Human Being and Vulnerability

Butler herself critiques “radical” or “linguistic” constructivism on the basis that “[t]he radical constructivist position has tended to produce the premise that both refutes and confirms its own enterprise,”25 The main question for a “position of linguistic monism,” according to Butler, where “everything is only and always language,”26 is who is the agent, who is doing the construction? This type of constructivism, for Butler, “not only presupposes a subject, but rehabilitates precisely the voluntarist subject of humanism that constructivism has, on occasion, sought to put into question.”27 Butler’s solution is instead a type of constructivism which maintains a great skepticism toward any such subject, or doer of the construction who would be temporally and spatially “prior” to construction.28

Butler might still belong within the range of a strong constructivism,29 but this needs to be developed in the next chapter since Butler’s critique of radical constructivism is closely linked with questions of the human subject.30 Even if Butler cannot be seen to represent all types of social constructivism, she is helpful for understanding problems and potentials with a social constructivist view of the human being in relation to biologist anthropologies. And considering that Butler challenges the division between sex as natural and gender as cultural, and attempts to move beyond the polarization between biology and the social herself, it is of interest to engage with her argument.

In contrast to “social constructivism,” the term “biologist essentialism” has no real wide currency. I use it as a compound of two concepts, “biologism” on the one hand and “essentialism” on the other. Cultural critic Sara Arrhenius defines “biologism” as the “confident conviction that biology can encompass the whole human being.”31 Being a worldview, biologism makes wider claims than the scientific field of biology. The distinction from the science of biology is important since it clarifies biologism as a framework within which the human being should be understood. It is not then a case of “science versus the humanities,” but rather two discourses that are compared when social constructivism and biologism confront each other.

“Essentialism” as a term is traditionally connected with the question of the soul as the essence of the human being. However, as philosopher Elizabeth Grosz points out, essentialism can also be seen as the attribution of fixed essences and can therefore be connected with biologism.32 As philosopher of science Susan Oyama points out, essentialism enters in many disguises and in biology it is found in the assumption of innate traits. Oyama writes correctly that

“[i]nnate” characters are thought to be internally generated and trebly static: immutable in individuals, uniform across generations, and/or universal in individuals. They are attributed to genetic programs “for” those features, and are frequently assumed to be either inevitable or changeable only at heavy cost.33

Thus, there is an innatist assumption in exploring internal traits of a universal human psyche or nature.34 This innatist view of the gene is by no means the only view presented by biologists,35 but it is influential within evolutionary psychology.

Evolutionary psychology, which owes much to John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, and which Pinker shares, is worked out in opposition to a particular understanding of the social sciences. Tooby and Cosmides argue that the starting point of the Standard Social Science Method (SSSM) is to state that all is culture, culture is the autonomous agent of change.36 Against this is proposed a clear actor who acts upon culture, rather than is acted upon by culture.

Further, essentialism is apparent in another main principle of evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology proposes that the human genome evolved over a long period of time in the conditions of the Pleistocene era,37 but went through a “population bottleneck […] fairly recently in evolutionary history,” as Steven Pinker puts it.38 After that “population bottleneck” there was no more significant change in the human genome to alter human psychology. Even if human nature is not unchangeable evolutionarily speaking, it is nonetheless assumed that the change is so slow in terms of the essential constituents of the universal human nature that it is insignificant for all important purposes. The essence of human nature is found in the genes of which the human body is the “vehicle.”39

To sum up, evolutionary psychology is essentialist in that all human beings share a particular and unchanging human nature. It is a biologist essentialism since it assumes that human nature is based on a shared human genome. And, from the vantage point of genes as “replicators” and the human body as “carriers” of the gene, evolutionary psychology also relies on a dualism, as theologian Conor Cunningham has argued convincingly.40

On a final note, biologism as well as essentialism, in certain traditions, are decidedly pejorative terms. It is not my intention to use them with any such undertones here. Also, if I were to transfer the terms “strong” and “weak” used for constructivism, then biologist essentialism is a weak essentialism since the proposed essence is not ontologically unchangeable or of a different essence from the body.41

Interestingly, just like Butler, Pinker argues that his understanding of the human being renders the distinction between nature and nurture obsolete. Indeed, some argue that this is an inherent feature of evolutionary psychology itself.42 My point, however, is that while this is a positive development in biology, in the end, just as with Butler, there are problems, but also indeed useful insights in Pinker’s accounts of the human being. What about theological anthropology then?

As theologian Michelle Voss Roberts succinctly puts it, treating “topics such as human nature and purpose, freedom and sin, and difference and gender, this doctrine [theological anthropology] deals with what it means to be a human being in relation to our divine source.”43 The inclusion of the divine distinguishes theological anthropology from social constructivism and biologist essentialism. This distinctly non-secular starting point of theological anthropology entails, as suggested by John Webster, “the dogmatic depiction of human identity as it is shaped by the creative, regenerative and glorifying work of the triune God.”44

But theological anthropology cannot completely be separated from its secular counterparts. For as theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg points out, theology and anthropology are inseparable and theologians “must begin their reflection with a recognition of the fundamental importance of anthropology for all modern thought and for any present-day claim of universal validity for religious statements.”45 For Pannenberg, this is not to say that theology is anthropology, the argument famously put forward by Ludwig Feuerbach,46 but rather that anthropology is a central concern for theology.47

The theological anthropology that is of most interest here is what could be called a “relational” anthropology.48 The meaning of this concept will be expounded in much greater detail in chapter 4 and also part II, but can in brief terms be said to be the view that the human being becomes who she centrally is only in and by the relations in which she finds herself.

The starting point for this anthropology is often an interpretation of the Genesis creation account together with a “social” understanding of the Trinity, but more recently there has been much critique of “social trinitarianism(s).”49 Further, Marc Cortez, a main voice within theological anthropology today, sees some problems with a relational interpretation of Genesis 1 and sides therefore more hesitantly with a relational theological anthropology. Nevertheless, he concludes that “despite criticisms about the exegetically unfounded nature of the relational imago, it remains a viable candidate for understanding this important concept,“50 if, as Cortez argues, theological anthropology is founded on christology rather than by analogy with the doctrine of the Trinity.51 This point, emphasized by many theologians also before Cortez and which is the “traditional” route to theological anthropology,52 is an important argument for this book.

Gunton rarely refers to the nature/nurture question explicitly but pays much attention to what he sees as a confused relationship between culture and nature in Modernity and late Modernity.53 Gunton views this as a theological problem due to Modernity’s, as he states, “displacement of God.”54 While Gunton’s critique of Modernity will be challenged below, certain aspects of his theological engagement with culture are helpful.

In chapter 1 Judith Butler’s theory of performativity is explained in relation to its implications for her view of the self and the subject. I argue that the human subject is constituted by norms outside of the subject’s control. For Butler, one is called, or interpellated, into subjecthood. As such, Butler develops a relational view of the human where vulnerability and precariousness become more and more significant, as does embodiment. I show how this embodied relationality even takes on an ontological meaning in Butler. Notions such as interpellation, vulnerability and “the other” will thus be discussed in some detail.

The next chapter expounds on Pinker’s understanding of evolutionary psychology and its implications. I suggest that Pinker’s interest in language provides the link between biology and culture in his account of the human being. I also argue that there is a duality to Pinker’s thinking about the human being. The prominent side of this duality is biologist essentialist with genes as “atoms” of evolution and an emphasis on innate traits. The other, less developed, side has an opening toward the relational with concepts such as “group identity” and “unique environment.”

Chapter 3 turns to Colin Gunton’s theological anthropology. For Gunton, this is linked with the doctrine of the Trinity, the doctrine of creation, as well as christology, and these notions must be dealt with to understand Gunton’s view of the human being. The idea of a relational ontology is key for his thinking and in this a strong stress is put on the concept of the person in his anthropology. I then argue that the relation between human persons and the divine is strongly linked to christology for Gunton and this has important implications for the constructive discussion between these thinkers.

In the following three chapters I bring Butler, Pinker and Gunton into interaction with one another. In particular, a relational reading of evolutionary theory, of time, materiality and the body will be advanced. Chapter 4 gathers some general aspects from the three theories to show that a polarization of relationality, nature, and the body from the three perspectives is not necessary. This is done with a particular focus on the theory of evolution, and aspects of time and materiality. What is developed is a relational ontology, but I propose a “weak” ontology in contrast to Gunton’s “strong” ontological claims.

This more general groundwork leads to a discussion focused on the human being in chapter 5. My “interactive” reading attempts to bridge the gap between nature and nurture on the one hand, and ontology and ethics on the other. If human lived reality is constituted relationally, then ethics and being are closely related, or so I argue. I present what I call a kenotic personalism that emphasizes the person as the fundamental concept for the human being, but personhood as a gift that occurs through particular and bodily relations between human beings. Considering our fundamental vulnerability, the relation that constitutes the human person is that of self-giving love, or kenosis.

Chapter 6 brings the threads together and firstly works out the relation between personalism and individualism to then return to the school example with which everything began. I argue that the question of a divide between the biological and the social in the context of school opened up a more basic issue, namely that of institutions’ individualization of fundamentally vulnerable and dependent human body-persons.

1 Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. I: Swann's Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, & D. J. Enright (London: Vintage Books, 2005), 20.

2 Fraser Watts, “The Multifaceted Nature of Human Personhood: Psychological and Theological Perspectives,” in Niels Henrik Gregersen, Willem B. Drees, & Ulf Görman (eds.), The Human Person in Science and Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000) and Sara Arrhenius, En riktig kvinna: om biologism och könsskillnad (Stockholm: Pocky, 1999).

3 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 191.

4 I am of course not alone in having this concern, nor in acknowledging the prevalence of the distinction between biology on the one hand and the social on the other. One would, for example, need to cite almost every single prominent feminist thinker from Simone de Beauvoir to Judith Butler and beyond for an extensive list. But to cite some influential thinkers, Donna Haraway and Anne Fausto-Sterling, as well as Elizabeth Grosz, should be mentioned for a particularly deep engagement with biology and the theory of evolution. See Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991); Donna J. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997); Anne Fausto-Sterling, Myths of Gender: Biological Theories about Women and Men, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1992); Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sex/Gender: Biology in a Social World (New York: Routledge, 2012); Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2004); Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2005); Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). From the Scandinavian side, see Toril Moi, “Vad är en kvinna? Kön och genus i feministisk teori,” Res Publica 35/36, no. 1-2 (1997): 71-158; Toril Moi, “What Is a Woman? Sex, Gender, and the Body on Feminist Theory,” in Toril Moi, What is a Woman?: And Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) and Åsa Carlson, Kön, kropp och konstruktion: En undersökning av den filosofiska grunden för distinktionen mellan kön och genus (Stockholm: Symposion, 2001).

From a more biological perspective, see Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, & John Tooby (eds.), The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Henry D. Schlinger, “The Almost Blank Slate: Making a Case For Human Nurture,” Skeptic, 11, no. 2, 2004; Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do, 2nd ed. (New York: Free Press, 2009); Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Penguin, 2003).

Within theology see Philip Hefner, The Human Factor: Evolution, Culture, and Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993).

5 For examples see Maurizio Meloni, Simon J. Williams & P. A. Martin (eds.), Biosocial Matters: Rethinking Sociology-Biology Relations in the Twenty-First Century (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2016) and Maurizio Meloni, John Cromby, Desmond Fitzgerald & Stephanie Lloyd, The Palgrave Handbook of Biology and Society (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Many emphasize the area of epigenetics for this question (see Samantha Frost, Biocultural Creatures: Toward a New Theory of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). Although sharing a similar interpretation of evolution (see ch. 5) I will not enter that field since my concern is in the main a discussion with evolutionary psychology.

On New Materialism, see for example Grosz, Volatile; Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Stacy Alaimo & Susan J. Hekman (eds.) Material Feminisms (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); Vicki Kirby, Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Vicki Kirby (ed.) What if Culture was Nature all Along? (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017) and Diana Coole, “Rethinking Agency: A Phenomenological Approach to Embodiment and Agentic Capacities,” Political Studies 53, no. 1 (2005): 124-142.

Interestingly, sociologist Vicky Kirby has already pointed to how a nature/culture division is masked and maintained within a poststructuralist framework (Kirby, Quantum. See also Kirby (ed.), What if and Alaimo & Hekman (eds.), Material).

6 There are of course other theologians that relate to New Materialism in different ways than what I propose here. One difference is the starting point from a context of radical theology or process theology as seen in, for example, John Reader, Theology and New Materialism: Spaces of Faithful Dissent (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and Petra Carlsson Redell, Foucault, Art and Radical Theology: The Mystery of Things (London: Routledge, 2019) or Susan Hekman, “Feminist New Materialism and Process Theology: Beginning a Dialogue,” Feminist Theology 25, no. 2 (2017): 198-207.

7 My suggestion is not in any direct sense an attempt to correlate culture and Christian theology but rather to integrate theology with a culturally relevant question where theology has social effects (Hefner, Human, 17ff, 25f, 217ff; Mattias Martinson, Postkristen teologi: Experiment och tydningsförsök (Göteborg: Glänta Produktion, 2007), 10; Christoph Schwöbel, “Where Do We Stand in Trinitarian Theology?: Resources, Revisions, and Reappraisals,” in Christophe Chalamet & Marc Vial (eds.), Recent Developments in Trinitarian Theology: An International Symposium (Augsburg: Fortress Press, 2014), 11.

8 But important here are Alasdair C. MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (London: Duckworth, 1999); Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers, & Susan Dodds (eds.), Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Erinn C. Gilson, The Ethics of Vulnerability: A Feminist Analysis of Social Life and Practice (London: Routledge, 2014) and Sofia Morberg Jämterud, Human Dignity: A Study in Medical Ethics (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2016).

For a good overview of the relation between ethics and vulnerability, see Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers, & Susan Dodds, “Introduction: What Is Vulnerability and Why Does It Matter for Moral Theory?,” in Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers, & Susan Dodds (eds.), Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

9 Martinson, Postkristen. Whether our society is “post-Christian” or “post-secular” the position and place of Christian theology in it needs to be carefully clarified (Ola Sigurdson, Det postsekulära tillståndet: religion, modernitet, politik (Göteborg: Glänta produktion, 2009)).

10 Dennis Bielfeldt, “The Peril and Promise of Supervenience for the Science-Theology Discussion,” in Niels Henrik Gregersen, Willem B. Drees, & Ulf Görman (eds.), The Human Person in Science and Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), 142.

11 See John Webster, “Theological Theology,” in John Webster, Confessing God: Essays in Christian Dogmatics, Vol. II (London: T&T Clark, 2016). For a critique of this position see Mattias Martinson, “Silence, Rupture, Theology: Towards a Post-Christian Interdisciplinarity,” in Heather Walton (ed.) Literature and Theology: New Interdisciplinary Spaces (Burlington: Ashgate, 2011).

12 See John Webster, “Theological Theology,” in John Webster, Confessing God: Essays in Christian Dogmatics, Vol. II (London: T&T Clark, 2016). For a critique of this position see Mattias Martinson, “Silence, Rupture, Theology: Towards a Post-Christian Interdisciplinarity,” in Heather Walton (ed.) Literature and Theology: New Interdisciplinary Spaces (Burlington: Ashgate, 2011).

13 Hefner, Human, 151. See also William H. Newell, “A Theory of Interdisciplinary Studies,” Issues in Integrative Studies 19, no. 1 (2001): 1-25.

14 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 4f; Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). See also Christian Smith, Moral, Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

15 William Desmond, Being and the Between (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995), 7. In Desmond’s argument, it is when our lived experience is “given” to us in this process of self-reflection that we also can receive it, a “beholding of” wholeness. That is, we become aware of it as an experience of being through self-reflection (Desmond, Being, 10).

16 William Desmond, God and the Between (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 10.

17 Eugene d’Aquili, “Apologia pro Scriptura Sua: Or, Maybe We Got It Right after All,” Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 28, no. 2 (1993): 251-266, as quoted in Hefner, Human, 264.

18 As Dawn Youngblood points out, interdisciplinary studies are often problem-oriented, as is mine (Dawn Youngblood, “Interdisciplinary Studies and the Bridging Disciplines: A Matter of Process,” Journal of Research Practice 3, no. 2 (2007)).

19 J. T. M. Miller, “Methodological Issues for Interdisciplinary Research,” Postgraduate English: A Journal and Forum for Postgraduates in English, no. 23, Sep. 2011 (2011), 8.

20 Peter L. Berger & Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1966).

21 Christian Smith, What is a Person?: Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), 121ff.

22 Smith, Person?, 122. Smith calls the weak version of social constructivism the ‘realist’ version, linking it thus with the other essential epistemological starting point in his argument, namely, critical realism.

23 Smith, Person?, 122.

24 Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1999), 24ff. Smith’s view of ‘strong’ constructivism comes close to what Ian Hacking, in reference to John Searle’s work on social constructivism, calls ‘universal constructionism’ that would claim that ‘everything’ is socially constructed (Hacking, Social, 24). But, the term ‘strong’ is to be preferred over ‘universal’ since it indicates a continuum and with no necessary decisive point of transition from ‘weak’ to ‘strong’ versions of constructivism.

25 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the discursive limits of “sex”, Special Indian ed. (New York: Routledge, 2011), xv.

26 Butler, Bodies, xv.

27 Butler, Bodies, xvi.

28 Butler, Bodies, xvi.

29 See Lena Gunnarsson, On the Ontology of Love, Sexuality and Power: Towards a Feminist-Realist Depth Approach (PhD, Örebro University, 2013), 25, chs. 3 and 6.

However, there is no consensus on how to categorize Butler. Lois McNay, political theorist, sees Butler’s view on subject, psyche and agency as a “constructivist perspective” (Lois McNay, “Subject, Psyche and Agency: The Work of Judith Butler,” Theory, Culture & Society 16, no. 2 (1999): 175-193, 176). The political theorist Moya Lloyd, on the other hand, argues that Butler should be called a “deconstructionist” (Moya Lloyd, Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 72). However, as sociologists John Hood-Williams and Wendy Cealey Harrison point out, Butler does not use Derrida in a particularly deconstructivist way but rather uses Derrida’s ideas methodologically (John Hood-Williams & Wendy Cealey Harrison, “Trouble with Gender,” The Sociological Review 46, no. 1 (1998): 73-94, 81). And theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid, sees Butler as interrogating materiality as constructed through performativity (Marcella Althaus-Reid, “Bodily Citations: Religion and Judith Butler,” Journal of Contemporary Religion 22, no. 3 (2007): 416-418, 416. Political theorist Stephen K. White also views Butler as a constructivist thinker, but, importantly, with weak ontological assumptions (Stephen K. White, Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 85).