All content © RJ Robinson 2002-8
by RJ Robinson (2004)
ISBN 0954216857
Reply to Eller
The following is the full text of my reply to Jack David Eller's review of The History of Human Reason, originally published on the Anthropology Review Database (ARD). The full reference is:
Eller, Jack David 2005 Review of The History of Human Reason. Anthropology Review Database. February 18. Electronic document, http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/cgi/showme.cgi?keycode=2427, accessed March 27, 2006.
My reply took the form of an email to Dr Eller, of which the full text is reproduced below. Direct quotes from Eller are shown in green. The ARD declined to print any reply.
Dear Dr Eller
Thanks you for taking the trouble to review my recent book, The History of Human Reason. I am sorry you found it so objectionable, not least because this is clearly a case of my intentions not being clearly communicated. I certainly had no intention of suggesting that ‘phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny’ and I have no sympathy whatsoever for the Levy-Bruhl vision of childlike primitives. Quite the contrary, and I thought I had said so in my book. Evidently I had not, or at least not clearly enough. Certainly if I knew nothing about my own book apart from your review, I would not only ignore it but also be inclined to assume that it was precisely as silly and insulting as you suggest.
However, as this not at all what I intended, I feel I must make some reply. As the ARD does not seem to allow for replies by authors, I thought I should make my response to yourself. I can’t think of a more economic or fair way of doing this than working through your review from beginning to end, so please bear with me.
Phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny in R. J. Robinson’s new book. In this case, the phylogeny of all of human cultural history recapitulates the ontogeny of individual human cognitive development in a manner that will disinterest, alarm, or offend anthropologists depending on how tolerant they are of grand theories from one discipline being fairly uncritically and totally non-ethnographically imposed on our own.
I was a little surprised to see this as a summary of my ideas. Although methodological individualism is not totally incredible, I certainly do not subscribe to it. In fact I thought I had gone to some lengths to make this clear. Indeed, far from having phylogeny recapitulating ontogeny (or the reverse) I suggested that neither takes unequivocal precedence. For example:
Each aspect and product of intelligence is a structure in its own right. An art form, an idea, a belief, a technology, a method, a theory, an institution, an estate or a class, a practice, a value: each has its own necessities, its own possibilities, its own proper logic, its own propensities, its own dynamics, its own internal order, its own residual contingencies. It must therefore be developed in its own right – Nature no more makes leaps here than anywhere else (305).
Of course, there are interactions between such structures, which creates shortcuts and obstacles to development, some of which I mention explicitly. On another level, some structures are much more extensive and enduring than others, and so create rather asymmetrical and overpowering relationships with other structures, but that is by no means the same thing as a one-sided determination. That is why social determinists are as misguided as methodological individualists. In fact I wrote the whole of the last chapter, and especially the section entitled to ‘Intersecting Developments’ (p.305ff), to refute any notion of the reducibility of one intelligent structure to another. So you can imagine that I am at a loss to understand how I could have given the impression that this implies that phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny.
Perhaps I was not explicit enough about refuting a widespread assumption about the nature of intelligence – that fundamentally it consists of individual cognition. This would indeed suggest a rather one-sided relationship between the social and the psychic. But as you will know from the Piagetian literature (with which I assume you are well acquainted – otherwise on what other basis could you review a fundamentally Piagetian book?), intelligence is no more a matter of individual cognitive than adaptation is what individual organisms do. Just as adaptation cannot be understood without taking into account the full range of biological structures from the most expansively evolutionary to the most microscopically organismic, so the Piagetian concept of intelligence is irreducible to individuals thinking, perceiving, remembering, and so on. Rather, intelligence, like adaptation, is defined by general rules of equilibrium for activity in general. These are the general rules of coherence and consistency we have managed to articulate in logic and mathematics (and elsewhere), which are plainly neither the products nor preserve of the individual. It is true that, in the case of adaptation, there have to be individual organisms operating at the biological level, but that does not mean that adaptation ultimately consists of or can be explained by reference to individual organisms; and in the case of intelligence, there have to be intelligent individuals for higher level structures of intelligence to exist, but social, historical, and cultural structures need not be reducible to the activities of individual intelligences. So when I write about the development of ‘intelligence’ I am referring to this entire complex.
Again, I thought that this was implied by the way all manner of structures were treated as having their own proper structure and development, but I guess that I was not explicit enough.
Robinson’s project is an ambitious one: to account for all of human culture and human history in terms of “a single unitary structure, namely intelligence itself, by virtue of which all aspects of human nature, even the most lofty, can not only be explained but also be seen to point the way towards a practical resolution to its current conflicts, short-comings and immaturity” (10).
Correct.
Whether or not this is even a possible project, let alone a wise one, is questioned by the works of scholars like Howard Gardner (1983) who suggests that intelligence is not all that unitary in the first place.
I’m not sure I would have chosen Gardner as my authority for criticising the idea of a unitary intelligence. When I raised Gardner’s views with Les Smith (one of the English-speaking world’s leading authorities on Piaget), he just laughed. The best one could say of his work is that it suggests that intelligence has many facets – a claim that no one seems to doubt. It may be mildly effective against monolithic accounts of Piaget, but Piaget himself is anything but monolithic. On the other hand, if there is any merit at all in The History of Human Reason it is that it shows how intelligence can be extremely diverse in its practical and empirical expressions, yet retain a fundamental unity at its core.
Clearly, then, Robinson is operating with a particular definition of “intelligence,” and a concept that is going to be so heavily leaned on needs a powerful and dependable definition. On the very first page of his book, Robinson asserts that he uses the term “to encompass all that is specifically human about human beings—and all that makes some other animals, including the great apes, dolphins and perhaps a few others, so very human too” (1). But if other species share that which is “specifically human,” it appears not to be specifically human at all but rather a general biological possibility, such that they are not “very human” but we are “very natural.” With that observation alone, his edifice crashes down.
I don’t quite follow this. All I am saying is that there is a difference between biology in general and intelligence in particular (a point you seem to agree with in your next paragraph), and that any organism that is at or on this side of the borderline will show many attributes that are normally regarded as the preserve of human beings. In particular, when we say that a chimpanzee is being very ‘human’ we are actually referring to the aspects of its activity that result from its intelligence. The evidence would seem to place not only some primates but perhaps also some cetaceans and birds on or near this transition point. That does not imply that intelligence is a general biological possibility, any more than the existence of viruses at the boundary between biology and chemistry implies that life is a general chemical possibility. On the contrary, it simply suggests that, intelligence being a natural phenomenon, we should avoid the kinds of ‘species-hubris’ that often infects any theory of human nature that rejects the idea that everything about human beings can be explained in biological terms. Far from this causing my edifice to collapse, it grounds it firmly in the natural world.
Nevertheless he proceeds. The motivating factor seems to be that intelligence, not yet adequately defined, “cannot be explained in biological terms” (2). I am not sure that anyone ever claimed that it could be, but the fact that other animals have it as well indicates that it can at least to some extent. He argues that intelligence cannot be reduced to biology, which I assume we would all agree, nor understood as a “quantitative” improvement over other species—that is, we just have more brain and therefore we have this unique intelligence and history. Again, I think he is jousting with straw men, since no one (I hope) thinks that the only difference between humans and non-humans is brain mass; at the very least, the human brain is not merely a reptilian or amphibian brain writ large but is structurally different from them. Robinson seems to have no sense of the significance of structure versus substance, and with a little sense of it, again his project is rendered somewhat moot.
I only wish I lived in a world in which all this was true - if I am attacking a straw man, this particular straw man is alive and well and very, very busy around here! It is not I who lacks a sense of the difference between substance and structure – on the contrary, I insist on it, but there is a very general (if generally unspoken) assumption in the literature with which I am acquainted that human intelligence is not really different, not least because the continuity of substance confirms that there is nothing really new about the structure of human intelligence. For example, practically everyone uses the fact that we share 98.5% of their genes chimpanzees to conclude that there can’t be anything basically new about human beings (a classic elision of substance and structure, of course). Apparently the fact that we have email and New York and things like that need not be taken into account. Likewise, while Jerison’s work was still fresh there were any number of papers that cited Homo sapiens’ exceptional encephalisation index as the ‘explanation’ of our intelligence. Likewise for recent adaptationist accounts of our supposed ‘Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation’, and any number of other neo-Darwinian arguments about the origins, inherent tendencies and limits of our cognitive capabilities. I am quite certain that there is a straightforwardly Darwinian explanation for the origins of intelligence (and I have set it out in my Birth of Reason, the final draft of which can be found at www.prometheus.org.uk), but these aren’t it.
The goal of this long (367 large and dense pages) book becomes clear starting on page 10, when he presents his “synopsis” of the argument to follow. He lays down a sequence of stages of reason which purportedly account for cultural diversity and for historical development, from “intuitive reason” through “concrete reason” to “formal reason” to “dialectical reason.” If these terms sound familiar and Piagetian, they are, for he next acknowledges his debt to Piaget for elucidating the stages of individual cognitive development. He also tips his hat to Marx for approaching human history in a developmental, stage-wise manner. Although he takes exception to both in ways, we see now what will follow: another attempt to break culture and history into “stages.”
True. Is this a problem? A stage theory does not imply that everything is explained by the stages, only that everything can be assimilated to a single stage in some meaningful way. Stage theories in general do not exhaust explanation any more than the existence of cognitive stages explains everything about, say, personality. That there are many, perhaps infinitely many, possible personalities is not contradicted by the fact that all psyches are also embodiments of a small number of cognitive stages.
The first chapter after the introduction, “The Nature of Intelligence,” performs a Schutzian (e.g. 1967) analysis of self and world that will interest students of Alfred Schutz and those with a philosophical bent, although Schutz did it better decades ago.
As you know, I don’t cite Schutz, whom I have not read since I was an undergraduate. I had no problem with the kind of social-phenomenal world-picture he was trying to paint, but it seemed to have no material basis. As you do not explain in what sense he ‘did it better decades ago’, I’m not sure how to respond.
Robinson tries to build up the world system out of the concepts of “subject,” “object,” “world,” and the “activity” that adapts and constructs the others. The Piagetian attitude is immanent. However, he ends the chapter with a claim that should make anthropologists gasp: that he sees, and is going to show us, how the major cultural-historical transformations are transitions from one cognitive stage to another. Namely, “the historical form of the transition from intuitive to concrete reason was the Neolithic revolution…; and that from concrete to formal reason seems to have taken the form of the industrial revolution” (75). If one doubts that he is really serious about this, the ensuing chapters remove all doubt.
If intelligence could be equated with individual cognition, this would of course be preposterous. But even the quote you offer does not say that. Assuming that you accept my earlier point, that intelligence is about general structures of activity at every level (social, economic, political, ideological, cultural, technological, etc) rather than individual cognition as such, I’m not quite sure why this should ‘make anthropologists gasp’. Didn’t these transitions make a profound difference to the organisation of human activity? And if they did, what was the difference they actually made, if not to introduce quite new forms of social activity and personal experience?
Chapter Two, “Intuitive Reason,” discusses this “most rudimentary form” of intelligence, just barely developed beyond the baby sucking its toes. Whether there was ever a culture or civilization of toe-suckers Robinson does not inform us, but there was definitely not only a culture but an entire historical period in which humans were at Piaget’s “pre-operational” stage of cognitive ability—that is, all the way from the first foragers to the first farmers. This “intuitive” stage was characterized by “treatment of things and objects as facts of the most primitive sort, comprehended only to the extent that they can be handled on a pre-rational level, which is to say, only in terms of their empirical surfaces” (79). As a consequence, he opines, “standardization is rare, objects are dealt with as isolated and static entities, measurement is seldom employed and invariably scalar. In all, it is an environment almost designed to defeat any notion of objectivity, comparison, analysis, or enquiry” (79). Indeed, he informs us, such intelligence is “at a level where it is scarcely distinguishable from a complex organic structure” (150) which “few would consider intelligent and none should think rational” (153).
Robinson does not reference Levy-Bruhl in his bibliography, but perhaps he is channeling his spirit. Even Levy-Bruhl, I think, did not impugn primitives as indistinguishable from complex organic structures. I think this takes us back to the ontogeny/phylogeny issue and the non-psychic nature of intelligence. It is certainly the case that pre-operational children operate like this, and a ‘intuitive’ society would have analogous limitations. However, there is nothing in my actual argument to imply that the two levels go hand in hand. On the contrary, I cite repeated instances (in later chapters) of how the relationship between any two levels of structure can be quite open and complex.
So to say that the structure of a social system is intuitive in my sense does not imply that its individual members must at Piaget’s pre-operational stage. In fact there are positive reasons to expect them to be substantially more developed than the social systems they inhabit. As I actually put:
...the members of a society whose social structures are intuitive are unlikely to be limited to intuitive levels of cognition. In fact they could not be: childish intelligences could not sustain a society of any kind without the constant sup-port and guidance of much more advanced caretakers. So I have no doubt that cognitive testing of members of Sahlins’ ‘Stone Age economies’ or Levi-Strauss’ ‘savages’ would quickly dispel any idea of simple societies being populated by individuals with simple minds. So does the simple fact that their technology is strictly intuitive, yet they often have a well-articulated taxonomy of literally hundreds of species and are generally sensitive enough to the internal order of their natural environment to avoid over-harvesting or over-hunting it at least as well as we avoid despoiling our more artificial environment. None of these achievements would be open to cognitively intuitive individuals (308).
All this could still be true and all the members of such a society cognitively post-intuitive, and yet it still be true that ‘standardization is rare, objects are dealt with as isolated and static entities, measurement is seldom employed and invariably scalar’. For methods of measurement and standardisation are the products not of individual inspiration and decision but of social systems. And as I understand the literature, there is ample evidence that the very simplest cultures and (especially) technologies do indeed operate at this level. I cite a number a sources in the footnotes. If these references are incorrect, I would welcome corrections – the sequence of stages I propose does not rely on there actually existing any such societies at the moment, only that they existed somewhere in human history.
It would be bad enough if Robinson used even one shred of ethnographic evidence to support his brave, silly, and insulting assertions, but there is not one—I repeat, not one—ethnographic case of any significance is his entire book. And I personally, as a fieldworker among Australian Aboriginals—that most abused population of “ultimate primitives” exploited by Durkheim, Roheim, and any number of “explorers of the primitive”—can assure you that they have a subtle and not-at-all “empirical” or superficial worldview, cosmology, and social system. Each anthropologist can vouch for his or her own subject-society.
I can sympathise with your position here, although there is only a limited amount I could have done about it. It is perhaps quite inadequate to say that I cited little empirical evidence largely for reasons of space, but even the single chapter all this argument is about aims to cover a good deal more than just the anthropological ‘space’ – all in 23 pages. Not much room for primary sources.
There is no need to prolong our tour of this scholarly but wrongheaded book. His discussion of formal reason takes a strange turn into a critique of capitalism—welcome by some, no doubt, but not really germane.
Why is a critique of capitalism not germane to a general theory of human activity? Is there any more powerful structure of contemporary human activity? Has any structure of human activity ever had such as overwhelming power over its inhabitants? (By the way, doesn’t my account of the systematic character of capitalism exemplify how the most powerful forms of intelligent activity operate at a completely different level from individual cognition?)
Chapter Five, “Dialectical Reason,” takes us into territory that I think Piaget never intended. By it he means “a complete comprehension of the content and context of activity, based on a comprehensive set of mediations, and so arriving immediately at the here and now” (233). If that sounds like some kind of mystical goal, it is, since he explicitly credits mystics of all types with uniquely achieving this highest stage of intelligence, and he particularly privileges Japanese haiku poetry as its expression. What an “immediate here and now” even means in the context of culture—was culture not supposed to be a necessary symbolic mediation between humans and their world?—I do not know, but I do know that he should take a look at John Horgan’s Rational Mysticism (2003) for a glimpse of just how messy the whole mystical enterprise can be.
Again, I can sympathise with your reservations about this chapter. I was frequently tempted to simply draw the line with formal reason. However, it seemed logical that I should tell what seemed to me the whole story. As for Piaget, I flagged my disagreement with him about how the development of intelligence ends as early as p.23. I’m not quite sure why ‘a complete comprehension of the content and context of activity, based on a comprehensive set of mediations, and so arriving immediately at the here and now’ should sound like a mystical goal, given that all forms of experience are based on the internalisation and exploitation of cultural and technological mediations. All I am talking about here is what would happen if this process could and should be taken to its logical conclusion – surely it would be no more mystical than any other piece of everyday common sense, once we had arrived there. After all, we all now take for granted forms of activity and experience that would have seemed like magic not too long ago (such as communicating directly between places 5000 miles apart by manipulating unimaginably tiny particles like electrons), so all I have asked is what would happen if this process were continued.
Likewise for the phrase about transforming all these technological and cultural mediations into an immediate form. Isn’t that exactly what happens all the time – although they originate as mediations, often originating a long way from the individual, we translate values and symbols and the like into structures we then inject into our immediate experience. They are certainly mediations, but the whole point of their internalisation is that we experience and treat them as though they were immediate. If that were not so, if their objectively mediate character were visible in our subjective experience, we would not need theories of cultural and technological mediation. Isn’t that why I can write this in English – because I don’t have to think about how to do it? And isn’t that at least part of the reason why Australian aborigines and other oppressed peoples are oppressed – because of the very prejudices the oppressors regard as self-evidently valid assumptions?
I’m pretty sure that it is not right that I ‘credit mystics of all types with uniquely achieving this highest stage of intelligence’. All I have said is that, although mysticism is a historical dead-end, some forms of mysticism give us a glimpse of what we might expect in this direction, in a somewhat distorted (because strictly psychological) fashion. Regarding haiku, yes, I do indeed think that it corresponds to this stage, although I do not ‘privilege’ it in any way. It’s just an example. Do you have an alternative explanation for its peculiar qualities?
Regarding John Horgan’s Rational Mysticism, yes, most forms of would-be mysticism are a mess, with strong streaks of escapism, charlatanism and self-interest. But that does not mean that mysticism as a whole is mistaken. Much religious, political and even scientific thinking is beset with similar problems, but that does not mean that religion, science and politics are not about anything real. They are just not as realistic as they imagine. But isn’t it the point of cultural analysis to see into the depths of these things and work out what they ‘really’ mean? I have not advocated that everyone retreat to a Zen monastery and write haiku or suggested that they are in some sense the ultimate truth; on the contrary, I have argued that they are historical dead ends. However, I do think my analysis reveals a little of what these two very impressive phenomena might signify from a wider perspective.
Having reached what should be its end, the book enters a 130-page dénouement, going on about substages and wisdom and management and Bergson and machines and any number of interesting but only vaguely relevant topics.
As this is a book about the general nature and development of activity, I am not sure why these two chapters are only vaguely relevant. As before, I assume that I have not made myself clear, but I am a bit surprised that I have been this obtuse. Certainly that has not been the reaction of others who have read The History of Human Reason. I am especially surprised that the point of these last pages has been missed. Surely if I simply listed a lot of stages I would have invited the criticisms these chapters were designed to meet – that this looks like a very mechanical sequence, and that a simple one-dimensional sequence is too simplistic. Hence I wrote a chapter about how stages in fact lead quite naturally into one another, and a chapter about how development is an immensely complex process. In fact, had I omitted the final chapter, it would have been almost impossible to respond to many of your previous criticisms.
Robinson is someone who has thought a lot about his subject and has some interesting things to say, but one thing he has not thought about a lot and on which he has nothing to say is anthropology. His attempt to introduce the concepts of cognitive development to culture and history, while someone was inevitably going to do it, are less than helpful; they are downright false and offensive. Foraging or pastoral peoples are not pre-operational children, and if he had ever met one he might know that.
I think I have addressed all these points above: I have not tried to introduce the concepts of cognitive development to culture and history – on the contrary, I have tried to draw a very careful and explicit distinction between them; and I have not claimed that foraging or pastoral peoples are pre-operational children – on the contrary, I have expressly said that they could not possibly any such thing.
Whether we need a new theory of human nature and culture is a question that Robinson himself asks. Whether we need a theory of culture that conceives of it as an effect of discrete and “advancing” cognitive cause is a question we can ask—and probably answer negatively. The idea of culture as super-biological, “superorganic,” is one that has already been explored (Kroeber 1917). The idea of cultures as more or less rational in toto has already been advanced and rejected. The idea of discussing culture without any cultural data at all is simply non-anthropological.
Regarding the question of whether we need a theory of culture that conceives of it as an effect of any cognitive cause, I would answer it very negatively indeed. In fact I thought that that was what I had done in this book. What I have not done properly is to express that answer in terms that make that answer clear enough.
In summary, I have not made it clear enough that intelligence is not reducible to individual cognition. Now that I have done so (if only between the two of us), does this raise your opinion of The History of Human Reason any higher?
Regards
Richard Robinson
Science
Etc.
Work in progress