Lenny Moss

The Question of Questions: What is a Gene? Comments on Rolston and Griffths & Stotz

If the question “What is a gene?” proves to be worth asking it must be able to elicit an answer which both recognizes and address the reasons why the concept of the gene ever seemed to be something worth getting excited about in the first place as well analyzing and evaluating the latest develops in the molecular biology of DNA. Each of the preceding papers fails to do one of these and sufferrs the consequences. Where Rolston responds to the apparent failure of molecular biology to make good on the desideratum of the classical gene by veering off into fanciful talk about “cybernetic genes,” Griffiths and Stotz lose themselves in the molecular fine print and forget to ask themselves why “genes” should be of any special interst anyway.

Detachment, Genomics and the Nature of Being Human

Human self-understanding and our presuppositions about nature are surely mutually implicative and inseparable, even if the reciprocal lines of influence can be complex and subtle. While we’ve come to fret quite a bit about the ethical poverty, and arguably catastrophic consequences, of our modern Western (but increasingly global) technologically-driven ‘vision of nature’, we may have lost sight of the extent to which our human self-understanding is an inextricable part of that ‘loop’. While there are many who feel sickened (on behalf of nature?) by even the suggestion of a need for any further anthropological self-reflection (haven’t we obsessed about ourselves enough?), it could well be that such sickness is itself a symptom of the same disease. Our understandings, tacit or otherwise, of nature and of ourselves, will influence and implicate each other whether we choose to become conscious of such influences or not, so surely better that we make this more explicit as opposed to less. If my intuitions (and the strategy of this chapter) are correct then any ‘high road’ to a new and better (and in any sense more ethical) vision of nature can only begotten through an interplay of ‘nature’ and ‘human nature’ concepts and considerations. Many contemporary ‘naturalists’ celebrate the idea that Darwin brought us closer to the animal world, i.e., to ‘nature’, but they ignore (at our peril) the concomitant dialectical implication, brought to our attention by Hans Jonas—that Darwin equally brought animal nature closer to us. But to reap thatbounty of potential naturalistic insight we have to also be getting it right about us. Dialectics, of course, can well resemble the logic of a ping-pong match. Following an introductory (and hopefully contextualizing) excursus on Aristotle, the strategy of this chapter will be to borrow a concept—that of ‘detachment’—from the lexicon of ‘philosophical anthropology,’ put it to use as a basic organizing concept for rethinking the ostensible ‘purposiveness of nature’ in modern terms, re-situating ourselves, anthropologically, in such a reconfigured nature and finally reflecting on that vision of a nature which has (once again) become ‘closer to us.’

Science, normativity and skill: Reviewing and renewing the anthropological basis of Critical Theory

The categories and contours of a normative social theory are prefigured by its ‘anthropological’ presuppositions. The discourse/communicative-theoretic basis of Habermasian theory was prefigured by a strong anthropological demarcation between an instrumentally structured realm of science, technology and labor versus a normatively structured realm of social interaction. An alternative anthropology, bolstered by current work in the empirical sciences, finds fundamental normative needs for orientation and ‘compensation’ also to be embedded in embodied material practices. An emerging anthropologically informed concept of skill that goes beyond old manual versus intellectual dichotomies and brings forth internal criteria of autonomy and authenticity can serve as a new bridge between categories of social justice, such as Sen and Nussbaum’s basic human ‘capabilities’, and new cutting-edge work in the empirical human sciences and thereby provide Critical Theory with a renewed point of departure that is both normatively and descriptively rich, for advancing its dialectical, historical mission.

The Meanings of the Gene and the Future of the Phenotype

Grasping at Complexity How does one analyze a living organism? It’s not as easily settled a question as it may sometimes appear. For all the indisputable success of reductionist approaches in biology we are still not yet so very close to being able to explain how an embryo develops or even how a single cell functions. If biologists were able to build a living organism, even the simplest of living cells, out of purified parts, it would certainly do much to settle methodological and epistemological conundrums over questions of relative holism versus relative reductionism and presumably it would bring biology into a more seamless continuum with the physical sciences. Good intentions and boastful ambitions notwithstanding, we still cannot predict when that feat will be accomplished. And unless and until it is accomplished (and maybe even after that) the study of the living will be uniquely burdened with the dilemma of whether to try to grab onto basic units or parts, hypothetical or otherwise, and then proceed to work one’s way ‘up’ to the complexity of a whole living system, or to begin at some minimum level of intact living complexity and attempt to poke it and probe it, hypothesize about it and take its measure in every conceivable fashion while yet preserving its integrity as a living system. Not that these need be mutually exclusive approaches – far from it. But how to relate the one to the other also remains an open question – bold claims by behavioural geneticists notwithstanding.

Detachment and compensation: Groundwork for a metaphysics of ‘biosocial becoming’

There are many in the social sciences and social philosophy who would aspire to overcome the ‘nature/culture binary’, including some who, with at least an implicit nod toward a putatively ‘anti-essentialist’ process ontology, have set out with an orientation toward a paradigm of ‘biosocial becoming’ (Ingold and Palsson, 2013). Such contemporary work, however, in areas such as social and cultural anthropology and sciences studies has often failed to clarify, let alone justify, the warrants of their most basic assumptions and assertions. In what follows, adumbrations will be offered for a comprehensive metaphysics of ‘biosocial becoming’ that can stand accountable both to empirical/descriptive and to normative claims.

On nature and normativity: Normativity, teleology, and mechanism in biological explanation

There is a spectre haunting contemporary Anglophone philosophy . . . and it is not teleology. The spectre is that of an intractable problem when it comes to reconciling two commitments that are each pervasively embraced by contemporary philosophers and yet ostensibly irreconcilable, namely: (a) that there is no respectable alternative to some form of philosophical naturalism, and (b) that human life is saturated with norms in general and that philosophy itself is especially beholding to the norms of rationality in particular. One need look no further, for ample confirmation, than the recent collection edited by Mario De Caro and David Macarthur, entitled simply Naturalism and Normativity (2010). Featuring contributions by the likes of Hilary Putnam, Richard Rorty, T. M. Scanlon, Akeel Bilgrami, Huw Price, Paul Redding, Peter GodfreySmith and others, the common aspiration is clear: to avoid the Scylla of some form of reductive, normative eliminativism on the one side and the Charybdis of a dualistic non-naturalism on the other. Normativity, for these thinkers, is identified with the realm of the human, and the overarching strategy of the contributors is that of finding a ‘naturalism’ that is neither too reductively restrictive (to be able to countenance human normativity as natural) nor too permissively liberal (to be able to appear as natural in any presumably relevant sense). The good news seems to be that humans too are natural. The bad news seems to be that sailing this middle course is easier said than done. Any brand of naturalism that is sufficiently capacious as to do justice to the strong normativity of human practice appears to suffer such a radical disconnect from ‘scientific naturalism’ as to veer off into dualism, whereas any naturalism that stays faithful to the precepts of natural science appears inevitably to find its way to some form of normative eliminativism. All the many deflationary moves by contributors notwithstanding, the path not taken, nor scarcely even considered, is that of a more radical re-thinking of just what is the relationship

Prague – a 21st-century salon and beyond?

As Dick Bernstein’s and Alessandro Ferrera’s own reminiscences disclose, the origins and structure of what became the Prague meeting were shaped in response to historically specific political challenges which further elicited certain emancipatory motivations. A quarter of a century hence marks a propitious moment for reassessing the good fit between form and function, between the historical/political challenges we perceive and the realization of the best possibilities of Prague for addressing them. I will attempt to suggest succinctly a perspective along these lines, not meant as a final word but rather as a solicitation for further conversation. I am myself heading into a dozen years of participation in the Prague meetings, which coincides also with my move from an American to a British university. My outlook is conditioned by both of these. There is, first of all, at least an apparent paradox with respect to normative presuppositions. Normative reconstruction of institutional practices (even our own) may not be critical theory’s only game in town, but it certainly is one of our most venerable. Whereas questions of democracy and democratic procedure are front and center at the meeting itself, there are no formal democratic procedures that determine the appointment of directors or the relationship of directors to participants. All decisions are made by the directors and if directors themselves adhere to democratic procedures these are not made visible beyond the de facto enclosure of directorial interactions. What a moment’s reflection on normative presuppositions suggests is that ‘Prague’ is (or has become) not a political organization but essentially a kind of 21st-century salon consisting of hosts and guests with the normative presuppositions that follow thereof. Intuitive endorsement for this characterization is indeed quickly found in the gratitude that we participant ‘guests’ feel for the hard work that the directorial hosts donate on an annual basis and for the fact of our being invited to participate. Observing a quarter century duration surely attests to some felicity of the salon format, and yet to be true to the intention of our history is also about not necessarily being limited by the visions and vicissitudes of the past.