rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_9e66a39d-526e-576a-b6e2-a8a17d1d94c7">51 This point, emphasized by many theologians also before Cortez and which is the “traditional” route to theological anthropology,52 is an important argument for this book.
Gunton rarely refers to the nature/nurture question explicitly but pays much attention to what he sees as a confused relationship between culture and nature in Modernity and late Modernity.53 Gunton views this as a theological problem due to Modernity’s, as he states, “displacement of God.”54 While Gunton’s critique of Modernity will be challenged below, certain aspects of his theological engagement with culture are helpful.
In chapter 1 Judith Butler’s theory of performativity is explained in relation to its implications for her view of the self and the subject. I argue that the human subject is constituted by norms outside of the subject’s control. For Butler, one is called, or interpellated, into subjecthood. As such, Butler develops a relational view of the human where vulnerability and precariousness become more and more significant, as does embodiment. I show how this embodied relationality even takes on an ontological meaning in Butler. Notions such as interpellation, vulnerability and “the other” will thus be discussed in some detail.
The next chapter expounds on Pinker’s understanding of evolutionary psychology and its implications. I suggest that Pinker’s interest in language provides the link between biology and culture in his account of the human being. I also argue that there is a duality to Pinker’s thinking about the human being. The prominent side of this duality is biologist essentialist with genes as “atoms” of evolution and an emphasis on innate traits. The other, less developed, side has an opening toward the relational with concepts such as “group identity” and “unique environment.”
Chapter 3 turns to Colin Gunton’s theological anthropology. For Gunton, this is linked with the doctrine of the Trinity, the doctrine of creation, as well as christology, and these notions must be dealt with to understand Gunton’s view of the human being. The idea of a relational ontology is key for his thinking and in this a strong stress is put on the concept of the person in his anthropology. I then argue that the relation between human persons and the divine is strongly linked to christology for Gunton and this has important implications for the constructive discussion between these thinkers.
In the following three chapters I bring Butler, Pinker and Gunton into interaction with one another. In particular, a relational reading of evolutionary theory, of time, materiality and the body will be advanced. Chapter 4 gathers some general aspects from the three theories to show that a polarization of relationality, nature, and the body from the three perspectives is not necessary. This is done with a particular focus on the theory of evolution, and aspects of time and materiality. What is developed is a relational ontology, but I propose a “weak” ontology in contrast to Gunton’s “strong” ontological claims.
This more general groundwork leads to a discussion focused on the human being in chapter 5. My “interactive” reading attempts to bridge the gap between nature and nurture on the one hand, and ontology and ethics on the other. If human lived reality is constituted relationally, then ethics and being are closely related, or so I argue. I present what I call a kenotic personalism that emphasizes the person as the fundamental concept for the human being, but personhood as a gift that occurs through particular and bodily relations between human beings. Considering our fundamental vulnerability, the relation that constitutes the human person is that of self-giving love, or kenosis.
Chapter 6 brings the threads together and firstly works out the relation between personalism and individualism to then return to the school example with which everything began. I argue that the question of a divide between the biological and the social in the context of school opened up a more basic issue, namely that of institutions’ individualization of fundamentally vulnerable and dependent human body-persons.
1 Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. I: Swann's Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, & D. J. Enright (London: Vintage Books, 2005), 20.
2 Fraser Watts, “The Multifaceted Nature of Human Personhood: Psychological and Theological Perspectives,” in Niels Henrik Gregersen, Willem B. Drees, & Ulf Görman (eds.), The Human Person in Science and Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000) and Sara Arrhenius, En riktig kvinna: om biologism och könsskillnad (Stockholm: Pocky, 1999).
3 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 191.
4 I am of course not alone in having this concern, nor in acknowledging the prevalence of the distinction between biology on the one hand and the social on the other. One would, for example, need to cite almost every single prominent feminist thinker from Simone de Beauvoir to Judith Butler and beyond for an extensive list. But to cite some influential thinkers, Donna Haraway and Anne Fausto-Sterling, as well as Elizabeth Grosz, should be mentioned for a particularly deep engagement with biology and the theory of evolution. See Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991); Donna J. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997); Anne Fausto-Sterling, Myths of Gender: Biological Theories about Women and Men, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1992); Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sex/Gender: Biology in a Social World (New York: Routledge, 2012); Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2004); Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2005); Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). From the Scandinavian side, see Toril Moi, “Vad är en kvinna? Kön och genus i feministisk teori,” Res Publica 35/36, no. 1-2 (1997): 71-158; Toril Moi, “What Is a Woman? Sex, Gender, and the Body on Feminist Theory,” in Toril Moi, What is a Woman?: And Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) and Åsa Carlson, Kön, kropp och konstruktion: En undersökning av den filosofiska grunden för distinktionen mellan kön och genus (Stockholm: Symposion, 2001).
From a more biological perspective, see Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, & John Tooby (eds.), The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Henry D. Schlinger, “The Almost Blank Slate: Making a Case For Human Nurture,” Skeptic, 11, no. 2, 2004; Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do, 2nd ed. (New York: Free Press, 2009); Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Penguin, 2003).
Within theology see Philip Hefner, The Human Factor: Evolution, Culture, and Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993).
5 For examples see Maurizio Meloni, Simon J. Williams & P. A. Martin (eds.), Biosocial Matters: Rethinking Sociology-Biology Relations in the Twenty-First Century (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2016) and Maurizio Meloni, John Cromby, Desmond Fitzgerald & Stephanie Lloyd, The Palgrave Handbook of Biology and Society (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Many emphasize the area of epigenetics for this question (see Samantha Frost, Biocultural Creatures: Toward a New Theory of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). Although sharing a similar interpretation of evolution (see ch. 5) I will not enter that field since my concern is in the main a discussion with evolutionary psychology.
On New Materialism, see for example Grosz, Volatile; Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics
