Complexity in Organizations; A Research Overview (for True Epub) by Stig O. Johannessen

Author:Stig O. Johannessen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2022-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Kantian Dualism

Although Kant had as his starting point Hume’s prioritizing of the subjective autonomous human, he was critical of the notion of purely subjective constructed truth. However, he was also critical of the way deterministic scientific rationality did not attribute any significance to human free will. Rather, his suggestion was that there is a fixed reality beyond our reach, which individuals can only perceive as imperfect and variable. Whenever individuals do this, reality will appear to become relative. Kant referred to this duality as Das Ding an sich – the thing, or nature of things, which in itself is independent of human observation, and Das Ding für mich – the things as they appear to be in human sensation or experience. Thus, according to Kant, there is a given reality of nature, which our senses can come closer to experiencing but will never really comprehend because it transcends human possibilities of knowing. Our experience is limited as an instrument to understand nature (i.e. the complexity of nature).

Kant thought that when nature unfolds and change, it is because some characteristics are enfolded in it from the beginning, thus forming nature’s evolution in particular ways. The internal interactions of nature’s components are such that they produce more mature (i.e. complex) forms of whole organisms, clearly recognizable and predictable in their natural form (i.e. humans, animals, trees) but also clearly unpredictable and different as individual organisms.

However, Kant also claimed that when human actions evolve, it is because people make rational choices based on their individual free will. Hence, human causality is rational, while nature’s causality is formative and based on pregiven characteristics. The full scale of reality evolves according to dualistic causality principles: human’s rational causality (agency) and nature’s formative causality. Kant’s dualism implies that nature has a given purpose (teleology), whereas humans choose their purpose. The theory seeks both to explain and to defend a causal split between nature and humans as a legitimate reason for bridging both reliable scientific objectivity and unreliable human subjectivity.

After World War II, the social sciences moved away from the pre-war polarizing debate that Blumer had described in the late 1930s, and in a peculiar way adopted the Kantian ‘bridge’ – the dualistic logic of nature and humans – in order to explain the relationship between the subjective individual and the objective structure of society. In social theory, the American sociologist Talcott Parsons constructed a synthesis of the views of whom he thought had been the four most influential sociologists up until then, namely Emile Durkheim (French), Max Weber (German), Vilfredo Pareto (Italian), and T.H. Marshall (English). All four had made crucial contributions to the problem of emergence of social order, leading to the formulation of a kind of unified theory of social structure.

However, in his book The Structure of Social Action Parsons completely ignored the work of the American pragmatists (Parsons, 1937). As Parsons became a dominant figure in social theory in the 1940s and 1950s, pragmatist thinking more or less disappeared in social theory (Joas and Knöbl, 2009).

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