Are the variable functional capacities of social structures rooted in human nature?
Abstract
Reflections on "human nature" are found throughout the Western intellectual legacy. From Greek antiquity onwards human nature has been related to an understanding of human society. The effect was that human nature acquired a mediating or co-conditioning role in respect of the way in which society is shaped or structured. The implication is that the type laws for human society became dependent upon human nature instead of norming it. From a systematic perspective this amounts to a misunderstanding of the relationship between modal universality and the typicality of type laws. Concrete societal entities function in a typonomic way within the various modal aspects, thus reflecting their "typonomicity". However, the scope of the modal aspects of reality displays an unspecified universality. The link between human nature and human society recently surfaced in a work of Jonathan Chaplin. He argues that normative societal structures are "variable, historical channels for the communal pursuit of specific, though universal, functional capacities rooted in (created) human nature". The first part of this article investigates a number of significant historical lines, running via Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and Marsilius of Padua to modernity and post-modernity. Throughout this history the human person as a rational-ethical being embodies an impulse towards the formation of community. Since Marsilius of Padua the theme of human autonomy has surfaced in close relation to the so called Copernican turn in epistemology which eventually has given birth to the motive of logical creation and the social construction of reality. In their own way Lakoff, Johnson and Merleau-Ponty have developed a view of the human subject in its supposed shaping of the very possibilities for conceptualization and categorization. Merleau-Ponty believes that "our body is not primarily in space, it is of it". The rest of the article discusses some elements of Chaplin's alternative view on the capacities of human nature and their role in the flourishing of being human. It commences with a misunderstanding of Dooyeweerd's idea of the act-structure as one of the bodily individuality-structures of a person (illuminated in a Diagram). His aim is to provide an alternative view - one in which the principles of possibility of which Dooyeweerd speaks are seen as fully embedded in human nature. These principles are viewed by him as emerging from the "possibilities or potentials given with the created structure of the human person". It turns out that this alternative view suffers from a number of problems, intimately related to an alternative understanding of the relation between modal universality and type laws, as well as four issues discussed in more detail (paragraphs 21-24). In these paragraphs modal universality and type laws are discussed as well as the distinction between constancy and change (principle and variable positivization) and the question whether or not the structural principle of the state has only emerged during the past few centuries. The overall conclusion reached is that neither modal laws (norms) nor type laws (norms) derive their norming meaning from human nature. Rather, these norms should be observed by human subjects, whether in a norm-conforming or antinormative way. The variable functional capacities of social structures are therefore not rooted in human nature - they are rooted in the applicable modal laws and societal type laws.
Collections
- Faculty of Humanities [2033]