Hopefully this will make it through this time.
AA
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 1 May 1996 13:52:40 -0500 (CDT)
From: Andrew W. Austin <aaustin@mtsu.edu>
To: wsn@csf.colorado.edu
Subject: Re: historical responsibility (fwd)
"Homo sapiens sapiens" is a biological concept. Biology is socially
constructed, or, at the very least, interpreted through socially
constructed frames. Reality, including empirical reality, is only made
meaningful within conceptual and symbolic systems created through, and
reified by, social interaction and processes. Humans are at the center of
history and science, because history and science are human products. I
call this the "fact" of historicity.
What is "human"is a social concept. What is human is not only interpreted
thought socially constructed frames that are subject to the "fact" of
historicity, but the human itself is a social product. We are all born Homo
sapiens, this is our genetic/biological/morphological heritage as a
species, nomenclature made meaningful through taxonomic schemes
(schemes constructed by humans and constructed socially). But we must be
socialized (humanized) to become human. Therefore, to say that there is
an unalterable "human nature" is to naturalize an historically and
socioculturally given entity, on both the conceptual and the material
level. This sort of doctrine or ideology becomes a barrier to
critical theory and analysis. Whereas history and science are human
products, humans are products of social relations. Science, and its
speculations vis a vis "human nature," are, at the core, a social process.
To summarize, human beings and what is considered being human is a
product of the sociocultural and historical matrix, itself a product of
social relations, made meaningful in the intersubjective. These reciprocal
relationships have been defined variously as interaction between agent and
structure, and structure and process, etc. But it is, in all cases,
self-in-society and society-in-self simultaneously. Human is a creative
entity; we make and remake ourselves. Therefore, a human cannot have a
permanent character or "nature." It is absolute idealism (and utopian) to
posit such a nature, particularly ahistorically and asocially.
Peace,
Andy