A Critique
Hayo Krombach
The danger of fragmentation in the social sciences, including the futile infatuation with myopic 'newness' and postmodern 'agenda', is this: if we disperse too much into smaller and smaller areas of inquiry, discourse becomes flat and almost impossible. We no longer know what linking ideas and principles of thinking to communicate, and to whom. The more we become intelligent specialists, the less are we intellectually taken seriously. Piling higher the heap of facts can never produce a better theory, let alone a philosophy of reflection.
The warning: 'publish or perish', is another debilitating development in academia. Such threats halt the growth and freedom of thinking. They not only push social scientists into the privatisation and commercial exploitation of research. Worse still, in that they lower academic expectations to instruction in functional skills and their practical usefulness, they also change substantially the satisfaction of educational ideals. And similarly, there are the hordes of publicists, all-rounders, prolific volunteers, pronouncing on everything fashionable. In academic journalism little or no time and care are taken to fathom the ideas on offer, if any are offered at all. We have forgotten what the social sciences inescapably demand of us.
To examine the claim of an academic discipline to be science, is to go to the heart of its philosophical values. This means going beyond the rigid methods of analytic rationality, confined within a discipline, which is always removed and remote from the reality of human concerns. Education is the path out of narrow maxims of teaching and into clearings of freer and more flexible thinking. The purpose of this article is to discuss the pedagogical role of philosophy for a humanistic way to understand the world in which we live. A good example is the social science called International Relations, which deals with the global totality of the self-created relations between human beings. In its existential implications international politics raises the most far reaching philosophical questions about the social and historical condition of humankind.
Without conceptual rootedness and the philosophical perspective of historical consciousness, the shaky scientific status of the social sciences will not be overcome. It is not that we pose questions; they come to us, and we have to respond. We therefore must be clearer where and how we have to anchor our thinking.
The Need for Philosophy
Indifference to philosophical reasoning in the social sciences tragically undermines their study. This is a matter of first priority. It urges us to pursue our intellectual endeavours with a strengthened philosophical orientation in mind. Our standards should not be idle talk or what is ephemerally interesting, what meets the taste of everyday opinions. No, the search for the highest good in education should guide our aspirations.Philosophy is a caring and healing praxis. If it has a role to play in education, it is to enrich our moral vocabulary and so our moral lives. This challenges the technical claims of those experts and that expertise that demean political and social questions to short-term problem-solving and efficient management. In the end, the role of philosophy is to recapture the sense of wonderment and intellectual sensibility about the calamity of the human condition. I would challenge the reader to find more tragic examples of this than in the history of international politics.
Some may find the educational requirement of philosophy either too high or not needed at all. For cultural reasons this is indefensible and professionally insufficient. It is also discourteous towards those philosophers whose thinking one can, without refined knowledge of linguistic nuances, only pretend to study. Furthermore, the criterion of a good translation is not just its philological exactness, but the rendering of philosophical meaning.
International Relations is the most complex of the social sciences. Yet despite its immense importance, its tradition or history of ideas is philosophically shallow. It has no compelling school of thought. It is devoid of paradigmatic depth and insight into the nature of humanity's past and destiny. And running commentaries and day-to-day consultancy about what is happening in the world can be no substitute for the task of demonstrating the conceptual structure of international relations and their global consequences.
We have to concentrate on integrating philosophical appraoches into our understanding of international affairs which are now all about the very condition that affects and can destroy our earthly source of existence. This is our fundamental challenge. The enormous sufferings of so much of humanity pose a profound problem for us. And related to this is a further daunting philosophical question: how is it possible for a part to say something of validity about the whole of which it is just a part? When the social sciences deal with particular issues, they fail to recognise the universal links between their themes. But social life and its historical development can be understood only in a holistic and not in a piecemeal fashion. In the light of such growing pedagogical anomalies, we need to have the courage to inquire into the scientific, conceptual underpinnings of International Relations. We need to return to the humanities, especially philosophy.
Principles of Dialectic and Phenomenology
Thinking philosophically in social science means sharpening the logically necessary categorial prerequisites for the comprehension of our relationship to the world we live in. This, for instance, means rejecting the all too popular insistence on psychologism with its empirical and relativistic tendencies. Fundamental for a critique of this approach to knowledge acquisition is that we do not enquire into the psychological sources of cognition, but into its logical underpinnings. To say that psychologism is senseless is to make the difference between psychic acts of thinking and their logical content. It is to make the distinction between what is and what is valid. Asking for adequate conceptual conditions of the possibility of reflection is likewise dismissing as one-sided those viewpoints which reduce an understanding of our life-world to mechanistic and causal explanations, analogous to the mathematical and positivist physical sciences. Instead of a formal logic, we require for educational purposes a logic of reflection. Such a logic is to establish the correct scientific cognition of human consciousness and the way it manifests itself in socio-historical actuality.
This logic would also study the premises of the individual sciences, their construction and methodologies. Empirical sciences, after all, are practised according to the conceptually unifying operations and intentions of a reflecting human consciousness. The modes of presuppositional thinking, which most closely fulfil the quest for such unity in the social sciences, are dialectic and phenomenology.
In order to make sense of these disciplines, we must turn to their most influential expositors: Kant, Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger, and examine as the tensions within them. These continental traditions cannot be ignored. For without them our understanding of modern societies is likely to become ahistorical, conceptually muddled, and thus defective, as is so often the case with the quantitative and classificatory approaches of Anglo-American scholars. With their usual claim only to local and analytical knowledge they deny at the same time any legitimacy to comprehensive thinking in social science.
The discussion of Kant and Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger, however, does not entail dependency on them. Thinking itself, especially in times of social crises and historical transitions, is vitally dependent on the subject matter of part-whole relations towards which thinking is ultimately directed. Thinking is a predicative and, hence, relational activity. And relation is the quintessential category of philosophical science at all levels of socio-historical perspectives, from interpersonal to international relations.
But why should we inquire specifically into the dictions of dialectic and phenomenology? It is because ethics, politics, justice and progress are themes which in a most crucial way call for criteria of judging the theoretical and practical connections between individuals and their communities and history. In addition, the epistemological and methodological question of how an open science of the global structure of social reality as a project for the future is possible at all is framable primarily within dialectic and phenomenology.
And these Western languages, in turn, have their beginnings in ancient Greek thought. What is more, it is through the Greek tragedians that the tragedy of modernity can be appreciated and non-Western holistic ideas of the world mediated. The ancient vision of the world invoked the entire environment - human, divine, and inanimate. It was a world intact, a world whose parts, spiritual and material, were interdependent. This world has collapsed and long been lost. Only slowly are we now beginning to relearn the pressing question of how this happened and whether we can ever again regain a sense of unity. For understanding the relationship between human beings and the world is the first condition of human survival.
All thinking about socio-historical formations takes its cue from starting-points of reflection, which must be assumed as conditions for comprehending these developments. The following are merely sketches of some educational aspects and objectives of dialectic and phenomenology. These may serve as an impetus for the reader to explore them further.Kant's theoretical philosophy, for instance, is a sharp conceptual critique of empiricism, but also a denial of all metaphysical knowledge as an illusion. It describes with dialectic the contradictory relationship between the understanding and reason. By means of the Copernican revolution, which establishes the subjective and transcendental categories of the understanding, one cognises objects of sense-perception in space and time. Reason, however, allows only for the belief in transcendent ideas such as God, freedom, and immortality. Reason 'out there' cannot be reflectively known. But, as a logical presupposition, it is said to prescribe to the understanding the task to seek the unity of its conceptual knowledge - the ultimate goal of every individual science.
This dualism cannot be bridged. It leads Kant to ask the famous questions: 'What can I know?', 'What ought I to do?', and 'What may I hope'? As a first orientation for working towards a coherent social science, these most humanistic of questions are today as appropriate as they ever were. Hegel's approach is to resolve the Kantian dichotomy by placing dialectic in socio-historical relations. The dialectic of reason is no longer a transcendent condition for understanding a presumed objective world external to us. It is now the truth itself of human self-consciousness. Reason creates and educates itself within and through the totality of social and historical actuality.
This process of production results in the unity of theory and praxis. History is the immanent object in which the social subject reflects itself. Dialectic is the conceptual mediation of present subjective and holistic identity out of differing and in this sense contradictory and particular moments of the past. Hegel's statement that the ''I' is the 'We', and 'We' is the 'I'' formulates most succinctly the organic structure of interdependence that constitutes the part-whole relations between the individual, society, and history. Husserl's phenomenology is a passionate argument against modern science and the impact of its history on the human life-world. Unlike Kant, Husserl does not study the world as it appears conceptually. Rather, he describes the logical structures of the manners of how it shows itself to consciousness.
Phenomenology is a rigorous attempt to probe the essence of the cognising subject itself. Subjective consciousness always intends the unity of all the horizons of the world. Phenomena are therefore not essentially physical entities; they are experiences intersubjectively lived and articulated. Husserl's humanism is the search for new constitutions of humanity's self-responsibility. These conditions cannot be material facts, for 'merely fact-minded sciences make merely fact-minded people'. Their legitimacy, instead, is grounded in the transcendental origin of a logic of reflection.
Phenomenological thinking for Heidegger is a path that penetrates the transcendentalism of Kant's concept and Husserl's consciousness and leads towards the unconcealment of Being. Being is for the subject the meaning-giving ground of its experiences. Phenomenological research opens up those rigid traditions which seemingly established philosophical and religious certainties. '
All these historical epochs show how Being appeared in time but in distorted forms. Its expressions in the praxis of science and technology today are seen as particularly dangerous. Unlike Hegel, who constructs dialectically the reflection of the present out of its past, Heidegger destroys phenomenologically all metaphysical manifestations and re-discovers the authentic source of Being in the pre-Socratic visions of the unity of the world.
To regain a binding sense of origin, in order to find a truer social and historical direction into the future, one needs to question the development of the past. This is the educational task of philosophy, for 'questioning is the piety of thought'.This synopsis indicates that dialectic and phenomenology provide us with an initial access into conceptual languages of relation. They also reveal the manner in which the inescapable tension within and between them reflects the need for calm and change in humanity's self-image.
Concepts connect facts and theories about society and history into contextual, and philosophical meaning. More than any other heuristic entry into social science they offer the possibility to make our spiritual and material reality transparent and hence intelligible. But we cannot grasp these concepts - and their further appropriation by later French and German writers - without recourse to our quartet: Kant and Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger. Structuralism and post-structuralism, hermeneutics and critical theory, for instance, have their bearings in the dialectical and phenomenological practices of our philosophers. These sages illuminate our awareness of the internal relations of socio-historical life. Observation alone and simplistic common-sense thinking cannot accomplish this. Questions which underlie the evidence of relational unity have their final justification in dialectic and phenomenology. It is in dialectic that we find the immanent principle of all human activity and movement, while in phenomenology the philosophy of subjectivity grounds this principle in a framework of consciousness and world, history and Being.
The works of Kant and Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger are at once distant and contemporaneous. Their thinking can help us to overcome the conceptual chaos in the increasingly atomised social sciences. These philosophers subject slippery assumptions about social and historical appearances to critical judgments. In their daring questions and answers they teach us to think thinking, and not merely to record and report on ready-made theories, to seek safety in uncontroversial facts, or to escape into relativistic pluralism and its twin, dogmatic scepticism.
Humans are the only beings who are concerned about what they ought to be, about their future, their possibilities of being
I said earlier that among the social sciences the study of International Relations is the most far reaching. War and peace and the danger of a nuclear holocaust, environmental and ecological threats, and the impact of capitalist economies on world poverty are issues of truly planetary magnitude. Everything else is derivative. These developments affect the whole of humankind. But how do we relate to them? They cannot be made sense of merely with catchy sound-bites like 'new world order', 'the end of history', or 'the clash of civilisations'. Their understanding, instead, is intrinsically philosophical.
In dialectical and phenomenological reflection we are dealing with ourselves as subjects, and with the questions 'what is it to be human?' and 'how ought we to live?'. Humans are the only beings who are concerned about what they ought to be, about their future, their possibilities of being. Their end and thus their future is always only a question for them.
This is in stark contrast with factual studies and predictions based on the pretensions of statistics. There we treat the political world as if it self-evidently existed as an object outside and independent of us. To prove this wrong, philosophical teaching has to become the pedagogical agent through which knowledge becomes, not only the conscious possession of human beings, but also the guiding principle of their action - now with the view of a future that is to be secured for all humanity.
One example must suffice to illustrate my point. Carl von Clausewitz begins his great book On War like this: 'I propose to consider first the various elements of the subject, next its various parts or sections, and finally the whole in its internal structure. In other words, I shall proceed from the simple to the complex. But in war more than in any other subject we must begin by looking at the nature of the whole; for here more than elsewhere the part and the whole must always be thought together'.It is for reason of this part-whole relationship and the most radical paradigmatic shift it necessitates that Raymond Aron called Clausewitz a 'philosopher' of war.
Little in Clausewitz is ever understood unless we see the timeless truth of his premise embodying a unity and are prepared to think it through and ponder its consequences for action. Clausewitz is not a theoretician of particular types of war. And by the same token, Marx is not a market economist, just as the philosophers of nature, from the pre-Socratics to Heidegger, are not short-term policy-makers. They are not specialists in the pursuit of narrow interests. They are thinkers who conceive of human beings not as distinct entities, but as subjects who produce themselves spiritually and materially in the whole of society, history, and nature. Their work needs to be carefully studied and not misused in mindless collages of quotations and for ambiguous motives.
It is not that we are disturbed by a problem for which we must fix a solution. We are faced with a condition of humanity that requires first a transformation of our thinking. We think correctly when we learn that socio-historical phenomena and their relation to nature are both woven together into a web of life.If we do not care to wonder about the significance of our own standpoint, our scholarly products remain unconvincing and hopelessly entangled in the finitude of facts and myriads of theories. They will remain built on quicksand and not be accepted as valid reasoning. But the effort to legitimate what we are doing is our foremost educational responsibility. While our pronouncements may not be the truth, the search for truth remains nonetheless inalienable. If we fail in this imperative, our need for philosophical conceptions of what we are engaged in when we think about the world is unfulfilled, and all sense of intellectual purpose lost.
Philosophising is not an exercise which we impose on others. It is a form of praxis; it guides us towards the integrity of our own thinking, its origin and unfolding.
The experience of nihilism in the 20th century should be the strongest justification for adopting the questioning thinking of dialectic and phenomenology. This century calls for the contemplation of the necessary though complicated and often tragic relationship between philosophy and politics, between our actions and the great ideas which we acknowledge. This century supports much pessimism about what is domestically, internationally, and globally possible, despite the attempt by some to retrieve and preserve the Enlightenment promise. But the premise of that promise, that is, man's inevitable emergence from his own self-imposed immaturity, has clearly lost credibility, both theoretically and in practical terms.
Many people today doubt our wisdom and see no reason to be sure of ourselves. The politics of thinking must therefore be to determine, again and again, who we are and what we are doing to ourselves and to others, even though this quest is never fully complete. It is only a possibility. But we must try to get a grip on the question. To choose a philosophy is like choosing a self. Not to choose one is not knowing who one is and what one thinks.
The social sciences are about factual knowledge and theory acquisition and the informative and policy-oriented analysis of historical, contemporary, and current affairs. But the study of socio-historical phenomena also demands the scrutiny of these theories, the understanding of that knowledge and the justification of the very presuppositions which are claimed to validate this analysis. All knowledge is ultimately grounded in principles of philosophical comprehension. What theory is to fact, philosophy is to theory, and all three moments of cognition are inextricably linked to one another. Only when we raise our human concerns to the level of philosophical consciousness are these concerns opened up to understanding. Upholding philosophical values presupposes a noble vision of educational purpose. This purpose is the imaginative teaching of serious thinking. It may well be that in the world today we act too much and think too little.
Address for correspondence:Dr Hayo Krombach, Centre for the Philosophy of the Natural and Social Sciences, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE.