Human Nature as Capacity: Transcending Discourse and Classification

By Nigel Rapport

What is it to be human? What are our specifically human attributes, our capacities and liabilities? Such questions gave birth to anthropology as an Enlightenment science. This book argues that it is again appropriate to bring “the human” to the fore, to reclaim the singularity of the word as central to the anthropological endeavor, not on the basis of the substance of a human nature – “To be human is to act like this and react like this, to feel this and want this” – but in terms of species-wide capacities: capabilities for action and imagination, liabilities for suffering and cruelty. The contributors approach “the human” with an awareness of these complexities and particularities, rendering this volume unique in its ability to build on anthropology’s ethnographic expertise.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Mar 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781845458157

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        Introduction        

HUMAN CAPACITY AS AN EXCEEDING, A GOING BEYOND

Nigel Rapport

The Nature of the Human

The issue of human nature, what it is to be human, has been the central enterprise of an ‘anthropological’ science – nominally, at least – since Immanuel Kant's (1996) first, modern formulation of the disciplinary endeavour in the late 1700s. At the same time it has been argued that in ‘human nature’ anthropology conjures with a concept compromised beyond redemption by its essentialistic, hierarchical and exclusionary history: its role in an imperialism of male over female, adult over child, advanced over primitive, Occidental over Oriental, rational over emotional, and conscientious over brutish, as representative of the essentially human. Others again would contend that its very unscrupulous usage, its ubiquity, makes the concept of ‘human nature’ necessary for anthropology to unpack, if not rehabilitate. Indeed, the impurity of the concept is perhaps an additional attraction: a fitting conceptualization for a human condition equally ‘impure’ in its complex amalgams of objectivity and subjectivity, knowledge and desire, science, morality and taste. Recently Maurice Bloch called for a rehabilitation of ‘human nature’ whose study represents anthropology's ‘ultimate aim’ and ‘core concern’, its ‘anchor’ and its ‘centre’ (2005).

The position adopted by the present volume is that the term deployed is not the fundamental issue. ‘We are all human’, Ernest Gellner urged shortly before his death (1993:3), and we should not take any ‘more specific classifications seriously’. Robin Fox (2005:7) has recently claimed a ‘nature/nurture’ dialectic as fundamental to an anthropological project and as remaining unresolved (2005:7). Marilyn Strathern (1980) has seen sense only in recognizing the simultaneity of ‘nature–culture’, with no possible either/or. The ‘cosmopolitan’ is a term to which a number of contributors to this volume turn, recalling Kant's projection of inextricable links between human being in its local diversity (polis) and its global commonality (cosmos): the cosmopolitan was the general human being, ‘Everyman’, identifiable at once as possessing immediate, everyday attachments and as not limited or overwritten by these. More important than the particular term employed is the intent to address the generality of the issue of what it is to be human, the singularity of the phenomenon. An alternative title to the volume might be: ‘Claiming the Human: Anthropological Reflections upon a Complex, Cosmopolitan Singularity’.

The core thesis of the volume is that anthropology apprehends the human as a complex singularity not on the basis of the substance of a human nature – ‘To be human is to be like this, to want this, to have this’ – but in terms of species-wide capacities: capabilities for action and imagination, say, liabilities for suffering and cruelty. A focus on capacities rather than substance provides a way to bring the nature of the human again to the centre of anthropological deliberation without revisiting the culs-de-sac that some have felt arguments over the proportionate mix of nature as against nurture came to represent.

One could frame the approach as follows: There is an intrinsic openness to animal life. The animal's nervous system translates into the organism being at the centre of a two-way traffic of information and energy constantly crossing the integument of the skin. An organism is not made distinctive by the existence of a boundary, a skin, animal physiologist Scott Turner explains (2000), but by way of what its boundary does: exert an active, ‘adaptive’ control over the flows of matter and energy such that the organism's internal state is regulated in the face of changing external conditions. More than this, regulating the flows of energy and matter across its boundary effects an ‘orderliness’ in nature such that the generating organisms may be described as ‘architects and engineers of their environments’ (Turner 2000:7; cf. Rapport 2003:220–6). To be human is to have the capacity to attend to the world in a particular way: to direct that traffic and have it directed with unique subtlety, complexity and flexibility. Beyond the animal necessity to be-in-the-world in specific ways is a human capability, and liability, to create diverse possibilities of attentiveness and to suffer diverse constraints. Human beings have unique capacities to become: they can be uniquely fulfiled and thwarted.

A focus on capacities turns the anthropological attention to action and the ethnographic: to activities witnessed in the field and an intuiting of their causes and meanings. The volume comprises eight contributions from anthropologists approaching the question of the human from the perspective of their various fieldworks. Questions of human being, becoming, and the origins of difference are, as David Parkin observes (1987), a universal component of the ethnographic record. In Maurice Bloch's terms (2005:3), the question ‘What are human beings like?’ is universally asked, irrespective of cultural tradition, knowledge practises, intellectual school or educational attainment. If the present volume is to accede to abstractions concerning the singularity of ‘the human’, then it will be from a position of anthropological expertise and strength: amid a sense of the complexity and contingency of social interaction. Terms for human capability and liability such as ‘imagination’, ‘action’, ‘learning’, ‘suffering’, humiliation’ and ‘pain’ may avoid becoming reductive in the context of rich ethnography.

The intuition or working assumption of the volume is that the human reveals itself as a kind of going beyond. Anthropologists most readily witness the human in a ubiquitous capacity to treat ironically a boundedness to identity: to go beyond present circumstances of being, their lineaments and seeming limits; to go beyond the categorial features of symbolic classifications – the boundaries between things and relations – that human beings at the same time invent so adeptly and defend so vehemently. The volume is structured, therefore, in terms of pairs of chapters, each of which interrogate one kind of going beyond: beyond the cultural community (economy and polity), beyond the classificatory system, beyond finite embodiment. On what occasions do these different kinds of going beyond become visible? To what particular human capabilities do goings beyond attest? To what do the varied and routine acts of ironical transgression or digression make us liable?

Clifford Geertz has described as anthropology's ‘recurrent dilemma’ the question of how to square the generic human rationality and the biological unity of humankind with the great natural variation of cultural forms. Witnessing the capabilities and the liabilities of a human going beyond the particularities of current categories of identity is a way for anthropology to claim the human as a complex singularity: the discipline's unique insight into the nature of human being and the crucial lever of an anthropological science.

Being Humans

In his collection Being Humans (2000), Neil Roughley allowed for an approach to human nature by way of plurality – ‘humans’ – and transitivity – ‘being’. He thus pointed the way towards a conceptualizing of human nature as a lived quality, and a capacity. Our nature includes, inter alia, the capacity to be open to the world, cosmopolitan – to transcend one's self, place and time; also the capacity to make spatial sense of specific environments; also the capacity to understand the norms and constitute the cultures of particular places; also the capacity to satisfy one's desires for an autonomy necessary to uphold the values one has set oneself and to avoid loss of self-esteem; also the capacity to gain interpretive insight into others’ aims and beliefs; also the capacity for communication and intuition; also the capacity to appreciate reciprocity and mutuality, symmetry, clarity and smoothness; also the capacity for hope and projection; and so on. If our nature is a plethora of capacities, an excessiveness, an overriding capacity to be open to the world and go beyond what it is made out to be at present, then, in the words of the poet, Philip Larkin, ‘how we live measures our own nature’ (1990:103). Our circumstance is a manifestation of our nature. We make our circumstance according to the particular deployment of our capacities. The variousness and changeability of our circumstances, their specificity and idiosyncrasy, make manifest our capacity to remain open to the world, and to attend to it in ways that reflect a deliberate and flexible intentionality (cf. Rapport 2003).

One is led in the direction of considering a lived human nature as complex and impure, transitive and individual, by the work of Ernest Becker. Human being has no essence, Becker begins in The Denial of Death (1997), but it has an existential dilemma. The essence of human being is a paradox: being half animal and half symbolic. Human beings are creatures with names and life histories; creators with soaring minds, able to contemplate atoms and infinity, able ironically, imaginatively to consider themselves and their history and their planet from outside. Our dexterity, self-consciousness, ethereality afford us a god-like, transcendental capacity. At the same time we are food for worms, hopelessly embodied, bearing the evolutionary marks of single-cell organisms and fish. We are aware, moreover, that we stick out of nature with a unique, towering majesty. Our material casing is alien to us in many ways. It aches and bleeds and will decay and die and disappear forever; and yet it pleasures us physically, sexually, even scatalogically. We are split: individuality within finitude; transcendentalism amid morbidity (even the new-born, as Montaigne observed,¹ is old enough to die). Where are we really? Lower animals, it seems, are spared this terrifying dilemma, this painful contradiction. They lack our self-consciousness and the symbolic means to project and express this. To have to live a lifetime haunted by bodily waste, fallibility, decay and death is uniquely human: a human constant.²

Body and self can never be reconciled seamlessly, Becker concludes. But to grow up and develop characters, as individuals, to develop cultural traditions, as societies, is temporarily, perhaps necessarily, to repress the realization. The individual and the society succeeds in concealing a recognition of the intrinsically complex and split and transitive nature of human being. The realization throbs in dream and myth, nevertheless, in outbursts of madness and genius: a form of scar tissue. Everyday, ‘commonsensical’ character traits and culture traits are ‘secret psychoses’, in Sandor Ferenczi's words: pyrrhic victories over our contradictory nature (cited in Becker 1997:27).

What might anthropology say to this? Typically, that Becker's universal thesis is itself culture-specific. That embodiment and conceptualization, notions of death and dilemma are social facts, culturally and historically specific.

What would it be, however, not to be satisfied with the typical response and to wish to frame something more supra-cultural, cosmopolitan, to do with the existential domain of the universal–individual human actor? To accept that the capacity to know and to deny finitude, death and decay, for instance, are human capacities: human capacities which transcend cultural particularities; instantiation of a sameness over and against our inhabiting different cultural worlds? What does our being humans come to look like in a ‘post-cultural’ dispensation which confronts the common ‘embodiedness’ of an individual human being-in-the-world (Jackson 1989:135), beyond cultural-classificatory diversity and social history. Here is culture re-drawn not as the foundation or final cause of social life but as a synthetic medium, an idiom: a means of individual comings-together and exchange, a kind of surface or social skin. It is also the skein left behind from past efforts at meeting and sharing (and distancing) between particular interactants, the formal residue of acts of individual meaning-making, a skein always in the process of being sloughed off and re-worked, given new form and new meaning in particular situations (Rapport 1997a:30–42). The cultural, in short, is one avenue – poetic, dramatic, rhetorical – by which individuals might hope to represent, to themselves and to others, features of their common human bodiliness – such as their intrinsic contradictoriness and contrariety. The ambiguity at the heart of all social existence concerns the indeterminate relationship between the flux of individual life and the seemingly frozen forms of ongoing cultural tradition. The personal is never translated fully into the social (Rapport 1993). No cultural discourse does more than create the practical illusion of fusion and balance between personal and interpersonal life-worlds. In this individuality of experience exists, paradoxically, a universality to our being humans, a singularity of condition over and above proximal differentiations of culture and society, nation, ethnicity, class, religion, gender and locale.

Becker starts us in this direction – of contextualizing culture as one, particular modality of the existential – when he suggests that, ‘everything that man does in his symbolic world is an attempt to deny and overcome his grotesque fate [to deny death]’; that all cultural expression is, in some basic part, ‘a fabricated protest against natural reality, a denial of the truth of the human condition, and an attempt to forget the pathetic creature that man is’ (1997:33). We are taken further in this direction by an anthropology that admits of deliberate ‘existential’ or ‘phenomenological’ concerns. The question of being is universal, Michael Jackson observes (2005), only its symbolic expression differs, and it is properly the starting-point of an attempt to explore and compare human life-worlds. He continues: Albeit that individuality may be played down in the milieux where anthropologists often work, that identity and responsibility are taken to be primarily matters of community belonging, that meaning and fate are supernaturally lodged – these local, ‘cultural’ practises and habits of mind are not ontologies. Existence does not reduce to category terms, whether ‘society’ or ‘culture’, or ‘individual’, or ‘belonging’, ‘relationship’, ‘habitus’, ‘structure’, ‘ideology’, and these terms cannot be made foundational to a theory of human being. These terms are themselves rhetorical devices: some of the symbolical vehicles by which human beings have designated some of the modalities of their experience and sought solutions to the issue of existence; the terms have meanings inextricably connected to the experiences of individual subjects. Culture, race, tribe, nation, cosmos…such terms are instances of an intersubjective discourse that has in countless places and times reflected a human-individual struggle between contending imperatives: between being an actor and being acted upon; between furnishing the wherewithal of life through one's own efforts and through one's memberships; between a search for pure self and a search for belonging, for being through others; between being at home in the world through everyday attachments and through distant hopes. One possesses a fluid consciousness which oscillates between solitude and sociality, speech and silence, reflection and habit, aimlessness and purposiveness, bodiliness and cerebralism, passion and calm; between illness and health, the past and the present, futurity and limitation (Rapport 2005a). Society, Culture, Structure, Habitus or History, as isomorphs of the fluxional world, are illusions, forms of wishful thinking, with an indeterminate relationship to the lived experience they purport to concern. Human experience is not so systematized, but characterized by a ‘going beyond’: beyond structures, situations, statuses, roles, patterns, substances and things, in a constant becoming. It surpasses the environmental givenness in which it arises.

This is not to downplay the dialectical nature of human experience, Jackson stresses (1989:1–18). Capacities for openness, and going beyond, operate in contexts that might be variably closed and constraining, and manifest themselves in a variety of ways of being-in-the-world. One protests against closure, constraint, limitation; one seeks out and chooses bonds; one elects to acquiesce to custom and move with the collectivity; one strikes a balance between the freedom of autonomy and the isolation of anonymity. To do analytical justice to the human capacity is to do equal descriptive justice to this diversity of modes of being, of fashioning human life – including the ‘opening-up’ of individuality to collectivity, of personal being to superordinate Being, of cosmopolitan connection to parochial insularity (cf. Jackson 2002:107–8). Important to insist on, is that here, too, are instances of intentionality and aspiration: the capacity to attend to the world so as to bring about new and particular states of affairs.

‘Everything decisive comes about in spite of’, Nietzsche summed up (1979a:100), even as decisiveness is recognized as our common condition. If human practise is intrinsically decisive, going beyond the present in an extension of order (structure, habit, pattern) or of disorder (anti-structure, spontaneity, randomness) into the future, then there is a diversity to how such capacity manifests itself at different moments. An ethnographic approach lends itself to an elaboration of the dialectic between practise and prior conditions: an illumination that what may be brought about is not circumscribable or pre-determined. There is an excessiveness intrinsic to the human.

Theories of Human Nature

‘[I]t is no exaggeration to say’, Leslie Stevenson writes (1981:79), ‘that the main theme of philosophy since the seventeenth century has been th[e] problem of the relationship between scientific and other understandings of human nature’; ‘how a complete physical explanation of the workings of our bodies could be reconciled with our view of ourselves as free agents, and as having distinctively mental powers of rational thought’ (1981:79).

Philosophical arguments have swung back and forth between varieties of materialism and of dualism without resolution.³ To Rene Descartes's assertion of a body subject to deterministic, mechanical causation as against a mind (an incorporated soul) free to deliver explicitly human attributes of thought and rationality, Baruch Spinoza could retort that mind and body were the same, merely conceived under the different attributes of thought and of extension (occupancy of space): mind had no power to act independent of bodily activity, and all human phenomena were capable of explanation by way of the deductive methods of mathematics based in natural law. To John Stuart Mill's assertion that psychology could not be derived from physiology, that there were laws of the mind – causal laws linking introspectable mental states such as thought, emotion and sensation – which could not (yet) be derived from physiological laws, J.B. Watson retorted that all behaviour was a matter of stimulus and response; the psychological may appear private but it was in fact an outward, public, behavioural domain, and so-called intentional activities such as writing were as much a determined bodily movement as were automatic reflexes. To Jean-Paul Sartre's assertion that there were material things possessed of a being-in-themselves as against consciousness which was a being-for-itself and a freedom, an intentional capacity to change the world from nothingness, to believe, consider, desire, fear what is not the case, E.O. Wilson retorted that instinct could always be regarded as fundamentally causative….

There has been a tendency in anthropology to hold ‘human nature’ in a certain disdain, as we have observed. No entries under that designation are to be found in its recent, professional ‘companions’ or dictionaries.⁴ If post-Enlightenment, Western philosophy had been caught on the horns of a dilemma, between varieties of dualism and materialism, then anthropology's response, as a newer discipline, a younger and more radical discipline, has often been to seek to change the terms of the debate. ‘Context’ could be brought to bear on the old dichotomy, such that the figure that human nature represented derived from the ground in which it was situated (Dilley 1999). Given the inexorably reflexive nature of human knowledge, the way in which materiality was constantly being colonized anew by the sociocultural, anthropology could endeavour to demonstrate ‘third options’ between the ‘Robinson Crusoe’ model of the self-created mind and the ‘Romanticism’ of environmental absolutism (Gellner 1998:79, 182–91). Anthropology could ‘go meta’: elucidate how it was subsequent upon human activity-in-the-world – an individual and original and changing phenomenon – that our nature, as organisms-amid-environments, was decided (Rapport 2003:74–88). (It was likewise the case that twentieth-century philosophical voices latterly urged similar complexifying or ambiguating departures. Hence, between dualism and materialism could be insinuated ‘anomalous monism’ (Donald Donaldson): while every mental event may also be a physical event in the brain, this did not mean we need accede to strict psycho-physical laws because the two vocabularies could remain irreducible. Or again, between ‘empirical-analytic’ (scientific) explanation and ‘historical-hermeneutic’ (psychological) understanding could be inserted a ‘critical’ social-scientific insight which deconstructed the conditions of our knowing or understanding something to be true to our natures (Juergen Habermas).)

In perhaps three main ways, anthropology has sought to change the terms of a debate over human nature. The first is cultural relativism: ‘the anthropologist's heresy’ (Williams 1978:34).⁵ Relativism, as Clifford Geertz more approvingly described it, has been a major source of anthropology's ability to ‘disturb the intellectual peace’ in the Western academy; through its relativism, anthropology has asserted the illusionary nature of objective, ‘pasteurized’ knowledge, and insisted that provincialism is a greater danger (epistemological as well as political) than spiritual entropy (2000:42–46). Through the lens of culture one espied the ‘set of control mechanisms – plans, recipes, rules, instructions (what computer engineers call programs) – for the governing of behavior’ (Geertz 1970:57).

In other words, claiming culture as foundational, anthropology approached mind and body alike as social constructions, and knowledge practises as phenomena of symbolic exchange. Culture represented a totality of symbol-systems (religion, ideology, common sense, economics, sport) in terms of which people made their worlds: made sense of themselves and their world, and represented themselves to themselves and to others. The imposition of meaning on life was the major end and primary condition of human existence, and culture provided the patternings ‘of’ and ‘for’ social practise. Knowledge was a matter of an encompassing, collective, public and shared cultural context; hence anthropology's ‘outdoor psychology’ (Geertz 1983:151). Considering ‘the impact of the concept of Culture on the concept of Man’, Geertz concluded that while ‘becoming human is becoming individual’, we nevertheless ‘become individual under the guidance of cultural patterns, historically created systems of meaning in terms of which we give form, order, point and direction to our lives’ (1970:63). Representing a ‘manipulation of cultural forms’, of systems of symbols of collective possession, public authority and social exchange, human thought was ‘out in the world’ (Geertz 1983:151). The symbolic logic of thought, and the formal conceptual structuring, may not be explicit, but they were socially established, sustained and legitimized. Affording meaning to the world was not something that happened in private, in insular individual heads, but something dependent on an exchange of common symbols whose ‘natural habitat is the house yard, the market place, and the town square’ (Geertz 1970:57). Meaning was something publicly enacted, tied to concrete social events and occasions, and expressive of a common social world. Hence, outdoor activities such as ploughing or peddling were as good examples of ‘individual thought’ as were closet experiences such as wishing or regretting: cognition, imagination, emotion, motivation, perception and memory were directly social affairs. A cultural anthropology insisted on human life as a matter of plein air proceedings, public, organized and collective: all always live in worlds of ‘group efforts, group clashes, and group commitments’ (Geertz 2000:44,164). Culture, society, psyche and organism should not be considered separate levels of being, Geertz concluded: one did not adhere to a stratigraphic conception of human nature. The human brain may subsist in individual heads, but ‘cabbages, kings and a number of things’ – including mind – existed outside it (Geertz 2000:204).

Anthropology was not unique in its turn to relativism. Both Geertz and E.E. Evans-Pritchard drew heavily on the (revolutionary) ordinary-language philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1978). Geertz was happy to acknowledge Wittgenstein as his ‘master’ (2000:xi), for the way in which he turned human knowledge into a language-game: not something accumulative but a series of positionings with regard to an assortment of ends. Evans-Pritchard adverted to Wittgenstein's notion of a ‘form of life’ famously to argue that people could not but think within the rubrics of their own cultural logic and the limits this set; the Azande affirmed witchcraft beliefs and practises which challenged the limits of Western rationality because this was all they could know: the rest was silence, or chaos (1976). Cultural relativism brought anthropology to possess a new kind of claim on human nature: ‘if one sees the behaviour of a living thing, one sees its soul’ (Wittgenstein 1978:#357). To be human was to behave under the aegis of particular, cultural forms of life.

Similarly swimming in the currents of more radical ideas, this time the cybernetics of Norbert Wiener, led to a second way in which anthropology found it could change the terms of a debate over human nature: an emphasis on relatedness. ‘[T]hings are epiphenomena of the relations between them’, asserted Gregory Bateson and Juergen Ruesch (1951:173), their nature deriving from the manner and moment of the relationship. The individual human organism, the human society and the larger ecosystem are, Bateson elaborated, but three levels of one cybernetic or homeostatic system: complex assemblages of interrelated parts that depend on internal feedback loops of communication to maintain certain truths about themselves. The elemental cybernetic insight is that to comprehend anything in human behaviour is always to deal with total circuits. ‘Mind’ itself can only be synonymous with cybernetic system: the total ‘information-processing, trial-and-error completing unit’ in which humanity dwells (Bateson 1980:434).

When Marilyn Strathern (1990) employed the ‘cyborg’ – part-human, part-machine; part-body, part-tool; part-self, part-other (the Six Million Dollar Man; the Cybermen; Robocop) – as a paradigmatic figure, she did so in order to overcome the false mathematic of seeing entities either as a series of discrete atoms or as parts of a monolithic, static whole. It was necessary to appreciate ‘the relation’ in identity (Strathern 1995): the nature of things in the world was an effect elicited by the ongoing (circuiting) reciprocal relationship between social partners at a particular point in time and space. It was the ‘cultures of relatedness’ (Carsten 2000) between people, between people and objects, the networks of effects, which afforded things their natures.

The relationality of identity should also alert us to the crucial role that positioning plays in nature, Tim Ingold adds (1992). There is an embeddedness to being, not a distinctiveness. Mind is not distinct from body, species is not distinct from species, the organic is not distinct from the inorganic, in any absolute sense. All is a view from somewhere, attending to something. Attention gives identity. Nature in an absolute sense is the whole in which all dwells, but more nearly the competency accrued by a particular positionality, relationality, to achieve an effect. Technology provides a paradigmatic case: it is a mistake to abstract and objectify the techniques we use in relating to the world, to make an object out of our making of objects and relations. What the Greek word techne should alert us to how a world is at once made and attended to by way of a certain ‘craftiness’, bodily skill, and practise. A ‘technologist’, then, is not someone who mechanically applies an objective system of rational principles and rules, but more properly a being wholly immersed in the complex nexus of an instrumental coping-in-the-world and dwelling-in-a-landscape.

For Maurice Bloch this translates into a ‘functionalism’ which he defines as an anthropological ‘commitment to seeing culture as existing in the process of actual people's lives, in specific places, as a part of the wider ecological process of life’ (2005:12). For functionalism ‘the mental exists in the practical, and both are conjoined functions of bodies’; ‘ideas, representations and values [are seen] as occurring in the natural world of action and transformation, of production and reproduction’ (2005:12). In this way Bloch would see anthropology steering a path between materialism and idealism, between nature