Taking humanity seriously: grounds and blooms of a philosophical sociology

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Acknowledgement

I would like to express my gratitude for the invitation to participate in this debate about humanity. I thanks especially to Daniel Chernilo, whose excellent work gave me a pleasant reading and crucial reflections, and to S.L. Raza-Mejia, who does a sympathetic mediation and a precious reading, commentaries and review. I thanks also to Paulo Henrique Martins, Alberto L. C. de Farias, Rafael Damasceno and Marco Aurélio de Carvalho Silva for reading and commenting; and to the latter also for the fundamental support in the translation into English.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

André Magnelli is the founder and director of the independent institute of study and research Ateliê de Humanidades (ateliedehumanidades.com); has doctorate (2011-2015) and postdoctoral (2016) in Sociology from IESP-UERJ. He is co-editor of Cadernos do Ateliê and Ateliê de Humanidades Editorial; and editor of the tribune Fios do tempo: análises do presente [Threads of time: analysis of the present]. He organizes the ‘Humanities Cycle: ideas and debates in philosophy and social sciences’ which is carried out in partnership with the French and German Consulates in Rio de Janeiro. Magnelli researches at the interface of social theory, technosciences & society, historical sociology of the political, anthropological theory, ethics, political philosophy and rhetoric. He published the books: Durkheim, apesar do século: novas interpretações entre filosofia e sociologia (2018); Uma democracia (in)acabada: quadros e bordas da soberania do povo com Pierre Rosanvallon (2019); and Cartografias da Crítica: balanços, perspectivas e textos (2019). E-mail: [email protected].

Notes

1 Frédéric Vandenberghe also proposes this dialectical articulation between ontological, anthropological and normative presuppositions in his systematic metatheoretical framework: cf. Vandenberghe (2009).

2 I refer obviously to the ‘manifesto’ of the Frankfurt School, ‘Traditional and critical theory’ (Horkheimer 1937).

3 This is the effort we carry out in the research project ‘Cartographies of critique: between crisis, criticism and reconstruction’, carried out inside the independent institute of study and research Ateliê de Humanidades. For a project balance, see: Farias et al. (2019).

4 Curiously, Chernilo differentiates the philosophical sociology of critical theory, saying that the latter tends to establish a definitive conception of normativity, while the former represents an investigation into the open and always proofreading normative. However, although in fact there is always a tendency of critical theories to closure, even more because of the Marxist bias - which occurred in Frankfurt in the 1940 years with the conceptions of culture, personality and capitalism -, the definition of the modus operandi of Habermas can be understood as linked not only to the original intuition of the Frankfurt school, but also to the most appropriate understanding of what is critical theory. For a classic study of the Frankfurtian tradition, see: (Benhabib 1986). My critique of the first generation's theoretical closing is guided by Honneth (1991 [1985]).

5 The historical-semantic imbrication between criticism and crisis was revealed by the Koselleck’s classic: Critique and Crisis (Koselleck 1988 [1959]). We consider, however, that the relationship between criticism and crisis has, in equal measure, a systematic role. The best contemporary study about this is Cordero (2017).

6 See Habermas (1975 [1973]).

7 This reminds the conclusion to which Alain Renaut and Luc Ferry arrived in the book on ‘68 Thinking’: At the end of the subject, the criticism of the individual, of history and reason, resulted in the motto ‘to each his truth, to each his morals’: Renaut and Ferry (1985).

8 For a great mapping of three possibilities of critique, see: Honneth (2009 [2007]).

9 Against the constant misunderstanding of a supposed ‘axiological neutrality’ in Weber, Chernilo is fortunate to recall one of the ways in which the German sociologist considers a scientific critique of values valid. Interestingly, Weber attributes the scientific evaluation of the values at stake and the meaningful structure of action as something that would fit more to a philosophy than to the social sciences, which would focus more on forms of technical criticism. At any rate, in the exceptional Weberian methodological essays, I believe that we find much more collaboration for a philosophical sociology concerned with the establishment of normativity than is believed in the most widespread interpretations of Weber's work: See Weber (1965 [1951], 428–435; 121–139).

10 Here we see an excellent dialogue between the philosophical sociology of Chernilo and the work of Paul Ricoeur. Unfortunately, I merely indicate it in a footnote because there is not space to exploit it properly. Although a philosopher, Ricoeur has always maintained a dialogue with sociology, connecting it with the traditions of phenomenology and hermeneutics. Among others, see Ricoeur (1997 [1986a]). In addition, since his 1960s essays, he has shown himself to be the French philosopher who has most seriously taken the project of integrating the theories of language into distinct national and disciplinary traditions: see Ricoeur (1965); and Ricoeur (1969). He is also the philosopher who further deepened the systematic connections between text theory, action theory, self theory, narratology, social imaginaries, and questions of ethics and justice: see Ricoeur (1986b); Ricoeur (1990). Finally, in his last book, he reconstructs the path of recognition by integrating philosophical, sociological and anthropological arguments, with a view to a ‘philosophy of recognition’ with a strong normative content: Ricoeur (2004). This is how the ‘normative description’ of lexicons, philosophèmes and lived experiences leads to a phenomenology of a human being capable of saying, acting, (self-) narrating, (self-) imputing, and building relations of mutuality; in short, of a human being capable of recognizing and being recognized, but, for this very reason, vulnerable to misrecognition and disrespect.

11 Especially: Habermas (1961).

12 Emmanuelle Danblon and Michel Meyer have works that advance in the accomplishment of this anthropological seam between rhetoric, philosophy and sociology: Danblon (2005, 2013); Meyer (2008).

13 This is what I did in my rhetorical analysis of the ‘sociological justification of values’ in Emile Durkheim: Magnelli, Neto, and Weiss (2019).

14 This is what I did as an essay in: Magnelli (2016a).

15 Chernilo briefly mentioned Habermas's explorations of ontogenesis and phylogenesis, but he did not dwell on the writings on the reconstruction of historical materialism: see in particular Habermas (1985).

16 See Morin (1973, 2008 [1977–2004]).

17 I understand why Chernilo does not dialogue with anthropology, since almost all contemporary anthropology is more concerned with nonhumans than with humans, more concerned with undoing the human images constructed in modernity than in making a ‘Science of man’. Whether through culturalism or the ontological turn, anthropologists seem to be oblivious to projects as those of philosophical anthropology, being infinitely more sympathetic to Deleuze, Foucault, and Heidegger than to Kant, Cassirer, and Blumenberg.

18 Marcel Gauchet stresses the importance of ethnology: ‘Basically, [ethnology] is what the twentieth century produced as the most original in terms of the representation of history, revealing an unknown continent beyond the five thousand years we knew, by far most vast continent of human history.’ (Gauchet 2003, 81).

19 A recently published book shows how Durkheim mobilizes a vitalist ontology and a dualist anthropology in his effort to invent sociology (Magnelli, Neto, and Weiss 2019).

20 For Gauchet, there was in the emergence of structuralism ‘something completely new, which seemed to escape the impasses of both dusty academic philosophy and the empirical sciences: a unified science of man and society behind the element of language. Therein lies the profound meaning of structuralism.’ (Gauchet 2003, 43).

21 For an article that indicates a good way, see: Maniglier (2000).

22 This is what is explicitly said in the kind of structuralist manifesto that was the ‘Introduction to the work of Marcel Mauss’: Lévi-Strauss (1950).

23 As Polanyi shows, the rise of the self-regulated market and of homo economicus, which is nothing natural, transforms not only society but also the human being itself.

24 See M.A.U.S.S Manifesto: Critique de la raison utilitaire (Caillé 1989).

25 More recently, Caillé & Vandenberghe retake the proposal, claiming a ‘new classical sociology’: Caillé and Vandenberghe (2016). It is important to indicate that the proposition refers to Chernilo's own project of philosophical sociology as being one of the few to seek the desired interface between philosophy and sociology.

26 Chanial, one of M.A.U.S.S. leaders, develops a theory of human interrelations that conceptualizes the gift as the articulator of individual and collective flourishing. It is worth noting also that a whole field of research on agapic action is undertook by discussing the studies on love in Boltanski and the gift theory of M.A.U.S.S.: Araújo, Cataldi and Iorio (2015); Cataldi and Martins (2016).

27 One of the leaders of the reception of anti-utilitarianism in Latin America, Paulo Henrique Martins, carries out important works on the relationship between gift, postcoloniality and decolonization. See Martins (2019a, 2019b).

28 For this, I refer to other texts where I explore the question: Magnelli (2015); Magnelli, A. (2016b); Magnelli, Campos, Silva (2019).