Theory, Culture &

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The Human Sciences

Sam Whimster
Theory Culture Society 2006; 23; 174
DOI: 10.1177/026327640602300229

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10_science_063781 10/5/06 10:23 am
174 Theory, Culture & Society 23(2–3)
concerned members of the public sphere, civil
society, governance and the reflective arts.
References
Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1937) Witchcraft, Oracles
and Magic Among the Azande. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Fischer, Michael M.J. (2003) Emergent Forms of
Life and the Anthropological Voice. Raleigh,
NC: Duke University Press.
Fleck, Ludwik (1935) Genesis and Development
of a Scientific Fact. Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press.
The Human Sciences
Sam Whimster
Keywords dualism, La Mettrie, materialism,
Simmel
A
persistent theme of the human sciences
is the reduction of socio-psychological
human life to the study of the material
basis of the human organism. One of the best
examples of this was La Mettrie, who was the first
person in the modern era to give expression to the
idea of man as no more than a machine. He did
not, however, employ the term ‘a science of the
human’. This concept owes much to the English
translation of Geisteswissenschaft which, in its
German form in the late 19th century, contained
a large ambiguity. It could either mean a ‘science
of the spirit/human’ and lead towards materialism
and monism, or it could mean more generally the
humanities. The humanities, which are a celebra-
tion and expressive elucidation of the human
condition as non-reducible to any materialist base,
have been in retreat since the late 19th century
with the emergence of Darwinism as the valid
scientific account of the origin of all species of life.
So, a science of the human would seem either to
have the capacity to be inhuman or, alternatively,
to be humanistic but hardly scientific. In all of the
many and various attempts to construct a ‘human
science’ these two possibilities represent polar
opposites and they are reflected in the two
readings below.
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Page 174
Kuhn, Thomas (1962) The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions. Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press.
Latour, Bruno (1987) Science in Action.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Latour, Bruno (1993) We Have Never Been
Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Michael M.J. Fischer teaches at MIT, where he
was Director of the STS Program from
1996–2000.
I
Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–1751), a French
physician, was the first philosopher to state that not
only body but also mind and soul were determined
by physiological constitution. His L’homme machine
is taken as the starting point of a materialist science
of life. In a religious age he attracted notoriety for
stating that the soul was not immortal. Today he
can be seen as a precursor of attempts to reduce
human consciousness and behaviour to bio-
chemical states and inherited traits.
I reduce to two the systems of philosophy which
deal with man’s soul. The first and older system
is materialism; the second is spiritualism.
The human body is a machine which winds
its own springs. It is the living image of perpet-
ual movement. Nourishment keeps up the
movement which fever excites. Without food,
the soul pines away, goes mad, and dies
exhausted. The soul is a taper whose light
flares up the moment before it goes out. But
nourish the body, pour into its veins life-giving
juices and strong liquors, and then the soul
grows strong like them, as if arming itself with
a proud courage, and the soldier whom water
would have made to flee, grows bold and runs
joyously to death to the sound of drums.
Words, languages, laws, sciences, and the
fine arts have come, and by them finally the
rough diamond of our mind has been polished.
Man has been trained in the same way as
10_science_063781 10/5/06 10:23 am
Problematizing Global Knowledge – Science/Alternative Science 175
animals. He has become an author, as they have
become beasts of burden. A geometrician has
learned to perform the most difficult demon-
strations and calculations, as a monkey has
learned to take his little hat off and on, and to
mount his tame dog. All has been
accomplished through signs, every species has
learned what it could understand, and in this
way men have acquired symbolic knowledge,
still so called by our German philosophers.
Nothing, as any one can see, is so simple as
the mechanism of our education. Everything
may be reduced to sounds or words that pass
from the mouth of one through the ears of
another into his brain. At the same moment,
he perceives through his eyes the shape of the
bodies of which these words are the arbitrary
signs.
I always use the word ‘imagine,’ because I
think that everything is the work of imagin-
ation, and that all the faculties of the soul can
be correctly reduced to pure imagination in
which they all consist. Thus judgement, reason,
and memory are not absolute parts of the soul,
but merely modifications of this kind of
medullary screen upon which images of the
objects painted in the eye are projected as by
a magic lantern.
Let us now go into some detail concerning
these springs of the human machine. All the
vital, animal, natural, and automatic motions
are carried on by their action. Is it not in a
purely mechanical way that the body shrinks
back when it is struck with terror at the sight
of an unforeseen precipice, that the eyelids are
lowered at the menace of a blow, as some have
remarked, and that the pupil contracts in broad
daylight to save the retina, and dilates to see
objects in darkness?
I shall not go into any more detail concern-
ing all these little subordinate forces, well
known to all. But there is another more subtle
and marvellous force, which animates them all;
it is the source of all our feelings, of all our
pleasures, of all our passions, and of all our
thoughts: for the brain has its muscles for
thinking, as the legs have muscles for walking.
I wish to speak of this impetuous principle that
Hippocrates calls enormon (soul). This prin-
ciple exists and has its seat in the brain at the
origin of the nerves, by which it exercises its
control over all the rest of the body. By this
fact is explained all that can be explained, even
to the surprising effect of maladies of the
imagination.
To be a machine, to feel, to think, to know
how to distinguish good from bad, as well as
blue from yellow, in a word, to be born with
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Page 175
an intelligence and a sure moral instinct, and to
be but an animal, are therefore characters
which are no more contradictory, than to be an
ape or a parrot and to be able to give oneself
pleasure.
Such is the uniformity of nature, which we
are beginning to realize; and the analogy of the
animal with the vegetable kingdom, of man
with the plant. (Offray de la Mettrie, 1960)
II
In this next passage Georg Simmel concedes that
there is a material and objective determination of
the human individual, including our cognitive
capacities, but that our being and our values belong
to a separate plane or dimension of existence. The
concept of human sciences may be said to be held
in a perpetual oscillation between the materialism
of La Mettrie and the dualism of Simmel. Do we
think of the human species as existing solely
within the plane of the material, or do we think of
it as existing at the intersection of the planes of
the material and the experiential?
The order in which things are placed as natural
entities is based on the proposition that the
whole variety of their qualities rests upon a
uniform law of existence. Their equality before
the law of nature, the constant sum of matter
and energy, the convertibility of the most
diverse phenomena into one another, trans-
form the differences that are apparent at first
sight into a general affinity, a universal equality.
Yet on a closer view this means only that the
products of the natural order are beyond any
question of a law. Their absolute determinate-
ness does not allow any emphasis that might
provide confirmation or doubt of their particu-
lar quality of being. But we are not satisfied
with this indifferent necessity that natural
science assigns to objects. Instead, disregarding
their place in that series we arrange them in
another order – an order of value – in which
equality is completely eliminated, in which
the highest level of one point is adjacent to the
lowest level of another; in this series the
fundamental quality is not uniformity but
difference.
We may be aware of the same life experi-
ence as both real and valuable, but the experi-
ence has quite a different meaning in the two
cases. The series of natural phenomena could
be described in their entirety without mention-
ing the value of things; and our scale of valu-
ation remains meaningful whether or not any
of its objects appear frequently or at all in
reality. Value is an addition to the completely
10_science_063781 10/5/06 10:23 am
176 Theory, Culture & Society 23(2–3)
determined objective being, like light and
shade, which are not inherent in it but come
from a different source. However, we should
avoid one misinterpretation; namely that the
formation of value concepts, as a psychological
fact, is quite distinct from the natural process.
The meaning of value concepts is denied to
nature as a mechanical causal system, while at
the same time the psychic experiences that
make values a part of our consciousness them-
selves belong to the natural world. Valuation as
a real psychological occurrence is part of the
natural world; but what we mean by valuation,
its conceptual meaning, is something inde-
pendent of this world.
We are rarely aware of the fact that our
whole life, from the point of view of conscious-
ness, consists in experiencing and judging
values, and that it acquires meaning and signifi-
cance only from the fact that the mechanically
unfolding elements of reality possess an infinite
variety of values beyond their objective
substance. At any moment when our mind is
not simply a passive mirror or reality . . . we
live in a world of values which arranges the
contents of reality in an autonomous order.
(Simmel, 1978: 59–60)
The polarity between La Mettrie and Simmel’s
position is a philosophical one, of monism versus
dualism. While it is perfectly correct to ascribe a
humanistic approach to many of Simmel’s
writings, the first part of his Philosophy of Money
goes a long way towards establishing a theory of
value in terms of desire which in its terms is
defined as the expenditure of energy against resist-
ance. In other words Simmel’s view of the individ-
ual is one of a living organism which, like all
organisms, expends effort in pursuit of psychic
needs. Simmel in talking about life and the human
organism is quite prepared to advance naturalistic
arguments, but ultimately the sphere of values
remain beyond determination. Both Simmel and
Max Weber were intellectually open to materialist
accounts of psychological behaviour and human
attributes, but only up to a point (Whimster,
1995). Simmel drew a philosophical line (which is
traceable back to Spinoza), as in the above excerpt.
Weber was forced to struggle with the issue, having
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Page 176
written The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capi-
talism (1904–5) which raised a series of awkward
questions about the causal status of Geist: was it
psychologically determined, or theologically and
socially formed, and was it a causal determinant in
its own right? Weber’s solution to these problems
was to devise an interpretative science of social
reality (which he called sociology) (Weber, 2004).
Whatever the extent of the materialist science of
the individual and peoples – and he did not
exclude cognitive and neurological psychology,
social actors interpreted their world (with all its
materialist determinations) through values that
they constructed and sustained. Today the La
Mettrie approach is in the ascendancy. The
attempt to reduce consciousness to bio-chemical
states is analogous to Mettrie’s dismissal of the
soul. Cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychol-
ogy, behavioural ecology and evolutionary game
theory follow the same path that individuals and
social outcomes are shaped by material causes
beyond our immediate direct control. Hence, it
might be worth insisting on a Weberian distinction:
there are human sciences and there is also an inter-
pretative science of social reality.
References
Offray de la Mettrie, J.J. (1960) L’homme
machine: A Study in the Origins of an Idea.
Ed. Aram Vartanian. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Simmel, G. (1978) The Philosophy of Money.
Trans. T. Bottomore, D. Frisby and
K. Mengelberg. London: Routledge.
Weber, M. (2004) ‘Basic Sociological Concepts’,
in S. Whimster (ed.) Essential Weber. London:
Routledge.
Whimster, S. (1995) ‘Liberal Eugenics and the
Vitalist Life Sciences: Incongruities in the
German Human Sciences in the 19th
Century’, History of the Human Sciences 8(1):
107–14.
Sam Whimster is Reader in Sociology at London
Metropolitan University. He is the editor of Max
Weber Studies. His Understanding Weber will be
published in 2006 by Routledge.