Month: July 2020

The Arabic Freud

Omnia El Shakry, The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017; 206 pages, Hardcover £30; ISBN: 9780691174792

By Chris Wilson

‘Out of the darkness my eye glimpses a faint light. I see my small hand as it reaches for the moon from atop my mother’s shoulder. What a memory! How often have we reached for moons that are no less unattainable? I recall the tremendous effort I once expended trying to take hold of my mother’s nipple, only to be thwarted by something with a bitter taste…’[i]

By the 1940s, the Oedipus complex, along with a host of other Freudian notions, would have been familiar to an Egyptian reading public. Naguib Mahfouz’s The Mirage (al-Sarab), published in 1948, offered readers one of the most evocative portrayals – and starkest warnings – of the perils of an excessive, pathological, and ultimately destructive attachment to the mother, in the story of Kamil Ru’ba Laz. So unattractive was this portrait of Kamil that when an acquaintance was informed that Mahfouz had based the character on him – the problem in his life, Mahfouz later recounted, as in Kamil’s, was his relationship with his mother – he pulled out a revolver and made threats against the future Nobel Prize winner.[ii]

Together with radio shows hosted by practising psychoanalysts, the introduction of psychological and intelligence testing into the military, and a flurry of other novels, plays, and films which dealt in similarly Freudian themes, Mahfouz’s novel was one of the many ways in which psychoanalysis became ‘nothing short of ubiquitous in postwar Egypt’.[iii] Yet rather than attempt a comprehensive reception history, Omnia El Shakry’s The Arabic Freud – the much-anticipated monograph-length sequel to her article of the same name, published in Modern Intellectual History back in 2014[iv] – has its sights set on a different aim, one at once more focussed and more ambitious. The Arabic Freud, at one level, offers a richly researched intellectual history of an encounter between psychoanalysis and Islam which took place in Egypt over the 1940s and 1950s, reconstructing how a generation of philosophers, psychologists, and criminologists sought to cross-fertilise Freud with pre-analytic Arabic and Islamic traditions. On another level, however, El Shakry recuperates these thinkers not simply as objects of historical inquiry, or as mere products of their political context, but producers of theory in their own right, whose arguments and ideas can enrich and expand our understandings of the self and the other, intuition and ethical cultivation, and psychoanalysis and Islam, today. We can learn from, not only about, academic psychologist Yusuf Murad, Sufi shakyh and philosopher Abu al-Wafa al-Ghunaymi al-Taftazani, and criminologist Muhammad Fathi, El Shakry argues. If these twin ambitions sometimes appear to tug The Arabic Freud in different directions, the tension is a productive one. This is a short text, at only 115 pages, but a densely argued one, and one which will reward multiple re-readings.

While one might be forgiven for wanting to dive straight into The Arabic Freud, it is worth lingering a moment on its stunning jacket art. Featuring a lithograph of one of the ceramic tiles created by Rachid Koraïchi as part of his 1998 travelling exhibition Letters of Clay: Homage to Ibn ‘Arabi, it is an apt gateway to El Shakry’s text. In an interview in July 2018, Koraïchi explains his recurring interest in the great Sufi masters like Ibn ‘Arabi, Jalaluddin al-Rumi, and others, as stemming in part from a desire to puncture a (mis)representation of the Islamic world as being in crisis, or as a source of unease, tension, and violence, by showcasing instead ‘the tolerant and sophisticated writings of the great Muslim poets and sages who have left such a large imprint on succeeding generations’. Letters of Clay, underlining this point, retraced in reverse order Ibn ‘Arabi’s own life itinerary, starting with his resting place in Damascus and ending at his place of birth, Murcia.

Koraïchi’s work is an apt starting point because El Shakry,too, continually returns to the medieval Sufi philosopher Ibn ‘Arabi (d.1240), and shares a concern with how a thinker might travel. More fundamentally, both seek to contest a misrepresentation of Islam. El Shakry’s interlocutors here – the Tunisian analyst Fethi Benslama, Bulgarian-French philosopher Julia Kristeva, and Syrian psychoanalyst Rafah Nashed – contend no dialogue is possible between Islam and psychoanalysis. It is, to take the words of Benslama, a tale of mutual ignorance. Yet El Shakry decisively shows how psychoanalysis and Islam were brought into a mutually transformative conversation in postwar Egypt, by deftly tracing the epistemological resonances and elective affinities between the two as living traditions. Indeed, what is methodologically impressive about The Arabic Freud is the careful even-handedness with which it stages this encounter, such that psychoanalysis in Egypt is never reduced to a mere importation from the West. Individual chapters unfold in a way that underlines this point; starting with a broad-brushstroke account of infantile sexuality, for instance, which leads a reader to think that Murad, al-Taftazani, and Fathi are simply glossing Freud, before digging deeper and revealing the complex ways in which these thinkers wove together Freud and Ibn ‘Arabi, Melanie Klein and Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d.1111), Karen Horney and Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (d.1209).

The Arabic Freud is in two parts. The first – The Unconscious and the Modern Subject – puts philosophical and ethical debates about the nature of the soul, self, and psyche under a microscope; the second – Spaces of Interiority – follows psychoanalysis into more pragmatic areas such as adolescent sexuality and criminal psychology.

The first chapter, Psychoanalysis and the Psyche, examines key concepts – integration and unity, insight and intuition, the self and the other – as elaborated on the pages of Yusuf Murad and Mustafa Ziywar’s journal, Majallat ‘Ilm al-Nafs (‘The Journal of Psychology’), which ran from 1945 to 1953. It sets out Murad’s distinctive integrative (takamuli) approach to psychology, which figured the self as a unity of psychic, bodily, and societal aspects. In his emphasis on unity, Murad was drawing on Gestalttheorie as well as Ibn ‘Arabi; there is more than an echo of Fanon here too, in the importance in a context of decolonisation which attached to a project of reconstituting the psychic life of the colonised from the scattered and fragmented elements left in the wake of colonialism.

The second chapter, The Self and the Soul, shifts the focus from Murad to Abu al-Wafa al-Ghunaymi al-Taftazani, Sufi shaykh and professor of philosophy at Cairo University. Parallels between Sufism and psychoanalysis are numerous – traditions of dream interpretation, the analogous relationships between shaykh/disciple and analyst/analysand, and a highly specialised vocabulary of the self and its topography. Indeed, the ease with which similarities are drawn is suggestive of psychoanalysis’s own debt to the mystical traditions, an instance in which reconstructing this specific encounter between psychoanalysis and Islam might enrich our understanding of the psychoanalytic tradition more generally.

One danger amidst all these parallels, and potential criticism of The Arabic Freud overall, is that its focus on affinities, resonances, and hybridisations means it passes over points of tension and disconnect, but in this chapter, El Shakry is careful to note that the stakes in the encounter between Sufism and psychoanalysis were very different. The aim of the former, after all, was not so much self-knowledge, as knowledge of God, and belief in divine transcendence carried over into thinking on the self, such that the presumed hallmarks of modern selfhood – interiority, autonomy – did not replace but rather coexisted with the heteronomous subject of premodern orthodox religious discourse. The question of the status of the secular subject when psychoanalysis travels is a central one, not only in relation to Islam or the Middle East. As Christiane Hartnack has noted, in her study of psychoanalysis in colonial India, Freud himself was privately concerned psychoanalysis would not travel easily. When the ivory statue of Vishnu sent by the Indian Psychoanalytic Society to mark his seventy-fifth birthday began to develop cracks, he mused in the privacy of his diary: ‘Can the god, being used to Calcutta, not stand the climate in Vienna?’[v] El Shakry recasts the cracks feared by Freud as openings towards a creative encounter of ethical engagement.

The third chapter, The Psychosexual Subject, develops some of these themes further, arguing that the postwar Egyptian subject was defined both by autonomy and heteronomy, neither fully religious nor fully secularised. But it is also a sharp intervention in a debate over what happens to sexuality in the history of the Middle East. Responding to the idea that sexual pleasure and desire, common in premodern Ottoman texts on sexuality, had either been silenced entirely by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, or displaced by a scientific sexology aimed at regulating sexual contacts and pleasure along bourgeois lines, El Shakry convincingly argues that sexual pleasure and desire never went away; rather, the emergence of psychoanalysis in the postwar period was able to breathe new life into earlier premodern classical literature centred on desire and the appetites, and on the ethical cultivation of the child – a far cry from the incommensurability alleged by Benslama indeed.

The final chapter, Psychoanalysis before the Law, digs into a set of debates sparked by attempts to have psychoanalysis admitted as evidence in the court of law. A central figure here is Muhammad Fathi, professor of criminal psychology, who became convinced in the 1940s that psychoanalysis – rather than biomedicine – held the key to ensuring that law and justice aligned in the courtroom. Yet while many of his colleagues shared his hope of mitigating criminal responsibility by pointing to contributing psychological factors, Fathi found himself embroiled in deep disagreements with Mahmud al-Rawi, Mustafa Isma’il Suwayf, and Murad himself over where exactly to look for these contributing factors. Fathi emphasised the individual’s (in)ability to resolve historic, mostly sexual complexes; his contemporaries were more inclined to give weight to present-day explanations, which took account of social and environmental considerations.

The above summaries only sketch some of the arguments made in these chapters, which touch on a bewildering array of subjects, including insight and intuition, love and same-sex desire, and the problem of the properly feminine subject. Though densely argued, El Shakry writes in a way which brings along the reader; the subheadings too prevent the reader from being overwhelmed. Certain unifying themes help knit the text together, too, notably the question of translation. The question of translation was a central one to Murad, a member of the Academy of Language, in particular, and the first issue of Murad and Ziywar’s new journal provided a list of the Arabic equivalents to key terms in the field of psychology and psychoanalysis. Murad reached back into classical Arabic texts for his translations, with the unconscious (al-la-shu’ur), for instance, taken from Ibn ‘Arabi; rather than reading these translations as simply grafting new concepts onto old, El Shakry is attentive to the epistemological resonances between these older classical and newer psychoanalytic usages, and the ways in which these pre-existing meanings stretched or even dyed the fabric of psychoanalytic terms. Nafs – glossed as soul, spirit, psyche, self – smuggled into the idea of the self a spiritual core; al-la-shu’ur too carried over its meaning as a place where God could be manifested. Yet I wondered about another kind of translation: that between clinical practice or the case study, and theory. In The Arabic Freud, psychoanalytic theory floats – with notable exceptions – largely free of practice. Yet, as El Shakry has since demonstrated in a compelling complementary article on Sami Mahmud Ali, translator and psychoanalytic theorist, thinking about the translation from clinical practice into theory can be extraordinarily productive, opening up the possibility, for instance, of figuring incarcerated female prostitutes as the co-creators of psychoanalytic theory.[vi]

A second thread which ties together The Arabic Freud is a shuttling between belief in the opacity and transparency of the human subject. At points, psychoanalytic theorists and practitioners argued for a transparent human subject; this was especially the case in the courtroom, where psychoanalysis promised to render visible criminal intent. At other points, it was the opacity and unknowability of the human subject which loomed large, influenced both by Lacan as well as a Sufi topography of the self, one element in which was the sirr, the secret held between God and his servant alone. El Shakry warns that the former was liable to be seized upon by a postcolonial state hungry to render all visible – and malleable – under its technocratic gaze, and notes that in other ways, too, the stress in Murad’s integrative psychology on harmonious totality fed into the political ambitions of the Free Officers who seized power in 1952. Yet these connections between the intellectual history of the encounter between Islam and psychoanalysis, and the politics of this tumultuous period in Egyptian history, are alluded to, rather than fully developed.

However much the reader might like to know more about these connections, in resisting pursuing these, El Shakry holds true to the wider principle that these thinkers and their ideas can and should be taken seriously not as just another exemplar in a global history of psychoanalysis, nor as merely epiphenomenal to political history, but as theorists and intellectual productions in and of themselves. If Murad, al-Taftazani, and Fathi are El Shakry’s interlocutors, rather than just objects of historical study, then it may be appropriate to credit the decision to step back from the political history at least in part to the influence of Murad himself. In The Arabic Freud, Murad is depicted as a bridge between an older generation of intellectuals who were proponents of an enlightened liberal literature molded in the image of Europe, and a younger generation of vanguardist radicals for whom decolonisation and engagement were the intellectual currency of the day; he emerges as a thinker always more interested in ideas for their own sake, and not merely as means to a political end, like the production of the national or socialist citizen-subject; less interested in national health than in self-integration. The Arabic Freud, in a sense, follows suit, by taking the encounter between Islam and psychoanalysis in postwar Egypt on its own terms. One suspects Murad would have approved.

Chris Wilson (@cw498) is a lecturer in the history of the modern Middle East at the University of East Anglia. His research focuses on the history of colonial psychiatry and mental illness in Palestine under the British mandate. Parts of this research were published last year in The Historical Journal, The Jerusalem Quarterly, and Contemporary Levant . More recently, he has drawn parallels from the history of psychiatry with Covid-19’s impact on care homes for The Conversation.

References:

[i] Naguib Mahfouz, The Mirage (originally published 1948, Cairo: American University of Cairo, 2015, trans. by Nancy Roberts 2009) p.17.

[ii] Gamal al-Ghitani, The Mahfouz Dialogs (trans. by Humphrey Davies, Cairo: American University of Cairo, 2007), p.95.

[iii] Omnia El Shakry, The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017), p.4.

[iv] Omnia El Shakry, ‘The Arabic Freud: The Unconscious and the Modern Subject’, Modern Intellectual History 11, 1 (2014), pp.89-118.

[v] Christiane Hartnack, ‘Colonial Dominions and the Psychoanalytic Couch: Synergies of Freudian Theory with Bengali Hindu Thought and Practices in British India’, in Warwick Anderson, Deborah Jenson, and Richard Keller, eds Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2011), p.108.

[vi] Omnia El Shakry, ‘Psychoanalysis and the Imaginary: Translating Freud in Postcolonial Egypt’, Psychoanalysis and History 20, 3 (2018), pp.313-35.

Robert Maxwell Young (Bob Young) 26 September 1935 – 5 July 2019

Three pieces reflecting on the life, work and legacy of the late Bob Young by his former students Roger Smith, Roger Cooter and Kurt Jacobsen

Roger Smith

The historian of the evolutionary and psychological sciences, psychotherapist, philosopher of science, academic and scourge of academics, publisher and TV producer of radical science, libertarian socialist and family man, Bob Young, died, aged 83, early on 5th July. In later years he had a number of medical complications; an added infection proved too much. A large man with a large, often dominating presence, exceptional vitality of intellect and personality made him a large influence in many people’s lives. He was combative in manner and often embraced controversial personal and institutional roles, giving life to the slogan ‘the personal is political’. Underlying the colourful surface, which he and those with him always made the focus of attention, there was a deep moral and philosophical commitment to the value of the individual person. He thought life came with certain values. His search for ways to live these values, first in academic intellectual terms, then through a radical Marxian interpretation of science and then in psychotherapeutic practice and teaching, added layer to layer of complex understanding. He created an exceptionally rich, if at times difficult, life – for himself, and for those around him.

            Bob was born into a Presbyterian family in Highland Park, a rich suburb of Dallas, in Texas, though his family was not rich. He retained a love of aspects of that culture – steaks, the novels of Larry McMurtry, popular music and the rhetoric of the preacher. He was a scholarship boy at Yale University before beginning training at the University of Rochester Medical School. He discovered the intellectual theme that was to run through all his life: the gap between the medical conception of the body and the mental world of purposes and values. With boundless intellectual energy and ambition, he looked to psychoanalysis to bridge this gap, and then, plainly seeing that it did not, he turned to the history of science of the nineteenth century to understand why. He married a fellow American and had a son, David. He moved to the UK and to King’s College, Cambridge University (1960) to write a thesis under Oliver Zangwill, a psychologist liberal enough in this regard to take him on. He wanted to understand, and ultimately to transcend, belief in dualism of mind and body, of subject and object, of culture and nature and of values and the material world. His thesis, translating this search into the concrete historical terms of approaches to mind via brain, became his first book, Mind, Brain, and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century (1970; reissued 1990), which continues to be cited as path-breaking. His argument led to close examination of the intellectual development in the nineteenth century, the theory of evolution, which, more than any other, drew the understanding of the mind and the person into nature. Young’s readings of Darwin, the theory of natural selection and the Victorian debates of which they were part pioneered the study of Darwinian thought in context. It is hard now to recall the degree to which the sciences, and such revered geniuses of science as Darwin, were then treated apart from the wider culture as the creators of ‘purely’ objective knowledge. Young’s studies of ‘the common context’ of Darwinian and Malthusian ideas (1969) and of Darwin’s metaphor of ‘natural selection’ (1971) transformed scholarship and lie at the base of a huge amount of work undertaken by other scholars. Bob also wrote (1966) a famously devastating critique of the state of the history of psychology, a critique that other scholars then sought to address, moving out from Bob’s Anglo-American perspective.

            Bob Young’s innovative brilliance was recognized and he became a Lecturer in History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge and a Fellow (subsequently Graduate Tutor) of King’s College. These were years of radical political protest and ambition for major social change. At the end of the sixties, Bob’s already liberated life-style and commitments became radical, personally and politically, fuelled by intense reading of Marxian literature and an understanding of the role academic institutions, including science itself, had in mediating ideology in the wider world. He linked his own work on the Darwin debates with twentieth-century science, especially in a notoriously massive paper in a book of essays (which he edited with Mikulas Teich) honouring Joseph Needham (Changing Perspectives in the History of Science, 1973). He organized an influential seminar at King’s, including scholars then transforming the history of science like Charles Webster and Piyo Rattansi, and the young star, Roy Porter, on the contextual understanding of science. He was an inspiring teacher, seen to be where the action was, and he attracted a range of students and colleagues, including Porter and Ruth Leys, who went on to occupy positions in the history of science and medicine, some sharing his political commitments, others moving away from them.

He lived a life in which thought mattered, which intended unity of theory and practice. He had a deep relationship with Sheila Ernst, later a leader of feminist group psychotherapy in London, and there were two daughters, Sarah and Emma. He became head of a new Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine in Cambridge, with Karl Figlio as a close associate. Locked in conflict with conservative interests in History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge and in the Wellcome Trust, a conflict which involved marked contrasts of style, in 1976 he resigned and moved to North London. There, off the Caledonian Road, he lived the rest of his life. He established a long-lasting relationship, with Margot Waddell, subsequently an influential practitioner, teacher and editor at the Tavistock Institute, and there were two children, Anna and Nicholas. He was the motivating centre of a radical science collective, which was responsible for the Radical Science Journal and, later, Science as Culture (now commercially published) and a prominent voice on the political Left, in conflict with more traditional Marxists as well as the despised academic establishment. What is perhaps his key political paper, ‘Science is Social Relations’, which interprets science as part of the labour process, dates from 1977. He helped produce teaching materials for the Open University. His earlier papers appeared in a volume from Cambridge University Press, Darwin’s Metaphor (1985). He trained as a psychotherapist in the Kleinian tradition and, with others, began to publish the much admired journal, Free Associations, and books under the same imprint (Free Association Press, which continues in other hands). He much admired and supported the work of the US feminist scholar, Donna Haraway, and was the first to publish her classic, Primate Visions (1990). Bob’s title, ‘Free Associations’, beautifully illustrates his sense of play, and sense of seriousness, at the task of unifying different areas of life – personal, therapeutic, collective, political. Indeed, much of his work saw the profound content of metaphor; he published his Kleinian study under the title Mental Space (1994). Bob was also the central force in the 1980s TV Channel 4 documentary series, ‘Crucible’, on science in society, which included a memorable film on Newton introduced by Simon Schaffer, later head of History and Philosophy of Science in Cambridge. He also established Process Press (yet another metaphor, and a nod to two philosophers who guided the framework with which he approached the history of science, A. N. Whitehead and E. A. Burtt).

            Psychotherapeutic practice, teaching and publishing increasingly occupied Bob’s formidable energies. He looked critically on developments in the history of science after leaving the field professionally, thinking that the central position history of science, and especially Darwin, should occupy in understanding the human political condition had been given up for the pursuit of detail without purpose, except in narrow career terms, and for what he was inclinded to see as the games of ‘French theory’. He was unsympathetic to relativism and retained a longing for a metaphysics that would ground knowledge of the whole person – a longing which, he was well aware, linked him with religious ways of thought. He judged biography, with its capacity to integrate the moral, the social and the personal, to be a key genre of human self-understanding. He himself had deep, warm and highly emotional personal feelings for family and friends; at the same time, he could impose intolerable demands. No one was or could be indifferent.

After the changes in Europe in 1989, he took a central part in introducing psychotherapy training in Bulgaria. Young also accepted a new position as Professor and Chair in the department of Psychotherapeutic Studies at the University of Sheffield Medical School, where he established a swathe of new courses, many online. He continued to give inspiring, accessible lectures calling for unity in ways of thinking about the whole person – moral, political, biological, psychological. He created a new relationship, with Em Farrell, who became a specialist on eating disorders, and there was a loved daughter late in his life, Jessie. In retirement, he was hampered in movement by weight and knee-joint problems. He relished the internet as a medium for spreading and sustaining access to his work and rejoiced in the egalitarian voices it brought into his study. He organized sites around the theme of ‘human nature’, which he took to be the topic that mattered. His study was a fantastic marvel (or horror, depending on who looked) of the heaped paperwork, books, discs, electric cables, loudspeakers, broken chairs, of a life-time as an intellectual. In the last years, he was joined in friendship and given loving support by Susan Tilley. Even Bob mellowed a little, though he retained sharply critical independent views, a sense of irony about his life and life in general and a fierce belief in the intellectual calling for a humane understanding of the human sciences – and of the people these sciences are supposedly about. People love to talk about his impact, and there, indeed, spread over many people and institutions, is this impact. One of his websites (www.psychoanalysis-and-therapy.com/rmyoung/pubs.html) has, at the top left corner, a small moving image of Sisyphus, rolling his stone uphill – over and over again. But something came of it.

Robert (Bob) Maxwell Young, hardly remembered by young scholars today, was one of the leading historians of science in the Anglophone world from the late 1960s and early 1980s. He was certainly among the most humanistically committed and creative. His scholarship on man’s place in nature (i.e, ‘nature’s’ constructed place in man’s thinking on man) was wholly innovative. So too was his elaboration of what he came to formulate succinctly in the mid-1970s as ‘Science is Social Relations’ (after having made an intensive study of Marx, the labour process, the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and the notebooks of Antonio Gramsci). Science was not just social, he claimed, it was constructed in/under particular social relations and embodied particular labour relations. It was ideological. At least a half a dozen years before postmodern scholars re-discovered Ludwig Fleck’s 1930s writings on the fallacy of objectivity in science (New Zone Books 1979), Bob made clear that science, technology and medicine—far from being value-neutral— embody values in their theories, artefacts, therapies, procedures and programs. All facts are theory-laden, all theories are value-laden, and all values occur within an ideology or world view, he argued. Fact/value, subject/object, science/society, internal/external (in the study of the history of science), mind/body, and so on were all false dichotomies, the popular belief in which precluded their systematic discussion and critical analysis. Bob opened the space for the latter, especially in relation to the biggies, Darwin, Marx and Freud.

The depth, scope and profundity of his scholarship was without equal, and he had an unrivalled ability to communicate it. His writings, complex, yet cogent and incisive, were always scrupulously researched. They shimmer in their honesty and commitment, as if his enormous brain was at one with his mind and soul or political bottom, as indeed it was. It comes as no surprise to learn that, besides psychology, Bob was deeply interested in religion as an undergraduate at Yale.

His influence was enormous, although I hesitate to use that word here, since a part of what he taught me as a historian was that ‘influence’, like the word ‘fashionable’, only masks what is always in need of explanation. In Cambridge he attracted dozens of bright young scholars, Roy Porter, Roger Smith and John Forrester among them. Donna Haraway, one of his great admirers, was not alone among junior and senior people in the history of modern biology who (she admits) were thoroughly taken with Bob’s insights. The same has been said by dozens of others intellectuals at the coal-face of the study of the brain and nervous system, psychological theories, medicine and the human sciences, the labour process, the history of epistemology, and the contemporary apparatuses of cultural production, on all of which he wrote on. Darwinian scholars, in particular, were/are indebted. Even the apologist for the neo-genetic ‘Darwinian Revolution’ of the 1970s, the philosopher of science Michael Ruse with whom Bob was frequently in heated public debate, admits that Bob’s mind was nevertheless ‘the most exciting’ ever to have turned to the issue.

When I first met him in 1972 he was near the height of his powers. The creative brilliance of his Mind Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century: Cerebral Localization and Its Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier (1970, reprinted in1990) had earned him the directorship of the first-ever Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, which was located in the department for the History and Philosophy of Science in Cambridge (HPS). The year before, in 1969, in Past and Present, he published a germinal paper on ‘Malthus and the Evolutionists’ exposing the common context of biological and social theory – a article that foreshadowed much of what was to come. Besides presiding over the weekly seminars in HPS (with Karl Figlio and Ludmilla Jordanova always in attendance), he was in the midst of writing his watershed essay on “The Historiographic and Ideological Contexts of the Nineteenth-Century Debate on Man’s Place in Nature” published in his and M. Teich’s edited volume Changing Perspectives in the History of Science (1973). At the same time he was organizing the defence of Rudi Dutschke, the spokesperson for the German Student movement of the 1960s whom Bob must have met in the mid-1960s. It may have Dutschke who turned Bob on to the work of Gramsci and the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, which were central to Dutschke’s activism. It was Dutschke at least that led him more into neo-Marxist critique and even to the setting up of a short-lived commune in Cheltenham. By the mid-70s Bob had set up the Radical Science Journal (morphed in 1987 to Science as Culture) and was plotting Free Association Books. His energy and commitment were unbounded.

As one of his many PhD students I was always in awe of him. If I came away in tears from some his supervisions, it wasn’t out of resentment of his having effectively torn to sheds what I had submitted to his scrutiny, but, rather, out of grudging acknowledgement of the rightness of his assessment. Throughout the process of my thesis’s completion he never stinted in his encouragement. He didn’t browbeat and, in retrospect, he was remarkable generous with his time. He could, however, be could be acerbic and abrasive, although personally I never experienced this (rather more, his endearing sense of irony). He also liked to massage his own ego, not least through the praises bestowed upon him. He could come across as a brash and over self-confident American, to the annoyance of some (he was born in Dallas, Texas, after all). For all his interest in psychology and work in psychotherapy, he never seemed to be self-aware of this feature of his character. At the book launch of his collection of essays on Darwin — Darwin’s Metaphor (1985) — it was cruelly suggested to him by one his former students (the only one, incidentally, that I ever heard Bob speak ill of) that the peacock on the cover was a perfect self-portrait. Bob was deeply offended. To my mind the ego massaging was forgivable, as we might forgive it with any extraordinary personage. His towering intellect more than permitted it.

            That he is hardly remembered today and that his death in July of this year has solicited so little notice from his peers in the history of science is partly attributable to his having more-or-less left the field in the 1980s in order to pursue his interest in Klienian psychotherapy, for which he re-trained in the 1980s qualifying as a practitioner. He continued, however, to contribute to the history of science – a stunning example being his chapter on ‘Marxism and the History of Science’ in the Routledge Companion to the History of Science (1990). According to those who know much more than I about the last decades of his life, his contributions to the understanding of psychoanalytic concepts, and of philosophical and sociological ideas as they bear upon thinking about human nature, were as formidable as his earlier work. ‘I would think he is without equal,’ remarks one; ‘he combines a depth and scope of knowledge with an extraordinary facility for producing lucid and telling synopses of bodies of work, and a unique alertness to the connections and contrasts between different positions, both within psychoanalysis and between psychoanalytic ideas and their correlates in the wider culture.’

Undoubtedly, too, his neglect is the result of the challenge of his politically radical stance on science and society; he was a ‘Marxist’ thorn in the side as much to pious sociologists and historians of science as to populist apologists for science and technology, such as the Nobel prize winning biologist Peter Medawar (another well-earned victim of Bob’s wrath along with Dawkins and Gould). But his neglect, if that is what it is, may have as much to do with the fact that his ideas (albeit shorn of Marxian hue) actually became fairly normative in the history and epistemology of science. They were watered down to the academic blandness of the importance of ‘social context’ or ‘science in culture’– the leaving aside of what he had to say on the ideological nature of concepts and categories in science. At the same time, his formulation of science as mediating and mystifying the social relations of capitalism became as it were almost surplus to requirement as science became ever-more nakedly capitalistic and blatant in its political and economic service and as its knowledge production became more obviously commercial and corporate conducted on privatized university campuses and science parks.

            But Bob’s neglect among his peers in the history of science has rather more to do, I think, with the fact that he was never a disciplinarian in the field. He transcended it. He was never just or only an academic. From an early age his commitment was to one thing, the question of what it is to be human, or rather, what is ‘human nature’. Thus was his entire career unified. His turn to Klienianism was not a deviation from this path, but a continuation, for no enterprise was so likewise worried over the split between subject and object. As the postmodern intellectual world of mediated ideology (would-be apolitical but in fact deeply neoliberalism) moved increasingly to the disparagement of humans and the celebration of the equality of things and animals (Latour), towards fragmentation, to the reduction of everything to social context, to the negation of essences, Bob struggled to salvage the essence of what it is to be human – not to a naïve belief in the goodness of man, but rather, to the belief that there was such a thing as human nature and that it was worth rescuing from the reductionisms of biology — behavioural economics, bio-psychology, neuroscience, etc. People are more than mere species, Bob believed, and through education/critical thinking they could learn to struggle against the hegemony of a disastrously riven scientistic culture.  In the midst of this, our present anthropological crisis, it is view that is more than ever is in need of urgent revival.  From this perspective, Bob Young was more than an academic tearaway; he was fighter for human qua human salvation. I suspect that his true moment is only just becoming.

Roger Cooter

Robert (Bob) Maxwell Young, hardly remembered by young scholars today, was one of the leading historians of science in the Anglophone world from the late 1960s and early 1980s. He was certainly among the most humanistically committed and creative. His scholarship on man’s place in nature (i.e, ‘nature’s’ constructed place in man’s thinking on man) was wholly innovative. So too was his elaboration of what he came to formulate succinctly in the mid-1970s as ‘Science is Social Relations’ (after having made an intensive study of Marx, the labour process, the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and the notebooks of Antonio Gramsci). Science was not just social, he claimed, it was constructed in/under particular social relations and embodied particular labour relations. It was ideological. At least a half a dozen years before postmodern scholars re-discovered Ludwig Fleck’s 1930s writings on the fallacy of objectivity in science (New Zone Books 1979), Bob made clear that science, technology and medicine—far from being value-neutral— embody values in their theories, artefacts, therapies, procedures and programs. All facts are theory-laden, all theories are value-laden, and all values occur within an ideology or world view, he argued. Fact/value, subject/object, science/society, internal/external (in the study of the history of science), mind/body, and so on were all false dichotomies, the popular belief in which precluded their systematic discussion and critical analysis. Bob opened the space for the latter, especially in relation to the biggies, Darwin, Marx and Freud.

The depth, scope and profundity of his scholarship was without equal, and he had an unrivalled ability to communicate it. His writings, complex, yet cogent and incisive, were always scrupulously researched. They shimmer in their honesty and commitment, as if his enormous brain was at one with his mind and soul or political bottom, as indeed it was. It comes as no surprise to learn that, besides psychology, Bob was deeply interested in religion as an undergraduate at Yale.

His influence was enormous, although I hesitate to use that word here, since a part of what he taught me as a historian was that ‘influence’, like the word ‘fashionable’, only masks what is always in need of explanation. In Cambridge he attracted dozens of bright young scholars, Roy Porter, Roger Smith and John Forrester among them. Donna Haraway, one of his great admirers, was not alone among junior and senior people in the history of modern biology who (she admits) were thoroughly taken with Bob’s insights. The same has been said by dozens of others intellectuals at the coal-face of the study of the brain and nervous system, psychological theories, medicine and the human sciences, the labour process, the history of epistemology, and the contemporary apparatuses of cultural production, on all of which he wrote on. Darwinian scholars, in particular, were/are indebted. Even the apologist for the neo-genetic ‘Darwinian Revolution’ of the 1970s, the philosopher of science Michael Ruse with whom Bob was frequently in heated public debate, admits that Bob’s mind was nevertheless ‘the most exciting’ ever to have turned to the issue.

When I first met him in 1972 he was near the height of his powers. The creative brilliance of his Mind Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century: Cerebral Localization and Its Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier (1970, reprinted in1990) had earned him the directorship of the first-ever Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, which was located in the department for the History and Philosophy of Science in Cambridge (HPS). The year before, in 1969, in Past and Present, he published a germinal paper on ‘Malthus and the Evolutionists’ exposing the common context of biological and social theory – a article that foreshadowed much of what was to come. Besides presiding over the weekly seminars in HPS (with Karl Figlio and Ludmilla Jordanova always in attendance), he was in the midst of writing his watershed essay on “The Historiographic and Ideological Contexts of the Nineteenth-Century Debate on Man’s Place in Nature” published in his and M. Teich’s edited volume Changing Perspectives in the History of Science (1973). At the same time he was organizing the defence of Rudi Dutschke, the spokesperson for the German Student movement of the 1960s whom Bob must have met in the mid-1960s. It may have Dutschke who turned Bob on to the work of Gramsci and the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, which were central to Dutschke’s activism. It was Dutschke at least that led him more into neo-Marxist critique and even to the setting up of a short-lived commune in Cheltenham. By the mid-70s Bob had set up the Radical Science Journal (morphed in 1987 to Science as Culture) and was plotting Free Association Books. His energy and commitment were unbounded.

As one of his many PhD students I was always in awe of him. If I came away in tears from some his supervisions, it wasn’t out of resentment of his having effectively torn to sheds what I had submitted to his scrutiny, but, rather, out of grudging acknowledgement of the rightness of his assessment. Throughout the process of my thesis’s completion he never stinted in his encouragement. He didn’t browbeat and, in retrospect, he was remarkable generous with his time. He could, however, be could be acerbic and abrasive, although personally I never experienced this (rather more, his endearing sense of irony). He also liked to massage his own ego, not least through the praises bestowed upon him. He could come across as a brash and over self-confident American, to the annoyance of some (he was born in Dallas, Texas, after all). For all his interest in psychology and work in psychotherapy, he never seemed to be self-aware of this feature of his character. At the book launch of his collection of essays on Darwin — Darwin’s Metaphor (1985) — it was cruelly suggested to him by one his former students (the only one, incidentally, that I ever heard Bob speak ill of) that the peacock on the cover was a perfect self-portrait. Bob was deeply offended. To my mind the ego massaging was forgivable, as we might forgive it with any extraordinary personage. His towering intellect more than permitted it.

            That he is hardly remembered today and that his death in July of this year has solicited so little notice from his peers in the history of science is partly attributable to his having more-or-less left the field in the 1980s in order to pursue his interest in Klienian psychotherapy, for which he re-trained in the 1980s qualifying as a practitioner. He continued, however, to contribute to the history of science – a stunning example being his chapter on ‘Marxism and the History of Science’ in the Routledge Companion to the History of Science (1990). According to those who know much more than I about the last decades of his life, his contributions to the understanding of psychoanalytic concepts, and of philosophical and sociological ideas as they bear upon thinking about human nature, were as formidable as his earlier work. ‘I would think he is without equal,’ remarks one; ‘he combines a depth and scope of knowledge with an extraordinary facility for producing lucid and telling synopses of bodies of work, and a unique alertness to the connections and contrasts between different positions, both within psychoanalysis and between psychoanalytic ideas and their correlates in the wider culture.’

Undoubtedly, too, his neglect is the result of the challenge of his politically radical stance on science and society; he was a ‘Marxist’ thorn in the side as much to pious sociologists and historians of science as to populist apologists for science and technology, such as the Nobel prize winning biologist Peter Medawar (another well-earned victim of Bob’s wrath along with Dawkins and Gould). But his neglect, if that is what it is, may have as much to do with the fact that his ideas (albeit shorn of Marxian hue) actually became fairly normative in the history and epistemology of science. They were watered down to the academic blandness of the importance of ‘social context’ or ‘science in culture’– the leaving aside of what he had to say on the ideological nature of concepts and categories in science. At the same time, his formulation of science as mediating and mystifying the social relations of capitalism became as it were almost surplus to requirement as science became ever-more nakedly capitalistic and blatant in its political and economic service and as its knowledge production became more obviously commercial and corporate conducted on privatized university campuses and science parks.

            But Bob’s neglect among his peers in the history of science has rather more to do, I think, with the fact that he was never a disciplinarian in the field. He transcended it. He was never just or only an academic. From an early age his commitment was to one thing, the question of what it is to be human, or rather, what is ‘human nature’. Thus was his entire career unified. His turn to Klienianism was not a deviation from this path, but a continuation, for no enterprise was so likewise worried over the split between subject and object. As the postmodern intellectual world of mediated ideology (would-be apolitical but in fact deeply neoliberalism) moved increasingly to the disparagement of humans and the celebration of the equality of things and animals (Latour), towards fragmentation, to the reduction of everything to social context, to the negation of essences, Bob struggled to salvage the essence of what it is to be human – not to a naïve belief in the goodness of man, but rather, to the belief that there was such a thing as human nature and that it was worth rescuing from the reductionisms of biology — behavioural economics, bio-psychology, neuroscience, etc. People are more than mere species, Bob believed, and through education/critical thinking they could learn to struggle against the hegemony of a disastrously riven scientistic culture.  In the midst of this, our present anthropological crisis, it is view that is more than ever is in need of urgent revival.  From this perspective, Bob Young was more than an academic tearaway; he was fighter for human qua human salvation. I suspect that his true moment is only just becoming.

Kurt Jacobsen

Robert Maxwell Young, 83, who died 5 July 2019 in a London hospital, was an rambunctious transatlantic intellectual who made key contributions to social studies of science, especially Darwin studies, and to the even trickier realm of psychoanalysis, which he treated in a critical yet always appreciative way. He was a scholar, publisher, journal founder, editor, psychoanalytical psychotherapist, documentary maker, activist, and a radical entrepreneur – though. for lack of an acquistive attitude, a lousy businessman, Bob played a role in founding this journal as well as Radical Science Journal (now Science as Culture) Kleinian Studies, and Free Associations, which I coedited with him over the last few years.

            Bob down to his last days was an incorrigible free spirit, equally concerned with scholarly rigor and social relevance. Nothing was alien to him, except cruelty and hypocrisy, and nothing was above scrutiny. He was just plain fun in any conversation if one could keep up with his vast range of references, and, if not, one suddenly found oneself either in an engaging impromptu tutorial or else gestured toward a bookshelf containing a vein of knowledge he urged you to begin to master. Bob was instinctively heretical in every endeavor. I remember most of all his unflagging enthusiasm for the ‘life of the mind’ and his heartfelt moral concerns in this world of too, too solid flesh. Naturally, he rubbed a good few savants the wrong way, and. he also paid the cost, willingly. “We must imagine Sisyphus happy,” was his motto.

            If you knew the beefy, bearded and suspendered Bob in his last decades, as I did, you encountered an effervescent blend of Falstaff, the Ghost of Christmas Past (Alistair Sims movie version), and the latter day Orson Welles – with all of their sparkling virtues and not a few of their faults.  Entering his inner chamber in Islington was to stumble into a jovial wizard’s lair. All he lacked in that dazzling tumble of books and memorabilia was a magic wand. I am told, though, that in younger days he was a flintier chap, as I suppose befits a fellow who was up against extremely flinty orthodoxies. I glimpsed that peremptory side of him once or twice, but you have to bear in mind the daunting debunking tasks he set for himself and the formidable authorities he took on.

            Bob hailed from a modest family home nestled on the edge of a ridiculously wealthy community in Dallas Texas.  His rowdy associates included future oil heirs, who he found wanting in every respect except cash flow. Texas – a mythic brawling Texas of bold ideas and brave actions – pervaded everything he did from loftiest endeavors to personal habits. He is the only fellow I knew in London who drank Dr Pepper, which I later discovered was Dallas’ prized soft drink. Bob, after dallying like a good local boy with visions of a valiant military career, somehow slipped away on a swimming scholarship to Yale in the mid-1950s where, unlike the parched privileged legacy kids like George W. Bush (a bit later), he fell head over heels in love with scholarship, philosophy above all.  While at Yale Bob spent a Summer as a care worker at an Arizona ‘snake pit’ sanitarium, which left an indelible mark.

            After Yale Bob attended the University of Rochester Medical School to become a psychiatrist but in his second year he snagged an irresistible research fellowship to Cambridge, which he told me gave him an intoxicating freedom to explore whatever medical subject he chose.  He soon decided to remain in Cambridge to finish a PhD with a remarkable dissertation that swiftly became in 1970 the Oxford University Press book “Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century.” The correspondence theory of localized brain area to specific behavior that he demolished there is evident again today in a related form in stubborn genetic determinist enterprises.

            Bob was invited to stay on as a Cambridge don and soon became the first head of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine there too.  He followed up Mind Brian and Adaptation with ground-breaking Darwin essays that he eventually collected and published in 1985 as Darwin’s Metaphor, A former editor of this Journal was with Bob then so I won’t tarry with a description other than to mention how squarely he situated Darwin in the Victorian socioeconomic context.  All the time, however, the questing iconoclastic spirit of the late 60s and 70s worked its way into a highly receptive Bob’s life, as did an intense interest in Marxism, which colleagues found utterly unwelcome.  Bob, under some duress, left Cambridge in 1976 to roam at will outside the increasing strictures of the academy. Bob told me he really thought that the liberatory leftward social thrust of the era would continue apace. He did not reckon with the relentless counterrevolutionary neoliberal project signaled by the arrival of Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the US, and slowly steamrollering everything in its path ever since.

            Still, Bob had a great long run. He started Free Associations Books (turning out several hundred titles) and, after losing control of it, Process Press too, ran the aforementioned journals, formed the Radical Science Collective, produced and narrated a splendid British TV series on science issue in society, trained as a Kleinian psychotherapist, headed the celebrated Psychoanalysis and the Public Sphere conferences from 1987 to 1998, resumed academic life at Sheffield University, published Mental Space and several more fine books, and influenced a long stream of colleagues, assocites and readers.

            “I continue to believe”, Bob wrote in 1996, “that in the beginning was the value– not the word, nor the fact  – and that all institutions, theories and practices are embodied politics.” Those were fighting words when he started out and in some quarters they remain so. In revising his collection of Darwin essays in the 1980s he provocatively stated that he had cause to thumb again through the Bible (as literature, not doctrinaire guide), which perhaps seemed even worse to many academics than taking Marx seriously, and argued that it provided “a coherent frame of reference for the issues he addresses – origins, human frailty, temptation, the birth of knowledge, sin, pain, evil suffering, and the beginning of the sort of social order to which I wish to relate scientific knowledge- living and doing our best on the east of Eden.” Hard to bridle at that.  Bob did his best and it was more than good enough.

On Ethical Drives in Human Life: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Cheryl Mattingly, Rasmus Dyring, Maria Louw, and Thomas Schwarz Wentzer (eds.) Moral Engines: Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life. New York: Berghahn Books, 2018; 266 pages, hardcover $135.00/£99.00; ISBN 978-1-78533-693-5

By Paul van Trigt

What does it mean to be human? It feels like a cliché to ask this question, but it is undeniably high on the agenda of public and scholarly debates. Technological developments have fed these discussions, as well as identity politics, in which the human norm presented as a white, heterosexual man is questioned. An interesting contribution has recently been delivered by a collective of anthropologists and philosophers, under the banner of ‘new humanism’, which is characterized by a charming combination of theoretical and empirical approaches. In this review I will discuss one of their main contributions, the volume Moral Engines: Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life (2018), by situating it in scholarly debates and by exploring the meaning of their enterprise for other disciplines, history in particular.

In the prologue of Moral Engines one of the editors, anthropologist Cheryl Mattingly, describes the book project as partly a local history: ‘The Aarhus Story’. By this she refers to an interdisciplinary network at Aarhus University on ‘Health, Humanity and Culture’ founded by the philosopher Uffe Juul Jensen, led by the ‘very strong belief that philosophy could not, by itself, think through crucial issues like health (or suffering) without reaching out to create a cross-disciplinary conversation that not only spanned different disciplines but also involved health practitioners’.[i] An intense collaboration between philosophers and anthropologists arose within this network and led to various publications, including Moral Engines.

Before I turn to this volume, I will first discuss the introduction to a special issue in HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory in which some of the same editors explain the agenda of their philosophical anthropology. Thomas Schwarz Wentzer and Cheryl Mattingly start by considering what they believe to be, ‘an increasing dehumanization of social sciences in the aftermath of poststructuralism and the rise of various naturalisms’. Although they do not doubt that ethnography will keep its focus on living human beings, they argue that more reflection on the ‘human’ and humanism is needed. Moreover, they aim to integrate the anti- and posthumanist critiques in their new humanist project. With this concept they refer to a model of an ethnographically based philosophical anthropology, which acknowledges the situatedness of human life, keeping in mind its reference to humankind.[ii] Moreover, societal debates about climate change challenge to reflect on the human influence on our species and planet.[iii]

Interestingly, the authors link this societal challenge to the ‘ethical turn’ in anthropology. The protagonists of this turn are ‘concerned to give an account of situated human (inter)subjectivity’ that seems to be relevant in times of climate change and debates about the role of human’s responsibility. These protoganists have in common that they consider humans as ethical beings, who ‘act in the space of ethical claims to which they must respond, often through deliberation and judgment’. Wentzer and Mattingly’s aim is, however, not an intervention in societal debates. They mainly want to convince fellow scholars that the ethical domain marks ‘a fundamental feature of the human’.[iv]

It is right there, where the volume Moral Engines takes its starting point. The first sentence of the volume’s introduction says: ‘in the last two decades there has been a virtual explosion of anthropological literature arguing that ethics or morality (we use the terms interchangeably) should be considered a central dimension of human practice’. Within this ‘explosion’ the question of, ‘what actually commits and drives us to understand our lives in ethical terms?’ has remained underexplored. That is why the volume has ethical drives or moral engines as its focus.[v] The authors were asked to ‘engage the question of what the moral drives in human life are, where they are located and how they present themselves to us’.[vi] As the editors explain, the authors have approached these questions in three fundamental ways. I will discuss these three approaches and try to give some representative snapshots from individual chapters.

The first approach to moral engines highlights the ‘category of “moral facts”, of cultural, historical, discursive schematics that grant certain practical possibilities’. This approach is indebted to a Durkheimian understanding of morality, focussed on rules and regulations, but is in addition sensitive to ‘an Aristotelian focus on action and practical judgement’.[vii] The chapters in which this approach is applied are written by the anthropologists Michael Lambek, Joel Robbins and James Laidlaw who reflect on the central concepts of the volume, moral engines in particular. Robbins, for instance, argues that values are ‘moral engines that have the ability to act as drivers of people’s moral behaviours’. In a Durkheimian understanding of morality people combine a ‘sense of both duty and desire’ and, according to Robbins, values have to be related to the latter. Based on his fieldwork on exemplarity in the Urapmin community in Papua New Guinea, Robbins argues that values often do not come to people in abstract form, but through ‘people and institutions that exemply them’.[viii]

The focus of the second approach is on moral experience and a first-person perspective. The key term of this approach is (ethical) responsiveness, which refers to often unreflected and unintended responses to what people experience and highlights the relevance of taking ‘pathos, sentiments, moods’ into account.[ix] Five chapters apply this approach and present case studies about the narrative selves of mothers in a Los Angeles hospital (Cheryl Mattingly), regret, morality and mood in the Yap Sate (Jason Throop), ethical striving and moral aporias among Sufis in Uzbekistan (Maria Louw), forgiving after war in Northern Uganda (Lotte Meinert) and the moral experience that Marco Evaristti’s art installation Helena and El Pescador elicits (Rasmus Dyring). How moral experience is approached in this volume becomes clear, for instance, in Maria Louw’s chapter ‘Haunting as Moral Engine’. Louw starts her chapter with the story of Rustam, a young Sufi, who told her that he is feeling ‘evil things’ such as improper thoughts about girls ‘as even stronger forces in his life the more he attempted to avoid them’ since he has entered the Sufi path. In her research she has come across Sufis who ‘are frequently haunted by the moral choices they could have made’. This haunting is often part of their everyday life and is a reminder of ‘how every intersubjective encounter may be a moral “engine” in the sense of having the potential to redirect one’s care and concern’. Louw positions this findings in the recent literature about self-cultivation through religious practice in Islam and in particular Saba Mahmood’s study of religious women in Egypt who has provided ‘important critiques of liberal assumptions about agency’. She also includes critiques against the focus on self-cultivation, as formulated by Cheryl Mattingly and Samuli Schielke, because people often balance between different values and have to deal with value conflicts. Moreover, she highlights the moral force of emotions. According to her the haunting as experienced by Rustam and other informants often takes ‘the form of shifting moods and emotions that seemed to have a life of their own, overwhelming them in ways that were beyond their control and understanding, complicating moral principles and decisions, and revealing moral concerns in flux’.[x]

The third approach to moral engines, which is applied in the last three chapters, is closely related to the ‘new humanism’ agenda and explores the relationship between ethics and the human condition. This approach tries to not ‘presuppose too much about what it means to be human or to be an ethical being’ and recognizes, comparable to the second approach, how humans are always ‘respondents, not absolute beginners’.[xi] In a chapter about anti-drug war activism, Jarrett Zigon shows the limitations of a well-known concept such as ‘dignity’ and proposes instead ‘dwelling’ as a relatively open concept to investigate the human condition. In discussion with anthropologists, Thomas Schwart Wentzer developes in his chapter a responsive ethics that takes up ‘human responsiveness to be the existential condition that helps us to understand the roots – rather than the engine – of ethics and human agency’. Finally, Francois Raffoul’s chapter ‘The History of Responsibility’ contains a genealogy of philosophical approaches to this concept and argues to understand responsibility as ‘responsiveness to a call, rather than as the traditional accountability of the willful and powerful subject or agent’.

All the chapters show, in their own way, that philosophical anthropology offers a very sophisticated approach to understand how humans live. I have not previously come across such a rich analysis of what propels humans to act in light of ethical ideals in my own discipline, history. Historians have of course reflected on the classic distinction between agency and structure and studied the history of ethics and morality, but the ‘borderland inquiry’, as presented in this volume, has resulted in fine-grained understandings of human life from which historians only can benefit. Disability history, for instance, one of the historiographical subfields related to my own work, tends sometimes to favor an activist’s understanding of agency, assuming a self-reliant and reflective subject. Philosophical anthropology offers an approach to agency in which very different ways of being in the world could be included: for instance, the agency of people with cognitive disabilites, as shown by anthropologists Patrick McKearney and Tyler Zoanni.[xii]

Interdisciplinary exchange was, and is, important for the development of the above mentioned approaches. In the ‘ethical turn’ in anthropology, philosophy has already played an important role. In anthropological reflections on the relations between ‘selfhood’ and ‘world’, and agency and structure, philosophers such as Alisdair MacIntyre and (the late) Michel Foucault have been intensively discussed. Reflection about issues such as the possibilities of human freedom ‘presses inquiry into the very basic ontological considerations about the human condition as such’. However, philosophers are not only needed as ‘professional experts in ontology’, the editors of Moral Engines advocate for a more intensive ‘borderland inquiry’.[xiii] They aim for a dialogue in which participants ‘take up “roles” generally associated with the other discipline’.[xiv] This dialogue is possible because, as Karen Sykes has put it, cultural phenomena could be understood as responses to ontological questions.[xv]

The dialogue between anthopology and philosophy that underlies this volume has clearly enriched the understanding of ethical drives in human life. It was probably thanks to this dialogue and collaboration that the editors, in this volume and elsewhere, position themselves under the flag of ‘new humanism’: a very careful position, but nevertheless a position from where they are challenged to pronounce normative statements about what it means to be human. Here I would suggest that the ‘border inquiry’ could benefit from inviting other disciplines, history in particular. Not only because history enriches the understanding of humans as ethical beings, as Louw for instance does by understanding her interlocutors against the background of the post-Soviet era. But also because history enables philosophical anthropology to historicize the categories used by informants (emic) and by scholars (etic). As Cheryl Mattingly and Jason Throop have argued, ‘one of the driving forces motivating some of the earliest contributions to the ethical turn’ was a concern ‘to distinguish it from the realm of the political’.[xvi] It is probably no accident that the ethical turn was put forward in a neoliberal era characterized by a specific configuration of the ‘political’ and by ‘responsibilization’ policies. How does an anthropology of ethics and morality relate to this neoliberal regime? In order to better understand this relation, a next step after this excellent volume could be the integration of (conceptual) history in order to further evaluate the scholarly drive beyond the exploration of ethical drives in human life, and to reconsider the political.

Paul van Trigt (@paulvantrigt) is postdoctoral researcher in the ERC-project Rethinking Disability: the Impact of the International Year of Disabled Persons (1981) in Global Perspective at the Institute for History, Leiden University. He has published about the modern history of the welfare state, human rights, disability and religion. His monograph Blind in een gidsland (Blind in a guiding country) was published in 2013. Currently, he is writing a genealogy of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

[i] Cheryl Mattingly, ‘Prologue’, in Cheryl Mattingly, Rasmus Dyring, Maria Louw, and Thomas Schwarz Wentzer (eds.), Moral Engines. Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018) 6.

[ii] Thomas Schwarz Wentzer and Cheryl Mattingly, ‘Toward a new humanism. An approach from philosophical anthropology’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8, 1/2 (2018) 145-157: 145, 146.

[iii] Wentzer and Mattingly, ‘Toward a new humanism’, 147.

[iv] Ibidem, 148-149.

[v] Rasmus Dyring, Cheryl Mattingly and Maria Louw, ‘The Question of “Moral Engines”: Introducing a Philosophical Anthropological Dialogue’, Moral Engines, 9-36: 9.

[vi] Ibid, 20.

[vii] Ibid, 21.

[viii] Joel Robbins, ‘Where in the World are Values? Exemplarity and Moral Motivation’, Moral Engines, 155-173.

[ix] Dyring, Mattingly and Louw, ‘The Question’, 28.

[x] Maria Louw, ‘Haunting as Moral Engine: Ethical Striving and Moral Aporias among Sufis in Uzbekistan’, Moral Engines, 83-99.

 [xi] Dyring, Mattingly and Louw, ‘The Question’, 30-31.

[xii] Patrick McKearney and Tyler Zoanni, ‘Introduction. For an Anthropology of Cognitive Disability’, The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 36, 1 (2018) 1-22.

[xiii] Dyring, Mattingly and Louw, ‘The Question’, 13.

[xiv] Dyring, Mattingly and Louw, ‘The Question’, 14.

[xv] Ibidem, 15.

[xvi] Cheryl Mattingly and Jason Throop, ‘The Anthropology of Ethics and Morality’, Annual Review of Anthropology 47 (2018) 475-492: 483.