In the previous chapter I have outlined the constructivist theories of Fierke, Kessler and Jackson. In this chapter, I want to draw these three different approaches together and establish the common ground among them. In order to do so, I will make three arguments. The first two of these arguments locate the three constructivisms in a common and well-established body of ideas that have emerged within hermeneutic philosophy over the last century. (1) I will argue that the constructivist critique of the failure of contemporary positivist theorizing to account for contingency mirrors the hermeneutic critique of the Cartesian mind-body dualism, which argues that this dualism fails to account for the contingent and processual nature of knowledge. I will reconstruct this 'Cartesian problem' in the writings of a variety of hermeneutic thinkers and then argue that it is mirrored in the constructivist critique of contemporary positivism. In a second step (2), I will argue that the three constructivisms also mirror the hermeneutic solution to this Cartesian problem, which is a concept of contingency that conceives of contingency as an intersubjective process. I will reconstruct this concept in the writings of three hermeneutic scholars - George Herbert Mead, Charles Taylor and Quentin Skinner - and then argue that it is also manifest in the three constructivist theories. Finally (3), I will argue that there is a third point of convergence among the three constructivisms, which relates to the conceptual status of the notion of contingency conceived as an intersubjective process. Fierke, Kessler and Jackson treat this notion as a non-normative methodological concept that serves to descriptively analyze intersubjective processes of change. This puts them in one camp with Skinner but opposes them to Taylor and Mead, both of whom conceive of intersubjectivity as a concept that is both descriptive and normative and that not only allows for explaining but also for transforming the world. As for the conceptual status of intersubjectivity, there is, therefore, a dividing line cutting across the constructivist/hermeneutic camp.
The Cartesian Problem
I argue that the constructivist concern with contingency can be better understood against the broader background of hermeneutic philosophy. It is precisely the need to account for the particular and contingent nature of knowledge about the world that has been one of the guiding themes in hermeneutic writing since the early 20th century. This need arose out of the rejection
of the Cartesian dualism between mind and body. The core idea which underlies this dualism and which the hermeneutic attack centres on is the notion of an autonomous and disengaged
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individual facing an objective world. Charles Taylor and Norbert Elias locate the origins of this notion in the empiricist and rationalist tradition of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, including Descartes himself, Bacon, Condillac, Hobbes, Locke, Hume and Leibniz. This tradition emerged in opposition to the cosmic-platonic view, which had dominated philosophical discourses until the late Middle Ages. The cosmic-platonic philosophy conceived the universe as a meaningful and rational order, in which the different domains of the world were all linked because they expressed the same set of divine ideas. On this view, understanding the world was inseparable from being in attunement with that world, e.g. from seeing its goodness and loving it. All of our everyday experience was unreflectively and spontaneously understood on its own terms, that is, through its place in the cosmic order.1 Rationalism
pulverized this view by re-conceptualizing the concepts of reason and rationality. The rationalist thinkers were at pains to stress how our everyday experience could mislead humans in truly apprehending the world. Their solution was a rational method that helped to scrutinize the world properly and that freed the mind of all prejudices in order to grasp the essential features of that world. Rationality required a distancing or disengaging from all impressions, appearances and ordinary experiences in order to reach an understanding of the underlying constitution of things. The crucial move of Descartes and his successors was to conceive of this rational method in terms of a mental process. The disengaging procedure was ontologized in the very constitution of the mind. Thought became reduced to an incorporeal substance that delineated the individual as an 'inner' and self-enclosed space from his outer environment. The reflexive examination of and distancing from everyday experience transformed into a natural
distance between a thinking, autonomous subject and his external objects of contemplation. Through a correct ordering of his thoughts and careful scrutiny of his ideas and impressions, an individual could generate certainty and knowledge by himself.2
The ontologization of reflexive rationality in the constitution of the mind has fundamental implications for the relation between the individual and his outer environment, e.g. between subject and object ('object' and 'environment' can refer to both other individuals and physical things3). As thought is conceived as an incorporeal medium, the adjustment of the individual to
the outer world is reduced to an act of what Taylor calls correspondingto or representing that world. It is through the rational method that we examine our own ideas in abstraction from what
1 Elias (1980) LVII-LVIII; Taylor (1985a) 222-223; Taylor (1985b) 127-128, 141-142; Taylor (1995) 3, 44-45. 2 Elias (1980) XLVI-L, LII-LIV, LVIII, LX-LXIII; Taylor (1985a) 224-225, 241, 248-250; Taylor (1995) 4-5, 7, 61, 64-66, 72, 76, 169.
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they stand for. That is, we are able to operate a 'canonical split' between the intrinsic properties of things and our experiences of or reactions to these properties. Reflexive rationality allows us to distinguish subjective impressions from objective reality.1 It is this very operation of a split
between the subjective and the objective that establishes a correlation or a relation of representation between the two spheres. The separation allows for the delineation of an objective order of things from a subjective realm of experience which adequately represents this order. Affective reactions of or beliefs held by individuals come to be correlated with the objective world of material things, institutions and behaviour. As thinking reveals those subjective states that correspond to reality, language too acquires a designative function. It becomes an instrument that allows us to re-arrange our ideas according to the way the world is assembled. Words clearly designate or represent objects and behaviours.2
The relation between subject and object conceived in terms of correspondence or representation entails an important implication, which has been especially made clear by George Herbert Mead, in an essay called The Definition of the Psychical. In this essay, Mead scrutinizes various attempts to define the 'psychical' or 'subjectivity' as the subject matter of psychology. While his discussion includes a variety of thinkers, throughout the essay it becomes quite clear that Mead groups the majority of them into one camp, which he labels the 'psychological parallelist school'. It emerges also clearly that Mead takes the German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt to be the main representative of this group. That is, 'The Definition of the Psychical' is essentially a critical engagement with and a response to Wundt's psychological parallelism. The parallelist view holds that the psychical arises out of a process of logical criticism, reflection or analysis, which attempts to deal with contradictions that occur in our immediate presentation or experience of objects. In order to explain these contradictions, the procedure of criticism withdraws the immediate sensuous experience or presentation (Vorstellung) of the object into the subjective realm of feelings and volitions. That is, the operation of logical criticism purges or abstracts all that is subjective from the object under scrutiny. The result is a mediate, conceptual or abstract object and a psychical realm of subjectivity that contains the withdrawn sensuous presentation which now functions as a symbol
of this conceptual object. The psychical serves the purpose of symbolizing or providing the necessary sensory content for the object of mediate or abstract knowledge, which after all no abstract thinking can completely dispense with.3 What it does is “to offer a refuge for former
1 Taylor (1980) 31-35; Taylor (1985a) 224-225, 249; Taylor (1995) 4-5, 8, 65-66.
2 Taylor (1971)19-22, 36; Taylor (1980) 34-36; Taylor (1985) 220, 223, 225-226, 250-255; Taylor (1995) 3, 9. 3 Mead (1903) 78-80, 83, 86, 92, 94, 100.
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real objects which are now but ghostly symbols of the reality which they once constituted.”1
This means that the psychical is essentially representational in that it provides those subjective elements which answer or correspond to the outer environment. It is the subjective statement of the physical universe which makes this universe more comprehensible.2 This correlation of
the psychical with the object through logical criticism is similar to Taylor's canonical split which establishes a correspondence between subject and reality.
For Mead, the crucial implication is that this parallelist view transforms an individual's act of relating to the outer world into a self-evident and linear process of adaption. As reflection simply reveals those psychical states that symbolize or correspond to the conceptual object, the psychical is made up of contents that are alreadyanalysed or treated in terms of this object. That is, as the psychical is that which has been abstracted from and which does not constitute the object, it becomes a 'residue' or 'reject' that can only be stated in relation to the objective reality sought. In other words, the psychical is nothing but the result of a reflection that has already established an adequate relation between subject and object.3 This means that an individual's
act of relating to the world becomes a rather automatic process in that the individual already knows how to relate the outer environment; she already has an idea of how to appropriately respond to an object or stimulus. Communication with the outer world amounts to nothing more than the correct subjective adaption to a pre-given object, which loses its validity (to the subjective realm) through this adaption but retains its organized content or objective character.4
To put it in slightly different terms, the Cartesian view implies an already existing relationship between subject and object which thereby becomes universal, normal and self-evident. The process of communication between the individual and the environment comes about easily and naturally. Elias expresses this taken-for-grantedness well when he writes:
“But the “closed personality” of homo philosophicus perceives this mechanical and regular causal chain as an adult simply by opening his eyes, without needing to learn anything about it from others, and quite independently of the stage of knowledge reached by society. (…) The individual opens his eyes as an adult and not only recognizes autonomously here and now, without learning from others, what all these objects are that he perceives; he not only knows what he is to classify as animate and inanimate, as mineral, vegetable or animal; but he also knows directly here and now that they are linked causally in accordance with natural laws.”5
1 Mead (1903) 80. 2 Mead (1903) 82-84, 90, 94-98, 101, 103. 3 Mead (1903) 88, 93-98, 102-103, 104-105. 4 Mead (1903) 100-101; Mead (1934) 107. 5 Elias (1994) 470-471.
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As the subjective sphere is already stated in terms of or adequately related to the objective world, communication processes or forms of social cohesion that diverge from this adequate relation can only be accounted for as deviations, errors or disruptions. These disruptions will be overcome by distinguishing more strongly our illusions from actual reality. The normal state of affairs will be restored or achieved through a process of perfection, which purges the object more fully of ideology and thus reveals its true nature.1 Taylor finds instances of this
'developmental view' in the fields of comparative political and transcultural science as well as analytic philosophy. Comparativists such as Gabriel Almond, Seymor Lipset and Robert Dahl understand the cohesion of political society in terms of correlations between evaluative beliefs about the legitimacy and the actual performance of a political system. Politics in all societies is assumed to be a variation of a bargaining process, in which outputs are produced on the basis of group or individual interests. The fullest realization of this secularized and individualized bargaining model in Western societies is seen to be an increase of the correct perception of reality, which has succeeded in getting rid of the ideological culture of traditional societies.2
Likewise, philosophers such as William Quine and Donald Davidson assume the theoretical stance towards the world to be normal, which represents reality from an objective point of view as opposed to simply understanding it through putting ourselves in tune with it by means of symbolic or expressive activities. Therefore, tribal and High Renaissance societies which did not separate between representative and symbolic activities are regarded as examples of a mistaken and early 'proto-technology', as anthropologists like James Frazer have argued.3
It is precisely the assumption of a self-evident relationship between subject and object, e.g. the assumption that the subject is already stated in terms of the object and thus nothing more than the result of reflection, which so many hermeneutic thinkers have rebelled against. The problem with this view is, as Taylor argues, that a given subject-object relationship is never a natural outcome but only one possibility among other alternatives. A certain relationship does not come about naturally but only through a particular context or background, which is inherently partial in that it always emphasizes a particular point of view at the expense of others.4 By treating certain subject-object relations as natural and inescapable frameworks, the
Cartesian view loses sight of the contingent and particular nature of these relations. What it fails to do is to account for the specificity or detail of social orders, e.g., to answer “why there is this
1 Taylor (1971) 23, 33; Taylor (1985b) 92, 102; Elias (1980) X, XX-XXI; Mead (1930b) 702, 705; Luhmann (1987) 162-165.
2 Taylor (1971) 34, 35-37, 39-40; Taylor (1985b) 126.
3 Taylor (1985a) 281, 284-285, 289, 291; Taylor (1985b) 34, 105-106, 123-125, 127-128.
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kind of ritual, that form of hierarchy, thattype of fervour, those modes of blessedness, and so on.”1 The assumption of an already existing system of communication in which words or signs
stand for objects begs the decisive question of how this system came about rather than other possibilities. What remains unexplained is a community's sensitivity to or reflective awareness
of linguisticrightness, which prescribes the use of certain words in a specific way and not in others. By building the correct meaning into words from the very start, this view treats as unproblematic which has to be problematized and explained.2
Taylor argues that this failure has led Cartesian-inspired approaches to fall into ethnocentric assumptions. By positing the bargaining model as the normal way political society is organized, comparative political science fails to see that this model owes its existence to a distinct Western context which is grounded in a particular vision of society. This vision treats individuals as autonomous and rational parties which enter into willed negotiations and which all partake in the common endeavour of the 'civilization of work' in order to produce happiness and well- being. It is a specific way of organizing society which is far from shared in non-western societies, many of which lack notions of instrumental rationality and contractualism. The specificity of this model becomes even more visible when considering the fact it has come under increasing strain in Western societies, which is not to be interpreted as a 'pathology' but as a change towards a new social order. Rather than being an inescapable background, the 'civilization of work' is a particular way of organizing society among others.3 Likewise, the
scientific representation of reality from an objective position is not the natural way of relating to the world, as much analytic philosophy implies, but a distinct practice that has developed within the Western context and that has no meaning in societies where words and concepts are not used to represent reality but to connect the individuals with the cosmic or religious universe. By forgetting the norm of representation as a norm and by transforming it into a natural fact, Anglo-Saxon theories of meaning fail to grasp scientific and symbolic cultures as two distinct and contingent possibilities of relating to the world.4
Quentin Skinner has provided another statement of this critique through his attack on positivism in the history of political ideas and political history, which he argues fails to account for conceptual change or innovation. Positivist approaches studying the history of ideas assume the existence of essential and perennial concepts (liberty, reason, justice, ect.) that have a fixed
1 Taylor (1980) 34, 36-37; Taylor (1985b) 122-123.
2 Taylor (1985a) 227-228, 230-231; Taylor (1985b) 103-104, 276-277; Taylor (1995) 80-83, 86, 88-89, 92, 94-95. 3 Taylor (1985b) 126; Taylor (1971) 22-23, 26-27, 35, 37-45.
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meaning across time and space. The implication is that the writings of past thinkers have to be understood in relation to these perennial concepts. Historical texts are to be interpreted as either contributions or failures to contribute to certain 'unit ideas' that make up the field. As each text
already and naturally stands in a relationship with the canonical concepts, its meaning or significance can be discovered by merely focusing on what it says about these concepts. That is, the meaning of a text is entirely derived from its linguistic utterances.1 Skinner argues that
this view fails to see that there are no perennial concepts, doctrines or ideas. Concepts only acquire meaning in and through particular uses, which are radically contingent in that they fundamentally vary across different historical contexts. The positivist view that posits universal doctrines is only a localized understanding that reflects particular preconceptions and expectations of our time which were absent in other periods. There is no history of canonical ideas but only a history of the various and changing uses of ideas, in which the agents come to define concepts in specific ways which would have been unthinkable in other contexts.2 By
assuming the existence of perennial doctrines to which all past texts can be assimilated, the positivist view fails to grasp the contingent nature and thus to adequately understand the meaning of these texts. That is, by exclusively focusing on what a certain thinker said, it cannot understand what he was actually doing in or may have meant by saying what he said. This view fails to conceive of linguistic utterances as arguments that were made in a specific way in order to contribute to particular debates. The positivist approach to history cannot answer why a “text is organized in a certain way, why a certain vocabulary is deployed, why certain arguments are particularly singled out and emphasised, why in general the text possesses its distinctive identity and shape” at the expense of other possibilities.3
Mead's critique of psychological parallelism essentially mirrors the critiques above. The parallelist theory defines the psychical as that phase of consciousness which deals with contradictions in our immediate perception or sensuous experience by withdrawing this perception from the object into the realm of subjectivity through a process of logical criticism.