Abstract
Sociology is part of the agenda of modernity which privileges epistemology to the neglect of ontological issues. In the modernist mode, sociology was considered only an epistemic project, a project of knowing about the world with proper procedure and scientific method and neglected issues of consciousness, self, relationship of subject and object, and ontological issues of self-nurturance and self-transformation. The neglect of ontology is a crucial gap in modernistic sociology which continues to persist even in contemporary new formulations such as cosmopolitan sociology, offered by Ulrich Beck. For Beck, sociology needs to move from methodological nationalism to methodological cosmopolitanism. But this move is primarily methodological and epistemic and does not address the ontological preparation needed for the transformation of sociology from its contemporary binding in nation-state to a cosmopolitan one. This needs a new self-conception on the part of sociologists, not only as citizens of the nation-state but also as citizens of the world and children of Mother Earth. The later self-conception calls for not only reiteration of self-identity as sociologically constituted but also transcendentally nurtured, urging both the sociologists as well as all human beings to realize that they are not only role occupants but also transcendental selves living in varieties of communities but at the same time transcending these. The chapter explores some of these issues as it puts forward the idea of society as multiple movements of ontological epistemology of participation.
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Notes
- 1.
As John Clammer writes, “For much conventional sociology, a preoccupation with methodology has driven out any concern with consciousness” (Clammer 2009: 13).
- 2.
Gorz (1999) writes the following about education which embodies a critique of society-centered sociological reasoning and signature of an ontological sociality:
This can not be taught; it has to be stimulated. It can arise only out of the affective attachment of children or adolescents to a reference group who makes them feel deserving of unconditional love, and confident of their capacity to learn, act, undertake projects and measure themselves against others—who gives them, in a word “self-esteem.” The subject emerges by virtue of the love with which another subject calls it to become a subject and it develops through the desire to be loved by that other subject. This means that the educative relation is not a social relation and is not socializable.
In this context, what Touraine (2007: 191) writes below also deserves our careful attention:
The combination of economic participation and cultural identity cannot be realized at the level of society; it is only at the level of the individual that participation in the global economy and the defense or formation of a cultural identity—legacy or new project—can combine. That is why, in both family and school, we are seeing the triumph—despite resistance—of the idea that it is the child or the pupil who must be at the center of the institution. The protracted debates in France between advocates and opponents of the so-called college unique, the system in which all students attend the same middle school, lead us to the conclusion that the preservation of the latter is not possible without substantial individualization of the relations between the teachers and the taught.
- 3.
This seems to be the case with Anthony Giddens, whose very title, In Defence of Sociology, suggests this anxiety. It is no wonder than that Giddens laments the disappearance of the “capacity of sociology to provide a unifying center for the diverse branches of social research” (Giddens 1996: 2). To be fair to Giddens he is surely not alone: traces of this anxiety are to be found in André Béteille (2002) as well. An anxiety to defend one’s discipline is not confined to sociology. Habermas (1990) seems to be worried that one day philosophy may be replaced by cultural anthropology, and Sidney Mintz (2000) is worried about this being replaced by cultural studies.
- 4.
What Pollock et al. write below vis-à-vis their elaboration of what they call as cosmofeminism as an example of situated universalism deserves our careful attention:
Any cosmofeminine would have to create a critically engaged space that is not just a screen for globalization or an antidote to nationalism but is rather a focus on projects of the intimate sphere conceived as a part of the cosmopolitan. Such a critical perspective would also open up a new understanding of the domestic, which would no longer be confined spatially or socially to the private sphere. This perspective would allow us to recognize that domesticity itself is a vital interlocutor and not just an interloper in law, politics and public ethics. From this reconfigured understanding of the public life of domesticity and intimacy it follows that spheres of intimacy generate legitimate pressure on any understanding of cosmopolitan solidarities and networks. The cosmofeminine could thus be seen as subverting those larger networks that refuse to recognize their own nature as specific systems of relations among others. That is, we would no longer have feminism as the voice of the specificity interrogating the claims of other putative universals. Instead we would have the cosmofeminine as the sign of an argument for a situated universalism that invites broader debate based on a recognition of their own situatedness. A focus on this extensional understanding of domesticity and intimacy could generate a different picture of more public universalisms, making the domestic sphere subversive of thin claims to universalism. (Pollock et al. 2000: 584/585; emphases added)
- 5.
Reenchantment for Bhaskar also involves a “collapse of the distinction between sacred and profane” (Bhaskar 2002b: xxxviii). For him, “Once this distinction goes we can read the spiritual into the structure of everyday life” (ibid.).
- 6.
Bhaskar’s subsequent elaboration deserves our careful attention:
Our task is to re-become non-dual beings in a world of duality, opposition and strife. Freedom is the elimination of the non-dual components within my embodied personality; that is the elimination of everything inconsistent with my ground-state, the cessation of negative incompleteness. In order to do this, I had to experience duality, heteronomy and change, to grow and fulfill my intentionality. When I have fulfilled my intentionality, when I have no more non-me within me, I am one with my ground state, and one with the ground-states of all other beings in the rest of creation too. I am one with the whole of creation; and as such will reflect back to its creator his work, formation, creation, will or intentionality; and perfectly reflecting his intentionality, I am one with him too. This is self-realisation, the realisation of the divine ingredient within me […]
But this is not the end of the odyssey in the world of duality. I am still positively incomplete, in so far as other beings are co-present, enfolded within me, are negatively incomplete, that is, unfree. When the whole of creation is self-realized, when it reflects back its own divinity, then and only then will there be peace. Even then this peace is only the end of pre-history. I know in the meantime that I will grow and develop while I strive for this goal, a development to which I can see no conceivable end; so if there is an expanded plenitude of possibilities packed into my non-dual being, my agentive self in the world of duality, we cannot even begin to anticipate what possibilities lie within eudemonia. This eudenomia is not something removed from ordinary secular speculation…; rather, we have found it everywhere as a presupposition of even the most crude and rudimentary forms of ethics. (ibid.: 261–262)
- 7.
In the words of Vattimo: “We derive an ethics of non-violence from weak ontology, yet we are led to weak thought, from its origin in Heidegger’s concern with the metaphysics of objectivity, by the Christian legacy of the rejection of violence at work within us” (Vattimo 1999: 44).
- 8.
This may still be a helpful step despite Bourdieu’s own disdain for “the political ontology of Martin Heidegger” (Bourdieu 1991b). A way out is not to be trapped inside the supposedly abominable walls of Heideggerian political ontology and to explore the pathways of spiritual ontologies, taking inspiration, for example, from Dallmayr’s (1993) exploration of another Heidegger.
- 9.
Consider here what Niklas Luhman, the sociologist of communication, writes: “[We need] to make a digression at this point and consider whether the participation of consciousness is not perhaps best conceived as a silence” (Luhman 2001: 16).
- 10.
It is also enriching here to read what Dallmayr writes about his own vocation of journey, which takes inspiration from both Gandhi and Heidegger:
The notion of experience as a journey or of man as homo viator, is no longer much in vogue today—having been replaced by the sturdier conceptions of man as fabricator or else as a creative assembler and dissembler of symbolic designs. In invoking or reclaiming the eclipsed notion of a “journey” I wish to dissociate myself, however, from a number of accretions clouding the term. First of all, I do not identify the term with a deliberate venture or project (in a Sartrean or broadly existentialist sense)—irrespective of the deliberative or reflective posture of participants. Shunning the planned delights of organized tourism, I prefer to associate the term with unanticipated incidents or adventures which one does not so much charter as undergo. Moreover, journeying in my sense does not basically travelling along a well demarcated route in the direction of a carefully chosen or clearly specified goal. Rather, being properly underway or “abroad” denotes to me also frequenting byways, detours, and uncharted trails—sometimes exploring dead-ends, cul-de-sacs […]. (Dallmayr 1987: 1)
- 11.
It must be noted, however, that in his later seeking Heidegger himself made a shift from his earlier preoccupation with resoluteness. As Dallmayr helps us understand in an original reinterpretation of the Heideggerian pathway: “[…] Heidegger’s middle and later writings came to see the pitfalls and streamlining effects of linear power- seeking and to adumbrate a realm beyond power and impotence, domination and submission under the rubric of a ‘power-free’ (machtlos) dispensation that allows being (s) ‘to be’ (Dallmayr 2001b: 190).
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Giri, A.K. (2018). Beyond Sociology: Cultivating an Ontological Epistemology of Participation. In: Giri, A. (eds) Beyond Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6641-2_3
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