Human Being and Vulnerability

Introduction

The human being is between many things. Life takes place between birth and death, between the home and the political, between who I am and who I want to be, or, perhaps, as for Marcel Proust, between you and the idea of you. For some, the human being is also between God and creation. But the “between” that will be explored in this volume is that of biology on the one hand, and the social on the other. This particular “between” appears difficult to maintain in our contemporary society for one is often privileged over the other. There seems no easy way to reconcile the two.

I intend to constructively engage this divide between biology and the social by conversing with critical theorist Judith Butler and psycholinguist Steven Pinker. With these two divergent perspectives, another seemingly conflicting account will be brought to the table, that of Colin Gunton’s theological anthropology.

Why three such different thinkers? While it should be acknowledged that most theorists working on this question do reject simplistic binaries, much contemporary thought still maintains a dichotomy between the biological and the social. I hope that this study will shed some light as to why this division is so prominent in our society, not least in the school context. I have also chosen these thinkers because their different theories, when brought together in conversation, can inform a view of the human being in which the distinction between the biological and the social is less polarized.

As Proust illustrates in my epigraph,1 the dichotomy between nature and nurture has concrete relevance in the meeting between people and I agree. I want to argue that theoretical discussions on this issue are of practical interest, particularly in institutionalized societies, and not least in the context of school.

Teachers’ engagement with pupils is a pervasive feature of school, as it should be. And in their interaction with pupils, teachers conceptualize the pupils throughout the day. But in this conceptualization of and engagement with the pupil there is an underlying anthropology, a theory of the human being, that is rarely expressed or made explicit. When I contemplated this as a teacher in Sweden, I realized that the implicit anthropology underlying professional discussions in school was incoherent.

To clarify, when my colleagues and I conferred in what is called a pupil welfare meeting to discuss certain learning problems, such as dyslexia, we tended to switch our minds to a biological, not to say biologist, frame where the frontal and lateral lobes of the brain were in focus. But, if we instead were discussing a problem such as an eating disorder, we seemed to switch our minds to a social or cultural mode, thinking in constructivist terms of societal pressure, family situation and so on. However, when back in the classroom the teacher has to find a way to respond to the issue at hand, for in meeting the pupil the teacher needs to somehow make sense of the pupil’s biological and social sides in his or her practice. In the meeting between the teacher and the pupil a dichotomization between biology and the social is likely to be unhelpful but, as is shown here, turns out to even be problematic when coupled with wider questions of anthropology.2

One such problem that will be addressed already here is what I want to call the “addition model” of nature/nurture, where nature plus nurture equals a self as if two otherwise separate domains magically merge to create a whole. Philosopher and feminist theorist Elizabeth Grosz has similar concerns when she writes that “[b]iology is somehow regarded as the subject minus culture, as if this could result in anything but an abstraction or bare universal category.”3

This common “solution” to the nature/nurture dichotomy is unsatisfying and problematic,4 but I was not able to fully clarify why this should be so. This prompted me to look further into the question and my “school experience” worked as the entry point into the issue of the dichotomy between nature and nurture. Questions of ontology and anthropology on the nature/nurture divide are important in the school setting, but because the emphasis lies on the interaction between humans and the relation between the human being and institutions, the concerns I raise here are relevant to other areas too.

Considering that many societies are institutionalized, meaning that the state’s influence over citizens becomes materialized in particular buildings and bureaucratic structures where someone will represent the state, the role of institution demands consideration. Here the school is a particularly good place to start as an institution of learning. As I hope to show, learning itself, when institutionalized, highlights the dichotomy between biology on the one hand and the social on the other.

Thus, what follows is primarily an analysis that reveals what the foundational questions behind the nature/nurture dichotomy are. I also suggest ways in which the three thinkers can be of help to overcome that gap. My contention is that only by understanding why biology and the social consistently are pigeonholed into two distinct categories in today’s society will it be possible to move beyond a dichotomy of biologist essentialism on the one hand and social constructivism on the other.

Many others have treated this question with much insight and without polarizing biology and the social. Examples can be found in epigenetics and the postgenomic development within biology to the New Materialist development within, for example, feminist thought and critical theory.5 I will broach this as a theologian, for I want to argue that there are also valuable resources in Christian theology that are largely ignored in secular discussions about the human being.6 Aspects of theological anthropology are relevant for thinking about the human being in contemporary society, particularly as a critical resource.7 But theology will here also work constructively with the other fields of enquiry.

The purpose of this book, then, is to investigate two central issues concerning contemporary anthropological conversations. I want to bring the inconsistency in the underlying anthropological conceptions to the fore in order to return to the question of the concrete relation between the teacher and pupil. What I aim to do is to analyze the divide between a biologist essentialist and a social constructivist understanding of the human being with the help of resources from Christian doctrine and constructively elaborate a perspective on the human being where the polarization of commonly opposed explanations, such as biological, constructivist and theological, is not maintained. In this there is a connection between anthropological conceptions and ethics as well as ontology and ethics. But the ethics that need to be developed as a consequence of my work can only be hinted at here.8

Interactive interdisciplinarity and human lived reality

My contention is that the political theorist and philosopher Judith Butler, the psycholinguist Steven Pinker and the systematic theologian Colin Gunton each will in various ways help to shed light on and challenge the polarization between social constructivism and biologist essentialism. And while Butler and Pinker respectively can readily be associated with one of these positions neither can be said to belong to it in any simplistic way. They do shed light on the positions as “insiders,” but not without some qualifications.

Interestingly, both Butler and Pinker engage with the nature/culture dichotomy, but to my mind unsatisfactorily in some important ways. Thus, close attention to their respective arguments will better substantiate the constructive engagement that I aim for. The selection of these thinkers will be motivated further, but first something needs to be said about the interdisciplinary approach of this book.

Christian theology is part of the constructive suggestion in this book. My view is that Christian doctrine is a resource for critical and constructive engagement with questions of the human being even when other perspectives are more pervasive and influential in what could be called a post-Christian society.9 But this hinges upon whether theology as “[a]n explanatory language has relevance in people’s lives,” as Dennis Bielfeldt put it.10 I hope to show that this is the case.

The second part of this book will show that Christian theological language has explanatory relevance. But in terms of Christian theological content, I think it could and perhaps even should be a living11 part of a post-Christian culture, if theologians are also aware of the problems, historical and contemporary, of such claims highlighted by, for example, feminist thought.12 For what would the self-professed polyvocality of the post-Christian society be worth if non-secular voices must remain silent unless they leave all normative claims behind?

Explanatory relevance is not only a challenge for theology, however. It can be argued that the weakness of interdisciplinary studies lies in not being informed enough about any of the respective fields. Yet, if theologian Philip Hefner is correct about the interconnectedness of all reality,13 then one must at least attempt an interdisciplinary study of reality. But what reality are we talking about?

I agree here with Charles Taylor that the level of enquiry when trying to understand the human condition should be on that of lived experience, the human lived reality.14 As William Desmond argues, there is something in the immediate experience of being, or in my terms, the immediate experience of the human lived reality, that demands an explanation of the wholeness of that experience.15 This reality is no doubt a “pluralism of intermediations,” to borrow a phrase from Desmond,16 and as such it is complex. But I think it can be explained in a more holistic way than is the case in, for example, the division between the social and the biological. There is, then, something fitting and even necessary about accounts that attempt to bring different disciplines together to explore the human lived reality.

The task is not so much to make the different perspectives understandable to each other as it is to make them interact. Yet this will not happen by itself. The aim here is therefore to be, in Eugene d’Aquili’s words, “deeply interdisciplinary.” As he writes, “[b]y deeply interdisciplinary I mean that the data from various disciplines are presented in an interpenetrated manner rather than simply juxtaposed.”17

As such, I do a close reading of the material in order to bring into interaction the thinkers with each other and with the issue I am concerned with here.18 Since this interaction does not happen on its own, “interact” should be seen as an active verb so that “interacting” Judith Butler, Steven Pinker and Colin Gunton demands activity from me as the interpreter. This does not mean that I seek to force meanings onto texts that are foreign to them, only that the act of interpretation is just that, an activity.

Problems in interdisciplinary studies can occur, though, in the translation between disciplines. Translation always contains its own difficulties, as expressed in the Italian saying, traduttore, traditore: translator, traitor. In different disciplines the same term can have different meanings and one term that might be central in one discipline carries no meaning whatsoever in another. But as J. T. M. Miller points out, this should not be an insurmountable difficulty to overcome.19 What is required is for the researcher to read enough to spot these differences in terminology, understand them and then “translate” them in relation to the other discipline and “deep” interdisciplinary interaction ensues.

The point is not to “translate” everything, though. Not everything that Butler, Pinker or Gunton have written will be relevant. My interest is in what they state about the human being and, secondly, what in their thought contributes to the said goal and how. My point is to see if all three perspectives can contribute to the resolution of the problem I want to address and, therefore, the aim is to treat all three thinkers on an equal footing. I do propose that theology brings some particular insights into this, but the “lead” in the constructive argument is taken by Butler, Pinker and Gunton variously and interchangeably, which means that the final product is an interwoven net of voices difficult to disentangle from each other.

As a starting point, some central questions are posed to the thinkers. Firstly, what are the most significant features in their respective views on the human being with regards to the question of social constructivism versus biologist essentialism? Secondly, what are the inherent weaknesses, or inconsistences, in each view with regards to questions of biology and culture? Thirdly, what resources can be found in the theories in order to move beyond a division between social constructivism and biologist essentialism on the question of the human being? And lastly, how can these resources be brought together to construct a fuller conception of the human being beyond the constructivism versus essentialism dichotomy?

Social constructivism and biologist essentialism?

It is worth pointing out from the outset that neither Butler nor Pinker clearly identifies with either “social constructivism” or “biologist essentialism” as exclusive categories. Therefore, some clarification needs to be offered regarding their respective relations to, as well as a definition of, these terms even if Gunton’s position can more readily be identified as a theological anthropological view.

Despite its short history as a concept, “social constructivism” has had a widespread influence on both academic disciplines and the general public. The term came into use following Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s seminal book The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge.20 But “social constructivism” is no unified term and I follow largely the definition, as well as the distinction, of “weak” versus “strong” social constructivism advanced by sociologist Christian Smith.21

Smith defines “weak” social constructivism as the view that

[a]ll human knowledge is conceptually mediated and can be and usually is influenced by particular and contingent sociocultural factors such as material interests, group structures, linguistic categories, technological development, and the like – such that what people believe to be real is significantly shaped not only by objective reality but also by their sociocultural contexts.22

The “strong” version of social constructivism embraces the weak version in the main, yet is characterized, as Smith sees it, by an idealist and not a realist view of reality.

Reality itself for humans is a human, social construction, constituted by human mental categories, discursive practices, definitions of situations, and symbolic exchanges that are sustained as “real” through ongoing social interactions that are in turn shaped by particular interests, perspectives, and, usually, imbalances of power – our knowledge about reality is therefore entirely culturally relative, since no human has access to reality “as it really is” […] because we can never escape our human epistemological and linguistic limits to verify whether our beliefs about reality correspond with externally objective reality.23

Smith’s definition of a “strong” social constructivism moves somewhat from ontology to epistemology but provides a useful continuum within which different constructivist theories can be placed. This avoids the question of whether there are thinkers who adopt an extreme position of social constructivism, in which “everything” is understood to be socially constructed.24 Thus, “weak” and “strong” constructivism are not used here as two mutually exclusive categories. Rather, they provide a continuum in which even individual thinkers travel closer and further from the “weak” and the “strong” poles. In this view, Judith Butler is placed toward the strong end of the social constructivist spectrum, but she is no linguistic idealist.