ABSTRACT
With regard to the onset of the neo-Humanist revolt of the 1960s we have seen that both phenomenology and existentialism, and now the psychological sciences, were indeed self-destructing on the cardinal matter of the structure/ agency problem. This of course was to show in two decades, as I have already averred, that the crisis of social science concerning the ontology of human being was surely on its way to dying out. In view of Chapters 3 and 4 we are strongly entitled to assert that the above self-destruction must, at bottom, be placed at the “doorstep” of the ultimate thesis and the conflation of science with positivism. Since the conflation cemented the legitimacy of the ultimate thesis we discovered the following consequences in philosophy and the psychological sciences: continental philosophy was doomed to insist that freedom is a power, but because of the metaphysical limitations imposed on phenomenology by the above-mentioned legitimacy, the power of that freedom was nevertheless going to be power-less by virtue of the fact that it is without recourse to a realist ontology of the natural world; while Hullian behaviorism was driven by the ultimate thesis to artificially substitute instantaneity for spontaneity, in being blinded by the same dogma that patiency is natural and agency therefore supernatural, Skinnerian behaviorism winds up with the basic premise of emitted behavior that it is actually contradicted by its own empirical observations to be the basic premise of agentive action; and finally in the case of classical psychoanalysis, even with Holt’s stunning rejection of the “passive reflex/instinct model,” it nevertheless was left stranded with the dead-end idea of “directly experienced psychological energy,” and no means of ever giving it up for the more promising idea of a “directly experienced personal agency.” Remember, and we can take this fact as fundamentally relevant to both behaviorism as well as psychoanalysis, Holt threw out Freud’s having to reinstate the freedom of the Kantian ego. This meant, of necessity, that he would not be in a position to discover how to get from energy to agency. And, furthermore, consider this: as Holt had no idea that to move from energy to agency he needs causal powers theory, the premier psychoanalytic theorists of the next generation,
Gardner and Edelson, hit on causal powers theory, to be sure, but only to use it to reinstate the agency of the unconscious, all over again. The stalemate of the psychological sciences here must be judged beyond salvation. Why would anyone say of psychology – both behaviorism and psycho-
analysis – that “it is somewhere between fanciful and hopeless?” Perhaps the critical analysis presented in Chapter 4 and summarized above is one way to understand that. On the eve of the 1960s, it is not surprising to discover that Dahrendorf
expressed the predicament of being the victim of the ultimate thesis and of the conflation in an essay that had its roots in a crucial historical situation of German social science in the nineteenth century. That situation, thoroughly discussed in Chapter 4, was the fact that German social science was evincing a nationalist variety of the Science and Humanism debate, in which their natural science came forth with the formidable Solemn Oath with which to challenge the new structure/agency discourse of mechanism/vitalism. We have seen that the new discourse revealed the spectacular prominence of the ultimate thesis in its instantiation in the “passive reflex model,” thus deeply explaining why there was that renowned rigid separation of the natural and the cultural “sciences.” In other words, that thesis and model prescribed for Humanism as well as science its infamous fatal judgment: since the Kantian and Hegelian social and cultural realms were to be seen as extra-natural, hence as located in the world of “spirit,” they were therefore to be condemned as being beyond any possibility of scientific analysis (Turner et al. 1995: 179). Now, while true for Hegel, that judgment was of course dead wrong for Kant: his sophisticated understanding of the causal realism of science contradicted the cardinal point of the Solemn Oath. Consider that the reminder here of the discussion of the “passive reflex model” in Chapter 4 definitively reveals the metaphysical thrust that is the subtext of Dahrendorf ’s “Homo Sociologicus.” In short, the ultimate thesis is carried forward in that essay: Dahrendorf articulates the structure/agency problem around the idea that phenomenal determinism is the ontology of nature; and of course, since the ultimate thesis and its “passive reflex model” are mistaken, the categorical acceptance of phenomenal determinism is categorically mistaken. And we should note the significant fact that the “passive reflex model” would indeed be to taken to equally mean a “passive instinct model.” I have shown elsewhere that it has been a commonplace mistake in Freud and the social sciences to conflate the concepts of “reflex” and “instinct” (Varela 2003: 106). It is now thus eminently clear that in the major discourses that express the metaphysical tension with regard to human being and the natural world – free will and determinism (the Hobbes/Rousseau and Romantic traditions), noumenal ego and phenomenal world (the Kantian tradition), mechanism and vitalism (nineteenth-century biology and the Freudian tradition), social system and voluntarism (the Parsonian tradition), and structure and agency (the Giddensian tradition) – the ultimate thesis and the conflation of reflex and instinct that articulates that thesis is a unifying metaphysical theme.
