PhiloNotebook

the Adventures of Dasein: History, Biology, and Culture

state-of-the-art scholarly texts

Thinking in the Twenty-first Century (Transcendental Empiricism)

from Imanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787)

Thoughts without intuitions are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind.

from Eckart Förster, The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy: a Systematic Reconstruction (Harvard, 2012)

. . . concepts have their basis in functions, by which Kant understands “the unity of the act of bringing various representations under one common representaton.” (A68). A concept is a rule for combining certain representations (and thus also a principle for excluding certain others). Thus the represesntations ’white’, ‘grainy’, ‘saline’ are combined and ordered in the concept ‘salt, while the representations ‘colorless’, ‘liquid’, ‘tasteless’ (say) are not. In this way a concept is a rule allowing me to unite certain representations and to bring them under a higher representation, i.e. the concept. (pp. 22-3)

Cognition does not consist merely in the collecting of phenomena; rather we strive to forge conceptual links between them and to grasp the laws of nature that are valid for specific classes of objects as cases of yet more general laws, whereby we are guided by the ideal of a unified explanation of nature. (p. 38)

To make concepts out of representations one must be able to compare, to reflect, and to abstract, for these three logical operations of the understanding are the essential and universal conditions for the generation of every concept whatsoever. I see, e.g., a spruce, a willow, and a linden. By first comparing these objects with one another I note that they are different from one another in regard to the trunk, the branches, the leaves, etc.; but next I reflect on that which they have in common among themselves, trunk, branches, and leaves themselves, and I abstract from the quantity, the figure, etc., of these; thus I acquire a concept of a tree. (p. 250)

from Levi R. Bryant, Difference and Givenness: Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence (Northwestern University Press, 2008)

. . . . so long as philosophy assumes that thought has a natural affinity with the true . . . a specific form of objectivity (natural common sense), and bases itself on the model of recognition, thought cannot help but become unconsciously trapped in its own implicit presuppositions which are culturally, historically, and socially contingent. . . . Deleuze thus begins with a critique of the transcendental subject as a structure consisting of invariant categories. (17)

from Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University, 2007)

Discursive practices define what counts as meaningful statements. Statements are not the mere utterances of the originating consciousness of a unified subject; rather, statements and subjects emerge from a field of possibilities. This field of possibilities is not static or singular but rather is a dynamic and contingent multiplicity. 146-7

. . . the primary ontological units are not 'things' but phenomena--dynamic topological / reconfigurings / entanglements / relationalities / (re)articulations of the world. And the primary semantic units are not 'words' but material-discursive practices through which (ontic and semantic) boundaries are constituted. This dynamic is agency.

Inka Mülder-Bach, "Introduction" to Siegfried Kracauer, The Salaried Masses: Duty amd Distraction in Weimar Germany (Verso, 1998), p. 15.

. . . now theory forfeits its hierarchically privileged position in relation to empirical material. It infiltrates the surface, so to speak, manifesting itself in the way the tessera of the 'mosaic' are cut and in the interstices left between them. . . . this conceptual language misses precisely what matters crucially to Kracauer: the details of the situations, their complexity, the perspectives of their agents . . . His investigation, therefore, refrains from formulating its insight in a conceptual language removed from its material. . . Knowledge of the material's significance becomes the principle of its textual representation, so that the representation itself articulates the theory.

from from Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare: the Evolution of Human Consciousness (W.W. Norton, 2001), pp. 301-2

The human mind has been drastically changed by culture. In modern culture, enculturation has become an even more formative influence on mental development than it was in the past. This may be a direct reflection of brain plasticity, rather than genetic change, but that does not in any way diminish the importance of the change from a purely cognitive standpoint. The human mind is so plastic in the way it carries out its cognitive business, individually and in groups, that the core configuration of skills that defines a mind actually varies significantly as a function of different kinds of culture. This is especially true of the most conscious domains of mind, such as those involved in formal thinking and representation.

Let me be very clear about what I mean here. I am not speaking of trivial cultural changes, such as variations in custom or language use. These are by far the most common and have no proven cognitive impact. The most important of these is literacy. Literacy skills change the functional organization of the brain and deeply influence how individuals and communities of literate individuals perform cognitive work. Mass literacy has triggered two kinds of major cogitive reorganizations, one in individuals and the other in groups.

To become fully literate, the individual must acquire a host of neural demons that are completely absent from anyone who lacks literacy training. This involves massive restructuring. There is no equivalent in the preliterate mind to the circuits that hold the complex neural components of a reading vocabulary or the elaborate procedural habits of formal thinking. These are unnatural. They have to be hammered in by decades of intensive schooling, which changes the functional uses of certain brain circuits and rewire the functional architecture of thought. This process can be very extensive. Consider the impact of twenty or more years of schooling on the brain of someone who has acquired full symbolic literacy in several different technical, mathematical, scientific, and musical fields. These skills encumber neural resources on a vast scale and change how the person's mind carries out its work.

from Lionel Bailly, Lacan: a Beginner’s Guide (Oneworld, 2009)

The human child needs no training, or even teaching: human beings acquire language by simply 'crossing the bar' in the relationship between signifier and signified; and once the bar is crossed, the human psyche is in the entrance hall of the Symbolic realm, with all its vast possibilities. (46)

The associations between signifiers and their high mobility allow for the immeasurable complexity of human psychological functioning, both conscious and unconscious. (47)

The signified concepts are already present in the child’s mind, and it is the exercise of these concepts, via the vocalization, that produces pleasure in the game. In this case, jouissance is derived from the functioning of the psychological apparatus . . . . This process of symbolization is the means by which drives may be enjoyed in a sublimated form: ‘Sublimation is nonetheless satisfaction of the drives, without repression.’ [Sahlins] (120)

There is just as much, if not greater jouissance in the functioning of the mind than in the functioning of any other bodily part. The ability to cross the bar of metaphor, to operate in the symbolic realm—to conceptualize, to analyze, and to rationalise—are all libidinal functions, which entail enjoyment of the mere functioning of the intellect. (124)

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Marshall Sahlins, Hierarchy, Equality, and the Sublimation of Anarchy: The Western Illusion of human nature. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, delivered at The University of Michigan, November 4, 2005

Human culture, it needs be considered, is much older than human nature: culture has been in existence for two million years or more, ten or fifteen times longer than the modern human species, homo sapiens. Respectable biological opinion has come around to seeing the human brain as a social organ, evolving in the Pleistocene under the “pressure” of maintaining a relatively extended, complex, and solidary set of social relationships. This is to say that culture, which is the condition of the possibility of this successful social organization, thereby conditioned the possibilities of the human organism, body and soul. The “pressure” was to become a cultural animal, or, more precisely, to culturalize our animality. For two million years, we have evolved biologically under cultural selection. Not that we are or were “blank slates,” lacking any inherent biological imperatives, only that what was uniquely selected for in the genus homo was the ability to realize these imperatives in the untold different ways that archaeology, history, and anthropology have demonstrated. Biology became a determined determinant, inasmuch as its necessities were mediated and organized symbolically.

What is most pertinent to the relations between physis and nomos is not (for example) that all cultures have sex but that all sex has culture. sexual drives are variously expressed and repressed according to local determinations of appropriate partners, occasions, times, places, and bodily practices. We sublimate our generic sexuality in all kinds of ways—including its transcendence in favor of the higher values of celibacy, which also proves that in symbolic regimes there are more compelling ways of achieving immortality than the inscrutable mystique of the “selfish gene.”

As it is for sex, so for other inherent needs, drives, or dispositions: nutritional, aggressive, egoistic, sociable, compassionate—whatever they are, they come under symbolic definition and thus cultural order. In the occurrence, aggression or domination may take the behavioral form of, say, the new Yorker’s response to “Have a nice day”—“don’t tell me what to do!” We war on the playing fields of Eton, give battle with swear words and insults, dominate with gifts that cannot be reciprocated, or write scathing book reviews of academic adversaries. Eskimos say gifts make slaves, as whips make dogs. But to think that, or to think our proverbial opposite, that gifts make friends—a saying that like the Eskimos’ goes against the grain of the prevailing economy—requires that we are born with “watery souls,” waiting to manifest our humanity for better or worse in the meaningful experiences of a particular way of life.

from Christian J. Emden, Nietzsche on Language, Consciousness, and the Body (University of Illinois Press, 2005), p. 75

In Die fröliche Wissenschaft (1882) Nietzsche proposes that language enables us to “produce” things, to shape our conception of reality: “This has given me the greatest trouble and still does: to realize that what things are called is incomparably more important than what they are . . . it is sufficient to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order to create, in the long run, new ‘things’” (GS 58).

For Nietzsche, language lets us grasp, order, and judge what we regard as reality, and it also gives us the means to reflect on this reality through the development of general terms and concepts, which let us realize similarities and relations among things and see contexts and construct coherent systems of belief about this reality. Our experience and knowledge of reality . . . is therefore embedded in a network of concepts delineating what we perceive as our environment.

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state-of-the-art scholarly texts
The Social Origins of Language (summary)

The Social Origins of Language (extended excerpts)

summary

In many cases it is behavioural change that comes first, subsequently determing genetic change.

language’s evolutionary emergence would have required profound social and political change, [and] more trusting, stable relationships

. . . in the case of many nonhuman primates, dominance asserted through violence or threat is the internal principle of social organization . . .

. . . primate-style dominance is periodically overthrown and then restored, only to be overthrown and restored again and again

Language consitutes a ‘biocultural niche’, embedded within the entire human semiosphere—everything in human culture, material and non-material, that is symbolic in nature.

. . . the cultural technologies of reading and writing seem to have extended human memory, enabled abstract chains of reasoning, and guided new ways of scanning visual items, thus making human[s] even more cognitively plastic.

Language . . . is a quasi-artefactual biocultural niche, and the capacity to acquire and use it involves the evolution and replication of a phenogenotypic biocultural complex.

intersubjectivity and shared intentionality . . . Whiten and Erdal (2012) emphasize the socio-cognitive complex of cooperation, egalitarianism, and mindreading alongside language and cultural transmission in the evolution of humans as successful hunter-gatherers.

All languages are socially constructed technologies for the instruction of imagination, but the actual dynamics of exploration and stabilization in each and every language could be as variable as their communities, their histories, their particular communicative needs, their collective capacities, and the private experiential worlds of their speakers.

‘conventional knowledge sits in a kind of “middle ground” between objective and subjective knowledge about the world . . . it is neither strictly objective, nor subjective—it is ‘intersubjective’

Only given social forces of counter-dominance—where individuals with allies can resist being dominated—and reverse-dominance—where the collective dominates any would-be dominant individual—is language likely to emerge.

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state-of-the-art scholarly texts
The Social Origins of Language ( brief excerpts)

Daniel Dor and Eva Jablonka, “Why we need to move from gene-culture co-evolution to culturally driven co-evolution"

. . . language facilitates social interaction in four ways, all of which are crucial for collaborative exploration: “Language dramatically extends the possibility-space for interaction, facilitates the profiling and navigation of joint attentional scenes, enables the sharing of situation models and action plans, and mediates the cultural shaping of interactive minds. . . . 26

Chris Sinha, "Niche construction and semiosis: biocultural and social dynamics"

It is increasingly recognized, in theories of distributed cognition, that human cognitive processes extend ‘beyond the skin’, involving intersubjectively shared mental states and cultural-cognitive technologies. This presents a conceptual problem not only for psychology, with its traditional individualist assumptions, but also for biology, which assumes by default that the organism as a behavioral and morphological individual is identical to the organism as bearer of genetic material. 44-5

Daniel Dor, "The instruction of imagination: language and its evolution as a communication technology"

Current discourse on human experiencing tends to ignore the privacy of experience for a very good theoretical reason: much of the discourse has emerged as a counter-reaction to the solipsistic view of human experiences based on Cartesian philosophy, and has thus systematically highlighted the intersubjective nature of human experiencing—the primacy of the interpersonal over the intrapersonal. p. 108

In order to understand language, then, I suggest that we have to abandon both the Kantian dictum, the foundational presupposition of the cognitive sciences, that all human experiences comply with a universal interpretive scheme, and the neo-Kantian conviction, the foundational presupposition of most of the social sciences, that the members of every culture and sub-culture experience the world in the same ways. We have to begin with the acknowledgement that each human individual lives in a private, experienctial world which is different from that of the others, and is inaccessible to them. p. 109

Emily Wyman, "Language and Collective Fiction"

However, a curious type of speech act know as ‘performative’ neither describes nor brings about change in the world, but creates altogether new institutional states of affairs, or ‘institutional facts’, within it. (171)

As succinctly put by Kalish and Sabbagh, ‘conventional knowledge sits in a kind of “middle ground” between objective and subjective knowledge about the world . . . it is neither strictly objective, nor subjective—it is ‘intersubjective’. (173)

. . . the categories that humans recruit in making sense of the world are, in general, not restricted to the traditional ontological dichotomy of objective vs. subjective. They also include categories of fact that may be termed ‘ontologially intersubjective’, in that they exist in virtue of group consensus. Indeed, it may be precisely because such facts elude objective and subjective categorization that we recognize their intersubjective foundations, and with no reduction in their normative force. As Plotkin incisively observes, it is simply that for many human affairs, ‘the law is grounded in the group’. (181)

More generally, that humans use language and symbolic action to coordinate their private imaginings into shared, public fictions that have normative force is profoundly revealing with regard to our social evolution. In addition to sophisticated behavioural coordination strategies (shared with many other species of the animal kingdom) humans have, in addition, evolved modes of coordinating cognitively. The ability to jointly imagine and subscribe to a set of fictional statuses that we subsequently use to guide our interactions in normative terms is qualitatelvely different from anything observed outside our own species. Indeed, the whole framework of collective intentionality, in which we share attention to aspects of the environment, share goals and plans for collaborating together, and subscribe to shared fictions that then further govern our interactions, indicates an evolutionary environment in which the threats of competition and social exploitation became outweighted by the necessities of cooperation and trust. (183)

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state-of-the-art scholarly texts
On Reading as a Transformative Process

from T. Wilson Hayes, "The Peaceful Apocalypse: Familism and Literacy in Sixteenth-Century England." The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Summer, 1986), pp. 131-143 (13 pages)

. . . they believed that by reading they could learn how to save their own souls." p. 132

"transformation of consciosness with the spread of alphabet literacy"; Ong ref; p. 137

an internal transformation epitomized by the acquisition of literacy p. 141

In the sixteenth century literacy became a sign of independence. Unlike inherited wealth or class, the acquisition of literacy showed that one had the self-discipline to master an intellectual skill and enabled one to absorb "new conceptions of the behavior appropirate for self-possessing individuals." p. 142

Like the Lollards before them, Familists did not advocate separation from the dominant church and, as Champlin Burrage and David Loades have pointed out, should not be referred to as a sect at all. By encouraging the apocalyptic transformation of consciousness that literacy provokes, Familists showed ordinary people how they might transform both themselves and the world around them. This was a key factor in the advancement of popular literacy and, as a result, of popular political awareness. 143

from S.A. Smith, Revolution and the People in Russia and China: A Comparative History (Cambridge Univesity Press, 2008)

We have seen that for 'conscous' workers in Russia and, to a lesser extent, in China, reading was an activity that was central to self-fashioning, constitutive of what it meant to be a cultured and autonomous individual. By contrast, the relation of the newly literate and semi-literate readers of the lower urban classes to new forms of commercially produced mass literature, produced with an eye to entertainment rather than education, was far less earnest. . . . p. 100

Indeed, without denying the real potental for tension between individual autonomy and class-based collectivism, we may conclude that genuine forms of collectivism and cooperative action are possible only where class solidarity is grounded in autonomous individuals capable of demanding the recognition due to them as thinking, feeling persons. Without that, new forms of group coercion based on weak individuality are likely to be the result . . . 110

from Philip Roth unbound: interview transcript (Daily Beast, October 30, 2009)

Tina Brown: You said in an interview that you don’t think novels are going to be read 25 years from now. Were you being provocative or do you believe that to be true?

Philip Roth: I was being optimistic about 25 years really. No, I think it’s going to be cultic. I think always people will be reading them, but it’ll be a small group of people—maybe more people than now read Latin poetry, but somewhere in that range. . . . To read a novel requires a certain kind of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. . . I think that that kind of concentration, and focus, and attentiveness, is hard to come by. It’s hard to find huge numbers of people, or large numbers of people or significant numbers of people who have those qualities.

from Lionel B. Steiman, Paths to Genocide: Antisemitism in Western History (Macmillan Press, 1998), p. 93-95

The Enlightenment did not deny the existence of all manner of evils but denied that these were a consequence of human nature. It held that people are by nature reasonable and capable of good but had been corrupted by their institutions and environment. Its rationalism assumed the universal existence of human reason and applied the criterion of social utility to all institutions, policies, and actions. Transform or abolish corrupt institutions, improve the human environment, and human behavior would likewise improve. Human beings were by nature rational and therefore capable of creating a rational and humane socal order.

This was the intellectual ethos of Progressivism, whose radical wing included the socialists and communists. It is this ethos which now lies in ruins. One does not simply pick up the pieces and hope for a better day. One can no longer yearn for that "class with radical chains," that phantom of the 19th and 20th centuries. Indeed, a stunning reversal has occured, most evident in the United States, where the deterioration of discursive and cognitive performativity is now the hallmark of our times. Is it possible that literacy is dying even as we speak? You bet! And right before our eyes. Watch MSNBC and see for yourself.

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Neo-primordialism

Daniel Dor, Chris Knight, and Jerome Lewis, The Social Origins of Language (Oxford, 2014), p.4

. . . in the case of many nonhuman primates, dominance asserted through violence or threat is the internal principle of social organization . . . [Among humans] . . . primate-style dominance is periodically overthrown and then restored, only to be overthrown and restored again and again. (emphasis added)

Franz de Waal, Our Inner Ape (Riverhead, 2005) (p. 135)

Tendencies toward group identification, xenophobia, and lethal combat--all of which do occur in nature--have combined with our highly developed planning capacities to "elevate" human violence to its inhuman level. The study of animal behavior may not be much help when it comes to things like genocide, but if we move away from nation-states, looking instead at human behavior in small-scale societies, the differences are not that great anymore. (emphasis added)

from Merlin Donald, "The mind considered from a historical perspective: human cognitive phylogenesis and the possibility of continuing cognitive evolution." In D. Johnson & C. Ermeling (Eds.) The Future of the Cognitive Revolution (Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 360-61

Mimetic representations are evident in human children before they acquire language competence. . . . They continue to be important in adults, taking the form of highly variable social customs, athletic skills, and group expressive patterns (such as mass demonstrations of aggression or rejection).

Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (Yale, 2004) p. 7

The hatred and terror that drove people to such violence were shaped by social tensions and religious beliefs, but the passions themselves derived from deeply rooted fantasies, extravagent in their evocation of demonic lovers and Satanic revels. These fantasies shared, for the most part, a standard structure and a similar set of primary themes.

Richard Lachmann, "Coda: American Patrimonialism: The Return of the Repressed” in Patrimonial Power in the Modern World, Julia Adams and Mounira M. Charrad, eds. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2011:

Patrimonialism, until fairly recently, seemed an archaic social form, largely replaced by bureaucratic rationalism. That confident view of modernity, in the histories that Max Weber and his followers wrote, deserves to be challenged as patrimonial regimes reappear in states and firms throughout the world. (emphasis added)

from Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004)

It may be that the earliest phenomenon that can be functionally related to fascism is American: the Ku Klux Klan. . . . The first version of the Klan in the defeated American South was arguably a remarkable preview of the way fascist movements were to function in interwar Europe. p. 49

Measures of Cognitive Performativity

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Table 7.1 from A mind so Rare (p. 260)

Successive layers in the evolution of human cognition and culture

Each stage continues to occupy its cultural niche today, so that fully modern societies have

all four stages simultaneously present.

Stage	Species/Period	Novel Forms	Manifest Change	Governance
EPISODIC	Primate	Episodic event perceptions	Self-awareness and event sensitivity	Episodic and reactive
MIMETIC (first transition)	Early homids, peaking in H. erectus 2M-0.4 Mya	Action metaphor	Skill, gesture, mime, and imitation	Mimetic style and archetypes
MYTHIC (second transition)	Sapient humans, peaking in H. sapiens sapiens 0.5-present	Language, symbolic representation	Oral traditions, mimetic ritual,narrative thought	Mythic framework of governance
THEORETIC (third transition)	Modern culture	External symbolic universe	Formalisms, large-scale theoretic artifiacts, massive external storage	Institutionalized paradigmatic thought and invention

Figure 1. The Quantum Heterogeneity of Dasein: Five Genetic Ontologies
(Five Principles of the Production of Practices)

Genetic Ontology	Sources (Full page here)
Primate Dominance and Deference	Mazur, deWaal, Wrangham . . .
Paleolithic Dynamic Egalitarianism	Whiten, Descola, Chase, Price . . .
Ressentiment & the Mechanisms of Defense Despotic regime; Racism; Nationalism; Fascism	Nietzsche, Deleuze & Guattari, Clarke, Paxton, Knox . . .
Bildung & the Will to Power (Jouissance) Progressive Narcisism; Individuation; Progressivism, Socialism, Communism the UAW and the Keynesian Elite	Hegel, Nietzsche, Vygotsky, Piaget, Alcorn . . .
Nihilism & the Last Man Regressive Narcissism and the Culture of Consumption; Repressive Desublimation; Disindividuation; Neoliberalism	Nietzsche, Hall, Ehrenberg, Stiegler, Illouz, Marcuse . . .

Cognitive Modalities: a summary of sources

Psychometrics ("Q"): Flynn, Nisbett, Ceci; Hernstein and Murray

•IQ tests
•PISA
•MEAP

Evolutionary: Donald, Mind: cognitive evolution Table 7.1 p. 260

•episodic (primate)
•mimetic (homo erectus, h. sapients)
•oral-mythic (h. sapiens sapiens)
•theoretic (required by modern capitalism*)
•post-theoretic (Foucault, Sellars, Deleuze)

Developmental: Piaget et. al.

•pre-operational
•concrete operrational
•formal operational
•post-formal thought (Commons)

Psychoanalytic: Freud-Klein: mechanisms of defense

•projection
•displacement
•reaction formation
•denial
•identification

Cultural-historical: Vygotsky, Luria, Ong, Bruner, Flynn, Tomasello. The Social Origins of Language (Oxford, 2014)

• zone of proximal development
• joint intentionality
• intersubjectivity
• niche construction

Cognitive-linguistic Cardinality
(orders of magnitude/index of cognitive complexity)
the Quantum Heterogeneity of Dasein in the context of Merlin Donald,
A Mind so Rare, Table 7.1, p. 260 (Apologies to George Cantor)

ℵ_i index of cognitive complexity (Ceci)

i = 4 Internet and the Extended Mind

i = 3 Foucault (Kant Hegel Nietzsche)

i = 2 Formal operational

i = 1 Concrete operational

i = 0 Oral-mythic/pre-operational

i = -1 Mimetic/gestural (Homo erectus)

i = -2 Primate semiosis

The Development of Children (Sixth Edition) by Cynthia Lightfoot, Michael Cole, and Sheila R. Cole

Development Through the Lifespan, Laura E. Berk

Jerome Kagan, The Human Spark: The Science of Human Development 2013

Piaget, Genetic Epistemology

Stephen J. Ceci, On Intelligence: A Bioecological Treatise on Intellectual Development (Harvard, 1996), p. 22

The term intelligence is often used synonymously with "IQ", "g", or "general intelligence", especially in some of the psychometric literature. . . however, the ability to engage in cognitively complex behaviors will be shown to be independent of IQ, g, or general intelligence . . . cognitive complexity will be seen to be the more general of the two notions and the one most theoretically important to keep in mind when referring to intelligent behavior.22

Analyzing Power Relations: Six Frameworks

Max Weber

Deleuze & Guattari

Vincent/McMahon

Piaget/Vygotsky

Michael Mann

This site

Three regimes (charismatic, patrimonial, rational-bureaucratic)

Three regimes (primitive, despotic, capitalist)

Left vs. Right: (topologies of the two-party system)

Cognitive modalities (topologies of the two-party system)

Four networks of power

Five genetic ontologies (topologies of the two-party system)

two commentaries on Victor Nell, "Cruelty’s rewards: The gratifications of perpetrators and spectators," Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2006) 29, 211–257

1. from Mika Haritos-Fatouros, “Cruelty: A dispositional or a situational behavior in man?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2006) 29, p.230

The basic question remains, however: How far are aggression, violence, and cruelty in humans today the result of predisposition factors, or biological or archetypal processes, and how far are they the result of cognitive/emotional processes evoked by situational factors?

2. from Albert Bandura, “A murky portrait of human cruelty,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2006) 29, p. 225

At the macrosocial level, Nell greatly exaggerates the prevalence of human cruelty. There exist wide intercultural differences representing both warring and pacific societies with large intracultural variations and even rapid transformation of warring societies into peaceful one.

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Shilton, D; Breski, M; Dor, D; Jablonka, E (February 14, 2020). "Human Social Evolution: Self-Domestication or Self-Control?". Frontiers in Psychology. 11: 134.

The social evolution of humans and bonobos has been interpreted as a special variant of domestication – as a self-domestication process. While this analogy has led to productive research because it focused attention on the commonalities of humans and domesticates, we believe that the social evolution of humans is better explained in terms of selection for pro-social motivation and self-control, which are guided by symbolic communication and representation rather than as a process of self-domestication.

In summary, we regard the social, gene-cultural evolution of humans as more similar to the social evolution of other highly social mammals that display enhanced cognitive and affective plasticity and sophisticated social structures, than to the evolution of socially impoverished domesticates. These similarities however, pale in comparison to the unique features of human social evolution, which has been guided by cumulative cultural changes that led to increased cognitive and affective plasticity, allowing feats of saintly cooperation and sadistic cruelty that go far beyond those of any other animal.

A. R. Luria, The Making of Mind

Dissatisfied with the competing arguments over mental elements, I looked for alternatives in the books of scholars who were critical of laboratory-based psychology. Here I was influenced by the work of the German neo-Kantians, men like Rickert, Windelband, and Dilthey. Dilthey was especially interesting because he was concerned with the real motives that energize people and the ideals and principles that guide their lives. He introduced me to the term reale Psychologie in which man would be studied as a unified, dynamic system. He contended that a real understanding of human nature was the foundation for what he referred to as the Geisteswissenschaften or “social sciences.” This psychology was not the psychology of the textbooks but a practical psychology based on an understanding of people as they live and behave in the world. It was a psychology that described human values but made no attempt to explain them in terms of their inner mechanisms, on the grounds that it was impossible to achieve a physiological analysis of human behavior.

Classical scholars are those who look upon events in terms of their constituent parts. Step by step they single out important units and elements until they can formulate abstract, general laws. These laws are then seen as the governing agents of the phenomena in the field under study. One outcome of this approach is the reduction of living reality with all its richness of detail to abstract schemas. The properties of the living whole are lost, which proved Goethe to pen, “Gray is every theory, but ever green is the tree of life.”

Romantic scholars . . . do not follow the path of reductionism, which is the leading philosophy of the classical group. Romantics in science wan neither too split living reality into its elementary components nor to represent the wealth of life’s concrete events in abstract models that lose the properties of the phenomena themselves. It is of the utmost importance to romantics o t preserve the wealth of living reality, and they aspire to a science that retains this richness.

. . . the more we single out important relations during our description, the closer we come to the essence of the object, to an understanding tis qui\alities and the rules of its existence. And the more we preserve the whole wealth of its qualities, the closer we come to the inner laws that determine its existence. It was this perspective which led Karl Marx to describe the process of scientific description with the strange-sounding expression, “ascending to the concrete.” (Jim Peters interview: the abstract makes the concrete more real than the actual experience of the concrete minus the abstract!)