Onuf- World of Our Making- part 2

 Onuf uses close readings to “supply materials for a disciplinary construction project.” (p. 23) For him, IR has as its central puzzles the “need for order, equilibrium, or cooperation in face of unconfined political activities.” (p. 14) He has doubts about anarchy as a central/defining feature of IR. Instead, he looks at reality as being constructed to begin with. His central idea is that human beings construct society and society constructs humans out of inner nature and outer nature (of material circumstances) (p. 46) He does not see a sharp distinction between social and material reality. Instead, people and societies construct each other, but this is not done “wholly out of mind.”

In his SEARCH for ways to explain how “rules make reality social”, Onuf employs close readings in a wide range of disciplines.

Here are some questions...thoughts I had as I read the text:

1. ) How does the figure on page 57 compare with PTJ’s matrix on methodological approaches?

2.) In the opening to chapter 3, Onuf states “Reasoning takes practice; cognition is conduct.” (p. 96) On page 97, he then goes on to talk about “stages” of moral development (with reference to Piaget and Kohlberg). When I was teaching at a private school in Los Angeles, the school used the Kohlberg ideas of moral development and we, as teachers, were supposed to discuss what “stage” we felt the kids were in for their moral development. I took advantage of my position as a part-time music teacher to not engage in these discussions as I did not agree with placing kids into categories in this way. For Onuf, cognition is mindful and reasoning is about learning and knowing how to use knowledge. But, while he does not state a needed preference of an order or sequence to stages, it seems implicit in this formulation. For Onuf, “Practice and consciousness taken together yield judgment. We do not simply learn to respond to instruction-, directive-, and commitment-rules, having learned to recognize them in successive states of development. We judge them differently, once we have learned how to, and respond accordingly.” (p. 119) This statement seems contradictory because he is saying we do not respond, but then we learn how to respond. Is this a point about the level of consciousness of these states/stages? I know that at the high school where I worked that the students had workshops on the stages and were given opportunities to “practice” their moral development through community service. Does the practice then stay conscious, and, if so, what does that say about the moral aspects of these stages and how they are performed?

2.) Onuf’s discussion of gender on pp. 125-26 attempts to move beyond the binary of women’s concerns as concrete and men’s concerns as abstract. Instead he proposes abduction- with “an ethic of affect, of honor and pity.” He offers, that “people choose different categories of reasoning to deal with moral dilemmas.” (pl. 126). Thus, the way that people reason is based on the rules that are supported - but what happens when people have conflicting messages  about rules because of belonging/sensing in multiple identities?