Human Being and Vulnerability. Joseph Sverker
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The divine and the human
The triune Creator and the anthropological significance of Christ
“spirit,” sin and the question of ethics
Chapter 4: Going beyond: relationality, evolutionary theory and time
Establishing a weak ontology of relationality
Re-reading the theory of evolution
Chapter 5: Kenotic personalism
Kenosis, vulnerability and persons: the significance of self-giving relations
Relation, mediation, interpellation
Conclusion: persons, individuals and institutions
Disclosing the nature/nurture problem
Individualism and personalism in school
In memory of Kristina Sverker
[O]ur social personality is created by the thoughts of other people. […] We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent envelope, so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our own ideas of him which we recognise and to which we listen.
- Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way
Introduction
The human being is between many things. Life takes place between birth and death, between the home and the political, between who I am and who I want to be, or, perhaps, as for Marcel Proust, between you and the idea of you. For some, the human being is also between God and creation. But the “between” that will be explored in this volume is that of biology on the one hand, and the social on the other. This particular “between” appears difficult to maintain in our contemporary society for one is often privileged over the other. There seems no easy way to reconcile the two.
I intend to constructively engage this divide between biology and the social by conversing with critical theorist Judith Butler and psycholinguist Steven Pinker. With these two divergent perspectives, another seemingly conflicting account will be brought to the table, that of Colin Gunton’s theological anthropology.
Why three such different thinkers? While it should be acknowledged that most theorists working on this question do reject simplistic binaries, much contemporary thought still maintains a dichotomy between the biological and the social. I hope that this study will shed some light as to why this division is so prominent in our society, not least in the school context. I have also chosen these thinkers because their different theories, when brought together in conversation, can inform a view of the human being in which the distinction between the biological and the social is less polarized.
As Proust illustrates in my epigraph,1 the dichotomy between nature and nurture has concrete relevance in the meeting between people and I agree. I want to argue that theoretical discussions on this issue are of practical interest, particularly in institutionalized societies, and not least in the context of school.
Teachers’ engagement with pupils is a pervasive feature of school, as it should be. And in their interaction with pupils, teachers conceptualize the pupils throughout the day. But in this conceptualization of and engagement with the pupil there is an underlying anthropology, a theory of the human being, that is rarely expressed or made explicit. When I contemplated this as a teacher in Sweden, I realized that the implicit anthropology underlying professional discussions in school was incoherent.
To clarify, when my colleagues and I conferred in what is called a pupil welfare meeting to discuss certain learning problems, such as dyslexia, we tended to switch our minds to a biological, not to say biologist, frame where the frontal and lateral lobes of the brain were in focus. But, if we instead were discussing a problem such as an eating disorder, we seemed to switch our minds to a social or cultural mode, thinking in constructivist terms of societal pressure, family situation and so on. However, when back in the classroom the teacher has to find a way to respond to the issue at hand, for in meeting the pupil the teacher needs to somehow make sense of the pupil’s biological and social sides in his or her practice. In the meeting between the teacher and the pupil a dichotomization between biology and the social is likely to be unhelpful but, as is shown here, turns out to even be problematic when coupled with wider questions of anthropology.2
One such problem that will be addressed already here is what I want to call the “addition model” of nature/nurture,