Positive vs. Normative theory
There's a problem with social scientists and it's that whenever they think somethin' ought to be done, they articulate their ideas as though they are mere positive descriptions of what has been going on.One example would be Richard Posner. In some of his late 80s opinions, like the Indiana Harbor case and a number of innkeeper negligence cases, he apparently believed that a cost-benefit efficiency analysis (and consequently application of the Hand Formula) is what he as a Judge ought to apply. But in his earlier books (Economic Analysis of Law, Economic Structure of Tort Law, etc) he described efficiency as something Judges have always been doing and that he and his coauthor William Landes weren't doing anything new (notwithstanding the fact that with the illustrious exception of Judge Hand in Carroll Towing case most courts in tort cases never mention a word about efficiency.)
A better example is Hegel. Obviously he has this idea of the Absolute Spirit realizing itself in human societies throughout the ages. But is it a positive or a normative idea? Hegel wrote that it is positive (both in his Philosophy of History and in the great Phenomenology), that men did progress through the master-slave dialectic and the negating action of the man, although I seriously suspect that he was really contructing a normative theory: that men ought to, through realizing themselves as rational beings, push the human society into more enlightened "stages. If the Hegelian tautology is understood in normative terms, then we wouldn't even need to stand it on its feet as Marx did. All Marx really had to do then, is to rip Hegel's narrow-minded Prussian construction of the "Spirit" apart (which he did); substitute it with a truly trascendental ideal; perceive the human individual as she is ("sum total of the social relations he experiences") and tell her that she ought to strive for the ideal and that only thus could she achieve freedom.
Then the whole Kant-Hegel-Marx chain of development would become complete. What we have then is:
Concept/Absolute Knowledge = Something Eternal (the Moral Law), related to Time (=human society, which is temporal and always changes through the self-perfecting activities/practice of human individuals which negate the present)
It also squares pretty well with the Bible, since the something Eternal then could be used to explain away the Divine revelations, and the Time thing and the end of history thesis would fit pretty well with the notion of the Day of the Lord, the End Times or Last Things or however one would like to phrase it.
It also solve the issue a positive theory would create: that everything that happens in history could be justified as rational since it's the Spirit who's at work... (essentially my friend John Odito's biggest worry with respect to Hegelian philosophy...)
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posted by James Chang @ 12:09 AM
2 Comments:
This tension may be true in regards many social scientist, but Hegel is the very thinker who questions the possibility of such a dichotomy.
By "normative theory" you seem to be referring to the "ought" of Kant: things are not as the ought to be, and this "ought" clears the ground for change. This is your solution: the ideal one must strive for. Yet, this is precesiely Hegel's criticism: that there is no such thing as mere "positivity" or "normativity".
That's why the Phenomenology of Spirit is NOT historical (how would you explain his discussion of Antigone and Croseus? That was certainly not an historical "event"). The Phenomology is epistemological attempt to show that our thought (categories, concepts) is not at odds with being (the "thing-in-itself" of Kant). If Hegel stuck to a merely "postive" view of history (i.e., that some object called "Reason", like a chair or table, can be seen in history) he would be thinking pre-critically (pre-Kantian). But he doesn't do this. He argues that in order to UNDERSTAND history, we must look at it through the lense of its telos, or goal. That telos, for Hegel, was Reason, or society finally comprehending that its own presuppositions, or rather comprehending their own "age" (thus his system is much more important to look at than the philosophy of history- his weakest subject).
What Hegel argued with regard to positivity vs. normativity is that anything "positive" is always conceived in a "normative" sense (not saturated by normativity, mind you), and that this is impossible to get around. There are no "brute facts" prior to our concepts and language (or "immediate knowledge"- the first chapter of the Phenomenology). If we are always using previous concepts and language to discuss an historical fact, then is some way we are changing the 'brute fact' into something we can understand. In this way, he gets out of naive positivity (which some many Anglo-American philosophers loved in the 20th century), while at the same time didn't have a Bishop Berekley-esque Idealism.
It seems to me that all social scientist will view historical fact with some normativity- they must just be cognizant of that fact. As Hegel says, there's nothing wrong with presuppositions: the point is to find the right ones.
Thanks. There are criticisms by people like Popper that Hegel's epistemology (since I haven't done philosophy at all in school, I'm using terms in a very loose way, so pardon me) is indeed pre-Kantian and patently absurd.
A protestant theologian, Jurgen Moltmann, had a view similar to yours in his book "Theology of Hope," in which he broke down the dichotomy of the normative and the positive, claiming that the latter is unimportant (and therefore ecclesiastical history or the personal history of Jesus are somewhat unimportant) in our construction of our worldview.
Personally I'm not sure what Hegel really meant. He seems confusing to me at times when he start introducing/smuggling empirical elements into his idea of the Spirit. By contaminating the pure normative content of his teleology, he opens himself up to criticisms by people like Popper and Marx. This is particularly apparent in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, where he did seem to advocate the notion that things *had been* going the way he like 'em to, and that just because his empirical knowledge is exactly what the Spirit is about. As my friend John used to say, "how convenient."
Now the Phenomenology is different. I think it is precisely because the Phenomenology is not historical that Marxists like Kojeve could use it as a vehicle to rebuke the traditional idealist understanding of Hegel and transform Hegel into a sort of proto-Marx. Otherwise Hegel wouldn't have become a proto-Marx. He'd be a proto-vulgar-Marx.
Otherwise I agree totally with you that all social sciences are normative. In fact social scientists slip into a normative mode whenever their positive "descriptions" of the events come under attack. On one hand we have a whole host of free-market economists and on the other, uh, lefties...
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