The Phenomenological Papers V: The Force of Concepts & The Art(s) of Living

This is the fifth essay in my series, The Phenomenological Papers, a series of essays on topics in phenomenology and metaphysics. You can find the first essay here, the second here, the third here, and the fourth here. Here I discuss the phenomenology of what I call 'concepts', ways entities (yourself, others, or institutions) conceive of people as being, and the effects applying these concepts have on the ways we are, but most especially how we relate to ourselves. This essay is very much a product of my engagement with Foucault, part of whose general methodology and views about how reality is constituted for and by us has always seemed to me to be fundamentally correct. Unfortunately the fundamentals about which I believe he is correct (as well as his importance) have been obscured for various reasons. The present essay is an attempt to bring out, in my own way, some of what I believe he has already shown with his work.

The term [“sexuality”] did not appear until the beginning of the nineteenth century, a fact that should be neither underestimated nor overinterpreted. It does point to something other than a simple recasting of vocabulary, but obviously it does not mark the sudden emergence of that to which “sexuality” refers. The use of the word was established in connection with other phenomena: the development of diverse fields of knowledge (embracing the biological mechanisms of reproduction as well as the individual or social variants of behavior); the establishment of a set of rules and norms – in part traditional, in part new – which found support in religious, judicial, pedagogical, and medical institutions; and changes in the way individuals were led to assign meaning and value to their conduct, their duties, their pleasures, their feelings and sensations, their dreams. In short, it was a matter of seeing how an “experience” came to be constituted in modern Western societies, an experience that caused individuals to recognize themselves as subjects of a “sexuality,” which was accessible to very diverse fields of knowledge and linked to a system of rules and constraints. What I planned, therefore, was a history of the experience of sexuality, where experience is understood as the correlation between fields of knowledge, types of normativity, and forms of subjectivity in a particular culture.
– Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume Two, The Use of Pleasure

I. There are specific ways that specific people are. One person will be outspoken, while another will be reserved. One person will be competitive, while another lacks any taste for it. One person will tend to be sexually attracted towards men, while another will tend to be sexually attracted towards women. What a person is, it seems, just is the sum of ways they actually are at a given point. Some of the characteristics people have are shared in common with others. Which is to say, people are, in particular respects, the same, or at least similar to one another, in some respect. Thus, just as we say of one person that they are competitive, or left-handed, we say of another that they are too, if, and only if, they have ‘the same’ qualities as the other. We try to capture these shared characteristics in collections of persons by classifying and categorising them.
To classify and to categorise people is to abstract one or a cluster of common characteristics shared by different individuals and forming a concept out of them. A concept, for the purposes of this essay, is just that: a possible way, or a cluster of ways, that a subject could be. I mean this in the broadest sense as including everyday, moral, cultural, and scientific concepts. For example, we may describe subjects as being resilient, honest, suave, introverted or autistic. Or, we may say that they are a man, woman, mother, husband, influencer, dandy, manager, executive, scientist, king, or queen. These are all concepts in the sense used here. There are of course other concepts that don’t capture ways that people are but ways other things are, such as specific types of animals, plants, chemicals, or artifacts. However, unless otherwise made explicit, when I talk about concepts in this essay, I only mean those concepts meant to classify persons.

Nature, Nurture, & the Constitution of Human Life

I. One of the scientific debates I try somewhat to keep up with is the so-called “nature versus nurture” debate, the debate as to whether and to what extent individual traits and abilities are determined by our biology (which is what I will use as for a catch all for genes and whatever other mechanism may be supposed to be doing this work) or by our environment, which is supposed to include all mechanisms other than those that are intrinsic to our individual biology, including our upbringing, what we are taught, and our social life.

Note that this question of biological versus environmental determination is different from the question of the heritability of individual traits and abilities. The heritability of a trait is the ratio of biologically caused variation to total variation of that trait within a specific population. Heritability is often used to support arguments that specific traits are biologically determined. But, as Ned Block carefully shows in his classic article on the matter, that a trait is heritable does not by itself entail that it is biologically determined, and this means that other (often highly controversial) background assumptions and arguments are required to make this step. The question of the heritability of a trait needs, therefore, to carefully be pulled apart from the question of whether it is our biology or the environment that actually determines an individual’s traits in a given situation.

There is no need, however, for you to understand heritability, as it is only the latter question I will be concerned with here, the biological versus environmental determination of human traits and abilities. However, what follows is not a direct intervention in this debate, but rather, a modest intervention into its supposed stakes for the lives of individuals, and how we conceive of those lives.

Contra Kant and Mill on Goodness in Society

I. In The Metaphysics of Morals ("The Metaphysical Elements of the Theory of Right"), Kant lays out the conditions under which a society is in a state of 'right', a state which, if you care about being in a society (which we all almost always do), he thinks you must accept as the society towards which we ought to strive. He describes it as following:

'Every action which by itself or by its maxim enables the freedom of each individual's will to co-exist with the freedom of everyone else in accordance with a universal law is right.' 

Thus if my action or my situation in general can co-exist with the freedom of everyone in accordance with a universal law, anyone who hinders me in either does me an injustice for this hindrance or resistance cannot co-exist with freedom in accordance with universal laws.

The basic idea of this is that: as long as your free actions or your acting on the principles underlying them (the premises from which you reasoned to undertake them) do not interfere with my free actions or my acting on the principles underlying them, then we stand in a relation of right to one another. For example, if I decide to spend the day at the beach, this does not hinder you from doing the same, or from anything else. But if I decide to burn your house down, this would clearly hinder you in both your actions, and situation in general. In the former situation we stand in a relation of right, in the latter we do not. A whole society is in a state of right if all people stand in the former relation, where their free actions, whatever they happen to be, do not impede on the free actions of others, whatever they happen to be. This is the state towards which we ought to strive.