Transcendentalism, social embeddeddness, and the problem of individuality (original) (raw)
Related papers
2019
The heritage of transcendental philosophy, and more specifically its viability when it comes to the problematic of the philosophy of social sciences, has been a key point of dissensus between Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel. Whereas Apel has explicitly aimed at a transcendental-pragmatic transformation of philosophy, Habermas has consequently insisted that his formal pragmatics, and the theory of communicative action which is erected upon it, radically de-transcendentalizes the subject. In a word, the disagreement concerns whether transcendental entities have any substantial role to play in philosophical discourse and social-scientific explanations. My aim is to reconstruct how Apel establishes a connection between transcendentals, qua the ideal communicative community and the possibility of non-objectifying self-reflection. As I shall demonstrate, the principles that transcendental pragmatics sees as underlying social actions are not to be understood in a strictly judicial way, ...
As pure consciousness never acts in prohibition to the experience of mental phenomena, symbolic appearances, noumenal projections, or the positing of the object as both a Cartesian ego cogito and an abstract objective self from the transcendental horizon, we find an essential contradiction wherein we concern ourselves with the forms of production that rest before the transcendental subject. Therewith, the bio-genetic substrate of ontical being is addressed within a " scientism " before it has the opportunity to possess its own transcendency. But here, while the possibility of a synthesis between the social totality and the transcendental subject seems an ontico-ontological impossibility, one discovers the renewal of the image through its symbolization of the real throughout the fusion of transcendental subject and social production.
Societies Within: Selfhood through Dividualism & Relational Epistemology
Most see having their individuality stifled as equivalent to the terrible forced conformity found within speculative fiction like George Orwell's 1984. However, the oppression of others by those in power has often been justified through ideologies of individualism. If we look to animistic traditions, could we bridge the gap between these extremes? What effect would such a reevaluation of identity have on the modern understanding of selfhood? The term ' in dividual' suggests an irreducible unit of identity carried underneath all of our titles and experiences—the real self. By linking Marilyn Strathern's elaboration of dividualism and Nurit Bird-David's relational epistemology , a clear contrast forms between the animistic sense of self and that of the West. This system of selfhood more readily encourages a life lived in Henri Bergson's sense of duration and sets up a state of dialogical discourse , as seen in Mikhail Bakhtin's work. These concepts challenge the traditional praise for individuality and exposes how individualism can be used as a tool of marginalization as seen in Michel Foucault's critique of authorship. I argue that pursuing a sense of self rooted in these concepts instead of individualism mitigates this marginalization via a more socially aware cultural environment that the traditional Western sense of self fails to create.
Transcendental Social Ontology
In this article I would like to engage in a discussion on the possibility of reinstituting the relevance of transcendental philosophy for social ontology. With social ontology I denote a field of study examining the different modes and types of human co-operation which characterize different kinds of associations, communities, societal practices and institutions. I claim that Husserl’s philosophy of intersubjectivity provides us with a rich dynamic of communal existence, one which is able to afford communities a certain transcendental status. This means that the question of intersubjectivity cannot be returned back to the idea of shared intentions or common mental states, but it entails a fundamental relation to transcendence, that is, to the constitution of a common world. Thus intersubjectivity, according to the phenomenological position, must be approached from the idea of transcendental correlation, that is, the relation between constituting subjectivity and constituted accomplishments.
Towards an Alternative Social Theory (A.S.T)
The purpose of this essay is to understand one of the possible implications of Graham Harman's thinking in the field of Social Theory. If you ask a classic sociologist “How do you define your own field?”, you probably will receive a variety of answers from many sources, but there is something that is always in the background if you pay attention. Like any kind of Human Science, “Sociology” would be the study of human behavior and anything associated with it. So, we sociologists supposedly study language, culture, ideology, power, class, gender, and so on. It does not matter if you are a structuralist, pragmatist, or postmodern. What matters is the existence of a humanism always lurking in the epistemological shadows. The Human in Social Theory, therefore, is not only a material thing, a simple monkey walking around and using complex signs, but a transcendental structure, a kind of persistent matrix that we cannot get rid of. When a Social Theorist talks about anything, they all keep the same premise as always, i.e, all of them preserve the transcendentalist structure in their approaches, especially the most famous transcendental ever created: The Human
Realism without Reductionism: Toward an Ecologically Embedded Sociology
2005
Building off of the path-breaking works of Roy Bhaskar —and in particular his philosophical position of critical realism—this paper works toward a realignment of sociology with the life and ecological sciences. Sociology has been cautious of looking too far into the realm of the biophysical for causal potentials out of fear that such analyses might mark the beginning of a slippery slope toward biological reductionism. Yet, as this paper argues, such fears of reductionism are conceptually misguided. Critical realism argues that reality is stratified, rooted, and emergent. Consequently, to bracket social life from those levels “beneath” it—or, in some cases, to write out nature entirely (e.g., discursive theory and “strong” social constructionism)—is to approach the study of those phenomena with a degree of institutionalized blindness. Instead, this paper argues that sociology must open its doors to all causal potentials, regardless of where this search may lead.