This book is a programmatic plea for a new approach in sociology
(the discipline of the author). Being Human is, as Archer
points out, the third part of a trilogy, the other parts of which
are Realist Social Theory (1995) and Culture and Agency
(1996). I found no difficulty in reading only Being Human,
however. In this book, Archer asks her colleagues to describe
and explain human action in terms that thoroughly reflect, as
she writes, "the stuff of life" (2). What does she mean
by this, whom does she attack, and by what arguments?

First and foremost, Archer criticizes what she calls "Postmodernism’s
‘Death of Humanity’": the widespread views according to which
certain ordinary views concerning our own self-identity and self-consciousness
and self-understanding are hopelessly wrong. She connects such
postmodernism, not without reason, to claims such as that one
cannot but "dissolve the human being into discursive structures
and humankind into a disembodied textualism". Roughly stated,
the argument of postmodernists is that the self-representation
each person has of herself is a "construct" of social
conversation, or that our "continuous sense of self"
derives from linguistic interaction with other human beings, instead
of being prior to such interaction. Against this, Archer wants
sociological and other empirical approaches to human action and
its explanation, to take account of the fact – and it is a fact
– that in ordinary life we view ourselves as acting in order to
promote deeper concerns, as trying to make sense of our individual
lives, and that this is in turn inconceivable without the assumption
that we enjoy a kind of self-identity and self-consciousness.
Sociology should not only take seriously our ordinary concerns
and commitments, but also see them as rather intimate and constitutive
parts of ourselves. Archer not merely argues that postmodern views
regarding the self and the role it plays in each person’s life
are based on bad arguments. She also notes that if postmodernism
cannot really be true – if we really were such postmodernist beings
without self-identity and self-consciousness, "they are such
a contradiction in terms that they could never get out of bed."
(2) In science, the latter point cannot be enough; here we want
good reasons even for criticisms of views which, in ordinary life,
we do find absurd.

The argument of her book is divided into four parts. In Part I
("The Impoverishment of Humanity"), Archer discusses
critically two views: a view of humanity as it has been developed
during the Enlightenment, namely "Modernity’s man",
and the set of views subsumed under the heading of "Society’s
being". Enlightenment thinkers are said to have viewed human
beings as essentially characterized by their instrumental, means-ends
rationality: man is a "lone, atomistic and opportunistic
bargain-hunter". Archer thinks that this model cannot deal
with the human ability to have concerns and commitments that are
not of mere instrumental value. It overlooks that precisely those
ultimate concerns are what constitutes our self-identity. Consequently,
according to "Modernity’s Man" human being are never
really agents: they are pushed and pulled around by their
passions or preferences rather than having a certain control over
them; also, being active, creative members of their society is
not something they are fully capable of. Writers who view human
beings as "Society’s beings", again, explain all human
properties and capacities, hence also the abilities to identify
oneself and to be self-conscious, as being socially constructed.
The self here is sometimes explained in terms of a capacity of
mastering first-person pronoun statements, an ability which has
to be learned during our social upbringing. Hence the self becomes
a "grammatical fiction". Basically, Archer’s point here
is that it is to narrow to view ourselves as merely linguistic
animals. We are biological creatures as well, even prior to being
social creatures. We live in a natural environment we have to
deal with and survive in.

Parts II-IV provide constructive considerations concerning the
notion of the self and its role in sociology. Archer distinguishes
between (i) the "natural", prelinguistic "sense
of self", (ii) the practical self and (iii) the social self
and theorizes over their development. Stated somewhat differently,
she distinguishes between "self-consciousness" (the
first and most simple kind of self), personal identity (the self
we achieve by developing certain basic commitments), and social
identity (the roles we take over in society). The most important
point here is that she draws a major distinction between "evolving
concepts of the self, which are indeed social, and the universal
sense of self, which is not, being naturally grounded." (p.
124) Archer uses quite a bit of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology
and of some parts of modern neuroscience, here to make her views
on (i) plausible. Our natural self, that is, our "continuous
sense of self, or self-consciousness" derives from our practical
activity in the natural world. Instead of being a product of the
rather high-level practice of language, it is already achieved
as soon as we start to talk. The continuity involved in the notion
of self-identity is, from the view of modern neuroscience, based
upon certain types of memory (briefly, eidetic as opposed to declarative
memory).

Archer is sometimes a bit too repetitive and redundant about basic
points, and her style is, especially in Part I, sometimes too
close to the excessive rhetoric and the lack of argumentative
rigor characteristic of many of the writers she is attacking,
Yet, I am quite sympathetic with her criticism of postmodernism.
I find postmodern writers usually so disagreeable that at least
I myself won’t get out of bed just in order to read them. Also
her arguments are often more detailed and complex than can be
shown here. Yet, unfortunately for Archer, one can point the reader
to certain crucial problems that occur at the more basic levels
of her approach. Let me point out three of them.

First, there seems to be a misuse of the notions of reduction,
emergence, and epiphenomenalism. Archer defends a "critical
realism": we should accept that one can neither explain human
beings and all their properties and actions in terms of, or as
a result of, purely social relations nor can one explain social
relations completely in terms of human individuals, their properties
and actions. We should be realists both with regard to some individual
and some social phenomena. Her aim is to motivate the reader to
become openminded to the idea that not everything deeply important
for our human lives can be explained in social terms – in particular,
the basic kind of self-consciousness that we enjoy cannot be explained
in that way. Sociology should open itself to a cooperation with
the natural sciences in this realm. That sounds moderate enough,
and it is a fair methodological advice. However, it is a bit misleading
that Archer says of both of the views she is rejecting in this
context that they are "reductionist theories", where
this means that either social phenomena or individual phenomena
would be mere "epiphenomena" (pp. 4-6). Talk of reduction,
emergence and epiphenomenalism comes from philosophical theories
of the mind-body-relation. Here ‘reduction’ does not have the
rather negative overtones it has in Archer’s usage of the term.
Moreover, to be a reductionist with regard to the mental is precisely
not to be an epiphenomenalist. The latter is a kind of
ontological dualist, whereas the former adheres to a variety of
ontological monism. For instance, when a mind-body reductionist
claims that my thought "It never rains in southern California"
can be reduced to the set of neural firings in brain area so-and-so,
or that my pain can be reduced to the set of neural firings in
region blah-blah, he does by no means turn my thought or
my feeling of pain into mere epiphenomena. He rather argues that
thoughts and feelings are physical phenomena (under a different
description), and so are firmly embedded in the whole network
of causal relations of physical phenomena, whereas epiphenomena
are epiphenomena just because they do not causally influence the
physical world. The moral for sociology should be that to reduce
a certain phenomenon of an individual human being’s life to a
social phenomenon would by no means turn it into a mere epiphenomenon.
What she may want to say is that those "reductionist"
views try to render certain properties as epiphenomena, hence
as causally inert, hence as somehow superfluous. Usually views
which reject the existence of mental states are called eliminativist.
But it is unclear whether Archer wants to characterize her opponents
as eliminativists: to claim, as she thinks her opponents do claim,
that something is an epiphenomenon is not to claim that it does
not exist. It is merely to claim that it does exert a causal influence
to phenomena of a certain realm (typically the physical realm),
while perhaps itself being causally produced by that realm. So
the opponents of her "critical realism" are not characterized
in a perspicuous way, with the consequence that it is not entirely
clear what critical realists claim. I leave aside here the point
that the debate over reduction, elimination, and emergence of
mental properties has become so complex in the hands of contemporary
analytic philosophers that things are more complex than it might
seem right now.

Second, Archer’s characterization of her enemies is sometimes
too simplistic. My worry does not so much concern the postmodern
authors she cites and criticizes but her depiction of the enlightened
model of "Modernity’s Man". Yes, some writers have defended
the view that human beings are "lone, atomistic and opportunistic
bargain-hunters". But by no means all Enlightenment thinkers
have done so. Rather, many of the most important of them would
have rejected such a claim. Archer qualifies her claim only mildly
by noting that, say, David Hume did put a strong emphasis upon
the fact that human beings often act quite altruistically, and
that their capacity to express and further develop their sympathy
is indeed one of humanity’s most distinguishing features. But
so did Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and even the – often misunderstood
– Immanuel Kant. Moreover, these Enlightenment thinkers, and countless
others besides them, viewed human beings as essentially social
animals in other regards too. Kant was happy to accept Rousseau’s
view that human beings, due to their open nature – their "perfectibility"
– need education, and that who educates a human being is himself
just another human being, and so on ad infinitum. According
to Kant, our most human capacity is indeed the capacity of reason
(though not of instrumental reason, as Archer clearly sees). However,
man, he also said, is not so much an animal rationale;
it is an animal rationabile. This capacity has to be developed
in a genuine social context, and cannot evolve without (as Archer
doesn’t seem to see). It is dependent upon the complex dynamics
Kant called "the unsocial sociability" of mankind. And
in part he got his ideas from Rousseau and Ferguson and Hume.
There’s little of sociological loneliness and atomism in these
thinkers. Rather, in both Kant and Hume we find views that would
qualify as varieties of "critical realism". They both
accept that some of our properties are essentially social, whereas
others are essentially individual in their nature. I leave aside
here that other mistakes can be found in Archer’s characterization
of Descartes’ views of mind, matter, and the Cogito (cf.
p. 26). Her writing in those passages suffers from a kind of name-dropping
instead of a thorough, and historically adequate, analysis of
this thinker, of the problems he was concerned with, and of his
detailed arguments and solutions. Descartes’ problems and solutions
are largely epistemological and metaphysical in highly specific
and demanding senses. They have nothing to do, and cannot be substantial
contributions, positive or negative, to how we understand ourselves
in ordinary life or as viewed by the social scientist. Other historical
points could be noted here. Perhaps Archer has become prey of
the caricatures we find in Rorty or in Derrida of "the metaphysics
of Modernity", and postmodernism’s rather superficial despise
for Descartes and rationalism. Otherwise I find it difficult to
explain how she can seriously maintain that "practice has
never been given primacy in the philosophy of Modernity."
(p. 145)

Finally, and most importantly, Archer’s notion of a "sense
of self" is not quite an example of crystalline clarity.
Clarity is required, however, given the significance of that notion
for her crucial claim that the "sense of self" is prior
to any kind of linguistic – hence also to any kind of social –
practice, and given enormously complicated philosophical and psychological
history of the notion of the self, its cognates, and the problems
connected to it. In brief, my criticism is that although her intuition
that many linguistic and other social practices presuppose that
who performs the relevant actions also exercises certain kinds
of self-identification is correct, her conceptual framework for
analyzing and explaining that intuition is not.

Archer thinks that the self referred to in her formula "sense
of self" is the most basic, prereflexive and prelinguistic
kind of self. Is it? There is one sense of ‘self’ or ‘I’ which
is also quite basic or "prereflexive" without being
"sensed". I have in mind the well-known distinction
between the self as subject and as object of thought, a distinction
which is reflected, if crudely and superficially, in the distinction
the personal pronoun ‘I’ on the one hand, and reflexive first-person
pronouns like ‘me’, ‘myself’, and so on, on the other (one of
the ways in which William James has tried to express the distinction).
It is useful to try to make clear the significance of that distinction
for a project such as Archer’s by means of some examples.

Consider a list of various first-person-thoughts or -statements:
"I have a dot on my forehead"; "I am shaving myself";
"I hereby marry you"; "I am truly devoted to tennis";
"I am the boss here, not you"; or "I am the son
of my father". In some of these cases self-identification
is made explicit through use of reflexive pronouns, in others
it is not. It would be wrong to think that it is only by usage
of the appropriate reflexive pronouns that we would identify ourselves
as objects. As long as we assume that the statements or thoughts
are understood or used correctly, we always assume that self-identification
must be made at least implicitly. For instance, in the performative
utterance "I hereby marry you", there seems to be no
reference to the speaker or thinker himself, but we typically
assume that the speaker knows who is speaking and what is involved
in his statement; so he must implicitly identify himself. Nor
is it correct to think that ‘I’ would always be used for the self-as-subject
only: "I think I have mislaid the car keys" is a clear
counterexample, where the word ‘I’ is used both for the self-as-subject
and the self-as-object. That is all grist on Archer’s mill that
the basic sense of self is not all too closely connected to language.
That being said, the question is: why must we distinguish at all
between these two senses of self?

Thoughts or statements such as "I am truly devoted to tennis"
or "I am the boss here, not you" do not work without
some prior self and a way of identifying it. Equally, second-order
reflection upon first-order desires or intentions requires such
a basic notion of self, much as the playing of specific roles
in society does. That, again, supports Archer’s intuition that
the selves of personal and of social identity presuppose rather
then establish a basic self. But the problem is: Is one sensing
or observing one’s own basic self in the relevant sense? Take
the thought "I think I have mislaid the car keys". What
would be the self of Archer’s formula "sense of self"
underlying such a thought? It can hardly be what is referred to
by the second occurence of ‘I’, since this occurence is, so to
speak, embedded in the first occurence, in the ‘I think…’. So
maybe it is the first occurence which is most basic. But can we
sense this self? The familiar, and still correct, answer is: we
cannot. When I myself try to experience or point to the thinker
indicated by the first occurence of ‘I’ in this thought, when
I, to use Archer’s words, try to sense that self, there seems
to be yet another ‘I’ observing or even guiding me in doing this.
And so on. Whenever I myself try to sense or capture my most basic
self, it systematically evades my attention to it. It looks upon
my own thoughts, feelings, beliefs, perceptions, and so on, as
if from a detached point of view. As the philosopher Colin McGinn
says, this ‘I’ again and again stands aside as if it wanted to
mock at reality. It would be absurd to assume that the groom,
while looking at and speaking to his bride, and while making his
performative utterance, "I hereby marry you", would
be also be looking and checking inside for his own self and make
clear that it is him who is intending to say the words of his
life, and then go out again and do it. That is not how the word
‘I’ functions here, nor is it how we should understand his way
of identifying himself in making his utterance. Neither will ideas
of an access to the ‘I’ through some non-observational "reflection"
do the trick (so much seems to be agreed by Archer, given her
claim that the basic self is "prereflexive"). All such
reflection or presumed self-observation leads to the regress of
self-identification noted above.

Archer briefly alludes to the problem of the elusiveness of the
self (p. 95), but she does not realize the difficulty involved
in her basic notion of the self. She mentions Hume’s and Kant’s
views on this (pp. 95-97), but she does not really take up the
debates over different notions of the self and of the complex
relation between them. At that point, her target is merely Rom
Harré’s view that the self involved in the use of the first-person-pronoun
is a "theory". That view is clearly implausible, at
least if we assume that theories are sets of claims or models
by which we explain phenomena. The self is no such thing. Archer
finds objectionable that, by claiming that the self is a theory,
Harré turns it into a hypothetical entity, and that may
be a fair criticism too. I will not enter this question here.
The point is that it is the self-as-subject, not a self-as-object
that is the required condition of the possibility of second-order
reflection and other first-person thoughts and acts (it is quite
in place here to use a Kantian formula here), and that we have
yet to understand our mode of access to that elusive ‘I’.

Archer’s notion of a "sense of self" stands in the tradition
of classical empiricism (indeed, even in her choice of words),
and such talk is dangerously seductive: it appeals to the idea
that we would be able to identify ourselves somehow as isolated
entities or objects one could sense, look at or point to, quite
independently of any descriptions we give of these entities. And
so many writers on the subject speak of "the Self".
But though I can shave myself, I cannot shave my Self; and though
I can know what I think, or though I can know my own position
in space, I cannot know the thoughts of my Self, or know the location
of my Self. Archer notes that her analysis of the notion of the
self is "relational" (p. 97), but she does not seem
to be aware of the consequences of that claim. Our mode of access
to the self is not that of pointing to or feeling or touching
or looking at an isolated entity. The self always shows up characterized
in one way or another: "How could I overlook that dot on
my head", or "I remember saying that to her", or
"I would like to raise the following question…". It
seems proper to that to be conscious of oneself as an object needs
to be expressed, roughly, by a formula such as, "I know (or
think/am conscious…) that I so-and-so", where ‘so-and-so’
stands for some description or other. The same formal structure
even applies to when one is aware of the position of one’s own
limbs, say, or one’s location in space: I realize that my legs
are crossed, or I am surprized that I am suddenly standing on
the edge of a very high building. The self that is present here
need not be strongly dependent upon language or society. But it
is a substantive question how one can think, or perhaps even sense
or feel, that it is oneself rather than another person or thing
to whom the description applies. If we do wish to say that in
such self-identifying acts one is conscious of who exactly one
is among the many things that there are in the world, then one
presupposes that there is a certain kind of correct rather than
incorrect application of descriptions. And then it seems plausible
that standards of correct and incorrect applications of descriptions
are required, and that at least invites the question of how we
can apply standards completely independently of any social relations
we are embedded in. Maybe it is the capacity for evaluating
the correct application of those standards that is decisive for
the possibility of that kind of basic self-consciousness that
we connect to the ideas of the elusiveness of the self and of
the self-as-subject. That this capacity is best described as "reason"
is the suggestion of Kant and even of Kantians in our own times
such as Tyler Burge. Archer, of course, embeds the basic self
in our bodily behavior, especially as related to its natural environment.
But what might appear to oneself to be the same in introspection
or phenomenology need not be the same in fact. Maybe what she
calls a "sense of self" is merely some sort of
integrated sentience or mere consciousness, some basic form of
integration of more basic bodily and mental acts with no self
involved. If we want to say here that sentience or consciousness
itself requires self-consciousness, that is a claim that cannot
be assumed without further argument, on pains of begging the question.

We do not have to return to any of the social constructivisms
Archer wishes to reject. But we should consider that, even from
the point of view of contemporary developmental psychology and
cognitive neurobiology, the development of the human brain, including
its capacity of self-representation is no longer seen as something
that can be understood outside of the natural and social
co-evolution of every one of us. Perhaps Archer distinguishes
too strongly between the natural and the social. And certainly
her work is a piece that invites a closer connection between philosophical
and scientific work on the self.

© 2001 Thomas Sturm

Categories: Philosophical

Tags: Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences