action theory & the human condition

 

IV – THE HUMAN CONDITION - 325

 

Introduction to Part IV

 

AFTER WHAT HAS BEEN SAID in the General Introduction and other introductory discussions, the Introduction to Part IV can be brief.  The piece de resistance is clearly Chapter 15, "A Paradigm of the Human Condition."  It seemed best to give this selection the place of honor as the final chapter of the book especially since more than any other chapter it looks toward the future of the development of this kind of theory.  It did, however, seem appropriate also to include in Part IV Chapter 14, "Death in the Western World," because this essay is so closely related to the paradigm. Indeed, as was noted in the General Introduction, "Death in the Western World" was written for the new Encyclopedia of Bioethics immediately after the completion of the first draft of "A Paradigm of the Human Condition."  Readers with a specially strong theoretical interest may well prefer to read Chapter 14 after the more general Chapter 15.  One of the great virtues of books, as distinguished from aural communications, is freedom to choose the order in which to pay attention to component parts. 

 

            The only other point about Chapter 14 that needs to be made here is to remind the reader that it is the third in a series of attempts by me to deal with the problem of the meaning of death in modern society (as noted in the Introduction to Part III).  The first was the paper, in collaboration with Victor M. Lidz, entitled "Death in American Society"; ¹ the second, Chapter 12 of the present volume, "The 'Gift of Life' and Its Reciprocation," was written with Renee C. Fox and Victor Lidz.  In contrast, I am the sole author of Chapter 14, which differs from its predecessors in two important respects.  The first is the much more developed and explicit use of a Kantian philosophical framework - a direct consequence of the work I had done earlier on Chapter 15, the relevance of which to the theme of Chapter 14 seemed overwhelmingly clear. 

 

                        ¹ Talcott Parsons and Victor M. Lidz, "Death in American Society," in Edwin Schneidman (ed.), Essays in Self-Destruction (New York: Science House, 1967). 

 

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The second difference is also a consequence of the theoretical developments that so far have culminated in Chapter 15; namely, greater clarification of the relations between the treatment of certain problems at the level of action and at that of the organic system, a clarification that is particularly important for understanding the problem of human reaction to human deaths.  After all, it is in the first instance the human organism that dies.  The fate of the personality is, philosophically and theologically, far more problematical.  It was considerations such as these that led me to put greater stress than before on the biological normality of death and thus to raise serious questions about the tenability of the common thesis that American culture is prominently characterized by the "denial of death."  

 

            Turning now to Chapter 15, it is important to note that the initiation of the line of thought that eventuated in this essay (which has not been published elsewhere) was the hunch that the four-function paradigm, with which I had been working for about twenty years, could provide an analytical framework whereby the human action system could be placed relative to other features of the world with which we humans necessarily have occasion to deal.  This idea crystallized in the academic quiet of the summer of 1974.  As it took shape, I drafted a brief memorandum, which I sent to a few people with whom I had had close intellectual associations. 

Among them were the colleagues with whom I had worked in the previous academic year at the University of Pennsylvania - Rene'e Fox, Victor Lidz, Harold Bershady, and Willy de Craemer.  On my rejoining this faculty in the fall of 1974, we decided to organize a small discussion group on this general topic, and we met regularly during the academic years 1974-1975 and 1975-1976.  In the spring term of 1976, we were joined by Charles Bosk.  The group also had one meeting with A. Hunter Dupree and two with Hildred Geertz and Clifford Geertz. "Rump" meetings, held when Fox and de Craemer were abroad, including a notable one with Robert N. Bellah, also took place in the fall of 1976.  We plan to publish a collaborative volume as soon as feasible, but in the meantime the group has kindly given me permission to publish the draft of a general statement, which I prepared in the summer of 1976 and have substantially revised in 1977, in the present volume.  Its indebtedness to them should be evident.² 

 

² The title of the project, the analysis of the human condition, was also agreed upon by the Philadelphia group.  It is of course a rather widely used term, for example, Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).  We, however, above all had in mind its earlier use by Andre' Malraux as the title of his famous novel La Condition homaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1933).  Unfortunately, in our opinion, the English translation is entitled Man's Fate, H. M. Chevalier (New York: Modern Library, 1934).  We think the original French title is much more appropriate. 

 

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The hunch I mentioned had an initial payoff and the basic paradigm (Figure 1 of Chapter 15) crystallized early enough so that it could be included in the memorandum of the summer of 1974.  As is clear from the essays included in Parts I-Ill of this volume and the introductory materials that accompany them, there had been a long buildup to this breakthrough.  The key was the conception that all the principal components of the human condition could be fitted into a cybernetic hierarchy.  The most important single clue to the place of the action system lay in the relation of the sciences dealing with action to the other sciences.  It seemed clear that the classification that has come to be institutionalized in modern academic organization as comprising the physical, the biological, and the social sciences could be used to differentiate three of the four functional subsystems of the human condition for theoretical purposes. 

 

            The physical and the organic world obviously constitute, in the technical, scientific sense, environments of human life and activities.  Since Durkheim, however, it has become common to speak of the social environment of the action of the human individual.²  By this path of reasoning I arrived at the ideas that human experience could be divided into three primary categories and that all three could be conceived to constitute environments. 

The idea of the order of their hierarchical relations was by this reasoning already established.  It thus seemed to make eminent sense to treat the physical world as the adaptive subsystem since it is above all, in its meaning for humans, the ultimate source of the conditional resources on which we depend (energy, materials, etc.).  The organic world, then, is not only an environment of action but also the organizational base of human action since all human individuals are living organisms, belonging to a distinctive organic species.  No action system dissociated from living human or similar organisms indeed seems conceivable.  Hence, it also stands to reason that these components are, from the human point of view, integrated with

each other principally in and through the system of action, in the technical sense of our usage. 

 

            This left the pattern-maintenance cell unspecified in content, but there was a very obvious candidate for the place.  This problem concerns the rationale behind placing a set of essays in the sociology of religion in Part III of this volume, immediately preceding the treatment of the human condition.  Certainly, since writing The Structure of Social Action,⁴ I have been seriously concerned with the status of the category "nonempirical reality."  That such a category has to make scientific sense was a clear inference from my own analysis of the methodological difficulties of the several varieties of positivism.  Substantively, the special influence on my position was Weber's work on the sociology of religion.⁵  Recognition of such a concept as a residual category is surely better than denial of its relevance altogether, but as in the case of the parallel category of "nonrational" to leave it at that is less than satisfactory. 

 

³ See the Introduction to Part III and see also Chapter 10 of this volume.

            ⁴ Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action (1937; reprint ed., New York: Free Press, 1949).

            ⁵ Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Religionssoziologie (Tubingen: Mohr, 1921), 3 vols. 

 

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With respect to its cognitively accessible "existential" aspects, which surely are less than exhaustive of the category, placing it in the pattern-maintenance cell of a functional paradigm seemed to be an important step in theoretical specification and clarification. 

 

            That there was a preliminary acceptable fit of this placement in the more general paradigm was agreed on by the Philadelphia discussion group; hence, the provisional designation of the P-M subsystem of the human condition as telic.  In addition, in the meeting mentioned earlier, this conceptualization proved stimulating to Robert Bellah in its potential for further theoretical development in his field of special interest, the sociology of religion.

 

            This central paradigm remained of focal significance to the Philadelphia group for the two academic years in which we met regularly.  There were wide-ranging discussions touching on many phases of the intricate problems, scientific and philosophical, and it was only on the basis of these discussions that I felt myself in a position further to elaborate upon the implications of the paradigm. 

 

            In the sense of formal theory construction these steps followed the same pattern that had proved fruitful on two less generalized levels, namely, first that of the social system and second that of the general system of action.  Two main steps in this development involved formalization.  They followed the same formal models that had been used in the Technical Appendix of The American University for the social system and the general system of action, respectively.⁶  The first is presented in Figure 4 of Chapter 15, "Media and Their Normative Contexts."  It suggests the designation of four such media, each anchored in one of the four functional systems, on the analogy of money, political power, influence, and value-commitments in the social system.  Associated with each medium, on a one-to-one basis, are what have been called a "category of orientation," on the one hand, and a "standard of evaluation," on the other.  I shall not anticipate the discussion of Chapter 15 by enumerating these twelve conceptions here.  It will be noted, however, that one of the suggested media is health, which is anchored in the organic system (see the Introduction to Part I and see Chapter 3). 

 

            The second formal step beyond Figure 1 was the development of categories to designate what is involved in each of the six sets of double interchanges that are posited as taking place among the four primary subsystems of the type of functionally differentiated systems we have been dealing with.  It is clear that since we have confined the phenomenon of symbolic level expression and understanding of meaning to the action system, our previous restriction to "generalized symbolic media of interchange" could not be adhered to for the human condition; this problem is further discussed in Chapter 15.  Again, I shall not anticipate the discussion to follow by further elucidation here. The interchange set is presented in Figure 5

of the essay. 

 

            ⁶ Talcott Parsons and Gerald M. Platt. in collaboration with Neil J. Smelser, The American University (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), "Technical Appendix: Some General Theoretical Paradigms,” pp. 423-447. 

 

            Carrying formalization as far as these two steps have attempted to do is surely a kind of theoretical tour de force.  Since this is a first attempt in a very unfamiliar area, so far as systematization is concerned it cannot be but exceedingly tentative.  It seems to me, however, that only when such an attempt is made and the targets thereby set up systematically shot at – so that some will fall down but maybe some will stand fast - can a solid basis be established from which to judge whether formalization of this sort is theoretically fruitful or not, and if so how it can be carried out.  Such "shooting at" is of course expected to lead to revision not only in the particular categories proposed but also in the more general structure of the conceptual scheme into which they have been fitted. 

 

            It goes without saying that substantively most of the categories proposed are already familiar.  This is exemplified by the borrowing of three central concepts from Kant.⁷  What is new is not so much the categories themselves as the way in which they have been ordered relative to each other.  It also goes without saying that such sense as the proposals advanced in Chapter 15 make is attributable to long experience in working with similar problems for other systems (in my case, most notably the social system and the general system of action) and long discussions of many of the problems with my colleagues. 

 

            The final section of Chapter 15 attempts to use the outline that has been worked out to try to clarify some very general problems in the theoretical analysis of human action and interests.  The two sets of problems I have chosen to discuss are, first, the very old and pervasive matter of the relations between the cognitive aspect of human orientation and what has often been called the affective aspect.  Put a little differently, it is the problem of the relation between the rational and nonrational.  The second problem area concerns the broader, transsocial significance of the old sociological concept pair of age and sex not only as these appear as dimensions of human social organization but also as they help to link the latter with the organic realm, as well as with the telic (in our terms), in that they play such a prominent part in so many cases of religious symbolism. 

 

            ⁷ Set forth in Immanuel Kant's three critiques: The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. K. Smith (New York: Humanities Press, 1950); The Critique of Practical Reason, trans. and ed. L. W, Beck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950); and The Critique of Judgment, trans. J. C. Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964).  The three critiques were first published in German in 1781, 1788, and 1790, respectively. 

 

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Most generally, however, I hope the reader will treat Chapter 15 as it is meant - a highly tentative first attempt.  He can expect a further set of developments over the name not of one but of several authors.  But this will certainly constitute at best one further set of steps in the development of the implications of an idea.  If there is anything seriously important in the idea, its repercussions, including criticism of it, should be expected to be felt for a long time to come.