Complementarity as a Social Scientific Orientation

8/7/2019 Complementarity as a Social Scientific Orientation

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COMPLEMENTARITYAS A

SOCIAL SCIENTIFIC ORIENTATION

Allan Menzies


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CONTENTS

I INTRODUCTION ............................................................................. 1

II THE SHARDS OF "OLD-CULTURE SLAVERY" ........................ 6

III THE IMPORTANCE OF SOCIAL SCIENCE TO RESPONDIN DIALOGUE .......................................................................... 13

IV THE COMPLEMENTARITY OF OPPOSITES ............................. 20

V FROM THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE TO THE SOCIOLOGYOF KNOWLEDGE .................................................................... 33

VI THE SCIENTIFIC PSYCHOLOGICAL AFFIRMATION OF AUNIVERSAL HUMAN NATURE ........................................... 50

VII THE SHARDS OF ARMORED MAN .......................................... 74

VIII CONCLUSION .............................................................................. 92

This work is licensed underthe Creative CommonsAttribution 3.0 Unported License.


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In this paper I wish to address what I perceive to be at the very

source of all social perplexities confronting contemporary, post-industrial

civilization: a conflict-dualist weltanschauung. It is just such a weltansch-

auung which serves to perpetuate the endurance of a socio-political apparatus

predicated on the hierarchical arrangement of social relations and, atten-

dantly, domination and competition. With recourse to Philip Slater primarily,

I will endeavor to indicate that from such a conflict-dualism we may observe:

the domination of man over man, man over woman, and man over nature;

the domination of property over person; the domination of producer over

consumer and owner over worker; the domination of material needs over

spiritual needs; the domination of quantitative perspective over qualitative

perspective, as well as the domination of means over ends and technical

concerns over human concerns; and so on.

Again with recourse to Slater primarily, and to a lesser extent Marcuse,

I will argue that all of this is, contrary to widespread belief, not an

irrevocable fact of human existence. From within a sociological context,

I shall develop the notion that the societal nature of things need not be

founded on the politics of domination and competition that are perpetuated

and fortified by the conflict-dualist world-view. The position will be

forwarded that just such an undying belief in social nature is predicated

on a scarcity of natural resources; yet due to the tremendous advances of

technical know-how, we have advanced beyond the age of scarcity into an age

I INTRODUCTION

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of adequacy. The conclusion follows that, if material well-being may be

guaranteed every man, then the politics of domination as we know them today

can potentially become an artifact of social history. In other words,

technology could conceivably be utilized to serve the community of man

rather than collaborate in the domination of man . . . over his fellow men

and over nature.

In order for such a radical transformation to occur, it is imperative

that modern man generally re-evaluate his predominantly materialist frame

of reference; it is with a no less idealist sensitivity to the innermost

natural needs of man that such a transformation may be hoped for. In this

regard, two essential points are raised.

First, such an attentiveness to man's existential and essential needs

demands a breakdown of the conflict-dualist weltanschauung (ie. a materialist

-idealist balance is pleaded for). This is assumed to be an unrealistic,

idyllic dream by those entrenched in the Lockean or Hobbesian tradition

which underlines the incompatibility of natural man with the imperatives of

societal living. (Again we witness here a symptomatic appendage of conflict-

dualist).

In this respect, Sorokin, Northrop, and many others have argued from a

functionalist or integralist perspective that the Lockean and Hobbesian view

is rooted in, or at the very least meaningfully related to, a Newtonian

mechanistic and deterministic world-view. However, I shall indicate that

this is a natural scientific paradigm that has been almost completely dis-

missed in this century, and is coming to be replaced by an emergent paradigm

guided by the scientifically-based postulations of Heisenberg, Bohr, Einstein,

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Planck, Cassirer and Nagel, to mention but a few. Of especial importance to

this paper, Bohr forwarded a principle of the complementarity of opposites

and Heisenberg forwarded a principle of indeterminacy (meaning here tele-

ological meaningfulness, though not exclusively so) and uncertainty in nature.

One is logically forced to the conclusion in this regard, then, that not only is

conflict-dualism predicated on an antiquated social phenomenon (ie. scarcity),

but further it is predicated on a social contract tradition integrally related to an

antiquated, deemed-to-be-mistaken understanding of natural processes. Hence

it is perfectly viable to propose that conflict-dualism is about as scientifically

defensible a position today as, say, Ptolemaic cosmology or Aristotelean

physics . . . that is to say, hardly at all.

Bohr's principle of complementarity is of the highest importance in this

regard for it stands 180 degrees in the opposite direction of conflict-dualism.

This principle denotes the mutual harmonious interaction of opposites in

contrast to an intractable irreconcilability of opposites. Thus materialist

and idealist orientation for example, could be - and I will argue should be -

mutually complementary approaches towards amelioration of the human

condition.

While this century has provided scientific confirmation of this principle of

complementarity, one must by no stretch of the imagination suppose that

this is a twentieth century discovery of natural processes. The ancient

Chinese yang-yin circle, and Greek Heraclitan philosophy have dated this

view of nature to be at least 2500 years old. In order to further illuminate

the modern scientific weltanschauung, I would like to discuss the Taoist

understanding of complementary harmony permeating all of natural, psychical

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and social reality as it is elaborated by Lao Tse and Chuang Tse.

A second challenge to the potential for a radical transformation of

society, as we know it today, in the direction of one based on a complementarity

weltanschauung is that, although we may well have arrived at an age of

material sufficiency, man's innermost instinctual nature is held to be

in opposition to even the minimal requisites of an orderly social existence.

Now, an additional purpose for considering Taoism is that it is supremely

consonant to a scientifically-based redefinition of human nature that has

unfolded in this century. In this respect, despite their apparently dissimilar

theoretical orientations, I will argue that Carl Jung, Ronald Laing and Wilhelm

Reich each forward a complementary (to each other) delineation of human

nature which parallels the Taoist and twentieth century natural scientific notion

of complementarity permeating all of reality. Moreover, each of these men urge

the necessity of recognizing immediate intuitive apprehension as an epistemological

mode that is absolutely essential to the integral realization of vital natural life

processes, and the integral realization of human nature in its totality and unity.

As Reich, Laing, and Jung each would have it, to negate the validity of intuition

is to concordantly delimit our knowledge of said natural life processes and

human nature.

Yet it may well be countered that intuition has no rightful place within the

epistemological confines of rigorous scientific inquiry. It will be my position that

it is precisely in the rejection of such a mode of pure intuitive experience, often

in the name of "scientism", that sociological inquiry specifically, and social

scientific inquiry generally, has to date served largely to perpetuate and corroborate

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the status in quo of conflict dualism. It could not be otherwise: empiricism cannot

penetrate beyond the surface of corporeality towards the apprehension of vital life

process in creative duration, as Bergson conceived it. However a scientism

which negates the validity of intuition, at least within the confines of scientific

inquiry, appropriates it's directives from the natural sciences . . . and specifically

from an outdated Newtonian mechanistic and deterministic paradigm, as indicated

above. Therefore, were the social sciences attentive to the epistemological

directives of the new post-Newtonian natural-scientific paradigm, "scientism"

would, one might say, negate it's own existence.

Following from the above, I shall address the need to develop a social

scientific epistemological and ontological framework that is amenable to an

all-embracing knowledge of natural vital life processes and human nature.

I will do so with reference to F.S.S. Northrop's and Karl Mannheim's

contributions to the sociology of knowledge. It is my belief that these two

thinkers, probably more than anyone else in the field, have substantially

responded to the challenge of revealing a framework that: one, is responsive

to the very latest natural scientific development; two, provides for a rigorous

social scientific orientation that is, nevertheless, sensitive to the subject of man

in his totality.

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Complementarity as a Social Scientific Orientation