Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Thomas Sturm on March 27, 2012 at 2:20am

Dear Keith,

what you say about anthropology - being an "anti-discipline, drawing on and contributing to all the disciplines", may be said with good reasons of psychology (and has been said by Paul Baltes, a leading developmental psychologist, who used the term "interdiscipline"), and probably also about philosophy - and perhaps about history and many other sciences too. So I'm skeptical about this claim, and what you infer from it. - Could you explain what you mean by the disappearance of the traditional subject of anthropology?

Keith Hart said:

Thomas, one underlying difficulty for our conversation lies in how each of us conceives of their own intellectual project as part of a given structure or as historical movement. You seem to be a settler (plant), while I am a nomad (animal). Anthropology has always been an anti-discipline, drawing on and contributing to all the disciplines. I find Foucault's comments on ethnology and psychoanalysis at the end of The Order of Things (Les mots et les choses) on the archaeology of the human sciences striking.

They "...occupy a privileged position in our knowledge”, he wrote, “…because, on the confines of all the branches of knowledge investigating man, they form a treasure-hoard of experiences and concepts, and above all a perpetual principle of dissatisfaction, of calling into question…what may seem, in other respects, to be established....[They] are not so much two human sciences among others, but they span the entire domain of those sciences, they animate its whole surface…[They] are ‘counter-sciences’; which does not mean that they are less ‘rational’ or ‘objective’ than the others, but that they flow in the opposite direction, that they lead them back to their epistemological basis, and that they ceaselessly ‘unmake’ that very man who is creating and re-creating his positivity in the human sciences."

Foucault attributed anthropology’s originality to its being both “traditionally the knowledge we have of the peoples without histories” and “situated in the dimension of historicity”, by which he meant “within the historical sovereignty of European thought and the relation that can bring it face to face with all other cultures as well as with itself”. He was sure the human sciences had reached their limit and this was doubly true of a discipline whose premises were being undermined by the collapse of European empire. Given the disappearance of the traditional object of anthropology, we have to find not only a new one, but also a theory and method appropriate to it. This means identifying the historicity of our own moment, as well as complementing ethnographic fieldwork with world history and humanist philosophy.

....

I take the premise of such work to be to contribute to making a better world. And since Rousseau, Hegel and Marx, the task of extending actuality to embrace human possibility often involves developing new genres of writing which span fact and fiction and indeed conventional disciplines. Objectivity was elevated to pole position in science around 1840 and we may be living through the end of that moment. Kant is, like many of us, an interesting paradox who never left home, but imagined a world of movement, who conceived of separate disciplines and practised them all himself. He offers one example of how to engage in historical movement.

I will address the uses of your six points in my next post.

Permalink Reply by Thomas Sturm on March 27, 2012 at 2:35am

Dear Peter,

while Kant's views on freedom have changed, let me add that in most respects what they have done is that they have grown. For instance, while in the first Critique the issue is the apparent conflict between two kinds of causality (nature and freedom), or the "logical possibility" of freedom, his ethical writings deal with the "real possibility" of freedom - the possibility of genuine moral norms. Again, in the third Critique and partly in his writings on history and anthropology with the possibility of (a priori and empirical) conditions for approximating the realm of freedom. I do not wish to suggest that he time and again changed his views in the sense that he always contradicted his earlier views.

Plus, I'd be careful with stating that the different "projects" are "based on mutually incompatible assumptions". I rather think they are substantively different but yet compatible and, indeed, interlinked. This has to do with the architectonic of all the sciences in Kant. He thought that by properly reflecting on the subject matters, methods, and goals of the different discplines (including ethics) all could be given their proper place, and all be subsumed under the "highest end(s)" of reason. This follows from the doctrine of method in the first Critique, and many scattered remarks throughout his work on relations between neighboring sciences.

And this is part of the reason why he literally claims that an empirical science such as pragmatic anthropology can have free agency as its subject matter.

Peter Baumann said:

many thanks, Thomas. This is very helpful. You're right to call all this 'thorny' and 'complicated'. Not only has Kant changed his views on freedom and related issued several times over the years. Even if we restrict ourselves to the critical period, we have to be very careful when characterizing his views on explanation and evaluation. It's not that they cannot be done both, in different contexts of inquiry (that would amount to a very un-Kantian incompatibility of the empirical and the noumenal or between "freedom" and "nature"). Rather, they constitute two very different projects based on mutually incompatible assumptions. Anyway, that's my view on Kant but if one can read him as even more of a compatibilist that would be great on my books. 

Permalink Reply by Keith Hart on March 27, 2012 at 9:22am

The world is changing and organized intellectual work with it, so we should not talk about academic disciplines and their relations as if they are fixed. This is partly a problem of the twentieth century university system which merged a medieval guild approach with state bureaucracy in an unhappy union whose future is deeply uncertain.

Kant discussed whether philosophy should be a part of all departments or a separate department to itself. The same could be said of history, except that both have been squeezed into their own separate boxes. Anthropology has several names in different national traditions and is more heterogeneous than most. Socio-cultural anthropology developed in the last century as the study of remote peoples by means of fieldwork. But, as Huon pointed out, this restriction of place and type has given way in recent decades to the use of "ethnography" everywhere and on any social object. University expansion has allowed anthropologists to address only themselves and their students. Whatever is anthropological about their endeavours has often been lost. I wonder if we might revive Kant's version of anthropology as an interdisciplinary exercise, leaving academic anthropology to its narrow preoccupations.

In the nineteenth century exotic peoples were considered to be "primitive", the living residue of what the civilized peoples once were. The ethnographic revolution placed them squarely in the present, but somehow outside contemporary history ("the peoples without history"). Following Durkheim, they were seen as "simple" societies revealing the underlying principles of more complex societies. Anthropologists also helped make these peoples more amenable to indirect rule. In Britain the object of social anthropology was primitive societies, the method was fieldwork and the theory was functionalism (study what they do now). The French, Germans and Americans pursued different combinations of object, theory and method according to circumstance. The anti-colonial revolution literally blew up these recipes for the discipline.

Each leading imperial power conceived of anthropology as its own self-sufficent province, allowing some white men and women to generalise about humanity on the basis of limited exposure to a few exotic peoples. These imperial traditions are now in decline and global anthropology is a more plural concern, with regions like Scandinavia and Brazil in the lead. What goes on in the name of anthropology there depends on the academic division of labour in the social sciences and on whether it is still linked to a social democratic project. Thus Brazilian anthropology was once limited to Amazonia, but because sociology and political science are rigid, they have expanded to become lively interpreters of contemporary urban society.

Since the object of anthropology is now moot and the discipline is theoretically eclectic, the method of fieldwork-based ethnography has become the sole marker of its distinctiveness. This has led to further professional estrangement from world history and philosophy and to fragmented study of matters of interest only to academic anthropologists. The founders of modern anthropology were all trained in other disciplines. The fieldwork method made ethnographers open to any contingently important features of the societies they studied. This openness took them into economics, religion, law, politics, kinship and ultimately into development, feminism, medicine and a host of other specialisms defined by juxtaposition to a powerful external discipline. This eclecticism is stronger for anthropology than others and the core of what we have in common has been weakened in the post-colonial period.

The object of anthropology might be for some of us the making of world society and for that Kant is indeed a powerful mentor. This would not fit well with current academic anthropology departments and might be conceived of as an interdisciplinary project.

Permalink Reply by Huon Wardle on March 27, 2012 at 10:53am

Kant... thought that by properly reflecting on the subject matters, methods, and goals of the different discplines (including ethics) all could be given their proper place, and all be subsumed under the "highest end(s)" of reason.

It strikes me that the struggle with its own heterodoxy - anthropology can gather its insights from an Andean slum, a study of Wall Street bankers, Central European Gypsies etc. - this is central to anthropology's strengths and weaknesses. It provides a picture of the world as a mosaic. But constants in this are the individual subjectivity of the anthropologist, the varied expressive lives of the people anthropologists study and their attempts to communicate with each other. And, of course the possibilities for overarching narrative that world history provides.

Thomas, you describe a progression and enriching of Kant's view through time. I have always found the sequence; Reason, Morality and finally aesthetics and judgement fascinating. Aesthetics, judgement, anthropology as the study of life as it is experienced and cosmopolitanism as its regulating idea all come at the end of a process that started with Kant as a philosopher of art who then engages with the possibility of rational thought. Or is that a little romantic plus too stadial?

Permalink Reply by Keith Hart on March 27, 2012 at 11:25am

Thomas, here goes with your six points from section 5.1.

(1) Human dependency upon society. Human beings need education, and later on other forms of social cooperation.

Yes. Anthropology should be more about education than it is. My favourite book is Emile and I love Kant's aim to make the Anthropology an aid to his students in later life. Teaching has always been for me more important than research and I believe anthropology's future is as a form of education, not necessarily in the universities.

(2) Human egoism. At the same time, unfortunately, human beings are mostly driven by self-interested inclinations. The conjunction of (1) and (2) Kant famously calls the “unsocial sociability” of humankind.

I prefer Rousseau's pair of self-preservation and compassion. I also believe that a focus on individual self-interest as somehow opposed to altruism obscures the human imperative to be yourself and to belong to others at the same time. This one runs and runs. I like Mauss's approach best.

(3) The first-person point of view. That such things are possible is rooted in other, basic human facts.

As you say, this follows from the dualism postulated above, as well as some others (mental vs physical etc). I would have to pass on this, but many contemporary trends in anthropology would find it hard to sign up for it.

(4) Prudence and learning to adopt the third-person point of view. But what can we do about the dilemma of our unsocial sociability? Kant’s answer: take into account their first-person point of view.

Similar reservations. But prudence (Greek idiophrosyne) refers to the reasoning of individuals and was routinely opposed by them to logos or the reason that sustains life, the world and everything. Heraclitus is a key source for this. So I guess that anthropologists, who have trained themselves to be less interested in what individuals think and do, would wonder how this first/third person process might be applied to the cultural logics they claim to find out there. I have already mentioned Kant's notion, in the "Idea of a universal history" essay, that the evolution of reason in future will be more at the species level. I guess he had in mind libraries, or in our case the internet, as one way of building this.

(5) Invention of new social roles and rules. Thereby, however, social interaction becomes easily extremely complex. This leads to iterated forms of role-playing in society, to a concealing and dissembling of egoistic intentions before others.

I believe that the American school of social psychologists -- Mead, Thomas, Cooley, later Goffman -- took this further than any other ("symbolic interactionism"). In fact, Goffman got his PhD in the Edinburgh social anthropology department.

(6) New roles and rules become “another nature”. In this interaction, humans therefore develop new rules of interaction, or “another nature”.We can thus be producers instead of being mere products of our development.

Now that is a heartening conclusion on which we can surely agree. The way you have grounded this argument in Kant's work is truly inspiring. A whole intellectual agenda is contained here and it is one that some anthropologists and philosophers should surely collaborate in.

Permalink Reply by Huon Wardle on March 27, 2012 at 1:41pm

(6) New roles and rules become “another nature”. In this interaction, humans therefore develop new rules of interaction, or “another nature”.We can thus be producers instead of being mere products of our development.

Now that is a heartening conclusion on which we can surely agree. The way you have grounded this argument in Kant's work is truly inspiring. A whole intellectual agenda is contained here and it is one that some anthropologists and philosophers should surely collaborate in.

That is a very helpful intervention. I think it would be useful if, at this stage in our discussion, we could focus some of the next questions on these six points - either on specific points or on taken together.

Permalink Reply by John McCreery on March 27, 2012 at 3:18pm

Would someone care to elaborate on the "unsocial sociability" that Keith mentions in (2). I find myself thinking of Simmel's analysis of conflict as a form of sociability, in contrast to indifference, the denial of sociability. Just a gut feeling at the moment, but I rather suspect that indifference, exacerbated by too much information to process and what is now called compassion fatigue may be a greater threat to human well-being than self-interested conflict. 

Permalink Reply by Huon Wardle on March 27, 2012 at 3:59pm

That is right - Simmel's emphasis on conflict as a necessary element in all sociation is directly drawn from Kant's dialectic of unsocial sociability.

Permalink Reply by Thomas Sturm on March 27, 2012 at 4:44pm

Today only a short collective reply to your comments. All of them are very thought-provoking; many many thanks! I apologize I do not have the time to respond to all of them in detail. But I hope I can structure our discussions a bit and carry them further. 

A. I did not know that Kant's notion of unsocial sociability was taken up later on. Can I get some references from Simmel? I am most grateful for any such influences (also for the otheres theses)! - Another such influence hinted at concerns proposition (5): Keith, I often thought about Mead - and what I found was that he cited Kant, but not his anthropological claims about self-consciousness (which would have been proper) but his transcendental theory of apperception and tried to rework this into a theory of symbolic interactionism indeed - but thereby, as it appears to me, rediscovering Kant's anthropological insights.

A nice paper on unsocial sociability, in case you want more readings, is by Allen Wood:

Wood, A. W. (1991): „Unsocial Sociability: The Anthropological Basis of Kant’s Ethics.“ Philosophical Topics 19, 325-351. 

It's very good as an overview of how the topic is related to other themes in Kant. However, I do not buy the author's thesis that there "... is nothing ahistorical about Kantian ethics. It has a historically situated understanding of itself, and is addressed to specific cultural needs of its own age." (Wood 1991, 336) Probably some of you would like this to be the case. Except that it isn't.

B. Keith: Why do current anthropologists reject (3)? I think Kant has here some very plausible and defensible points to make. (Btw, they do not have anything to do with the mind-body debate.)

C. Keith: Concerning (4): This isn't a Kantian thesis about what anthropologists should do; it's primarily about that, because of (1)-(3), humans are able to, and often do, take the point of view of their fellows into account. Kant has these examples that lots of social behaviors are due to the intention to first putting oneself in the shoes of others, then trying to deliberate how that helps to manipulate them, and so on. Egoism by more refined means. (This is perhaps nothing we would nowadays call an anthropological insight but more one of social psychology - right?)

D. Keith concerning (6): Thanks for the flowers. (Let me distribute the credit: I learned that this might be a still viable position through working with an excellent psychologist-philosopher, Jochen Brandtstädter.) However, I thought I had tried to argue that Kant bases (6) upon (1)-(5). So if you want to keep (6), but reject some of the earlier propositions, what do you put in their place in order to arrive at (6)? Or do you think (6) is a brute fact that cannot be explained? - I think we need a conference on day on this topic. 

E. Concerning Huon's suspicion he might view Kant's development with too romantic an eye: Well, not so if you simply take the development as a matter of fact. If you read it as progressive, you add an evaluative component you would have to justify.  I myself do not think that all of Kant's developments are justifiable. (Some would say: None are.)

Permalink Reply by John McCreery on March 28, 2012 at 6:13am

Thomas, my allusions to Simmel are grounded in Georg Simmel On Individuality and Social Forms, a collection of essays translated into English, and published in a volume edited and with an introduction by Donald L. Levine. Published by the University of Chicago Press (1971) in The Heritage of Sociology series.

Explicit mentions of Kant occur in the first two essays "How is History Possible?" and "How is Society Possible?" The first (I am quoting a footnote) is

"From Georg Simmel, Die Probleme der Geschictsphilosophie, 3d, enl. ed. (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1907, pp. vii-ix. Translated by Donald N. Levine."

The second is 

"Originally published in German as "Exkurs über das Problem: Wie ist Gesellschaft möglich?", in Soziologie: Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung (Munich and Leipzig: Duncker & Humboldt, 1908).

The chapter on conflict was

"Originally published as "Der Streit," in Soziologie (Munich and Leipzig: Duncker & Humboldt, 1908).

Hope this is helpful.

Permalink Reply by Huon Wardle on March 28, 2012 at 12:06pm

"Kant behauptete, jeder Krieg, in dem die Parteien sich nicht irgendwelche Reserven in dem Gebrauch möglicher Mittel auferlegten, müsste schon aus psychologischen Gründen ein Ausrottungskrieg werden."

This reference in Der Streit/Conflict seems to be the most direct one to Kant's Idea for a Universal History. However, the larger argument is clearly shaped by Kant's dialectical view.

http://socio.ch/sim/unt4a.htm

Permalink Reply by Keith Hart on March 28, 2012 at 3:22pm

Thomas Sturm said:

Keith, I often thought about Mead - and what I found was that he cited Kant, but not his anthropological claims about self-consciousness (which would have been proper) but his transcendental theory of apperception and tried to rework this into a theory of symbolic interactionism indeed - but thereby, as it appears to me, rediscovering Kant's anthropological insights.

 

B. Keith: Why do current anthropologists reject (3)? I think Kant has here some very plausible and defensible points to make. (Btw, they do not have anything to do with the mind-body debate.)

C. Keith: Concerning (4): This isn't a Kantian thesis about what anthropologists should do; it's primarily about that, because of (1)-(3), humans are able to, and often do, take the point of view of their fellows into account. Egoism by more refined means. (This is perhaps nothing we would nowadays call an anthropological insight but more one of social psychology - right?)

D. Keith concerning (6): Thanks for the flowers. I thought I had tried to argue that Kant bases (6) upon (1)-(5). So if you want to keep (6), but reject some of the earlier propositions, what do you put in their place in order to arrive at (6)? Or do you think (6) is a brute fact that cannot be explained? - I think we need a conference on day on this topic. 

Thomas, we may be running up against the limits of what is possible in an online discussion with some pretension to being generally accessible to non-specialists, even perhaps publicity for Kant as an anthropologist and universal historian, and with a 4K signs restriction on each post.

(6) New roles and rules become “another nature”. In this interaction, humans therefore develop new rules of interaction, or “another nature”.We can thus be producers instead of being mere products of our development.

Now that is a heartening conclusion on which we can surely agree. A whole intellectual agenda is contained here and it is one that some anthropologists and philosophers should surely collaborate in.

I have tried, valiantly I would say, to sketch in some of the background to a contemporary lack of openness to Kant in anthropolgy and beyond. On several occasions, you have asked for more elaboration. I simply cannot, in this medium, explain how and why a strong polarisation of individual and society or egoism and altruism have fallen out of favour. I genuinely appreciate your account of Kant's reasoning and I have tried to indicate why there might be some resistance to it.

There is so much groundwork we would need to get to a point where a phrase like "another nature" would mean something acceptable to all participants. Nature generally means something biological today, whereas in the 18th century it meant what can no longer be changed, has become, rather than becoming. A lot of spadework is left before we can address human nature in terms that have contemporary resonance. I did not endorse everything in your sentence, but said that working out what it means for us would be worthwhile. It is entirely possible to find this summary important without having to buy into every step that you say Kant took to get there.

I suspect that linking up Mead with Kant's anthropology would be interesting. I don't really care whether we call the intellectual substance social psychology or anthropology.

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