Abstract
This chapter outlines an ontological approach to understanding social pathology. I begin by outlining what a critical social ontology consists of before elaborating categories for diagnostic critique. My thesis is that a social ontology is one that grasps the structural dynamics of social relations and considers the ways that these can be either rationally organised (or what I call anabolic social forms) or pathologically organised (or what I call katabolically organised). The main idea is that social pathology is not to be restricted to inter-cognitive or neo-Idealist frames (such as pathologies of recognition or communication) but rather to be located in the architecture and functional characteristics of social forms themselves. I end with a consideration of the relation between this ontological approach to social pathology and the idea of critical judgement or what I term ‘phronetic criticism’ that is not merely diagnostic in orientation, but contains within it the seeds of alternative praxis for social transformation.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
For an insightful and important critique of Zurn’s position, see Laitinen (2015). Laitinen suggests that a more satisfying approach to social pathology can be found in the exploration of the social reality rather than the second-order phenomena that Zurn describes. I will take this approach here toward a social-ontological account of social pathology, but in a way different from Laitinen.
- 2.
- 3.
Jörg Schaub points out this weakness in Honneth’s theory of social pathology, specifically that this is a problem for a more radical and transformative approach to critique: ‘Social pathologies are presented as aberrations related to relationships of individual freedom, whereas social misdevelopments denote aberrations of social freedom. Both forms of aberrations are characterised as socially caused misunderstandings of the norms that are already underlying existing, reproductively relevant social practices, which, in turn, lead to a failure to realise the norms that are underlying them more adequately. For this reason, the link between both forms of social aberrations, on the one hand, and radical critique and normative revolution, on the other hand, is severed’ Schaub (2015: 107–130, 113).
- 4.
Fabian Freyenhagen (2018) also gestures toward such an approach to ‘macro-social entities.’
- 5.
Again, I differ here with thinkers such as Honneth in that we must inquire into the ways that social power shapes the material and ontological structures of society because these have constitutive power over the normative structures of consciousness. What this entails is that the norms and practices of capitalistic life will infiltrate the recognitive and discursive forms of social action that neo-Idealists see as the vehicle for immanent critique and social transformation. In essence, they subscribe to a thin interpretation of reification. See my discussion of this problem of the power of reification over the normative structures of consciousness (Thompson, 2020a).
- 6.
As Frederick Neuhouser (2016: 31–48, 47) has argued, referring to a more materialist interpretation of Hegel and social pathology: ‘social pathology must be theorised not simply as false consciousness but, at the same time, as false material practices—social practices that embody false, or unsatisfying ways of negotiating the opposition between self-consciousness and life.’
- 7.
Erich Fromm gives us a sense of what a Marxian approach to social ontology would look like where the essence of human life is seen in concrete, objective terms rather than crude ‘materialist’ terms: ‘In our attempt to define the essence of man, we are not referring to an abstraction arrived at by the way of metaphysical speculations like those of Heidegger and Sartre. We refer to the real conditions of existence common to man qua man, so that the essence of each individual is identical with the existence of the species’ (Fromm, 1973: 27).
- 8.
Essentially, neo-Idealism is a mode of critical theory that has been dominant since Habermas’ break with Marxism and the positing of pragmatic modes of social action as the central framework for establishing social criticism and ethical validity of norms. See my (2016) The Domestication of Critical Theory.
- 9.
Because of space constraints, what follows here is a mere sketch. I elaborate a more systematic theory for a critical social ontology in The Specter of Babel: A Reconstruction of Political Judgment.
- 10.
For a more developed discussion, see Thompson (2019).
- 11.
- 12.
- 13.
- 14.
Frederick Neuhouser argues on this point: ‘Full spiritual satisfaction, in contrast, requires that life be elevated to freedom and that self-consciousness be filled with the aims of life. On this view, social pathology exists whenever the basic conditions of society prevent its members—in their self-conceptions, in their recognitive relations to others, and in their material practices—from bringing together their membership in both the realm of freedom and the realm of necessity’ (Neuhouser, 2016: 47).
- 15.
The distinction between anabolic and katabolic drives in the personality is first pointed out by Freud in his The Ego and the Id. I am borrowing these terms from Karl Menninger’s (1938), Man against Himself. Menninger employs these concepts to refer to tendencies within the personality, but extends them to patterns of human behavior as responses to social forces. ‘Freud makes the . . . assumption that the life—and death-instincts—let us call them the constructive and destructive tendencies of the personality—are in constant conflict and interaction just as are similar forces in physics, chemistry, and biology. To create and to destroy, to build up and to tear down, these are the anabolism and katabolism of the personality, no less than of the cells and the corpuscles—the two directions in which the same energies exert themselves.’ (Menninger, 1938: 5). Although Menninger employs these categories to describe aspects of the personality, I use them to describe the effects that relations have on the individuals who constitute them. Pathology is now a concept that describes both the ontological relational structures and the subjects within and affected by them. Also cf. Fromm (1973: 102ff.).
- 16.
It should be emphasised that pathological social schemes also produce pathological personalities and that the categories of anabolism and katabolism become features of pathological personal drives and tendencies (cf. Fromm, 1973: 246).
- 17.
Frederick Neuhouser (2020) describes this aspect of social pathology through Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the decadence of life and as a cultural pathology.
- 18.
This also holds for the famous Milgram (1974) experiments where participants were told by an authority figure to obey commands for shocking other participants for errors in an enacted learning experiment. One of the key findings of the study seems to me to be that the more authority is present and appears legitimate, the more likely that the roles of the participants would be enacted and fulfilled. The structural relations between the participants is again necessary but insufficient. What is crucial is that there be some kind of efficient cause, power, that provides the structure with coherence and allows for the enactment of prescribed structural roles and practices.
- 19.
Applying Aristotle’s metaphysical categories of causation, we can therefore say that any social scheme in social ontology have: (i) a material or substantive cause: the relational capacities of the species; (ii) a formal cause: the relations that are enacted in any scheme; (iii) an efficient cause: the guiding power that assigns the roles and purposes of that scheme; and (iv) a final cause: the purpose or end, the telos, of that scheme and its power to retrogressively define the boundaries of the scheme itself as well as the parameters of the roles, norms and practices that constitute the scheme.
- 20.
Also cf. Laitinen and Särkelä (2019: 80–102).
- 21.
See Tomasello (2019) for a more complete treatment of this thesis.
- 22.
See the excellent discussion of this theme by Thorpe (2016).
- 23.
The ontology of value can therefore be seen as the constitutive interplay between concepts and practices and the enactment of this practices within congealed ensembles of broader social schemes. As Sally Haslanger has argued about the nature of our concepts: ‘our concepts and our social practices are deeply intertwined. Concepts not only enable us to describe but also help structure social practices, and our evolving practices affect our concepts’ (Haslanger, 2012: 368 and passim).
- 24.
See the important discussion by Kavoulakos (2018).
References
Dent, N. (1988). Rousseau: An introduction to his psychological, social and political theory. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Freud, S. (1990). The ego and the id. New York, NY: W. W. Norton.
Froese, K. (2001). Beyond liberalism: The moral community of Rousseau’s social contract. Canadian Journal of Political Science, 33(3), 579–600.
Freyenhagen, F. (2015). Honneth on social pathologies: A critique. Critical Horizons, 16(2), 131–152.
Freyenhagen, F. (2018). Critical theory and social pathology. In P. Gordon, E. Hammer, & A. Honneth (Eds.), The Routledge companion to the Frankfurt school. New York, NY: Routledge.
Fromm, E. (1973). The anatomy of human destructiveness. New York, NY: Henry Holt.
Harris, N. (2019). Beyond recognition: A critique of contemporary social pathology diagnosis. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK.
Haslanger, S. (2012). Resisting reality: Social construction and social critique. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1969). Wissenschaft der Logik (Vol. 2). Frankfurt: Surkamp.
Honneth, A. (2011). Das Recht der Freiheit. Grundriss der demokratischen Sittlichkeit. Frankfurt: Surkamp.
Huxley, A. (1945). The perennial philosophy. New York, NY: HarperCollins.
Kavoulakos, K. (2018). Georg Lukács’s philosophy of praxis: From Neo-Kantianism to Marxism. London: Bloomsbury.
Laitinen, A. (2015). Social pathologies, reflexive pathologies, and the idea of higher-order disorders. Studies in Social and Political Thought, 25, 44–65.
Laitinen, A., & Särkelä, A. (2019). Four conceptions of social pathology. European Journal of Social Theory, 22(1), 80–102.
Menninger, K. (1938). Man against himself. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace and World.
Marcuse, H. (1964). One-dimensional man. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to authority: An experimental view. New York, NY: HarperCollins.
Neuhouser, F. (2016). Hegel on social ontology and the possibility of pathology. In I. Testa & L. Ruggiu (Eds.), I that is we, we that is I: Perspectives on contemporary hegel. Leiden: Brill.
Neuhouser, F. (2020). Geistige Gesundheit und kulturelle Pathologie bei Nietzsche. Deutsche Zeitschrift Für Philosophie, 68(1), 1–27.
Noone, J. (1980). Rousseau’s social contract: A conceptual analysis. London: George Prior Publishers.
Rousseau, J. J. (1964a). Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité. Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 3. Paris: Gallimard.
Rousseau, J. J. (1964b). Du contract social. Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 3. Paris: Gallimard.
Schaub, J. (2015). Misdevelopments, pathologies, and normative revolutions: Normative reconstruction as method of critical theory. Critical Horizons, 16(2), 107–130.
Thompson, K. (2019). Hegel’s theory of normativity: The systematic foundations of the philosophical science of right. Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press.
Thompson, M. J. (2016). The domestication of critical theory. London: Rowman and Littlefield.
Thompson, M. J. (2017). Autonomy and common good: Interpreting Rousseau’s general will. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 25(2), 266–285.
Thompson, M. J. (2018). The metaphysical infrastructure of Hegel’s practical philosophy. In M. Thompson (Ed.), Hegel’s metaphysics and the philosophy of politics (pp. 101–141). New York, NY: Routledge.
Thompson, M. J. (2019). Critical social ontology as a foundation for ethics: Marx, Lukács and critical judgment. Studies in Social and Political Thought, 29: 8–26.
Thompson, M. J. (2020a). Verdinglichung und das Netz der Normen: Wege zu einer Kritischen Theorie des Bewusstseins. Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 68(2): 217–240.
Thompson, M. J. (2020b). The specter of Babel: A reconstruction of political judgment. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Thorpe, C. (2016). Necroculture. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Tomasello, M. (2019). Becoming human: A theory of ontogeny. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Zimbardo, P. (2007). The Lucifer effect: Understanding how good people turn evil. New York, NY: Random House.
Zurn, C. (2011). Social pathologies as second-order disorders. In Danielle Petherbridge (Ed.), Axel Honneth: Critical essays. Brill: Leiden.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Thompson, M.J. (2021). An Ontological Account of Social Pathology. In: Harris, N. (eds) Pathology Diagnosis and Social Research. Political Philosophy and Public Purpose. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70582-4_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70582-4_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-70581-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-70582-4
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)