Human Being and Vulnerability

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.