APPENDIX I PERSONAL CONCLUSIONS (1ST EDITION, 2001)

Ted Benton

Our initial intention was to write two conclusions, in which we would each comment on the chapters written by the other, and state our own independent ‘positions’. I found this difficult, partly because, on reading Ian's chapters, I couldn’t find very much to disagree with.

I started my working life as a secondary school teacher of science and maths, but had the opportunity (we had grants in those days!) to pursue my passion for philosophy at university level. This opened up the possibility for me of a teaching career in the university, and I had the incredible good fortune to be given a job teaching philosophy within a sociology department. Even more fortunate, the job was at Essex University, and I still can’t imagine a better place to be! In those days (early 1970s), the university milieu was highly politicized, and there was unceasing debate among adherents of wildly different versions of Marxist, feminist and libertarian thought. Ian joined the staff (to replace Roy Enfield) soon afterwards, and he and I shared the teaching of philosophy of science in the department. Appropriately enough, we were both interested in the relationship between philosophy and the social sciences, and both thought this was a relationship of great importance for the latter.

We also had in common an attraction to Marxist ideas. However, this was not so much in common, since this was the time of intense debate over ‘humanist’ versus ‘structuralist’ developments of the Marxian heritage, and we experienced each other as on opposite sides of that debate.

However, Ian found within the ‘humanist’ Marxian tradition concepts with which to express something close to that. His humanism was never bereft of recognitions of how people’s lives and possibilities are shaped, constrained or stunted by their position in oppressive social structures. On my side of the debate (Ian remembers it differently - but I can refer to things I wrote at the time!!), I was never tempted by Althusser’s tendency to reduce individuals to the status of ‘bearers’ of the social structures, nor was I convinced by his (in effect) identifying ideology with the ruling ideology. Althusserian Marxism was seriously flawed in its inability to comprehend spontaneous resistance and struggle ‘from below’.

Partly as a consequence of our being attracted to different versions of the Marxian theoretical heritage, Ian and I tended to take opposite sides on another cluster of issues. These are at the centre of our concerns in this book. In those days, Ian’s commitment to the focus on subjectivity and the psychological aspects of social life, together with the literature he drew on, disposed him to an anti-naturalistic view of social science.

My commitment to a naturalistic approach had two main sources. The first was my life­long passion for the field of natural history - for observing and studying the wonderful diversity of animals and plants in their habitats. This was linked to my appreciation of biology as a science (my feelings about that discipline are much more mixed today, given the take-over of its research programmes by agribusiness and pharmaceuticals interests), and also to a growing awareness of the interconnection of ecological damage and human social practices. No one who cared about what is now called ‘biological diversity’ and lived through that period could fail to be horrified by the devastation of natural and semi-natural habitats wrought by ‘development’ pressures, but most of all by the industrialization of agriculture. A social science which failed to take seriously the ‘material’ dimension of what Marx called the ‘metabolism’ between human society and the rest of nature would have no way of addressing these issues.

The second spur to my ‘naturalism’ was something which at the time I experienced (amazingly enough, in retrospect) as quite separate. This was my intense involvement in labour-movement politics through the 1970s and into the early 1980s. To put it crudely, it seemed to me at the time that it was just obvious that the whole system of wage labour was exploitative and alienating, that people’s human potential was suppressed and blighted by the compulsion to perform often mindless and repetitive jobs for the benefit of a rich minority.

In academic terms, my own earlier immersion in the life sciences and familiarity with anti-positivist (both realist and socio-historical) accounts of the natural sciences made it possible for me to be committed to such a naturalistic approach to social science, while rejecting positivism. So, in fact, Ian and I continued to have considerable philosophical common ground, while disagreeing radically with each other on the issue of naturalism. I remained attracted by a ‘heroic’ vision of science as overcoming superstitious and authoritarian imposition of belief-systems in favour of a democratic use of our human powers of reason and experience to discover the world around us.

Even as science and technology were manifestly more and more being co-opted by big capital and the state in the service of exploitation, military conquest and social control (this was the period of the US war in Southeast Asia, and support for dictatorships in South and Central America), I was still resistant to the ‘constructionist’ view that science was no more than the projection of prevailing social interests and cultural values onto an otherwise amorphous or unknowable ‘nature’. The research programmes of science, the questions asked and the ones not asked, the links between research programmes even in ‘basic’ science and commercial or military interests were undeniable, and their distortion of the scientific enterprise quite clear. For all that, the popularized self-image of science as a heroic struggle to understand all the complexity and beauty of the natural world and to give insights into our place in it was still a source of attraction. I vividly recall reading, as a child, a popular book on evolutionary theory (called, as I remember, The Reason Why? Evolution), and later reading Darwin’s Origin of Species.

At this point (sometime in the late 1970s), Ian’s and my life diverged quite considerably. He became increasingly involved in fatherhood, psychoanalysis and therapy. Meanwhile, for me, too, fatherhood and the ‘domestic sphere’ provided an excuse for temporary withdrawal from active political engagement. Although I was already strongly influenced by the feminist movement which burgeoned in the early years of the 1970s, I don’t think I had taken on its full significance until fatherhood hit me. That, and the detachment from active political engagement which it required gave me time to re-think many former commitments, both in terms of the public sphere of politics and in terms of academic issues. During this period of Thatcherite domination of the political and ideological scene, I could not see any hope that the labour movement as then constituted could resist effectively. For some in the labour movement, this recognition meant abandoning socialist aspirations so as to appeal to a public which was assumed to have largely absorbed Thatcherite values. For me, it meant trying to think about how the left's traditional critical understanding of capitalism could be deepened and broadened in its popular appeal.

Not everyone who is engaged in this dialogue agrees that ‘naturalism' is necessary to it. Kate Soper, in particular, has strongly argued against it. I agree that we should be wary of attempts to make too close a connection between philosophical views and political positions. Nevertheless, it does seem to me that a naturalism which remains consistently anti-reductionist does facilitate new ways of thinking about social and political life. In particular, I've followed some feminist writers in insisting that the (different and similar) ways humans are embodied, their vulnerability to illness, the inevitability of death and so on are of profound importance both for any serious liberatory politics and for any adequate social theory. Similarly with the closely related facts of our necessary metabolism with organic and inorganic nature. It would be disastrous to reduce our understanding of what humans are to their biochemical make-up, or their genetic inheritance, as reductionist self-styled ‘Darwinists' do. Equally, however, a social theory which doesn't pay due respect to our embodiment, mortality, kinship and interdependence with other living beings won't be able to address some of the central issues facing our ‘civilization’.

So, to return to the themes of this book. The marks of the above engagements with feminisms, and with ecological politics will be evident in the chapters I've contributed. Both these streams of thought have deepened both my commitment to naturalism and my commitment to an anti-positivist understanding of the value and importance of science. A non-instrumental science of nature, which respects its objects, accepts some humility in recognition of the unfathomable complexity of its object, and fully acknowledges its own standing as a fallible human social project is a necessary dimension in any worthwhile human society. The vision of Hilary Rose, Evelyn Fox Keller and other feminists who do not abandon the quest for ‘objectivity', but rather seek to give it a new meaning, offers a prospect of an ‘alternative' science with just these characteristics. There is, too, something for ecological politics. These have been characterized by a somewhat uneasy oscillation between hostility to science and technology, on the one hand, and reliance on them to give authority to environmentalist knowledge-claims, on the other. In their different ways, the non-positivist accounts of science open up a way beyond this dilemma. If scientific work could be freed from its current domination from powerful interests and cultural forces, this might open up quite different possibilities for scientific and technical development and their relationship to social life and the natural world. The ethical intuitions of ecocentric ecologism, which require us to value non-human nature for its own sake find their complement in the ‘dynamic objectivity’ favoured by feminist epistemology. Critical realist work on the nature of science also converges on this recognition that science can be both a social practice and one which seeks (fallibly) knowledge of a reality beyond itself.

The chapters I contributed to this book chart a tortuous (in retrospect, perhaps more tortuous than was necessary) route through a whole mountain range of books, articles and ‘live’ debates. The position I’ve managed to put together as my provisional way-station is a product of this biography. It has been shaped by my intimate relationships (about which I’ll say nothing here!), by continuing creative dialogue with colleagues, including Ian, and students at this university, by my various political engagements, by my continuing passion for nature, by cooperative work with scholars and activists in this country and overseas. In short, while I can produce evidence and reasons for what I currently think, it is nonetheless the outcome of a very peculiar life-history. I have no good reason to expect any reader of this book to agree with me. So, what was mildly surprising to me was how close Ian’s path and mine had come after having taken such very different routes through the mountains.

One thing, I now see, is that we have both been resistant to what might be called ‘sociological imperialism’: this is manifest in some versions of ‘social constructivism’. In its more extreme versions, constructivism tends to see the subjective life of individuals as wholly constituted by social processes, or to swallow up the notion of an independent nature in the claim that all we have access to are culturally produced discourses of ‘nature’. Ian has been insisting on the need to recognize the psychic life of individuals as a domain with its own specific dynamics and processes, not reducible to what is put there by ‘socialization’. There is a parallel between this and my own commitment to a re-working of the social scientific heritage which takes our embodiment and our interdependence with non-human nature seriously. Since historically the social and life sciences have developed largely in ignorance of one another, the desirable reconciliation between them will require prolonged dialogue in which both groups of disciplines are likely to revise some of their most basic assumptions. Social scientists are right to insist on the indispensability of their perspectives in coming to understand our immensely complex world. Equally, however, they need to be open to, albeit critical, respect for the immense contribution of the life sciences (see Benton 1991, 1994).

But this leads on to a second area of common ground between us. This is our shared persistence with the now rather unfashionable view that knowledge and understanding are indispensable to human emancipation, or to the betterment of human life. For myself, there are two aspects of this. One is that faced with the scale of destructiveness and social disintegration unleashed by contemporary economic, technical and military power, and the cultural forms which have risen with them, those who still have the will to resist need good, testable theory to provide a strategic resource. Rhetorics of moral denunciation, I now accept, have an important part to play, but they aren’t enough. But there is a deeper, and perhaps more widely shared respect in which the struggle for understanding is emancipatory. This takes us back to our introductory chapter, and to the recognition that, as Gramsci used to say, ‘everyone is a philosopher’. In order to carry on our lives, none of us can avoid the challenge to make sense of the world we have to negotiate, to locate ourselves somewhere in it, to align ourselves in relation to its contradictory tendencies, and so to adopt values. This aspect of life as a struggle to make sense of the world around us and to establish a relationship to it is part of what it is to be human. I don't know a better statement of this than the one given by the young Marx in his Paris notebooks:

Just as plants, animals, stones, air, light, etc. on the theoretical side form part of human consciousness, partly as objects of natural science, partly as objects of art, just as they are his spiritual inorganic nature, spiritual nourishment which he must first prepare for enjoyment and digestion, so they also form part of human life and of human activity on the practical side... Nature is man's inorganic body - nature, that is in so far as it is not itself human body. Man lives on nature - means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man's physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.

(Marx 1844, 1975: p276. See also Collier 1991)

But striving to understand the world and our connectedness to it is intrinsically valuable for yet another reason. This has to do with our belated recognition of the social character of this struggle. Feminist epistemology has provided the clearest demonstration that so far this is a social enterprise which is profoundly compromised by its exclusive character. They show the extent to which it has been monopolized by men, the radical science movement would add its subservience to capital and the military, post-colonial theorists would emphasize its complicity with empire and race, while green critics would denounce its complicity with the destructive modern project of domination of nature. The feminist epistemologists' call for a practice of science in which an inclusive dialogue of equals can be conducted on terms and respecting criteria which are subject to continuous re-negotiation offers a prospect of mutual respect and understanding between rival traditions of thought. This in itself would be a true human good. That it is not utopian is illustrated by pre-figurative experiences of something approaching it in our fleeting opportunities for real dialogue in daily life, and, still, just occasionally, in the seminar rooms and coffee bars of colleges and universities.

However, as with all true human goods, the key question is how to extend it from the elite contexts where it is still enjoyed to make it available to all who can and wish to participate. How to realize a genuine democratization of intellectual life? This certainly means enhancing opportunities for previously excluded and marginalized groups within institutionalized settings. But it also means fighting in the wider culture for an ethic which sets value on curiosity and the search for understanding, and which affords opportunities, time and space for a confident citizenry to pursue these values. It means rejecting post-modern irony and economistic contempt for them, and it means opposing the ever-advancing commercialization and ‘corruption' of what is left of our common culture.

Ian Craib

It is with some pleasure that I can reciprocate Ted's response to my chapters: reading through his I find little that I disagree with and nothing that I can usefully disagree with. Even though I think we have worked with and still work with different intellectual proj ects, there has been something of a merging of horizons (in Gadamer's sense) from our arguments and attempts to understand each other. I have no problem with Ted's characterization of my positions, so perhaps I'll start by saying what I have learnt from him.

First, I learnt to tolerate what I regarded as more tedious dimensions of the philosophy of science and social science, arguments about logic and meaning which I now find myself defending to students and colleagues. There are some very basic notions which Ted covers in his contribution to the introduction and his discussion of positivism which are like the essentials of learning to play an instrument - learning to read music, play the scales and arpeggios, for example, without which one can make the philosophical equivalent of a horrible noise. Sociologists often do make a horrible noise when they venture into philosophical areas, and my contribution to our praise of the Essex department is that it has never been afraid to recruit from other disciplines or from the fringes of sociology (I'm talking about myself here) and so set up extraordinarily creative cross-currents. We work in a department where we cannot find security by theorizing other disciplines out of the way.

Second, the development of non-positivist philosophies of science to which Ted has been a major contributor has opened up a range of possibilities that I had not associated with naturalism, and I now think of the crossovers from natural to social science as an intriguing and sometimes exciting area, and it seems to me that increasingly there are dimensions of the sociological enterprise which can learn much from the natural sciences.

Third and most important in the context of this book is that what I appreciate about Ted's contribution is the passion with which he pursues and defends his ideas, and his love of the natural sciences. I have learnt what little I know of the natural sciences from listening to him and talking to him.

Yet we have different intellectual projects and I have always found it difficult to say exactly of what that difference consists. I could not produce my own intellectual history in the way that Ted has done - I feel I floundered through different theorists, different philosophers, different approaches, experiencing it all in the way Hegel describes it in the introduction to his Phenomenology of Spirit, and I paraphrase here: the truth is like a drunken orgy from which occasionally one member will stand out clearly defined before being absorbed back into the melee. My political views have not changed so dramatically - I am beginning to realize despite my attempts to be a Serious Marxist in the Socialist Workers Party and later on the left of the Labour Party, I have always been very unserious Marxist - perhaps tending more to anarcho-syndicalism - although I don't know if there are any anarcho-syndicalists out there or even if anybody knows what it is any more. In fact I'm not sure that I know what it is any more. What I distil from all this is that what is important is opposition, argument and thought. All three are under sustained attack in many areas, and I think they have been so as long as I can remember, and perhaps the battles have been with us ever since the Enlightenment.

In politics, it is opposition, argument and thought which provide us with what limited freedoms we have, and the advice of one of the heroes of my youth still stands: don't follow leaders.

Believe it or not, this has something to do with the way I approach the ideas in this book. To begin with, I think that all the ideas we consider here should be taken seriously and have relevance across the board in the social sciences. The social sciences as a whole and each one separately are complex animals dealing with multiple objects at multiple levels of analysis. No one approach and no one way of working can ever be the way. Many colleagues will acknowledge this and then carry on in their preferred way without any reflection. If progress is possible in the social sciences, it will not be achieved through a narrow focus - there are few if any areas where we can see ourselves as accumulating knowledge until we have it all and can pack up and go home, not least because what we study is continuously changing, often because we study it.

What we provide here is I think not a meta-narrative but a series of complementary and contradictory meta-narratives which enable a creative and critical debate to take place between approaches at both a theoretical and an empirical level - it is the existence of these debates which take us beyond being collectors of statistics and stories. A science in which there is no opposition or argument is a dead science.

This brings me to what Ted calls my interest in subjectivity and to the point where our projects differ. I was always interested in subjectivity on an intellectual level, but there was a point earlier than Ted dates it - in the late 1970s - when desperation set in, when my academic life and the political organizations to which I belonged felt like prisons and my personal life went through a number of upheavals. The desperation drove me to psychoanalysis first as a patient, and by the mid-1980s as a trainee group analytic therapist. The work I do as a therapist provides with me with equivalent sources of wonder to those Ted finds in the natural world. It is not the external world which I find wonder-full but the creativeness of the internal worlds and daily lives of the people who come my way in my work for the NHS. I am privileged by being able to witness the way in which people can survive against the odds and usually go beyond survival in their day-to-day lives through processes that remain mysterious to me. A metaphor which my patients regularly produce without my help is that we are given a hand of cards at birth and, however bad that hand, is we have to play it, and we can play it well or badly.

The subjectivity that I am interested in is that implicated in the way that the hands are played. Some people seem to be dealt a worthless hand - perhaps they are subjected to treatment in their childhood which can only be described as sustained torture - yet they are able, often by means of their supposed ‘symptoms', to build lives for themselves, sustain long-term loving relationships and bring up their own children in a loving way. They do not do this by concentrating on their victimhood, although of course they are victims, but rather by grasping some internal capacity of agency in a particular way. Other people seem to be dealt an average or even a good hand, yet each card they play takes them into further trouble. They use their internal capacity in a different way.

I would argue that given the complexity of contemporary understandings of science, we could develop scientific or rational explanations and understanding of everything up to the point where the hands are played. Beyond that there is something imponderable. However, what I would surmise from my own experience and from my experience as a therapist is that people who survive best, who play their hands in a way that does not cause them or others too much suffering are those who allow themselves to think. Psychoanalysis is often thought of as putting people in touch with feelings but more often is about people learning to think about and articulate feelings. It does not cure anxiety or misery but enables people to be anxious and miserable in more creative ways. We cannot explain or predict why one person might achieve this in one way and another person in another, and there are many more ways of achieving it than there are people to achieve it - we can, if we wish, gain access to an endless range of registers of internal achievements, from our dreams to our mathematical abilities to the pleasure taken in cultivating an allotment.

I think it is here where any type of science or rational understanding ceases, and my dominant intellectual concern is to develop critiques of those ideas, from the natural or the social sciences, which attempt to close down this area for if such ideas feed through into political and social policies, as they often do, they contribute to a closing down of human possibilities. To achieve these possibilities is always a struggle. Those who do best in psychotherapy are those who can learn to think about their inner lives, often think the unthinkable, who can learn to tolerate anxiety, contradiction, paradox and uncertainty and internal conflict and make something out of it all. Exactly the same abilities are needed to produce good social science. Opposition, argument and thought are internal as well as external processes. In this context, bad social science is what tries to explain away that imponderable area of creativity and internal confusion; and which closes down investigation and argument to one particular method and area. A living social science and perhaps a living natural science as well has to think in many different ways.

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