotation is from Geertz (1983, 59), whose characterisation of 'us' echoes that of other anthropologists. The 'them' contrasted to 'us' comprises a series of societies that have fallen under the anthropological gaze - some in the Orient, but in other places as well - , traditional societies, societies of persons not so autonomously individuated, persons rather more sociocentric, persons less alienated from, less autonomous, more morally constrained by, the surrounding social world than are persons of the modern Occident.1 So far the heated conversations on these matters within anthropology, and at the edge that anthropology shares with philosophy and history,2 have taken a form made familiar to us by Isaiah Berlin. He drew attention to Heraclitus' dictum of the 'hedgehog and the fox': on one side are the three synthesizers Marcel Mauss, Louis Dumont, and Clifford Geertz who, like the hedgehog, 'know one big thing', this master distinction between personhood in modern Occidental in contrast to some other (perhaps Other) society or societies. Thus Mauss argues for a distinction between ourselves and the putative original person in the putative original society (a composite picture drawn from a variety of actual ethnographic sources). This original person was in fact apersonnage, a role, the bearer of fixed moral rights and duties, designated by one of a fixed stock of names and perhaps of ceremonial masks (see Allen 1985). This person 1 2

For a short history of the concept of the person in anthropology, see Carrithers 1997. See Carrithers/Collins/Lukes 1985 and Lindholm 1997.

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was public and external - to adopt that metaphor - , was a manifestation of social and not psychological reality. There was also a transcendent reality in û\tpersonnage, for it was regarded as a reincarnation of an ancestor and certainly not as a unique individual valuable in his or her own right. This intellectual challenge of the Other is even more evident in Geertz's work on Bali. Balinese, he argues, use ways of identifying individuals, by a system of names and titles, which suppress their 'more idiosyncratic, merely biographical' (Geertz 1973, 370) existence as a human beings in favour of a 'more typical, highly conventional' designation as the holders of social roles. The contrast is between our 'egoizing', and their 'muted individuality' (ibid.). We, 'focusing upon [personal] psychological traits as the heart of personal identity, would say that [the Balinese] have sacrificed their true selves to their [social] role; they, focusing on social position, say that their role is of the essence of their true selves' (1973, 386). And D u m o n t is very clear that Indian society places moral value and cognitive emphasis entirely on the social whole and not at all on the individual human being. Consequently, in his view, normal Indian society 3 has nothing like what we would call the 'individual' properly speaking, that is, the single human being understood as a locus of value and touchstone of morality and law. Ours is a sociopolitical order valorised by the sacredness of the person, whereas Indian persons are defined and valorised by the social whole, which is to say, by their placement within that order as caste members. Moreover the hedgehogs are clear that the form of the person reflects the form of society as a whole. For Mauss, the original personnage is but a reflection of the original totemic clan organisation, while the modern citizen/individual is a reflection of modern democratic societies. For Geertz, the formal Balinese individual finds a socio-political counterpart in the peculiarly formal, ceremonial order of the Balinese state (Geertz 1980). And for Dumont, the institutions of kingship and the Indian state are the empirical expression of the same holistic design which effaces individualistic values in India. So far the hedgehogs. O n the other side, a series of Heraclitan foxes, knowing 'many little things', have worried the hedgehogs with detailed empirical studies, questioning and amending or rejecting the master distinction. Thus - and I choose these foxish examples among many because they are relevant here - Unni Wikan's ethnography of Bali, Managing Turbulent Hearts (1990), shows that the supposed sociocentrism of Bali does nothing to lessen the struggle any Balinese individual might face to establish and maintain her individual personhood, or to efface the intersubjective sensibility that Balinese possess of that everyday intimate struggle. So if the 'social and natural background' are different from the West, the experi-

3

He does however provide for the individual as a figure seeking spiritual salvation outside society.

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enee of trying to achieve a 'distinctive whole' which is 'set contrastively' against that background seems very familiar. By the same token, Mattison Mines (1994) has shown how South Indians — supposedly living in the stronghold of socially determining 'holism' as opposed to 'individualism', according to Louis Dumont - nevertheless manifest a strong sense of individuality, and struggle to express or defend that individuality in both public and private life. Nor has the founder of the master distinction, Marcel Mauss, fared much better. The contributors to the volume concerned with his essay on personhood (Carrithers/ Collins/Lukes 1985) proposed between them such an array of different forms of personhood across the world, and such different criteria for what might be understood as personhood, that the lineaments of his argument were swamped and submerged.

The Problem One might imagine that accumulating foxish arguments would lead to the gradual and decisive eclipse of the hedgehogs. But as I understand it that is not the situation, for the hedgehogs' prominence has hardly been dimmed, even though their views may now be quoted with a warning. Why have they endured? Well, the writings of the foxes have been directed to one specific and narrowly empirical case after the next: Mines stressing individuality in India, Wikan stressing the importance of people's experience in Bali, the writers in the Mauss book instancing one individual people or historical period or another. But these careful, smallscale, perhaps seemingly pedantic arguments are set off against the grander, forcefully phrased, clearly delineated, and mutually reinforcing arguments of the hedgehogs, which seem to cast a single bright and searching beam across human affairs in general, apparently beyond the narrow purview of the foxes. Central to the hedgehogs' success is their conspicuous use of the common generalising method of sociocultural anthropology. Mauss is an excellent example: his investigation, he writes, is entirely one of 'law and morality' (droit et morale), not of individual psychology or individual experience. He is concerned with 'social history', not a history of events, and with whole 'systems of law, religion, customs, social structures and mentality' ([1938], 3), not with merely contingent expressions of those systems. This method is echoed by both Dumont, who uses the terms 'ideology' and 'structure' to cover the same sorts of generalised, impersonal evidence, and Geertz, whose key concept is 'culture', through which he, too, adduces impersonal systems of religion, morality, customs and mentality. So in these respects the hedgehogs stick to the general and systematic, rejecting what would seem the idiosyncratic, the merely eventful, the 'merely biographical'. The intellectual politics of language here - the suggestive analogy with prestigious natural scientific 'systems' - is important, but more important is the

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shared hedgehogish claim to address human nature in general. Whereas the foxes may be thought to see only small facets of what may or may not be a general human nature, the hedgehogs, in knowing one big thing, know human nature tout court, and what they know is easily stated. Humans are culture-bearing, or if you like, society-bearing animals. This is a universal truth. Moreover societies and cultures differ widely from place to place. This is a second universal truth. The third universal truth is this: each people's culture (or society) comprises an impersonal shared moral and cognitive system that is compelling, both to their subjects as sources of behaviour and to us as explanations of behaviour. Dumont, for example, writes that people 'behave in a coherent and rational manner, ... and that it is possible to recover the simple principle of their thought' (1970, 37). And so by examining such principles the hedgehogish anthropologist knows why people do what they do, and can skilfully cleave the human species at its natural joints, so that the constituent pieces, the societies or cultures, fall apart neatly into their several natural kinds. Hence the hedgehogs could always argue that their own vision across cultures is profounder and more searching than that of the foxes; that such categories as 'individuality' and 'experience' as evoked by Mines and Wikan are in fact the narrow products of one, Occidental, culture; and that the hedgehogish vision has already comprehended the true and deeply challenging differences of cultures across the globe. Even the hedgehogs' admitted weaknesses amount to a strength. Thus all three of the hedgehogs, at one moment or another, in one way or another, admit in passing that the systems, as they explain them, do not exhaust social reality. Dumont puts this most clearly when he writes that 'what is observed', which he designates Ό ' , is equal to ideology, T, plus whatever is left, the 'residual' element, 'R': O = I + R. One might think that this admits a fault, but in fact it is rather like saying that a powerful light casts shadows: we readily believe, standing in such light, that what we see clearly is all we need to see, whereas what is left in the dark is insignificant. The 'residual' is just that, the left-over, the remainder when the useful pattern has been cut out. So these are refulgent hedgehogish theories, seeming to cast a powerful light over human affairs. Like all brilliant lights, they throw a dark shadow. Does everything significant stand in the light alone? Or does the light merely blind us to the more important matters lying in the dark?

Coercion Let me sharpen these alternatives. First, as I noted, on the hedgehogs' - and most anthropologists' - default assumptions, each people's culture comprises an impersonal system that is compelling, both to their subjects as sources of behaviour

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and to us as explanations of behaviour. So there is no revelation of hidden causation, as might be found in a Marxian or Freudian analysis. In some ways the systems are like language, in that they differ from society to society, and supposedly have a high degree of internal consistency. And like language, the systems are pervasive, covering society as a whole, shared by all its members. They are pervasive, too, in that they govern both collective and individual life. Indeed the systems are constituted by the combination of their pervasiveness and their conceptual and intelligible character. Were they not intelligible, they could not give reason and direction to people's actions; and were they not pervasive, they could not work to provide reason and direction across a whole society. In effect, for an ethnographer to describe a cultural system is to give an extended answer to a question of the form 'why do they do that?' The answer to the 'why?' lies in what Jerome Bruner called 'the landscape of consciousness', in how people understand and feel their world. 'They do it because they collectively think, feel, believe, understand, perceive ...' - and there follows an account of a cultural system (Geertz), or an ideology (Dumont), or collective representations (Mauss). As I have so far described these systems, they are clearly cognitive in nature. This cognitive character is stressed in Geertz's famous definition of religion, which was in effect also a definition of culture in general, as "... a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence, clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic" (Geertz 1973, 90). So here we have an idea of cognition - 'a system of symbols' - working directly to create a Weltanschauung, such that those governed by it might seem to have no choice but to act in its light. One could speak of the system as compelling or coercive, but in a sense it is stronger than coercion, precisely because there would be no choice, since there would be no way of understanding a choice. Nevertheless the hedgehogish writers are also clear that such systems are also moral and prescriptive as well. This is clearly set out by Mauss when he writes of the Zuni, who address each other in kinship terms, terms which express in their meaning relations of older to younger and of one clan to another: ... with such an arrangement of names correspondingly classified and of terms of relationship significant of rank rather than of consanguineal connection, mistake in the order of a ceremonial, a procession or a council is simply impossible, and the people employing such devices may be said to have written and to be writing their statutes and laws in all their daily relationships and utterances. ([1938], 5)

For Mauss and his teacher Durkheim, to speak of 'statutes and laws' was more than figurative, for they held that the coercion which society as a whole worked upon its members was primarily moral in nature, such that morality might be

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expressed in the categories of cognition, as well as in moral prescriptions. Neither Dumont nor Geertz writes in quite this way, but they do assume that the moral and the cognitive always work together. Thus Geertz analyses the Balinese word lek as 'stage-fright', which 'protects Balinese concepts of personhood from the individualising force of face-to-face encounters' (Geertz 1973, 403). Vtopìeshould possess lek and be governed by it, but they also perceive social relations in its light, as a description of how people are. Much of Dumont's analysis of the caste system is devoted to explaining the meaning of the word dharma, a word meaning the order of the universe both as it is, and as it ought to be, such that human persons are distributed across different castes with their different endowments and different rights and duties. Now it might seem that to include moralities, views of what should be, among cultural systems is to weaken them, since the explicitly prescriptive character of a morality at least recognizes an alternative to what is prescribed, whereas cultural systems as cognitive systems leave no room for the alternative. But I think the hedgehogs would rather insist that the combination of both cognition and prescription, of a view of what is and what ought to be, only strengthens cultural systems, making them more embracing, more coercive, more powerful. Thus the Zuni age- and clan-ordered terminology, for example, is effectively double-edged: to transgress against it would be both incompetent and perverted. The Zuni must - and the 'must' means both 'see no alternative' and 'are allowed no alternative' - understand their personhood in that single, shared, public, transparent, investigable - and now we may say: exclusive and coercive - conceptual language. To adapt Mauss's words to a different context, we would say that the Zuni 'finds [his personhood] natural, clearly determined', and that sense of personhood would be 'completely furnished with the fundaments of the morality which flows from it' ([1938], 1) This is an impersonal yet fundamentally moral system acting ineluctably, silently and without opposition on all equally. Geertz writes of 'cultural forces' (1973, 389) which weigh upon their subjects, pervade them, and make them act as they do, without choice. This is strong stuff, and indeed the strength of the hedgehogs within our Occidental intellectual scene is directly proportional to the strength that they themselves attribute to cultural systems or - a more precise phrase - conceptual moral systems. Yet that strength may still be a weakness. One implication of their argument is that the conceptual moral system determines both action and consciousness. No further decisions need or could be taken by the actors, no further cognitions are necessary or indeed possible for them. But can that really be the case? Could such a conceptual system so fiilly determine action and consciousness ... or at least so thoroughly that other factors are merely 'residual'? For this would imply that experience plays no part in morality and the understanding of persons, since the conceptual moral system would be a wholly sufficient explana-

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tion in itself. But could experience really play no part in creating or judging human conduct ... or so little that its effect is merely 'residual'? By the same token, the hedgehogish systems seem to exclude the contemplation of alternatives. But is it really plausible that people do not, and cannot, contemplate alternatives? For this would seem to exclude the possibility of change, indeed the possibility of history at all.

Contemporaries and Mitmenschen Fortunately Geertz has furnished us with a means to express in a nutshell both the hedgehogish position and these questions. As you recall, he said that the Balinese suppress their 'more idiosyncratic, merely biographical' existence as a human beings in favour of a 'more typical, highly conventional' designation as the holders of social roles. Now this notion of 'typicality' is in fact one he took from the social philosopher Alfred Schütz, though with a distinctive Geertzian twist. Schütz wrote of contemporaries, which for him was a term of art. Contemporaries are those with whom one lives contemporaneously, but with whom one is acquainted only peripherally or not at all. Contemporaries have only a sketchy, programmatic, and formal knowledge of each other, a knowledge provided by one's generalising, typifying understanding of the world. A good example would be the understanding I have of the police where I live. I suppose my knowledge allows me to know what their duties are, and indeed what their various ranks are. Fortuitously I also happen to know something of their promotion procedures, their dress code and their training. Certainly, as a sort of general cultural knowledge, it does enable me to interact successfully with policemen and -women. I am, to that extent, well provided with cultural knowledge. Yet I do not know the name of any police officer, or count any as more than the most glancing acquaintance ('that tall constable with the moustache who came to see about the burglary'). So my knowledge is typical, in Schütz's terms. It is sketchy. It is also formal, in two senses: first, it is not at all intimate, and second, it has a formulaic and schematic form - indeed a form very like the 'cultural forces' explained by the hedgehogs. The idea of contemporaries gains sense in Schütz's thought by being opposed to consociates - and though Schütz himself wrote partly in English, I will use his German word for consociates, which has the advantage of vividness: Mitmenschen, meaning something like 'people you are involved with'. Whereas contemporaries are known only distantly, formally, and schematically by their formal role, Mitmenschen are known intimately. One's fate is bound up with them. Thus Schütz on Mitmenschen: For each partner the other's body, his gestures, his gait and facial expressions, are

immediately observable, not merely as things or events of the outer world but in their

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physiognomical significance, that is as [expressions] of the other's thoughts. ... Each partner participates in the onrolling life of the other, can grasp a vivid present the other's thoughts as they are built up step by step. They may thus share one another's anticipations of the future as plans, or hopes, or anxieties. ... They are mutually involved in one another's biography; they are growing older together ... (Schütz 1962, 24). So your relationship to, and understanding of, Mitmenschen is not at all like that of contemporaries. You have a far deeper, a more specific, and certainly not a merely typifying, knowledge of Mitmenschen. You know their past; you know something of what they hope or fear in the future; you are entangled with them; your biography is only knowable through their biographies; you know them as individuals, not as types, not as contemporaries. This means too — to add a vocabulary which Schütz did not use but which is consistent with his - that Mitmenschen possess life stories, and that they and those others with whom they are entangled possess collectively a history unique to them as a group. Moreover their mutual involvement and intense mutual awareness means that the plans, hopes and fears of Mitmenschen arise in the light of each other's life stories and their mutual histories. Looking through the eyes of Mitmenschen we would see how a distinctively human world — of intense sociality, of intense mutual involvement, of acting because of the way others have acted to us, and because of how they have thought, or might think, of us - has come into being. It is this sense of interaction which is captured in Schiitz's phrases, 'mutually involved in one another's biographies', 'onrolling life' and 'growing old together'. For many scholars who have written since Schütz, this intersubjectivity-cum-interactivity is regarded as the most interesting and challenging human trait.4 Now for Schütz, the distinction between Mitmenschen and contemporaries is a universal terminology, meant to apply to everyone everywhere. All humans experience the presently living social world as divided - by a broad and fuzzy line, for the distinction can never be absolute — into contemporaries and Mitmenschen. Geertz, however, took Schütz's argument and gave it an ethnographic twist, saying that all Balinese treat all other Balinese as contemporaries; that theirs is a peculiarly formal view on life; that their social practice is also formal and formally controlling; and that the effect of this is to efface Occidentalseeming individuality in their social life and to bind everyone to an unambiguous and timeless social role. Balinese have no Mitmenschen. So the idea of formality here takes on a meaning which is very similar to that found in Mauss's

4

I have explained the reasons for this understanding of h u m a n nature in Carrithers 1992. Schütz is of course heavily dependent upon George Herbert Mead, and Vygotsky is, so to speak, a friendly and helpful neighbour as well.

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treatment of Zuni kin terminology and Dumont's caste ranking of persons, namely that there is a dominating ideology and morality which makes everyone treat everyone else under the heading of their social role, that is, as if they were Schiitzian contemporaries. Schütz was for the most part concerned with phenomenology and so largely with cognition and mental life alone. But Geertz's use of him shows how the distinction between Mitmenschen and contemporaries have real and important practical consequences for the Balinese. The actual conduct of their social life is different because their mental life is different. So the one alternative is that there do exist societies - the examples before us are Bali and India — in which there are only contemporaries. In these societies, people's actions and consciousness are (as near as makes no difference) determined by their conceptual moral system. Experience in such a society would play a negligible part in the unfolding of events. There would be little significance in knowing of someone else's 'onrolling life'. 'Growing old together', even if it appeared real to the participants, would in fact mean little from a social perspective, for the outcome would already be prescribed. T h e sense of individual characters, individual hopes and plans, or the sense of the individuality of relationships as captured by Schütz, would all be essentially irrelevant in such a society, however vivid they might seem: to know the schedule of roles and their accompanying ideology would be to know enough, for the participants or for the anthropologist. And of course change could hardly arise, even in the petty exigencies of everyday life and in the unfolding on even a small scale of social relations, for people would continue to write 'their statutes and laws in all their daily relationships and utterances'. There could be no history or indeed change in the concept of the person. Perhaps this alternative might best be characterised as closed, in the sense that the moral conceptual system would so fully determine the person that no opening onto the fruits of choice, experience, or mutability would be possible.

Two Women The alternative is to assert that, for all peoples everywhere, the difference between Mitmenschen and contemporaries is significant, as Schütz intended. From this assertion flow the corollaries that the conceptual moral language is not fully determining, that experience has some purchase in the business of social life, that people have an effective sense of alternatives, and that from these, history - both the eventful, consequential unfolding of everyday life and the effective change of social and cultural forms on a larger scale - can and does follow. This would be the open alternative, in the sense that personhood would be open to the contingencies of one's social setting and to one's own response to that setting. I have

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chosen the life stories of two particular women just because they let us see what 'open' or 'closed' might mean. Up to a point in middle life, both the women followed a course which would appear wholly consistent with their respective moral conceptual systems, and therefore with a contemporaries'-eye view of life. Thus Lakshmi, the Tamil Brahmin woman from South India, grew up and into a strictly orthodox Brahmanical social order (Mines 1994, 159-165). Her grandfather, the paterfamilias of the typical extended Brahman family of her childhood, was so strict in observance that he would bathe if one of the children, bearing pollution, ran into his room. This notion of personhood inhering in caste purity ran throughout her early life. One consequence of the notion of caste purity is that sexual union in marriage is a particularly important and sensitive occasion in the control of persons' purity, especially for women. At nineteen, when she did marry, by her family's choice into a similarly orthodox Brahman family, she found that her husband's father ruled with a typical and morally approved rod of iron - patriarchy in the simplest and clearest meaning of the term. If she was happy in her natal home she was correspondingly unhappy in her marital home, but these emotional facts, well understood in India, are nevertheless irrelevant to the terms of the moral conceptual language of Brahmanism. In marrying, she had cut her ties with her natal family and became wholly a part of her husband's family, to the extent that she could only visit her own parents with her father-in-law's permission. In her new home she participated in the reproduction of her new family and of the Brahmanical social order, by having children and by working according to the dictates of the males and senior women. Lakshmi's father-in-law exercised control over the resources allotted to her and her children. If her father-in-law was harsh and pennypinching, that was his right, as the senior man in relation to his sons and their more lowly-ranked spouses. If her husband was wholly self-effacing and did nothing to protect her or her children, that was consistent with his role as well, as an obedient son. The array of actual, empirical persons in the household matched, on this account and up to this point, the array of persons appropriate to the reproduction of the social order, as both Brahmans and Louis Dumont have understood it. Or, to return to the Schützian language, the persons are entirely understandable as contemporaries, as types: as paterfamilias, son, daughter-inlaw, and so forth. So far the account from Lakshmi's point of view of her'onrolling life' may be interesting, but it is not necessary to either the local Brahmanical, or to the hedgehogish, account. Petra Β. grew up and into the strict orthodox Communist social order in East Germany (Klein 1994, 38-58). Her parents were members of the SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands), East Germany's Communist party. She was active in the children's Communist organisation, the Pioneers, and later was active in the FDJ (Freie Deutsche Jugend) the Communist youth movement. She participated

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at the age of 21 in the immense World Festival of Youth in East Berlin in 1973 and was educated at the FDJ academy, where she met her husband-to-be. She herself, a model citizen, became a member of the Party, and a paid official of the FDJ. Later she took a year out to have her first child, and then became a kindergarten teacher, and eventually an official in the Interior Ministry. All these were, by East German standards, particularly important and sensitive posts. So, by some time in middle life, she had played a role as a dutiful member of society as practised and conceived in East Germany. Now there is a significant difference between the life, so far, of Lakshmi and Petra Β., a difference that is well captured in the sort of life-as-contemporaries account that Dumont might give. For, on the one hand, Lakshmi's life was played out in terms of her role-cum-relationships within the family: as dutiful daughter, as dutiful wife, as dutiful daughter-in-law, as dutiful mother. The stress, for her, lay in the fulfilment of her formal responsibilities to others as laid down by the conceptual moral language governing a woman's life course in India, and the notion of personal choice or of her autonomous worth as an individual played little part. To that extent, she lies clearly on one side of the hedgehogs' great divide, a person in a traditional society. Petra Β. lies clearly on the other side, in our individualistic world. For her, the individual as such was salient in her moral language. Thus, for example, her entry into the SED, though 'obvious' (selbstverständlich) given her family background, was nevertheless subject to her proving beyond a doubt, through at least a year's careful and strict examination, that she was personally committed to the Party. Moreover the importance of individual, autonomous choice in composing the Party was heavily marked in the initiation ritual. This was a solemn act, accompanied by the reading of her curriculum vitae and by a declaration of her personal reasons for joining, reasons which were then subjected to thorough questioning.5 Indeed, as Petra Β. describes herself, she represents more or less the moral ideal, the 'socialist personality' (sozialistische Persönlichkeit), an idealisation of the person with which the Party in East Germany was quite obsessed—appropriately so, given their need to show individuals volunteering freely for the collective purpose. As a socialist personality she was supposed to be, in the words of an observant critic, 'always ready and able to place all one's powers at the disposal of socialist society, prepared for the defence of the socialist homeland, and in any conflict between individual and collective interests, placing the latter first.' (Fuchs / Hieke 1992, 102). And so despite - or better, precisely because of - the strongly collectivist character of East German society, the individualistic moral foundations of that society, and of that society's concept and practice of the person, stand out strongly in Petra Β.'s life. Dumont writes of the Communist systems of 5

See W o l l e 1998, 106-7, for an account of this.

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Eastern Europe as direct, if pathological, developments out of the individualistic ideology of the West, and here we can see what he could have meant: Petra Β. had to be seen to volunteer of her own individual will, but the system was organised to demand that voluntary choice. So in this first pass over the life stories, we seem to discover a landscape laid bare and clear by the harsh hedgehogish light. Note, though, that the account so far is about as distant from the actual life stories as told by the women as it is possible to get. The accounts, to use a phrase adapted by Geertz from the philosopher Gilbert Ryle, are so far a 'thin description', an alienated, distant understanding. What happens when we go for a 'thick description', one which gives full weight to the view under which Lakshmi and Petra Β. themselves actually live their lives?

The real Lakshmi When she told her story to Mines in middle age, Lakshmi conveyed clearly a series of profound changes, and changes in awareness, in her life. In her natal household she loved her paternal grandfather dearly, for though orthodox, 'he never scolded', even when the children had transgressed his purity. And she loved her father even more. So when she aspired to marriage in her teens, as do so many Indian girls like Lakshmi, her hopes went with the grain of her experience. Her awareness began to diverge from Brahmanical ideals - and her nebenmenschlich view of life from the contemporaries'-eye view - with her marriage and her transfer into the new household. Her father-in-law demanded that the women cook and look after a long series of visitors, and as junior woman, much of this drudgery fell to Lakshmi. When she was pregnant, he only allowed her to go to her natal home shortly before the birth, rather than in the seventh month, as is usual among Tamils. When her children were born, he grudged them a good education and good food. When her children were older, she wished to go to college to get a degree, but he refused. All these encounters were exacerbated by her husband, who could not bring himself to intervene against his father's will. With her own father's death when she was thirty-one, Lakshmi fell into a deep and serious illness of body and mind, and came to realise how much she had depended on her father emotionally. She realised, too, that her father-in-law's 'strict control of the household, and ... her own efforts to be dutiful, were denying her control over her life, her basic interests, and her individuality' (Mines 1994, 161). This realisation prepared her for the decisive turning point. Her father-in-law began to borrow heavily, and demanded that his son, Lakshmi's husband, co-sign the loans. Lakshmi felt that the debts would only be left to her husband to repay

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when his father died, so she argued strongly to her husband that he should not cosign. Eventually, when her father-in-law again demanded that his son do so, she prevailed, and her husband refused. With that refusal, the father-in-law threw them out of the house. This broke the Brahmanical, patriarchal family irrevocably, a break for which Lakshmi was willing to take responsibility. 6 Eventually, after some years of difficulty, Lakshmi's nuclear family began to prosper, and the children overcame their relatively poor schooling to do well. Looking back over her life, Lakshmi was very clear that she had had to learn to assert her own viewpoint and to take responsibility for herself. She said: 'We are at fault for letting ourselves be cheated. He [her husband] should have protested that he had his own family to look after. ... If I had had the guts to get out when I was young, I would have gotten out.' And as Mines summarises Lakshmi's commentary on her experience: '[Lakshmi's] life began to improve when she finally recognized that, if she was to survive, she had to have the bravery to act on her realization that she alone was responsible for herself (1994, 164).

The work done by Lakshmi's story N o w the importance of Lakshmi's story is just this: it shows clearly how someone's developing consciousness of their own plight can lead events to take a turn against the grain of the dominating moral conceptual system. It shows, pace Mines, that individuality does play a part in Indian life, and that the Dumontian, hedgehogish light does not actually illuminate this facet of Indian society. And in fact, such resistance is far from a merely idiosyncratic experience of Lakshmi. Both Indians and ethnographers of India understand that the patriarchal, Brahmanical ideal of the joint family is, in sober reality, subject to ineluctable vicissitudes. It is understood that the birth of children in a joint household may betoken both its continuance and its possible dissolution, for the new mother and her children comprise the nucleus of a potential new family. This potential is the greater because the new mother may have little emotional investment beyond her children and her husband, and may look to support rather to her natal family, as happened with Lakshmi. The husband, in turn, is likely to find himself torn between old loyalty to his father and new loyalty to his wife and children. Nor is the new bride the only potential source of dissolution: it is sometimes clearly the resistance of a woman, as in Lakshmi's case, but sometimes largely the resistance of one brother to another, or of a son to a father, that lead to breakdown. This understanding is not the idealistic and prescriptive understanding of 6

M u c h writing in Indian sociology has concerned the nature of the joint family and the causes for breakdown in the joint family. See for example Madan 1989, Parry 1979 and Sharma 1980.

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patriarchal Brahmanism's moral scheme, but the sometimes world-weary understanding of accumulated social experience. Moreover it is an understanding of the world as Mitmenschen, as contingent, interacting, mutually involved and, quite possibly, resisting partners. Lakshmi's involvement in her marital household was concentrated upon her children, who became central to her experience, to her developing sense of place in the local social order and to her growing understanding of her own interests. Moreover her relationship to her own children, and the evidently clear and unassailable picture she had of how such relationships should go, must have arisen from her own earlier experience as a happy child in a happy childhood. It is true that there are moral conceptual norms in India that prescribe the growth of such a relationship; but those norms have to be realised in practice to have any purchase in social life. So what worked here was not the moral conceptual system itself, through its bare cognitive and moralising power, but rather its realisation through 'onrolling relationships' in different settings in Lakshmi's life. These relationships drew in Lakshmi's husband, too, because of his own growing closeness to Lakshmi and his children. These were Mitmenschen at whom Lakshmi's burgeoning individuality-cum-responsibility was directed with care and nurturance. But it was a third, and decisive, Mitmensch in Lakshmi's life history who really gave impetus to the direction of her personhood, namely the father-in-law. The Schützian account of the Mitmensch is one of amicable relationships, but the relationship between Lakshmi and her father-in-law shows that it need not be so. The father-in-law seemed bent on frustrating and curbing Lakshmi at every turn, even where her concerns were by no means idiosyncratic or self-centred. So her awareness of herself, or better, of herself-cum-children-cum-husband, grew out of resistance to him and his wishes. She grew together with him in hatred, and so grew apart. This was not resistance arising from a political movement or ideological feminism, but from the nexus of relationships in the household. It was not the adoption of a new ideology or a new moral conceptual system, but the acting upon accumulated interactive experience, that made events go as they did. I want to stress that I am not proposing another form of typicality — such as: it is typical that the new bride is alienated - as a form of explanation. I do not propose, in other words, that there is a second moral conceptual language that goes against the Brahmanical one. For that would miss the point of the Schützian contribution, which opens onto a world of intersubjective and historical contingency. Some joint families break down, but some do not. Not all Indian fatherin-laws interpret their patriarchal rights with the same license that Lakshmi's father-in-law did. Not everyone would have responded as Lakshmi or her husband (finally) did, though many might have so responded earlier. There are suggestive similarities from case to case, similarities that allow us to make our way in thought into Lakshmi's story and her local history, similarities that make Lakshmi's

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story significant for our larger picture of a variegated India. Parry, for example, noted that differing economic interests within the joint family may lead to breakdown, and we can see that economic matters were involved in the final act of Lakshmi's drama. Still, economic interests only make sense as a part of Lakshmi's whole story. W e can easily conceive that Lakshmi would have endured greater financial anxiety and remained in the joint family if her father-in-law had been more caring toward her and her children. But - and this is the real point - even that putative Lakshmi, in a putatively more loving joint family, would still have had that mutual involvement, that entwining of stories and histories, though in that case the theme of resistance might not have played a role and Lakshmi's life might have appeared as ifIt were determined by the Brahmanical code alone.

The Real Petra Β. So on this account, not just conflict, but even compliance with a moral conceptual order arises with mitmenschlich experience. Much the same is clear in Petra's case. She remarked that it was 'obvious' that she would eventually join the Party, but that was really true for what, in the present perspective, seem to be two reasons. Her mother and father were strict and committed Party members, which explains her exposure to the Party's moral conceptual system, but they were also protective and affectionate parents. As she put it, Ί experienced much love and care in my childhood, despite the great commitment of my parents to society (trotz des hohen Engagements meiner Eltern für die Gesellschaft)' (Klein 1994, 44). Moreover this mutual nebenmenschlich love with her parents was reinforced by a larger contemporaries'-eye vision of the world in which she lived. 'Everyone was marked by the [Second World] War, and had the same premises, to begin a new life in this, our land. O n e wanted a life-together (Zusammenleben) free from exploitation' (Klein 1994, 38). O r again, as regards the opinions of her parents as inherited by her: 'in principle everyone had the same possibilities. O n e could build up a country together (gemeinsam), and a feeling-of-belonging-together (.Zusammengehörigkeitsgefühl) came about' (Klein 1994, 45). Note that, even in these apparently straightforward descriptions of herself and her views, Petra is so to speak quoting from the official line, as in the phrases 'great commitment to society' and 'this, our land'. But this is not mere quotation, since there is an underlying style to her thought which is reminiscent of Mauss's idea of'writing their statutes and laws in all their daily relationships and utterances.' 'This, our land', 'life-together', and 'feeling-of-belonging-together' are expressions of an explicit and pervasive concentration on seeing experience in the light of the collective, and of collective purposes. Still, we should not mistake this for a simple reflection of Mauss's notion of the power of collective thought over the

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individual, for Petra was in fact in a very particular position. Her apparently normal nuclear family-an evidently happily married couple with children living as unit and enduring to reproduce itself-was relatively unusual in the post-war years in East Germany (see Borneman 1992). The extraordinarily disruptive effect of the war worked together with easy divorce and a great deal of necessary improvisation in living arrangements to create a large number of alternative domestic and family arrangements. It is true that there was a general social ideal of the nuclear family, but this was felt effectively mostly among Party members, whose marital conventionality stood as a test of their reliability. If Petra had a propensity to identify Party life with family life, then this was the result of her own parents' efforts to achieve that sort of artful Zusammenleben: a living-together that made collective ideals seem to pervade even domestic interpersonal relations. One meets the language of Zusammenleben again in Petra's account of one of the formative experiences of her life, her participation in the World Festival of Youth (Weltfestspiele der Jugend) at the age of 21 in 1973. She said I found it super (toll) to go to the World Festival. ... For the first time I got to know Berlin! One was unbelievably hungry to experience [or jointly-experience, miterleben] everything. In the evening we nearly collapsed, because we were so tired of running around, dancing, and so forth. ... I was twenty-one years old. In these days there was a demonstration, that is an organised march-past, naturally not a protest demonstration. ... I can still feel today how I marched past the tribunal where our Politburo and the foreign guests were standing: that was so incredibly uplifting! I don't know how to explain it - it was so wonderful to jointly-walk (mitlaufen) together with the youth of our country past Erich Honecker, past our FDJ (Free German Youth) chairman. It was a great honour for me. And then youths from Angola hung a necklace around my neck in the street. Amazing contacts took place, very honest contacts. (Klein 1994, 41)

The use both of'we' and of the impersonal third person, man, 'one', stresses the collective orientation of this experience. And this collectivity is set even more to the fore by the use of optional verb forms including mit, 'with' or 'jointly', which highlights the inclusion of others: mitlaufen, miterleben. So here we have the sense of being together with those known and long experienced, rolled together with new contacts, new Mitmenschen, as well as with distantly conceived but honoured consociates ('our Politburo' and 'the foreign guests'); and this whole constellation is seen in a consistent conceptual moral light ('very honest contacts', 'a great honour for me'). What we had to infer in Lakshmi's happy childhood and youth, namely the working of intimate mitmenschlich experience and the formal moral conceptual code to the same end, is laid out in detail in Petra's more extensive account.

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Resistance Petra attended the FDJ's own tertiary college, where she met her husband-to-be, an equally committed Party member. These experiences, too, Petra regarded as being all of a piece, experience corresponding to ideology, but there was one event which already presaged her resistance. T h e local FDJ members were gathered in a large hall, where many 'exemplary youths' (vorbildliche Jugendliche) stood up to give statements that they were volunteering to go to Berlin on the 'FDJ-Initiative Berlin' to rebuild the capital. Each participant was given a piece of paper on which a list of resolves were laid out: Are you willing to take part in the FDJ-Initiative Berlin? Are you unconditionally willing? Are you unwilling? Are you unconditionally unwilling? Petra had already met her husband-to-be, who was a Berliner, so she had no difficulty in ticking the correct box and signing. But there were others who had a family or some other attachment in the small city, and they did not check the correct box. Consequences followed, said Petra, for those who checked the wrong box could not later become secretaries of their local FDJ chapter, but had to remain ordinary members. Ί was quite shocked', she said, 'because I thought surely that everyone could decide about his own life.' (Klein 1994, 42) Petra herself did not resist until later, when she, like Lakshmi, had married and had a child. Following maternity leave, she was offered a position in the central administration of the FDJ (Free German Youth organisation), for which her husband worked. But she found she could not accept: '...my husband worked around the clock, and in the central administration they had not taken account of my family and me. I would have had to travel around with international delegations in the G D R , and that is not possible when you have a family.' (Klein 1994, 43) This was, said Petra, 'the first time I said no', and that led to a series of angry meetings, first with the personnel section of the FDJ administration, and then with a district Party Secretary. Petra argued that, as a kindergarten teacher, she had 'experienced the problems when children were left on their own'. (Klein 1994, 44) She said that she was 'not a mother who leaves her child alone all day, making it a latchkey-child.' Ί have a child,' she said, 'and it needs security. The family is the smallest cell of society, and if it doesn't function, the other [namely society] doesn't function'. "When one is a young mother, one cannot devote one's whole energy to society. Certainly one can pursue one's daily work. But not more. Sometime the children grow up, and then one is again fully available.' The officials' line was based partly on established family policy, which made child care available, especially to women in Petra's relatively favoured position (see Borneman 1992). Indeed she was offered a place in a weekly residential

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nursery. From this official point of view, the Party had already provided for the family 'as the smallest cell of society', though in a way very different from that envisaged by Petra. But the officials' line was also based on an altogether less friendly interpretation of Petra's refusal, on an assumption that she was here breaking Party discipline and therewith threatening the socialist project. Ί was accused of having no proper, no socialist consciousness (Bewußtseiri). I had been given the task, and I should carry it out. What kind of education had I received? They meant at home, from my parents. I was especially allergic to that.' This approach was taken repeatedly by Party officials. Petra said, Ί simply didn't understand that. In this discussion such an inhuman attitude was expressed. And I had thought that this Party is there for people (or 'persons' - Menschen) and devotes itself to the individual (geht auf den Einzelnen ein)'.

Ideology and experience Petra's resistance certifies, much as Lakshmi's did, the openness of humans to experience and change beyond their established moral conceptual language or ideology. In this case the sources of that experience are fairly clear. She had enjoyed a secure childhood in the idealised nuclear family, and that experience had formed her own project for family life. She had also worked as a kindergarten teacher in a society with many'latchkey-kids', and had met among those children notable difficulties. Hence she wanted work consistent with the family as she understood it: a man could work all hours and have small children, but a woman could not. O n e could say that there was some ideology guiding this inference from experience, in that Petra idealised a particular kind of nuclear family. But it would be perhaps more faithful to speak of memory as well as ideology, since whatever ideal was present was in fact validated by recollection of her actual childhood. Nevertheless ideology did play a key role in these events, though it was certainly not ideology as - in the hedgehogish definition with which I began - an impersonal shared moral and cognitive system that is compelling as a source of behaviour. Rather it was, in the first place, ideology as quotation, ideology as a tool to hand, ideology used in a conflict between people, not ideology as a force, as having some agency in its own right. Thus one constituent of Party thought concerned its devotion to the freedom and value of the individual. As a Party slogan had it, der Mensch steht im Mittelpunkt, 'the person stands at the centre'. Petra quoted this against her opposition, saying that she thought that 'the Party was there for people {Menschen), that it was 'devoted to the individual'. Elsewhere she remarked, in a similarly polemical vein, Ί thought that surely everyone could decide about his own life'.

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This is certainly a section of both official East German as well more general Occidental ideology, an ideological individualism that Dumont or Geertz might identify. Petra's opponents cited against her another section of that ideology. They reproached her for the failure of her personal, individual 'consciousness' (Bewußtsein), the failure of her will toward the realisation of socialism. She was not acting in the spirit of the 'socialist personality', her inner sense of her personhood was faulty. Her own answer, of course, was that she did possess the 'socialist personality', her inner consciousness was in perfect working order. She was aware of herself as working for the time being on the 'smallest cell of society', the family, and her efforts for other organs of society at large would come on line again when her children had grown older. So one can see, on the one hand, that there does exist here something like a Dumontian or Geertzian system of the Occidental person. One would be unlikely to meet quite these arguments in India. But, rather than exerting itself impersonally upon all with the same ineluctable cultural force, the system of individualism is in fact used, in broken pieces, rhetorically and strategically. Note, too, that the individualist ideology does not here possess that combination of systematicity and irresistibility, that sense of being an organised whole that excludes alternatives, which was so important to the hedgehogs' claims. Sometimes the ideology expressed by Petra and her opponents bestowed value upon individuals in their own right, sometimes, indeed more frequently, only as they relate to others. Petra was clearly injured most by the Party officials' implied insults to her parents. And the officials were indeed using common currency to be insulting, for alongside the notion of individuals committing themselves and their consciences individually to socialism there existed in the G D R the notion that one was formed in and through a family, and that families belonged to specific classes. Indeed one's class/ family identification as a 'worker' or as 'middle class' was part of one's school file, for example, and followed one through life onto other official files, to one's advantage if one were a 'worker'. So in this case, the Occidental individualistic concern with Petra's consciousness ('no proper, no socialist consciousness') was connected directly to a theory that would be much more familiar in India, a theory that persons are formed, and should be categorised, by their social origins ('What kind of education had I received? They meant at home, from my parents'). Moreover both the Party officials opposing Petra, and on occasion Petra herself, relied on a bit of ideology that specifically devalued individuals and individualistic personhood. Petra expressed this neatly when she said that, when she had difficulty with an official, her own father ('Daddy') gave the following advice: 'he is a comrade, but not the Party. Girl, get it straight! The Party as such pursues quite other, basic goals. This person has acted falsely. Girl! But he is not the Party!' (Klein 1994, 46) This valorisation of the Party, too, was part of the moral

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conceptual 'system' which Petra inherited, but in its despotic insistence on the primacy of the Party it seems diametrically opposed to the notion of a 'devotion to the individual' which Petra first cited. W e have moved through 180 degrees in thought, but among the same people, ostensibly sharing the same 'system'. Some might say, of course, that this inconsistency was a peculiar flaw in Communist thought that helped to bring it down. But I suggest, to the contrary, that there is no moral conceptual 'system', or better, 'collection', which does not comprise a similarly variegated and partly contradictory collation of ideas and values: certainly not the American liberal individualism which I learned in my childhood, nor the social and religious thought of South Asia which has engaged my scholarly attention.

Something positive Do the reflections in this essay tell us anything positive about human nature? Well, one generalisation I am happy to make is that humans everywhere possess an intense form of sociality, a sociality comprising a strong narrative awareness of one's involvement with others. The awareness is 'narrative' precisely because we have a rich consciousness of each other's pasts and projected futures, as well as of each other's hopes, fears, regrets and habits as evidenced in the flow of events. I used Schütz's idea of Mitmenschen (who are 'mutually involved in one another's biography'), to capture this intersubjectivity, but it can and has been written about in other terms as well (see Carrithers 1992). I believe that this general view over sociality in fact unites most foxish objections to the hedgehogs. For example, both Mines' 'individuality' in relation to others, and Wikan's notion of 'experience' are part of the mitmenschlich world. Moreover, as Lakshmi's and Petra's stories illustrate, openness to change, and indeed a constitutive mutability, is built into this intersubjectivity. There is, so to speak, a sort of Brownian motion of interpretations and relationships at the very foundation of human society. I am also happy with a second generalisation: we are a species very good at typifying - in Schütz's sense - the world about us, and particularly the human world. From typiflcations we erect institutions and elaborate social patterns with accompanying roles (Party official, kindergarten teacher, father-in-law, wife). Such a scaffolding of stereotypical expectations and judgements allows social relations to expand with some reliability beyond the intimately known sphere to contacts with contemporaries. It therefore allows for just the sort of complex social life found in East Germany and India. Among these typifications, too, we find effectively imagined collective agents, such as the Party. Yet it would be wrong to think that such social structures are closed, penetrating and embracing society without remainder, just as it was wrong to think that moral conceptual systems

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do so. The continuai working of actual mitmenschlich relations, and the Brownian motion of mutability, mean that such social structures as scholars may specify are shot through with historicity. What then do we make of the sort of impersonal evidence used by the hedgehogs to construct their systems? A colleague and I have tentatively suggested elsewhere (Machin/Carrithers 1996) that we may speak of cultural and moral concepts as landmarks. Such a landmark might be the idea that persons are constituted by families, which in turn belong to social classes. It was a landmark for both Petra and her accusers, because they all recognised the words fashioned around this landmark as an insult to her family. The imagery of a landmark is useful here, I think, because we do not expect landmarks to be other than widely and mutually visible: they are useful because you and I can see them, and I know you can see them, and you know I can see them, and I know you know ... etc. Moreover landmarks are known through their use. They are used by people on each other, often in order to make moral judgements, and therefore not always in a very friendly way. What draws such moral conceptual landmarks together is not some sort of logical systematicity among them, but the fact that they relate to a body of associated people. The ontological stress falls on the related people, not on the landmarks. Moreover, as was clear in the differences between the Party officials and Petra over the family as 'the smallest cell of society', landmarks may be loaded with moral potential, but their actual interpretation arises from the situation of their use in social relations. Petra took 'the smallest cell of society' to involve a mother as primary caregiver; the officials did not. Some time ago, quite by accident, I discovered the perfect chocolate brownie recipe. It involved mixing excellent ingredients in the right proportion, but more than that, it required cooking for just long enough to achieve a cracked, crisp crust over a nearly fluid, slightly chewy base. I cannot help thinking that just this mixture-the firm if broken crust over the malleable base—is the best analogy for the human condition as I have described it here. Just as the perfect brownie requires the combination of the two consistencies, so human experience is necessarily composed of received ideas and quotations, that is, a crusty if broken and inconsistent culture, bonded with the interactions and constant mutations of flowing social life.

Creativity I am clear, too, that there is more creativity and openness in people, and in the construction of new landmarks — new cultures or brownie crusts - than anthropologists have commonly recognised. Consider Petra again. Eventually she did manage to take a less demanding job; but her subsequent career was marked by

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more conflict between her and the Party. When later she accepted a job with the Ministry of the Interior, she dealt with applications of spouses in the GDR to join their partners in West Germany. She dealt, in other words, with the intervention of the State in family life. In that post she took a compassionate and, where possible, a helpful view of the cases she met, an attitude consistent with the family life she had developed with her parents and her sympathetic husband. But she was subjected to ever increasing pressure to deal harshly with applicants, and was dealt with harshly herself. A harassing figure from the Stasi began to take an interest in her, a figure very like the shadowy, ominous and finally catastrophic Stasi presence described in Volker Braun's lightly fictionalised document of East German life, Unvollendete Geschichte. On her husband's advice Petra managed finally to escape by pleading medical disability and taking a sinecure in the personnel department of a company. This was her last act of resistance - and of course it was an act more in the spirit of Scott's Weapons of the Weak than of direct political opposition - for then the Wall fell, and she was left to make yet another new life, and to make sense of her past. She did this extraordinarily well. At the end of her as-told-to life history she set out some moral conceptual landmarks for herself and her family, landmarks drawn partly from her past, but visible as well from her unexpected and very different future in a capitalist united Germany. I want to bestow (mitgeben) on my children, that they should take with (mitnehmen) them whatever is offered them as education. They should not only learn one philosopher (i.e. Marx), as we have done. They should develop their own picture of the world {Weltbild). ... I must also learn to deal with this freedom that we now have. One can realize a great deal in this society, and I want to bring that over to them, for they can certainly make of their lives what they wish. But this society is such, that it will leave you hanging, if you can't achieve any more. ... If you have money, you can enjoy your life. But I think that one can set up one's life quite well if one lives very modestly. I want to convey that to my children, because they often don't see the limitations. They have so many desires, called up by these unbelievable offers. I want to make them aware of the real values of life that are not just material values. Honesty, concern for one another's interests (aufeinander Eingehen), consideration (Rücksichtnahme), uprightness (Gerechtigkeit). Those are actually all values that I have seen in my, in this former Party.

This is an extraordinary mixture of old and recent experience set alongside values salvaged from the wreck of the Party and the project of living-together. Unlike many East Germans, Petra is not bitter, either about the Party's failings or the depredations of the new Germany. She evaluates the past in its own terms, and is willing to use landmarks from it in the new setting - concern for one another's interests, devotion to one another, consideration, uprightness. Beside these virtues of social solidarity she sets a mild intellectual individualism. By this

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time she already had enough experience of the new society to see that 'it will leave you hanging' if you fail, and so can incorporate that observation into her precepts, which recommend an arm's-length approach to consumerism. She recognises virtues in the new society, but resists some West German notions: the competitiveness of the sharply jostling 'elbow-society' (Ellenbogengesellschaft) and the emphasis on self-confidence and knowing what you want (Selbstbewußtsein). In hindsight, after a generation or so, some of these may come to seem, to historians and sociologists, the founding sentiments and long-enduring landmarks of East German society within the German nation. But however that may be, Petra's personhood, as here expressed, mixes the individualistic and the holistic, social solidarity and individual consciousness, moral concepts and experience, with a creativity little captured by hedgehogish social thought.

Afterword: "Human Nature". A Conceptual Matrix

The contributions to this volume contain a variety of claims about what it is to be human, claims which at times appear to amount to the same thing, at times to overlap and at times to contradict each other. They range from the claim that there simply is no human nature at all to the identification of human nature with the genetically programmed dispositions selected for by evolution. Other papers adduce one or more features firmly rooted in the western philosophical tradition of thinking about the human - characteristics such as instinctual reduction or world-openness, culturality or the capacity to follow norms, life in community with conspecifics, agency, responsibility, linguistic or pictorial competence, pleasure in certain properties of forms, value-constitutive emotionality and rationality. Moreover, being human is also claimed to involve susceptibility to certain universal emotional experiences, being a particular type of human, living in the context of incest taboos and being descended from certain ancestors. All of this has considerable prima facie plausibility. However, it is very difficult to see how these various claims might relate to each other and whether anything substantial is to be gained by establishing such relations. This difficulty is undoubtedly one of the reasons why discussion of the issue of the human tends to founder. In what follows, I wish to make a number of suggestions as to how some conceptual order might be introduced into this bewildering array of claims, claims marked by varying degrees of plausibility and accompanied by equal degrees of suspicion as to what is to be gained by establishing any one, perhaps at the expense of the others. In a first step, I specify four parameters which are implicitly or explicitly drawn on when conceptions of human nature are propounded. On the basis of the distinctions thus introduced, I then proceed to separate four senses of the term. It seems to me imperative to establish these distinctions, as the different concepts of human nature impose different demands on attempts to justify particular substantial conceptions. Moreover, there are going to be significant relations between conceptions covered by each of the four senses of the term. What precisely these relations are and how they can be justified can in turn only become clear once the independent meanings are themselves clarified.

Four Parameters Conceptions of human nature are located in a conceptual space established by four sets of distinctions. None of them are particularly spectacular, but taken

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together they do constitute a significant set of possibilities. Where these are lost sight of, confusion tends to arise as to what precisely is being debated when the term "human nature" is invoked, whether positively or negatively. 1. The first distinction is that between description and evaluation. Talk of "human nature" is often either explicitly or implicitly evaluative. Perhaps the evaluative dimension is in the end the most significant aspect of such talk. Particularly if that is so, we require clarity both as to the descriptive dimensions which support it and as to the modes of transition to the evaluative sphere. 2. A second distinction is necessary if one considers the status of the properties which tend to be ascribed to humans in sentences such as "It's only human nature to χ . The property in question might be a characteristic common to both humans and other animals; it might be a property seen as specific to humans or the claim might be that to χ is in some sense of the essence of what it is to be human. 3. A third distinction takes on importance once one focuses on the fact that talk of "human nature" implicitly involves universal quantification. There are two significant possibilities here as to the objects of such quantification. Firstly, and most obviously, we might be quantifying over members of the species. Where a claim is genuinely being made for every individual specimen of homo sapiens, we have a claim to strict universality. Such claims are, however, likely to be extremely rare. N o t only are they subject to the general difficulties of induction: we are not going to be able to check the truth of such claims by examining every existing individual, never mind no longer and not yet existent tokens. They are, moreover, unlikely to be true. Maiming, surgical amputation and genetic variation can, so it seems, all lead to there being members of the species without any properties one may think of. Thus, a claim such as "All humans have two eyes" is, read as a claim to strict universality, clearly false. O n the other hand, it is true as a generalisation: as a claim to generality, understood in terms of statistical near-universality. Secondly, the entities being quantified over may not be individual members of the species, but certain kinds of subgroup to which members of the species necessarily belong. Claims of this kind, which are often made by cultural anthropologists, can be called claims to transcontextuality. They have the form: every group of type g instantiates property x. In ethnological contexts, the type of group in question is usually a "society" or a "culture", so that we get claims like "All cultures are characterised by incest taboos", "All societies have institutions" or "There are no societies without artistic practices". Sentences with the same logical structure, but which quantify over different types of group, can be equally interesting for our topic. The context being transcended might be that of ethnicity, geographic location, historical situation, family, gender or age. These contexts all constitute groups to which it is impossible for individual members of the species

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not to belong. In contrast, claims which merely transcend the contexts of individual yachting clubs are irrelevant for the topic of human nature. Transcontextually valid claims are certainly of significance for understanding what it is to be human. If for instance it is true that all human societies are characterised by ethnocentrism, then any individual human, irrespective of whether she herself is ethnocentric, would exist in an environment in which that feature is present. Sometimes, an everyday statement about "human nature" might be no more than a statement about some such transcontextual feature of life in all human societies, without ascribing any property to every member of the species. Nevertheless, such statements do tend conversationally to imply that the reason for the transcontextual distribution of the property in question is that humans universally, or at least generally, have a disposition to instantiate it. In other words, claims about human nature usually involve an at least implicit form of (quasi-) universal quantification over members of the species, even where they are formulated in transcontextual terms. 4. The fourth parameter at work in notions of human nature is that established by the general concepts of nature which are applied to the human sphere. Like its Greek equivalent (cf. Aristotle, Phys. 192 b 8ff.), the term "nature" has various senses. Although these overlap in part with the conceptual dimensions distinguished above, they nevertheless require a separate heading, as certain semantic components are only imported by means of the term "nature". This is particularly the case with respect to the contrastive sense established by the ancient distinctions between φύσις and τέχνη or between φύσις and νόμος. Here, nature is seen as what is pre-given, independently of human intervention, and opposed to culture, technology or artifice, as for instance in Hume's distinction between "natural" and "artificial virtues". What is natural in this genetic sense could be universally, transculturally, generally or even merely individually given. It might or might not be the object of strong evaluation. And it may be common to humans and animals, specific to humans or it could in some sense belong to the human "essence". It is notions of essentiality which, alongside that of pre-givenness, structure the various concepts of nature at work in what is meant by "human nature". The conceptions of essentiality involved are three in number and can be entitled "conceptual", "predicative" and "axiological centrality". Conceptual centrality refers to the necessary and sufficient conditions for the identification of individuals that fall under the concept in question. In this sense, the nature or essence of a type of entity e is simply that feature or those features which need to be given and suffice to provide us with have a specimen o f e . The conceptual nature of the requirement here means that we are dealing in strict universality. Predicative centrality is assigned to those properties of an entity, identified by other criteria, which are in some way characteristic features of that entity, although they may be missing in

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individual cases. This is, in turn, to be analytically distinguished from axiological centrality, which marks those characteristic features of an entity which have particular value or are of particular importance. Neither predicative nor axiological centrality require that the features in question are exclusive to the entity. It is likely that they will be generally, rather than universally instantiated, although it is possible that they are merely instantiated by particular individuals. This latter possibility makes conceptual room for talk of "individual natures". Finally, it seems highly likely that those features seen as evaluatively central are also going to be predicatively central, although it is less clear that the inverse relation holds. In what follows, I will say a word or two about the application of each of these four conceptions of nature to the human case. The burden of my discussion is to show how they are located relative to each other in the conceptual landscape.

Pre-givenness This sense of "human nature" involves the transposition to the human case of the idea of nature most familiar from the context of nature conservation. There "nature", in line with its semantic roots in the Greek φύομαι and the Latin "nascere", is understood as that sphere of existence which has not been constructed by human beings, as those forms of being that have come into being or developed themselves (Passmore 1974, 32). Its paradigms are deserts, wilderness and oceans. In analogy with this use, then, "human nature" means those components of human constitution which are in some sense pre-given, independently of human intervention. Obviously, much needs to be said here about what can count as relevant human intervention: clearly, most of us only exist because of the constructive interaction of our parents. But, significantly, that does not normally, as yet, involve them deliberately piecing together the genetic material from which their children are to develop. As long as that is not the case, there is thus a sense in which the biological properties with which humans are born constitute their "natures". " H u m a n nature" would in this sense be constituted by all those pregiven biological properties which are universal, or perhaps merely general, among members of the species. These would not be restricted to actually instantiated properties, but should also include developmental dispositions: pre-given "programmes" which determine, for instance, that certain bodily changes are to take place in adolescence. This is the concept of "human nature" invoked by some contemporary evolutionary psychologists (Tooby/Cosmides 1990, 22ff.). It is also the concept which, for obvious reasons, is rejected out of hand by radical "constructivist" theories in the human and social sciences, for whom, somewhat strangely, there are no phenomena at all which can be accurately described as non-artefacts.

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T h e question of which features of humans are pre-given stands in a logically loose relation to the question of which features of humans are to figure in conceptions of their essence in the three senses distinguished here. I shall come back to these relations in dealing with each of the three senses in turn.

Conceptual Centrality In order to ascribe properties to entities of type e, whether these properties are claimed to be pre-given, universal or general, even when they are just ascribed to classes of which es are members, we need criteria for the identification of es. A second sense of "human nature", or a first sense of "human essence", consists in the relevant necessary and sufficient conditions. Here the "natural" or the "essential" is opposed to the conceptually contingent. Diogenes of Sinope is renowned for having theatrically objected to the putative sufficiency of the two properties of two-footedness and featherlessness (Plato, Statesman 266e; Diog. Laert. VI, 40). The same kind of objection can, so it seems, also be raised to any properties advanced as either necessary or sufficient for membership of the species. In the already mentioned cases of maiming, amputation and genetic defects, we will normally have a human-with-an-x-missing rather than a non-human. This might simply be taken to show that the definition in question cannot be in terms of currently instantiated phenotypical properties. However, the view from evolutionary biology shows that the problem runs much deeper. According to evolutionary theory, the survival potential of the human species, like that of any other, is grounded in its adaptability. Now, adaptability is only given because of the tendency to genetic variation. This is the precondition for our present genetic make-up having come into being and could lead to unforeseen changes in our constitution in the future. Thus, the fact that a certain trait might be shown to characterize (almost) all members of the species now neither means that it did so in the evolutionary past, nor that it will continue to do so in the evolutionary future. In other words, there are no kinds of currently instantiated properties, whether pheno- or genotypical, which are conceptually necessary to justify the identification of some entity as a member of the species homo sapiens (Hull 1986, 4ff.; cf. Griffiths 1997, 202ff.). There are two plausible responses to this point. The first has been widely accepted within biology since the 1970s. According to this solution, the one criterion necessarily implied by the use of the biological term "human being" is purely genealogical, i.e. the criterion of common descent. This solution does make it possible to talk of a human nature in the sense of conceptual centrality. However, it appears to condemn it to philosophical irrelevance. T h e human nature it gives us is shadowy and empty of any experiential content. At least of equal impor-

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tance is its total causal impotence. Talk of "human nature" merely marks the channel through which causally relevant properties may be transmitted; it tells us nothing about what these properties might be. The purely formal character of "human nature" in this second sense thus corresponds to a complete lack of a relevant "human nature" in the first sense of pre-given properties. Moreover, for someone who subscribes to the causal theory of meaning, according to which it is the task of a concept to track the causal mechanism that explains the properties of its referent, the causal impotence of the conceptually central genealogical criterion is likely to be seen as justifying the claim that there is also no human nature in this second sense. A possible counter-argument here is that the experiential vacuity of the genealogical criterion demonstrates its inadequacy, as we all appear to apply criteria for the identification of other members of the species without having the least knowledge of evolutionary biology. Moreover, it may be that those criteria are in a significant sense non-epistemic. Clearly, something about the other has to be "registered", as Jonathon Bennett (1976, 46ff.) has put it, but that appears not to entail that the properties to which we react are represented consciously. Philosophers working in the tradition of Heidegger and the later Wittgenstein have argued that identifying another human involves the involuntary adoption of a peculiar non-propositional attitude towards that other (Löwith [ 1928], 64f.; Winch 1987, I45f.; Kambartel 1989, 74f.; Olafson 1995, 255). What is meant by what Peter Winch calls "the general view, or conception" of other human beings can perhaps be best illustrated by the difference between entering a room in which someone else is sitting and entering the same room when it is empty of other humans. Independently of whether there is any explicit linguistic or gestural communication between the two people and independently of whether there are any specific negative or positive emotions involved, the person entering will, so it seems, inevitably have a form of awareness which is the result of their acknowledging the other as another of their own - human - kind. Such a phenomenological description captures an experience that might well be general. Moreover, it would be a fairly obvious candidate for evolutionary explanation. Were this indeed to prove general, there would presumably under most circumstances be no contradiction between the two perspectives. This non-epistemic, sub-propositional attitude would however, precisely in virtue of its non-propositionality, not provide a concept of the human. Moreover, one can imagine that cases might occur in which the experiential and genealogical criteria do drift apart. The android-hunter in the film Blade Runner, or in its literary forerunner, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Dick 1993), is faced with a dilemma of this kind. On reflection though, the dilemma can be seen not to result from a conflict between two types of criterion of the human. Rather, the conflict arises between moral duties towards humans and the tendency to extend the boundaries of the

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moral universe to include non-humans that possess certain morally significant features, features such as susceptibility to pain, emotionality and agency.

Predicative Centrality In spite of claims to the contrary (e.g. Hull 1986, 3ff.), neither pre-givenness nor conceptual centrality are the main topics of the traditional philosophical debates focused by the expression "human nature". Neither traditional characterisations in terms of rationality, linguistic capacity, life in community, culturality, agency and freedom, nor the naming of further properties such as world-openness, imagination, the capacity for spatial representation or the disposition to feel shame are sensibly understood as attempts to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the identification of species members. Moreover, the main point at issue in such contentions is not the extent to which the features are pre-given for their bearers. Many of these characteristics only develop in the course of time because of the active contributions both of their bearers and of the social environment. What is generally at issue in such contentions is what one can call the characteristic human form of l i f e . In order to make any such claims, we obviously need to have some fairly accurate idea as to which entities are to count as humans. And what we can identify as constitutive of the human life-form need by no means be the exclusive result of biological factors. What might justify assigning a particular feature, or particular features of human life a special status as "characteristic"? Further, is it possible to do so without crossing the boundary between descriptive and evaluative? Can we even make sense of the idea of purely descriptive centrality? I think so. A preliminary, necessary condition is going to be that the feature or features in question is or are given in humans at a significant level of statistical generality. The fact that we are not dealing in strict universality merely reflects the fact that there are members of the species who, for one reason or another, are incapable of living a characteristically human life. Obviously, statistical generality is not enough. If - to take up an example from Hull (1986, 7) - (almost) all humans were to prove capable of digesting Nutrasweet, that would still hardly be a plausible constitutive feature of the characteristic human life-form. The kind of feature we are after here has been aptly labelled a structural property (Midgley, this volume, p. 57). What makes such a property "structural" is the fact that its instantiation significantly affects the character of its bearers' other properties. In this its causal status in human life is opposed to that of those features of the mind designated "modular" by cognitive scientists and certain philosophers. A number of the traditional characteristics mentioned above - rationality, culturality, language, agency, world-openness, freedom, sociality - are

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clear candidates for such a structural role. But how do such features relate to each other? And is the characteristic human life-form to be identified primarily with the possession of one particular structural property or with that of a specific constellation of such properties? The list just given suggests at least prima facie, in contrast to many traditional conceptions, that the latter alternative is more plausible. However, a theory of human nature as predicative centrality would still have to broach the explanatory question as to whether the characteristic human shape of the constellation of structural properties does not depend primarily on one particular feature. A theory which answered this question in the affirmative would be foundationalist in character; a theory which insisted on the interdependence of the constellation's components would be holistic. A foundationalist theory would attempt to make the case for one particular property being the logical or causal precondition of the instantiation of the typically human form of the others. Conceptions which focus on the instinctual reduction and delayed maturation of the human infant, seeing here the root of culturality, rationality and institutionalisation - conceptions advanced from Herder to Portmann and the German Philosophical Anthroplogists - are of this kind. The debate between Chisholm and Sellars in the 1950s as to the relative priority of intentionality and language (Chisholm / Sellars 1972, 214ff.) also concerns the possibility of assigning foundational status to one such human capacity. In contrast, a holistic model would attempt to show that there are constitutive interrelations between a certain number of core properties which admit of no foundationalist explication. Davidson's position, for instance, according to which being a rational animal is a matter of having the entire gamut of the propositional attitudes, which are in turn inextricably bound up with a certain kind of sociality (1985, 473ff.), is of this second kind. There is a real difficulty about precisely what the methodological demands are on a theory which sets out to justify a specific conception of human nature as predicative centrality. It ought, at any rate, to be clear that the relevant forms of justification will involve arguments on a level of technical detail which is far removed from abstract talk about "the human". There are two final remarks in order about the relationship of predicative centrality to conceptual centrality and pre-givenness. To take the latter first: a number of positions on the characteristic human life-form argue that its structurally central characteristic essentially involves transcendence of the properties with which one has been equipped by instinct or genetic processes. Such positions, whether of an Existentialist or culturalist variant, are sometimes expressed in the paradoxical formulation that it is the "nature" of humans to have no "nature". In such formulations, the first use of "nature" often seems to refer to predicative centrality, whereas the second refers to pre-givenness. Then, clearly, there is no paradox. At times, however, both uses appear to refer to predicative centrality. The

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claim then is that it is a formal characteristic of human life to have no characteristic form at all. Either way, the claim is, at the very best, an exaggeration. Finally, it should be noted that claims of this kind are to be distinguished from the argument, discussed in relation to conceptual centrality, to the effect that there is no human nature because of the lack of any physical or phenotypical properties which are necessary and sufficient conditions for the identification of members of the species. If the genealogical conception of species sketched there is correct, then human nature in the sense of conceptual centrality is, trivially, "timeless". Even if the species were to move towards extinction, the genealogical criterion could be applied by Martians, gods or other scientifically gifted beings interested in whether certain specimens of life are to be classified as humans. What is certainly not timeless is the characteristic human life-form, which could be radically altered, for instance, by an ecological catastrophe. There is no conceptual reason why forces with a noxious effect on present human functioning could not so radically alter the properties of the surviving descendents of our ancestors that beings which fulfil the genealogical criterion would no longer be characterisable as rational, social, linguistic ... or whatever, animals.

Axiological Centrality Historically, there has been an unfortunate, although understandable tendency to fuse the question of predicative centrality with the question as to which characteristic human property or properties are most important or most valuable. Conceptions of the human life-form as essentially characterised by "dignity" are of such a hybrid type (cf. Roughley 1996a, 786). This tendency is not surprising, as we may have good reason to attribute a particularly high value to a characteristic which pervades our life in such a way that its loss would radically alter the way we live. However, there is nothing necessary in this: our mortality undoubtedly leaves its mark on many aspects of the way we lead our lives, but there have been many people who have longed to be rid of it. Human nature in the sense of pre-given components of our make-up has also repeatedly been seen as in some way inherently valuable. Popular contemporary arguments against genetic engineering often ground in such conceptions. However, the mere givenness of a property is in itself no reason to attribute value to it. Nevertheless, the greater the stability with which certain traits or tendencies are given and, in particular, the greater the costs of ignoring them, the greater the rational pressure to see that our values are at least compatible with them. Neither the pre-givenness nor the characteristic pervasiveness of particular features of human life are sufficient to justify assigning them evaluative centrality. Nevertheless, either of these ways of belonging to "human nature" may contrib-

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ute a certain plausibility to the positive evaluation of the property in question. In the final analysis, however, the question of why value is justifiably attributed in one way rather than another refers us to the theory of value. The traditional picture within western philosophy, painted in different ways by Plato and Aristotle, is that Reason — in some sense - is the intrinsically most valuable feature of human life and that its realisation is therefore to be striven for. Aristotle was able to ground this claim in a teleological view of life, which ensured the congruence of characteristic and most valuable features. Since the collapse of teleology after Darwin however, both the source of value and the feature in which it might inhere have become unclear. If one subtracts the idea of a pre-given end of human life, the idea that our rationality might be the most valuable feature of our lives is anything but obvious. One strategy for dealing with this problem involves abandoning the conception that a single property is the primary bearer of value and attributing value to a cluster of human traits and capacities. In one such contemporary model, sexuality, mobility, hedonic dispositions, cognitive capacities, affiliation, relatedness to nature and play are all seen as inherently valuable (Nussbaum 1992,216ff.). This can be seen as an axiological correlate of the descriptive move from exclusive properties to structural property clusters at the level of predicative centrality. However, whatever intuitive plausibility such a model may have, it is open to the charge of arbitrariness in its precise value distribution. Lists invite questions as to why certain items are missing and as to whether certain items included really should be. They also raise the question of the relative value of the items listed: are not certain values more "central" than others? Above all, such a broadly Aristotelian conception, deprived of its teleological background, leaves all the work of value justification to intuition. However, not only do people's intuitions notoriously differ, so that it is far from clear that evaluative generality can be attained in this way; intuition is quite simply not a form of justification. Plausible alternatives to intuitionist axiological conceptions see the source of value in mental attitudes, in particular in wants or e motions. Axiological subjectivism of these kinds solves the problem of the source of our values, and in particular provides an explanation of the claims that values make on subjects. However, such a solution to the source of value for individuals erects a barrier to the idea of values with universally, or generally valid content. This barrier could be definitively overcome if one could show that there is some trait that all humans (at least all members of the species with the capacity for valuation) necessarily value. Such a trait would presumably either be part of a holistically conceived model of the characteristic human life-form or else the constitutive property of a corresponding foundationalist account. A recently advanced argument for a foundationalist model takes its inspiration from certain formulations of Kant. According to this line of thought (Korsgaard 1996, 13 Iff.), the fundamental capacity in question is

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human autonomy, and its ultimate value results from the fact that it is itself the necessary condition of the existence of any value at all. T h e axiological premiss here is that values come into being through humans taking an autonomous stand vis-à-vis experiences and states of affairs. This is supplemented by an additional premiss, according to which the source of all value is itself a necessary (the highest?) value. Both premises can be, and have been, questioned. Should it turn out that no argument of this kind is valid, then the idea of founding an axiological conception of human nature in necessary valuation would have to be abandoned. If there is no feature of human existence which is necessarily valued, then there still might be human properties or capacities which, as a matter of fact — perhaps because of our biological make-up - all humans do positively value. Whether that is the case or not is in the end an empirical matter, and one which would certainly be worth investigating. T h e kinds of investigation required would involve a delicate combination of social scientific fieldwork with linguistic and conceptual analysis, in order to prevent errors which may be suggested by the surface grammar of a culture. Clearly though, axiological subjectivism does tend to discourage the idea that there may be generally instantiated human properties that can justifiably be seen as evaluatively central. However, whether such discouragement really is warranted seems to me to be still an open question.

Concluding Remarks What I hope to have shown in this Afterword is that we require clarity both about which conception of "human nature" is being invoked by a certain author and about the relationships she claims exist between the various senses of the phrase. Where such clarity is missing, one tends to be faced with a mobilisation of emotions whose strength is inversely proportionate to the transparency of what the debate is actually about. For instance, one often finds that someone is ostensibly discussing identity criteria, but ends up arguing as if they have shown something about the traits generally possessed by the creatures thus identified. O r we find authors emphasizing the lack of significance of pre-given characteristics before going on to draw conclusions about the impossibility of defining human beings. I hope it has become clear that a successful sceptical argument on one level by no means entails the destruction of any plausible conception of "human nature" on another level. T h e provision of criteria for the identification of members of the species homo sapiens is presumably a task of biology, assisted by the philosophy of science. A non-vacuous theory of the characteristic human life-form, on the other hand, is an extremely ambitious project, to which contributions from various disciplines are necessary and whose final form is not easily predictable. T h e discussion of the

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role of pre-given properties and dispositions would need to be integrated within such a project, whilst maintaining the conceptual differences. The not inconsiderable difficulties involved in such a theory of predicative centrality in turn cast doubt on the feasibility of an axiological conception of human nature. Beyond a theory of the characteristic human life-form, such a conception would also require the resolution of core problems within value theory. However, although no necessary and sufficient conditions for the validity of evaluations or norms can be derived from claims about the way humans are, facts about human capacities and their limits almost certainly provide defeating conditions for certain claims about the nature of normativity or the contents of specific norms. And perhaps more can be shown to be the case. N o n e of the contributions to the volume attempts to cover all the ground mapped out here. They represent very different approaches to the various senses of "human nature" and their interrelations. And they demonstrate clearly the relevance of the topic in the light of the developments in various disciplines in recent years. No-one can hope to have an adequate grasp of all these developments, but perhaps the transdisciplinary engagement with the various aspects of the topic brought together here can communicate some idea of what is at stake and what the consequences of resolving the issues one way rather than another would be.

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Notes on Contributors

Aleida Assmann is Professor of English Literature at the University of Constance. Among her publications are: Arbeit am nationalen Gedächtnis (1993); Texte und Lektüren. Perspektiven der Literaturwissenschaft (1996) and Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (1999). Particularly relevant for anthropological issues is the series Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation ("Archaeology of Literary Communication"), which she co-edits together with Jan Assmann and which contains volumes on topics such as writing, wisdom, secrecy and solitude. ChristopherJ. Berry is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. His most recent book is Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh University Press, 1997). He is currently working on a Philosophical Anthropology of Politics, which marks a return to some concerns adumbrated in his book Human Nature (Macmillan, 1986). His contribution to this book is an initial exercise in that development. Donald E. Brown is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His publications have centered on social structure, social change, Southeast Asia, history, ethnicity, and human universals. He is the author of Hierarchy, History and Human Nature: The Origins of Historical Mindedness (The University of Arizona Press, 1988) and of Human Universals (McGraw-Hill and Temple University Press, 1991). Michael Carrithers is presently Professor of Anthropology in the University of Durham. He has done fieldwork on Buddhist forest monks in Sri Lanka and on the southern Jain community in India. He has written a biography of the Buddha and a book, Why Humans Have Cultures (1992), on the foundations of anthropological theory. He co-edited (with S. Collins and S. Lukes) the interdisciplinary volume, The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History (1985). At present he is working on the East German response to the fall of the Wall and to the GDR past. David Cockburn is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wales, Lampeter. He is the author of Other Human Beings (Macmillan, 1990), and the editor of Human Beings (Cambridge, 1991). His most recent book is Other Times. Philosophical Perspectives on Past, Present and Future (Cambridge, 1997).

Notes on Contributors

423

Michael Cole is Professor of Communication and Psychology at the University of California, San Diego. His research focuses on the role of culture in human development. For the past 30 years he has been the editor of the translation journal, Soviet Psychology, currently called The Journal of Russian and East European Psychology. Among his contributions to cross-cultural psychological research are: (with J. Gay, J. A. Glick and D. W. Sharp), The Cultural Context of Learning and Thinking (1971) and (with P. Griffin and the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition), Contextual Factors in Education (1987). His most recent book is Cultural Psychology: A Once and Future Discipline (Harvard University Press, 1996). David Copp is Professor of Philosophy at Bowling Green State University, in Bowling Green, Ohio. He taught previously at Simon Fraser University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the University of California, Davis. He is author o f M o r a l i t y , Normativity, and Society (Oxford, 1995), a book on the foundations of ethics. He has published articles in moral and political philosophy, and co-edited three volumes: The Idea of Democracy·, Morality, Reason and Truth and Pornography and Censorship. He is an Associate Editor of Ethics and a former executive editor of Canadian Journal of Philosophy. Ronald de Sorna is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is the author of The Rationality of Emotion (MIT 1987), and of articles on emotions, rationality, philosophy of mind and ethics. His two main current research projects concern various aspects of individuality (see 'Individual Natures', Philosophia [Israel] 1998), and the philosophy of biology. He is preparing (in French) an Introduction to the Philosophy of Biology, to be published by Editions Nathan. Wolfgang Friedlmeier teaches psychology at the University of Constance, where he is affiliated with the Chair for Developmental and Cultural Psychology. His main research areas are the development of emotions and identity, socialization and culture. Recent articles in English which deal with these topics are: (with G. Trommsdorff), 'Emotion Regulation in Early Childhood: A Cross-Cultural Comparison between German and Japanese Toddlers', Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 30 (1999) and (with G. Trommsdorff), 'Control and Responsiveness in Japanese and German Mother-Child Interactions', Early Development and Parenting2 (1993). In 1993 he published Entwicklung von Empathie, Selbstkonzept und prosozialem Verhalten in der Kindheit. He has also co-edited two books which highlight the cross-cultural and developmental aspects of his approach respectively: (with G. Trommsdorff and H.-J. Kornadt), Japan in transition. Social and psychological aspects (1998), and (with M. Holodynski), Emotionale Entwicklung (1999).

424

Notes on Contributors

Rom Harré is Professor of Psychology at Georgetown University, Emeritus Fellow of Linacre College, Oxford and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at American University, Washington DC. He has developed his conception of a philosophical anthropology in the three volumes, Social Being {1979), Personal Being (1983) and Physical Being (1991). Other relevant publications are: (with V. Reynolds), The Meaning of Primate Signals (1983); (ed.), The Social Construction ofthe Emotions (1987); (with G. Gillett), The Discursive Mind (1994); (with W. G. Parrott, eds.), The Emotions. Social, Cultural and Biological Dimensions ( 1996) and The Singular Self (1998). His most recent book is (with L. van Langenhove) Positioning Theory (1999). Andrew Harrison is Reader in the Philosophy of Art at the University of Bristol. Relevant publications to the paper in this volume are: Making and Thinking. A Study of Intelligent Activities (Harvester Press, 1979); Ά minimal syntax for the pictorial' in S. Kemal and I. Gasiceli (eds.), The Language of Art History, (Cambridge University Press, 1991); Philosophy and the Arts. Seeing and Believing, (Thoemmes Press, 1997). He has also edited Philosophy and the Visual Arts. Seeing and A bstracting (Reidel, 1987). Helen Haste is Professor of Psychology at the University of Bath. Her current primary research interest is metaphor and its role at the interface of mind and culture. She has published extensively in the fields of gender, values development and issues in culture and the public understanding of science. She has co-edited (with the philosopher Don Locke) Morality in the Making. Thought, Action and Social Context (1983) and (with Jerome Bruner) Making Sense. The Child's Construction of the World (1987). Her most recent book is The Sexual Metaphor, Harvard University Press 1994. Karl Levitin is the Editor of the Russian edition of Nature magazine. For many years he was a science writer for the publication, Znanie Sila ("Knowledge is power"). It was in the latter capacity that he became familiar with the work of Alexander Mershcheryakov and the cultural-historical school of psychology in Russia. His autobiography of Alexander Luria, Viewing the Passing Years, is scheduled for publication in the U.S. in 1999. Thomas Luckmann is Professor Emeritus for Sociology at the University of Constance. His principal areas of research are the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of religion, the sociology of communicaton and the philosophy of science. Among his publications are: (with P. Berger), The Social Construction of Reality (1966); The Invisible Religion (1967); (with A. Schütz), Structures of the Life-World (1982); Life-World and Social Realities (1983); Theorie des sozialen

Notes on Contributors

425

Handelns (1992) and (with P. Berger), Pluralism and the Crisis of Meaning (1995). His most recent book is Moral im Alltag (1998). Mary Midgley was Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Reading and Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Some of her publications relevant for the topic of this volume are: Beast and Man (1978, revised ed. 1995); Heart and Mind (1981); (with Judith Hughes), Women's Choices (1983); Animals and Why They Matter (1983); Evolution as a Religion (1985); Science as Salvation. A Modern Myth and its Meaning (1992); The Ethical Primate (1994) and Utopias, Dolphins and Computers (1996). Neil Roughley teaches philosophy at the University of Constance. His main areas of research are action theory, ethics, aesthetics and philosophical anthropology. He has co-edited (with A. Barkhaus et al.) Identität, Normativität, Leiblichkeit. Neue Horizonte des anthropologischen Denkens (Suhrkamp, 1996) and (with Martin Endress) Anthropologie und Moral. Philosophische und soziologische Perspektiven (Königshausen & Neumann, 2000). In preparation for publication is Transsubjektivität, a study of the moral philosophy of the Erlangen School. He is at present working on a book on the pro-attitudes. Gottfried Seebass is Professor for Philosophy at the University of Constance. His main research fields are the philosophy of action and motivation, the theory of freedom and the philosophy of language. His book publications are Das Problem von Sprache und Denken (1981); (with R. Tuomela, eds.), Social Action (1985) and Wollen (1993). In preparation is a book on freedom and determinism. Bradd Shore is Professor of Anthropology at Emory University, Director of the Emory Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life and current President of the Society for Psychological Anthropology. His publications include Idea and Action in World Cultures (1977); (with C. MacPherson/R. Franco), New Neighbours: Pacific Islander Migration in Adaption (1978); Sala'ilua:A Samoan Mystery (1982) and Culture in Mind. Cognition, Culture and the Problem of Meaning (1996). His most recent book is How Culture Means (1998). His current research is on ritual and time management in middle-class American families. Justin Stagi is Professor for the Sociology of Culture at the University of Salzburg. His publications include Der melanesische Geschlechtsantagonismus (1971); Die Morphologie segmentärer Gesellschaften ( 1974) ; Kultur anthropologie und Gesellschaft (1974, 2 1982), (with W. Schmied-Kowarzik, eds.), Grundfragen der Ethnologie (1981) and A History of Curiosity: The Theory of Travel, 1550-1800 (1995). He is editor of the series Schriften zur Kultursoziologie and Ethnologica Austriaca.

426

Notes on Contributors

Wilfried van Damme is Head of Research and Documentation at the Afrika Museum, Berg en Dal, Netherlands. A former Postdoctoral Fellow of the Fund of Scientific Research, Flanders, Belgium, he specializes in the emerging field of World Art Studies and World Aesthetics. His publications include Beauty in Context, Towards an Anthropological Approach to Aesthetics (1996). Bernard Williams is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and Deutsch Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. From 1990 to 1996 he was White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford. He held chairs previously in London and in Cambridge, and from 1979 to 1987 he was Provost of King's College, Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the British Academy. His principal contributions to philosophy have been in ethics, but he has also written on personal identity, on the theory of knowledge and in the history of philosophy. He was Chairman of a British government Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship, which reported in 1979. His publications include Problems of the Self (1973); Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (1978); Moral Luck (1981); Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985); Shame and Necessity (1993) and Making Sense of Humanity (1995).