Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Translated by G. G. Candler
ABSTRACT
Alberto Guerreiro Ramos’s intellectual trajectory is analyzed to
show his permanent concern with the condition of contemporary hu-
manity. Two moments in his trajectory are specifically addressed. In
the first, under the strong influence of Christian intellectual thought,
the category of human person was most important to him. In the
second moment he sought to demonstrate autonomy from those ear-
lier influences, secularized his thought, and coined the expression
Parenthetical Man, which was central to his criticism of the social
sciences and especially of organizational theory. From this he pro-
posed his theory of social system delimitation. From this point of
view, it is possible to affirm that Guerreiro Ramos’s sociology is
predominantly antropocentric, in other words, Ramos takes man as
the main reference in his design of social systems.
The climax of the social scientist’s concern with history is the idea
he comes to hold of the epoch in which he lives. The climax of his
concern with biography is the idea he comes to hold of man’s basic
nature, and of the limits it may set to the transformation of man by
the course of history. (Mills, 1959, p. 165)
legacy of the classic era. The recuperation of this classical legacy would
be one of the principal intellectual activities of his life.
In Introdução à cultura one finds the main ideas of Ramos, articu-
lated in language that asserts the necessity of the installation of a new
culture, of a new humanity and of a new civilization centered in the
notion of the human person and of the community. Ramos’s transform-
ative proposal was very similar to the propositions of the French per-
sonalists. Using a conceptual framework based on pairs of contradictory
concepts—culture versus civilization, person versus individual, organic
versus mechanical, tragic feeling of life versus bourgeois feeling of exis-
tence—the young writer defends the necessity of the installation of a
new social structure that privileges the necessity of human spirit.
In our opinion, these first two of Ramos’s books are very important
for the comprehension of his intellectual trajectory, because in them are
significant elements—that is to say, certain influences, personal posi-
tions, theoretical options, concepts, and themes—that encompass the
totality of his intellectual contribution. One of the elements which re-
main present throughout his career is his commitment to the develop-
ment of an engaged knowledge. For example, he had an aversion to the
idea of art, which left him to criticize harshly what he referred to as a
poeta esteta, a type of poet who writes poetry as a mere fictional con-
struction, an artifice, something alienated from the existential life of the
creator. For Ramos, poetry was a form of spiritualization, of humaniza-
tion of man, a way to access God and the reality of the world, and had
an important social role, because poetry could help men and women
overcome the lack of spirituality in the modern world (1939).
Ramos leveled similar criticisms at some Brazilian sociologists. In-
spired by the difference proposed by Maritan between habit (evqoς) and
habitus (evxiς) (1972, pp. 15-30), Ramos distinguished between a “soci-
ology in habit” and “sociology in act or habitus” to differentiate a real,
applied sociology from a more academic, “literate” sociology. While a
sociology of habit would require specific training, often academic and
repetitive, focused on the exercise of “mere analagic repetition of prac-
tices and studies” (Ramos, 1996, p. 120) that is, focused on a trained
incapacity; a sociology of action required more than this sociological
literacy, because it could only be achieved through the commitment of
the sociologist with the immediate social context, and the development
of a new type of creative knowledge turned to improve individual and
associated human life. This link, this engagement or conscious compro-
mise of sociology with its context, would make it possible to produce an
authentic sociology. Without this kind of commitment, Ramos believed
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ity into a new phase of the process of structuring human associated life.
This new stage of human critical consciousness was especially important
because men and women would learn much about how to cope in the
face of the growth of organizations. This would add to human con-
sciousness a quality still absent, or at the least not yet dominant: the
parenthetical attitude (p. 145). This concept was inspired by Edmund
Husserl’s (1967) distinction between natural attitude and critical atti-
tude. Ramos’s parenthetical attitude was defined “by the psychological
capacity of the individual to separate their internal and external” cir-
cumstances (1972a, p. 243), that is, the capacity of putting between pa-
rentheses the Self and the World and the existence of the Self as such.
When doing this, men and women would acquire critical consciousness
of the Self and of their Circumstances and thus, they would conquer
“the plane of self-conscious existence,” of self-determination, indicated
in this sense by the conquest of a “superior mode of human existence,”
or a type of “learned and transcendent existence” (Ramos, 1966, pp. 10-
11). Without adoption of the parenthetical attitude, humanity would
not be able to overcome the state of “brute existence” (p. 46), would be
unable to humanize itself, would lack “power over itself and over its
circumstances” (Ramos, 1963, p. 145), and therefore would be unable to
promote its active adjustment “to society and to the universe” (p. 145).
The parenthetical attitude would have, in Ramos’s thought, a funda-
mental role in the process of human emancipation. It is important to
note that the parenthetical attitude put reason and freedom in the
center of human articulation with the world, not in metaphysical terms
but as a concrete question, as práxis, once it implied the “discovery and
instauration of new organization forms,” making possible “superior
possibilities” of human existence (1963, p. 169).
In this way, Ramos agreed with Peter Berger (1963) in the claim that
sociology had insisted, from its origin, in the total equalization of man
with determined types of socially validated identities; and also with
Karen Horney (1964), who positioned herself against the super-social-
ized normality and defended the necessity of studying society under the
perspective of the psychic difficulties that social arrangements and
structures created for individuals. Thus, the social sciences could not
remain immune to the criticisms being made regarding the “pathology
of conformity or social normality” (Ramos, 1971a, p. 25-6). Psychologi-
cal works such as those of Eric Fromm (1967), Abraham Maslow
(1968), Chris Argyris (1964), Douglas McGregor (1968), Frederick
Herzberg (1969), along with Horney, had pointed to the need to articu-
late a science of man that emphasized the fundamental requirements of
human development, reinforcing this plea through an anthropological
approach to the social sciences.
Also relevant to the development of these ideas was that in the 1960s
humanity was experiencing the passage from a period of shortage of
material goods and elementary services, to one of abundance. This
point was important to Ramos, because past “fundamental lacks” that
prevented people from engaging in substantive pursuits and pursuing
personal development could now be overcome (Ramos, 1973, p. 393).
At the same time, that transformation would lead people to question
the legitimacy of some social systems and existent organizations, if they
failed to correspond to the new demand for human and social develop-
ment (p. 402). Instead, formal organizations and the social systems they
constituted seemed, in Ramos’s view, true “prisons,” or “a refinement
of the master-slave relationship” (p. 396). The “repressive socialization”
of organizations was causing “high psychological costs” at both the per-
sonal and social level. For Ramos, the:
cause the parenthetical man’s autonomy clashes with the excessive regi-
mentation suggested by a behaviorist psychology.
Two fundamental characteristics of the Parenthetical Man reveal
some aspects of the earlier-discussed Christian legacy of Ramos’s work:
first, the parenthetical man as a rational being; and second, the paren-
thetical man as “self-actualized.” Reason is the central category of Ra-
mos’s humanism since his early works. Reason was always presented by
the author in terms of dichotomies, from his first book until his last. In
1939, when addressing the modern dichotomy of reason, he showed two
faces of the term: the utilitarian face and the spiritual face. The first,
utilitarian reason, would be linked with man as individual, the second
would be linked with man as person. Much later, with his deeper knowl-
edge of the works of Max Weber, Karl Mannheim and Eric Voegelin,
the duality of the significance of the term reason would gain more soci-
ological characteristics, and become a key component of Ramos’s social
thought. In a 1946 text, for example, he called the attention of his read-
ers to the difference Weber established, with the intent of elaborating a
comprehensive sociology, “between rationality and irrationality, in
terms of function before that of substance” (1946, pp. 132-133). In other
words, Ramos called attention to the Weberian distinction between
Zweckrationalität (formal rationality) and Wertrationalität (substantive
rationality) and consequently, between rational action referring to ends
and rational action referring to values. In this same 1946 work, he also
observed that Karl Mannheim had made use of this same distinction to
articulate his “theory of social organization” (Ramos, 1946, p. 133).
But it would only be in 1966, with the publication of his last book in
Brazil before he departed into exile, that Ramos would demonstrate the
maturity that the concepts of formal or instrumental rationality and
substantive or substantial rationality would develop in his reflections,
and indicate the direction in which his social thinking would develop, in
the case of the recuperation of the classic meaning of reason and the
implications of this for the articulation of human life in union with the
individual. In Administração e Estrategia do Desenvolvimento (1966),
Ramos firmed his understanding of functional and substantial rational-
ity, saying on the one hand, human acts could be functional “when,
linked with other actions or elements, they contribute to a predeter-
mined objective. It is functional if the predetermined objective that this
kind of rationality could be assessed” (1983, p. 38). On the another
hand, all intrinsically intelligent acts that are based in a lucid under-
standing of the relations among facts are substantially rational. A ra-
tional act is one that attests to the transcendence of the human being,
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He continues:
Self-actualization moves the individual toward inner tension, to-
ward resisting complete socialization of his psyche. . . . the individ-
ual’s self-actualization is very often than not an unintended
consequence of innumerable courses of action. Paradoxically it is
an after-the-fact verification rather than a guaranteed agenda. The
more the individual is concerned explicitly with self-actualization,
the more trapped he finds himself in the puzzle of existential frus-
tration. (pp. 87-88)
BY WAY OF CONCLUSION
In synthesis: the affirmation of the self, of liberty, of self-realization,
and the exercise of noetic rationality emerge as the principal engage-
ments of the parenthetical man. In Ramos’s understanding, these are
human characteristics that must be systematically articulated into social
science theory, if we want to remove ourselves from the gregarious con-
dition that was launched with the advent of secular modernity. We can-
not deny that the categorical types that qualify or that delimit the
contours of Ramos’s anthropological presupposition suffered some al-
terations over time, from his youth to his maturity. Initially, the author
was influenced by Catholic thought and linked with the category of the
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human person. After his Catholic phase, Ramos developed the category
of the parenthetical man: a being of substantive or noetic reason, with
the possibility of transcending the world in which he was put and of
acting in a manner consistent with his own subjectivity and meaning,
despite the challenges of a society of modern organizations.
The parenthetical man would aspire to autonomy, even while contin-
uing to participate actively in organizations; would possess a highly crit-
ical conscience developed on the premises of value latently evident in
daily life; would be a response to the present time, a reaction to the
circumstances felt most intensely in the most advanced industrial socie-
ties, and that are rapidly being spread to others; would possess a capac-
ity to “suspend his internal and external circumstances,” able in this
way to examine his circumstances with a critical vision; he would man-
age to separate himself, to abstract himself, to transcend the flux of
daily life, so as to examine and evaluate it in the quality of a spectator, a
foreigner; and the parenthetical man would be concerned with values
that would put noetic or substantive reason in a place of primary impor-
tance (Ramos, 1972a, p. 8).
By not treating man as a “preformed, predesigned, preconstituted”
being, but instead essentially as an “epic being,” a being who could al-
ways “form, design, constitute himself by exploring the range of pos-
sibilities available at each moment” (Ramos, 1970a, p. 11), Ramos
managed to make clear that this necessity of personal actualization that
the parenthetical man possessed does not imply a fluid character but,
on the contrary, it imples actualization. Here it would signify “the re-
tention of character through change; it is victory over fluidity” (1981, p.
171). Put this way, the implications of studies of the parenthetical man
would be enormous, and the first sketch of a typology of social systems
and their respective types of man was written in “The Parenthetical Di-
agraph” (Ramos, 1972b), in which one encounters the notion of organi-
zational delimitation in statu nacenti.
Finally, sociological reduction would be, for Ramos, a fundamental
instrument which humanity could make use of to achieve success in a
mission of self-realization and of emancipation because, through its in-
termediary, men and women—common people—through the adoption
of the parenthetical attitude as part of their daily conduct, could enter
into a process of true humanization. It is through this lens that we can
interpret the fact that sociology came to substitute, for Guerreiro Ra-
mos, a vocation that in his youth he attributed to poetry, which is to
become a knowledge of salvation.
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NOTES
1. Eric Voegelin, recuperating the Platonic notion of metaxy, affirmed that
human existence occupied an intermediate (in-between) structure, in which
human consciousness could develop. People would experience this intermediate
structure of existence as a tension between contrary poles, such as life and
death, perfection and imperfection, time and eternity, mortality and immortal-
ity, etc. Man did not exist in either of the poles of these tensions, but rather
among them. It would be an error, according to Ramos, to consider the poles
objectively. They should be treated, instead, as meaning or indices, among
which people move existentially. In Ramos’s interpretation, individual exis-
tence was in-between structures, in other words, “the tension between the po-
tential and the actual.” In this resided the difficulty of existence explained “by
mechanomorphic categories such as those which plague the prevailing model of
social science” (Ramos, 1981, p. 111).
2. The subtitle of A Redução Sociológica was “introduction to the study of
sociological reason.” The term “sociological reason” was inspired by the ideas
of historical reason (Dilthey) and vital reason (Ortega y Gasset). For Ramos,
sociological reason was a kind of framework of meanings, that is, “the basic
reference to sociologists to understand the meaning of all social facts or events
that happen in a certain society” (Ramos, 1965, p. 138).
3. In The New Science of Organizations, Ramos broached the behavioral
syndrome of formal social theory. According to Ramos, “the behavioral syn-
drome is a socially conditioned mood affecting individuals’s lives when they
confuse the rules and norms of operation peculiar to episodical social systems
with rules and norms of their conduct at large” (1981, p. 46). Implicit to him
were four principal traits at the basis of the formal theory of organization: the
fluidity of the self, perspectivism, formalism, and operationalism.
REFERENCES
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John Wiley & Sons.
Berger, P. (1963). Invitation to sociology. New York: Doubleday.
Fromm, E. (1967). The sane society. New York: Fawcett World Library.
Herzberg, F. (1969). Work and the nature of man. New York: The World Pub-
lishing Company.
Horney, K. (1964). The neurotic personality of our time. New York: W.W.
Norton.
Husserl, E. (1967). The thesis of natural standpoint and its suspension. In J. J.
Kockelmans (Ed.), Phenomenology, the philosophy of Edmund Husserl
and its interpretation (pp. 68-79). Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Maritain, J. (1972). Arte y escolástica [Art and scholarship]. Buenos Aires: Club
de Lectores.
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