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Speaking Biology 1 Speaking Biology. From Kant to Parsons…. And beyond? Script for Lecture May 19th 2008 FAU Erlangen Sociology Colloquium The audience of this event was comprised of MA and PhD graduate students and members of the faculty on the occasion of a summary lecture of the results of my work as a PhD candidate of the department, a relation to my current projects and their relation to my conception of the future of social science in general. Alexander Stingl Galvanistrasse 17 90459 Nuremburg Gemany +491607863333 [email protected] 2 1.Introduction to Speech First of all thank you for having me today, and thank you very much for agreeing to let me speak in English. I am obliged by protocol to mention the DAAD, because they made possible a trip to the Parsons archives at Harvard in Summer 2007. I most certainly would have to mention a great many names of people who have aided my research, but we probably would be running out of time. So I refer to the publication of the thesis, which will occur within a year’s time, with Edward Mellen Press it seems. The title of this presentation is “Speaking biology. From Kant to Parsons”. Since the general assumption is that I have, been doing my PhD work on Talcott Parsons, I must first make a very important confession: I have not. My interest was in the sources and the genealogy of his theoretical language in the history of science. I have found that the language that Parsons applied was the language of biology. Aside from that, allow me a provocation: I have also found out that Parsons seems inevitably quite and utterly boring. Now, before I elaborate – on both, the biology and the boredom – let me please explain in short why and how I became interested in Talcott Parsons and why and how he became actually the least of my worries. 2. Communication as Problem The problem I was thus toying with some five years ago when I was still pondering what I wanted to do not for my PhD, but my MA thesis – which took a very different turn in topic, but delivered the first inkling of my methodological approach; now this problem was the question or questions: 3 How, when and why did we begin to address the problem or the question of Communication and Mediality or Communicabilty in science and philosophy? While it certainly is always a nice sentiment to say with Alfred North Whitehead that all our pondering is but a footnote to Plato, I think it is equally clear that the way in which we today in the social sciences, in humanities and in the natural sciences and even in popular and public discourse speak about communication, information and media has a distinct “quality” to it. A quality not found in Plato, or Aquinas or Descartes. This “quality” has emerged at a certain place in time, under certain circumstances and with certain consequences. My research was and will continue to be guided by this question, because I remain convinced that this “quality” is the guiding thread, the thin red line that connects all of modern science. In the end, all those “turns” we have witnessed – the linguistic turn, the cultural turn, the iconic turn – they can all be reduced to the problem of communication, communicability and media. Naturally, I sought to begin my research, or let us say my adventure of communication with an archeology. And coming from the background of sociology I started at the uppermost layer of social theories. 4 3. Parsons/Habermas/Luhmann It is certainly no surprise then that I began with Niklas Luhmann’s media theory on the one hand and was looking at the aspect of the differences that his theory has with his opponent Jürgen Habermas in regard to communication and media. We can look at both men in a way that suggests that they are both different sides of the very same coin. But like two sides of a coin, they will forever face in exactly opposite directions and never one another. And they both share a blind spot, namely the body of the coin itself. In other words, from a less dogmatic point of view that allows for some contextualism Luhmann and Habermas offer two complementary accounts of social reality with the exception of their analogous blind spot. That blind spot is filled by a theory that accounts for a bridge between individual actors and collectivities as systems. A theory that accounts for the intermediary. That theory is the theory of Talcott Parsons, whose scholarship served both Luhmann and Habermas as an intellectual basis. At the same time, Parsons had enunciated the very first explicit sociological media and communication theory. In my archeology, Parsons became the natural next step downwards to finding a source of the problem of communication in science. A brief word on Habermas’ sources, which will receive a specific twist further down. There are many works and theories that Habermas draws from. But aside from Parsons, there is certainly one other that has received comparatively little attention by his interpreters. That is Hannah Arendt. I must thank Mark Gould for pointing this out to me and thereby confirming my suspicion on that. And please forgive me for leaving you in the dark for but a moment, why Hannah Arendt has a role to play in my reconstruction of Parsons’ language. 4. Archeology of Parsons: Back to Kant via Jaspers/Weber and Meiklejohn/Early Pragmatism (Emerson/James/Cooley) My archeology leads me through Parsons down a very interesting road. Parsons combines in a sense the best of both worlds: the Anglo-American and the Continental-European context. Very specifically, these worlds circumscribe the 5 interdisciplinary and international discourse of philosophy and physiology in the dialogue between Northeast Coast American and German scholarship in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In the United States, Parsons was immersed in a tradition that ran from Alexander Meiklejohn’s Kantianism back to the first generation of Pragmatism with Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James. In Germany, Parsons found a similar intellectual climate in Karl Jaspers’ class-room in Heidelberg, where he encountered the spirit of Max Weber and Emile Durkheim. There were a number of candidates, for who was the common source for these different strands of the intellectual discourse. Upon careful reconstruction this source was revealed to be Rudolf Hermann Lotze (1817 – 1881). Lotze was both a philosopher and a physiologist. My task was therefore set: If I wanted to find out, how the theoretical language of Talcott Parsons was made possible, then I had to investigate the discourse of philosophy and physiology. Going further back from Lotze it became clear to me that indeed the source for the conceptual frame of reference for this dialogue was Kantian philosophy. Turning from archeology to genealogical reconstruction, I would have to begin with Kant and Kantianism and via Lotze investigate the German and American branches of the discourse that became re-united in Parsons’ theoretical language. 5. Biology versus Logic My idea is thus the following: Talcott Parsons spoke a theoretical language that has become rare in the social sciences. He was one of the last scholars to be socialized, educated and immersed in an intellectual climate permeated by Kantianism and Lotzeanism “in spirit”, if you like. This way of talking, thinking and theorizing, this mode of thought, or as we can call it dialect of science, this epistemological vernacular of biology has been replaced by another language. A dialect of science, a vernacular that owes its conceptions to physicalist reductionism, naturalism, mathematics, logics and the idea of quantification. 6 The emergence of this dialect occurred towards the end of the nineteenth century with John Dewey, Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore. It gained strength and with Quine and others became the dominant tongue of science, including social science. 6. Genius Accounts versus discursive accounts I am speaking of languages more than of people. And in this regard, let me briefly say something about previous interpretations of the work and biography of Talcott Parsons. Whenever I mention that I am generally interested in the work of Parsons the reaction is two-fold. One half of people simply roll their eyes thinking I am seeking to “re-introduce grand theory”, a type of theory that seeks to have an “abstract explanation for everything”. Well, I do not, nor does that interpretation do justice to what Parsons did. Plus, I am not interested in Parsons’ work and biography for the sake of Parsons but because he is an excellent example for a development in the history of science – the genealogy of the biological vernacular. The other half of the people, making usually the same mistake, give me the advise that Harald Wenzel has written the final word on Parsons, or that I can at best offer a footnote correction and that any attempt to link Parsons to Neo-Kantianism or whatever else must fail, because Harald Wenzel has shown that the sole interpretation left is to link Parsons to Alfred North Whitehead. Or so I been told by Wolfgang Schluchter and Hans Joas. Well, since I did not want to write a biography of Parsons or simply offer another reconstruction of his theoretical development, I do not feel obliged to accept that. But most interestingly, my work reveals that there would be another account of Parsons possible. The problem is the following: Nearly all previous attempts follow what we can call a “genius-account”. Parsons life and work is reconstructed in the course of the life of Talcott Parsons the genius, the man, the individual.
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