ibidem-Press, Stuttgart

Acknowledgments

Learning is fascinating. Take school for example. When a lesson starts, one teacher and maybe 25-30 pupils are present. If all goes well everyone will know something they didn’t know at the beginning, and if things go really well the pupils also know why they should know what they have learnt and the teacher knows what the pupils have learnt.

Steven Pinker stumbled into a rabbit hole when he studied language. It was one of those Alice in Wonderland rabbit holes where a world opens up behind it. For Pinker the verb system is an opening to the whole human mind. For Colin Gunton, in many ways it is the doctrine of the Trinity and for Judith Butler it is that some human lives are not recognized as human lives that open up vast vistas of thought and insights. For me learning in school came to be that rabbit hole that brought me to think about the whole human being.

Learning happens all the time and everywhere and it is not restricted to the classroom. Learning is to understand more, to think anew, to be able to think differently or to acquire and perfect a skill. Learning can make someone change their mind or make new decisions for life. And most of the times learning is by small steps. I will be very happy if this book can be such a small step for some reader.

As a teacher I rarely get to know if my courses have any impact on the students and I suspect that the same goes for books. Neither will my pupils and students know how much they have taught me throughout the years. I would have learnt much, much less were it not for you. So, thank you!

What I do know, however, is the people that have had an impact on me, both as teachers and – since I’m writing a preface to a book after all – for the completion of this book. I am first of all very happy for the stimulating and constructive context in which this book was conceived, the research seminar of Systematic Theology at Uppsala University. I would like to thank Mattias Martinson, Katarina Westerlund, Thomas Ekstrand, Maria Essunger, Ida Simonsson, Ulf Bergsviker and Fredrik Wenell in particular. I also want to thank Petra Carlsson especially, warmly valued colleague and friend at the Stockholm School of Theology, for many insightful conversations. An especially warm thank you to my dad, Per-Axel Sverker, for reading and commenting on my texts throughout the years. The same goes for Jonas Kurlberg, who has also been the editor of this book. It has been a pleasure to mix friendship and work over this whole process.

Many people have been willing to read separate chapters, or all of them, and given much valued comments. For that I am very grateful. Many thanks in particular to Lovisa Nyman, Mikael Lindfelt, Karin Johannesson, Kjetil Haftstad, Arne Rasmusson, Stephen Holmes and John Webster. I was deeply saddened by Professor John Webster’s passing; he encouraged me immensely the few times we had the opportunity to meet. The book is much improved by all your comments, and if it is not without faults, that only means that I can still learn more.

Considering that this book starts off with a reflection on the relation between teachers and pupils in the context of school, I want to take the opportunity to thank some of the teachers that have been especially important to me. They might never read this and some will never get to know how much they have inspired and encouraged me, but I still want to mention Staffan Södergren at Almby högstadium, Dixie Ericsson at Karolinska läroverket and Staffan Nordin at Kulturskolan Örebro. I am also particularly grateful to Lish Eves and Peter Hicks who taught at the London School of Theology. They showed that lecturers can be not only brilliant theologians, but also wonderful people with deeply caring hearts. But my primary model as a teacher is in all reality my mum, Kristina Sverker. My gratefulness to her extends way beyond that of course, but she is my greatest inspiration as a pedagogue, not only for the self-giving love she had for her pupils but also because of her passion for pedagogy and determined belief in everyone’s capacity to learn. If she would have been alive when I started to think about the questions in this book, maybe it wouldn’t have taken so long to figure these things out. This book is in memory of her.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Interactive interdisciplinarity and human lived reality

Social constructivism and biologist essentialism?

Chapter 1: From interpellated subjecthood to recognized vulnerability

On the human being, or becoming

Gendered to be human

Performativity and human identity

Relationality and the constitution of humanity

The problematic body

Actions

Judith Butler and the person

Desire and personhood

Recognition, personhood and grievability

Chapter 2: Being human nature

Language: window to human nature

Nature/nurture

Unique environment

Genes, personality and behavior

Computationalism and the individual

Webbed causality

The individual and human nature

Death of the self again?

Openness and relationality in evolutionary psychology?

Chapter 3: Persons becoming in relations

Ontology of the person

Relationality, space and freedom

Personalist and relational theological anthropology

The divine and the human

The triune Creator and the anthropological significance of Christ

Embodied human persons

“spirit,” sin and the question of ethics

Chapter 4: Going beyond: relationality, evolutionary theory and time

Establishing a weak ontology of relationality

Re-reading the theory of evolution

Evolution as performativity

Time matters

The reality of body

Chapter 5: Kenotic personalism

Primacy of “person”?

Kenosis, vulnerability and persons: the significance of self-giving relations

Relation, mediation, interpellation

Called in time

The Gift of Vulnerability

The giving between persons

Kenosis and feminism

Kenosis and resistance

The gift of freedom

The most vulnerable?

Conclusion: persons, individuals and institutions

AI: artificial individualism?

Disclosing the nature/nurture problem

Back to school

Individualism and personalism in school

A love supreme?

Bibliography

In memory of Kristina Sverker

[O]ur social personality is created by the thoughts of other people. […] We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent envelope, so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our own ideas of him which we recognise and to which we listen.

- Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

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.

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).

30 Vicky Kirby is correct, in my view, that “[t]he difficulty in Butler’s project is considerable, for she has to juggle a critique of construction while still defending its most basic tenets” (Vicky Kirby, Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal (New York: Routledge, 1997), 105). But Axel Honneth’s critique is not quite on the mark (Axel Honneth et al., Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, The Berkeley Tanner lectures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 69).

31 Arrhenius, Riktig, 20 [my translation].

32 Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (London: Routledge, 1995), 47-49. See also Kirby, Telling, 68, 171. The problem of biologism and feminism links back to the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, according to Kirby. Here biologism, the thought that the woman is her body, was strongly established and later developed by Charcot’s colleague, Sigmund Freud (Kirby, Telling, 59).

33 Susan Oyama, Evolution's Eye: A Systems View of the Biology-Culture Divide (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 82.

34 “Universal” here is well defined by the psychologist David Buss as “[f]eatures found across cultures, races, and populations are assumed to be more part of human nature than those features that are unique to certain subgroups or individuals” (David M. Buss, “Evolutionary Biology and Personality Psychology: Toward a Conception of Human Nature and Individual Differences,” American Psychologist 39, no. 10 (1984): 1135-1147, 1138). See also Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (London: Phoenix, 1996), 45f.

35 See Sarah S. Richardson & Stevens Hallam (eds.), Postgenomics: Perspectives on Biology After the Genome (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015) and Haraway, Simians.

36 John Tooby & Leda Cosmides, “The Psychological Foundations of Culture,” in Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, & John Tooby (eds.), The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 23-26; Pinker, Blank, 30-104. Interestingly, see Christian Smith for a not dissimilar critique, but from the area of sociology itself (Smith, Person?, ch. 1). Yet Smith does not agree with theories such as Tooby and Cosmides’ that he calls “naturalistic positivist empiricism” (Smith, Person?, 4).

37 John Tooby & Leda Cosmides, “Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, Part I: Theoretical Considerations,” Ethology and Sociobiology 10, no. 1–3 (1989): 29-49, 34f.

38 Pinker, Blank, 143. For a problematization of that description, see David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past (New York: Pantheon Books, 2018).

39 For a discussion on replicators versus vehicles and ‘survival machines’, see Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 30th Anniversary ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 19.

40 Conor Cunningham, Darwin's Pious Idea: Why the Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get It Wrong (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2010), 42. See also David L. Hull, Science as a Process: An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

41 Although, as Cunningham argues, if one maintains the replicator/vehicle dualism as part of the theory of evolution then, as he phrases it, one introduces a “pre-Darwinian essentialism” (Cunningham, Darwin's, 67) into the theory of evolution that is in conflict with, in Cunningham’s words, the “very dynamic nature of the biological world, spelled out so well by Darwin” (Cunningham, Darwin's, 58). For how this anti-essentialist understanding has emerged in the last three decades and its implications for the view of nature/nurture, see Maurizio Meloni, “How biology became social, and what it means for social theory,” The Sociological Review 62, no. 3 (2014): 593-614 and further developed in Maurizio Meloni, Impressionable Biologies: From the Archeology of Plasticity to the Sociology of Epigenetics (New York: Routledge, 2019).

42 Jaime C. Confer et al., “Evolutionary Psychology: Controversies, Questions, Prospects, and Limitations,” American Psychologist 65, no. 2 (2010): 110-126, 116. Rightly, David Bjorklund and Anthony Pellegrini state that evolutionary developmental psychology has “come to rephrase the nature-nurture issue, asking not ‘how much’ of any characteristic is due to nature or nurture but rather ‘How do nature and nurture interact to produce a particular pattern of development?’” But, as they continue, “simply restating the question in this way advances the argument little. The developmental systems approach specifies how biological and environmental factors at multiple levels of organization transact to produce a particular pattern of ontogeny” (David F. Bjorklund & Anthony D. Pellegrini, The Origins of Human Nature: Evolutionary Developmental Psychology (Washington: American Psychological Association, 2002), 335).

Similar claims were made for the theory preceding evolutionary psychology, namely that of sociobiology. There was a lively debate about the claims of sociobiology in the late 1970s and early 1980s and much attention was placed on the issue of nature and nurture. See Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975); George W. Barlow & James Silverberg, Sociobiology, Beyond Nature/Nurture?: Reports, Definitions, and Debate (Boulder: Westview Press for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1980); Michael Ruse, Sociobiology: Sense or Nonsense? (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979); Ashley Montagu & Jerome H. Barkow, Sociobiology Examined (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980); John D. Baldwin & Janice I. Baldwin, Beyond Sociobiology (New York: Elsevier, 1982); Marshall Sahlins, The Use and Abuse of Biology: An Anthropological Critique of Sociobiology (London: Tavistock Publications, 1977); and Ullica Segerstråle, Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

43 Michelle Voss Roberts, Body Parts: A Theological Anthropology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017), xxiii.

44 John Webster, “Eschatology and Anthropology,” in John Webster, Word and Church: Essays in Christian Dogmatics, 2nd ed., vol. I (London: T&T Clark, 2016), 263; Webster, “Theological,” 24ff.

45 Wolfhart Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, trans. Matthew J. O'Connell (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1985), 16.

46 Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (New York: Harper & Row, 1957 [first published 1841]). See also Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, trans. Richard Crouter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996 [first published 1799]).

47 For this, see also John Macquarrie, Principles of Christian Theology, revised ed. (London: SCM Press, 1977).

48 See F. LeRon Shults, Reforming Theological Anthropology: After the Philosophical Turn to Relationality (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2003) and Bo Sandahl, Person, relation och Gud: Konstruktionen av ett relationellt personbegrepp i nutida trinitarisk teologi (PhD, Centrum för teologi och religionsvetenskap, Lunds universitet, 2004).

49 As only one example by a former PhD student of Colin Gunton, see Stephen R. Holmes, The Holy Trinity: Understanding God's Life (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2012).

50 Marc Cortez, Theological Anthropology: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 27.

51 Marc Cortez, Christological Anthropology in Historical Perspective: Ancient and Contemporary Approaches to Theological Anthropology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2016) and Marc Cortez, “The Madness in Our Method: Christology as the Necessary Starting Point for Theological Anthropology,” in Joshua Ryan Farris & Charles Taliaferro (eds.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Theological Anthropology (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015).

52 Kathryn Tanner is just one example, but her impressively concise book, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology, sums it up well, together with relevant historical references (Kathryn Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001)).

53 Colin E. Gunton, The One, the Three, and the Many: God, Creation, and the Culture of Modernity, The Bampton Lectures 1992 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), xiii. Gunton views “culture” as the result of “human activity” and the relationship between “culture’ and ‘nature” is that “culture takes shape in the context of what is sometimes called nature.” So that, for Gunton, “[t]he created world provides the framework within which human activity takes place” (Gunton, The One, xiii).

54 Gunton, The One, 28. Gunton’s view of Modernity is one that states that Modernity in its very definition should be understood as the rejection of God. As numerous thinkers have pointed out, the view that Modernity is anti-religious and necessarily secularist is more a part of a secularist self-understanding itself rather than an accurate description of the development of Modernity. See Taylor, Secular; Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Martinson, Postkristen, 12, 69ff; Sigurdson, Postsekulära; Jayne Svenungsson, Guds återkomst: En studie av gudsbegreppet inom postmodern filosofi (Göteborg: Glänta Produktion, 2004) and Joel Halldorf, Av denna världen? Emil Gustafson, moderniteten och den evangelikala väckelsen (Skellefteå: Artos & Norma bokförlag, 2012).

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