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Nature, Norms and Democracy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Extract
I am quite prepared to admit that modern western thought is shot through with contradictions. For example, it is not coherent to think both that the idea of human nature is an illusion and that eugenics is an out-and-out evil; or to claim to be a democrat and exclude a priori the topic of eugenics from political debate. However, I personally very much doubt that the notions of nature and democracy are themselves in crisis. In my view they simply give rise to semantic confusion and false problems that certain basic twentieth-century discoveries - in the field of physics, anthropology and political science - ought to be able to clear up, if they were better known. We shall just touch on a few thinkers whose work may give us some pointers to a clearer, calmer view of things. First a philosopher, Raymond Ruyer (1902-1987), and an economist, Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950), two of whose key ideas this paper will combine: a neo-Aristotelian conception of nature, implying the existence of regulating principles and norms, to which humans and their societies, like everything else, are subject; a procedural conception of democracy that says it is not an end in itself but, under certain conditions, an appropriate means of making political decisions and settling disputes. And in addition some anthropologists, who helped either to put human beings back into a neo-Aristotelian world, or to define more accurately the essence of the political: Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose structuralism gave back its full importance to the notion of formal cause and even to the idea of final cause, and André Leroi-Gourhan, who confirmed that ‘art imitates nature’ by demonstrating that technical skill is a natural extension of life, whose processes and results it mimics; Arthur Maurice Hocart, who demonstrated the ritual origin of all institutions, particularly political ones.
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References
Notes
1. R. Ruyer (1946), Eléments de psycho-biologie (Paris, PUF); (1948), Le Monde des valeurs (Paris, Aubier); (1952), Néo-finalisme (Paris, PUF).
2. J. Schumpeter (1974), Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, London, George Allen & Unwin Ltd, original edition 1942.
3. C. Lévi-Strauss (1971), “Le structuralisme est résolument téléologique”. Mythologiques****, L'Homme nu (Paris, Plon), p. 615.
4. A. Leroi-Gourhan (1964 & 1965), Le Geste et la parole (Paris, Albin Michel).
5. A.M. Hocart (1927), Kingship (London, Oxford University Press); (1933), Progress of Man: a short survey of his evolution, his customs and his works (Methuen, London); (1970), Kings and Councillors (Chicago & London, The University of Chicago Press), original edition 1936.
6. N. Bohr (1964), Physique atomique et connaissance humaine (Paris, Gonthier); P. Auger (1952), L'Homme microscopique, essai de monadologie (Paris, Flammarion); A. Kastler (1976), Cette étrange matière (Paris, Stock).
7. See L. Scubla, Sciences cognitives, matérialisme et anthropologie, in D. Andler, Introduction aux sciences cognitives (Paris, Gallimard), pp. 421-446.
8. B. Ponomarev (1974), Au pays des quanta (Moscow, Mir), pp. 98-105.
9. Néo-finalisme, p. 1-15.
10. For a synthetic view see L. Scubla (1995), Raymond Ruyer et la classification des sciences, in L. Vax & J.-J. Wunenberger, Raymond Ruyer, de la science à la théologie (Paris, Editions Kimé), pp. 75-90.
11. L'Homme microscopique (see note 6).
12. ‘Classical physics deals only with collective phenomena. To the opposite microphysics leads naturally into biology. From the individual phenomena of the atom it is in fact possible to go in two directions. A statistical accumulation of them leads into the laws of ordinary physics. But if these individual phenomena are complicated by ‘systematic' interactions, while still retaining their individuality within the molecule, then the macromolecule, then the virus, we get to the organism, which, regardless of its size, remains “microscopic” in that sense' (Ruyer (1958), La Genèse des formes vivantes (Paris, Flammarion), p. 54).
13. Ponomarev, op. cit., pp. 111-118.
14. Ruyer, Le Monde des valeurs, pp. 132-133.
15. Ruyer (1952), Néo-finalisme, p. 248; Lévi-Strauss (1955), Tristes tropiques (Paris, Plon), p. 183.
16. L. Scubla (2000), Françoise Héritier et l'avenir du structuralisme, in J.-J. Jamard, E. Terray & M. Xanthakou, En substances, Textes pour Françoise Héritier (Paris, Fayard), pp. 37-45.
17. Lévi-Strauss (1967), The Elementary Structures of Kinship, translated from the French by J.H. Bell, J.R. von Sturmer & R. Needham (Boston, Beacon Press), p. 8.
18. L. Scubla, Diversité des cultures et invariants transculturels, Revue du MAUSS no. 1 (1988), pp. 96-121, no. 2 (1988), pp. 55-107, and no. 11 (1991), pp. 132-136.
19. L. Scubla (1992), Est-il possible de mettre la loi au-dessus de l'homme? Sur la philosophie politique de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in J.-J. Dupuy, Introduction aux sciences sociales. Logique des phénomènes collectifs (Paris, Ellipses), pp. 105-143.
20. ‘The whole plea […] recalls vividly the defence offered by a man who was accused by his neighbour of having returned a kettle in a damaged condition. In the first place, he had returned the kettle undamaged; in the second place it already had holes in it when he borrowed it; and in the third place, he had never borrowed it at all', Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, ch. 2.