PHILOSOPHY

SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY
AN INTRODUCTION
Social Philosophy and Social Science
l Although philosophy and science spring from experience, from the inherent desire of the human person to know reality, they differ in their approach and intent.
l Philosophy seeks to understand reality in its totality and ultimate value, while science attempts to control and manipulate it.
l Philosophical approach integrative of experience; while science isolates a certain aspect of reality.
l Social philosophy penetrates into the social dimension of human existence with the immediacy of intuition, searching its meaning and value(s), conceptualizing them for the sake of integrative meaningful living.
l Structures that social philosophy seeks to understand are not taken in isolation from one another but placed in a figure-horizon sort of way.
l Attempts to understand being-with-others-in society in total integrative way.
l Social sciences try to examine a segment of social reality (a group of people, their culture, their economics or politics) as a fact and to explain it.
l Social scientist tries to find inter-objective connections between facts and formulates theories and laws, sometimes with measurements and statistics.
l Uses induction and deduction.
l Method limited to observable phenomena, to social reality as an object.
l Social philosophy and social sciences help each other.
l Philosopher’s insight substantiated by facts provided by scientist, and scientist is impelled to probe into a social fact by the insight of a philosopher.
l Scientist’s methodology contains certain philosophical presuppositions for the philosopher to unearth and criticize.
l Philosopher’s understanding of social reality would remain abstract and unfounded without findings of the social sciences.
l The Social and the Interpersonal
l Social philosophy and social sciences deal with relating to others that is called socius.
l Socius differs from the neighbor. (Paul Ricoeur)
l Neighbor is the personal way I encounter another as a person, the interpersonal, with varying degrees of intimacy.
l Neighbor is the immediate direct relationship with another.
l Socius is the human relationship I have with an organized group or the person I encounter through his/her social function.
l Socius is the mediate indirect relationship I have within the context of institutions and structures.
l In real life, the two overlap and crisscross each other.
l The personal relationship of the neighbor passes through the relationship of the socius,
l works out through the fringes of the socius, and
l rises against the socius.
l The socius and the neighbor are two ways of relating with others, and we must avoid the monopoly of one or the other.
l The socius is not evil in itself; it becomes treacherous when it absorbs and exhausts the whole of our relationships, “for the ultimate meaning of institutions is the service which they render to persons.”
l Nor can our relationships simply be that of the neighbor for this can easily lead to a false sense of charity or delusion. After all, our human existence is social through and through.
l Our life is social in everything. By “everything” we mean everything that is subject to human responsibility.
l The person’s activities are social not only because he/she performs them with others but also because he/she learns them from others, executes them according to accepted patterns and does them for his/her fellow human beings.
l Even wanting to be alone is social.
l Every genuinely human activity is interwoven with an orderly field of meaning, but this orderly field of meaning is at our disposal through others, through society. This is true in the areas of work, play, sense perception, thinking, and feeling.
l Orderly field of meaning in human activity depends upon our fellow human beings and is in turn dependent upon the human person.
l Human existence is fundamentally social in that
l 1) human existence has a historical character,
l 2) we need others to enter into the human world of meaning and to make it our own, and
l 3) being-together is a fundamental value which gives authentic fulfillment in our life.
l The authentic being-for-others is being at the service of others that promotes the existence of the other for his own sake. Here, the being-for-others and the being-through-others merge.
l Social Unity
l The German philosopher Max Scheler (1874-1928) speaks of several essential types of social unity:
l 1. mass (herd among animals):
l no understanding and experience of the other.
l There is only involuntary imitation and psychic contagion.
l The mob possesses its own lawfulness not determined by its members.
l No individuality and sphere of the person as transference of feeling takes place in absence of knowledge, and the individual member is absorbed in total experience. No solidarity because the individual does not exist at all as an experience
l 2. Life Community (as in family, tribe, a people):
l There is understanding but not preceding the experience of togetherness.
l There is an immediate experience of the other and the content of all experience is identical, though varying in course and content in their total dependency on the variations of collective experience.
l Togetherness is experienced as common stream having its own lawfulness.
l Representable solidarity: self-responsibility is built upon an experience of coresponsibility for the willing, acting, and effecting of the whole community.
l Corresponds to different tasks of community: caste, class, dignity, occupation, etc.
l 3. Society: characterized by conscious acts of self and consciousness of acts of others.
l Artificial unit constituted by mature and self-conscious individual persons who agree to come together for common interests.
l Disposition: distrust. Every willing together and doing together presuppose acts of promising and contract.
l No solidarity. Responsibility for others based on self-responsibility.
l Yet, nexus between society and life-community:
l “There can be no society without life community (though there can be life community without society). All possible society is therefore founded through community.” e.g. contract formed in common language.
l 4. Highest type of social unity:
l “the unity of independent, spiritual, and individual single persons ‘in’ an independent, spiritual, and individual collective person.”
l On this level every individual person is at the same time a member of a collective person
l Responsibility-for distinct from responsibility-to:
l In collective person, every individual and the collective person are self-responsible and at the same time every individual is coresponsible for the collective person, just as the collective person is coresponsible for each of its members. Mutual coresponsibility between individual person and collective person.
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l Responsibility-to:
l there is neither an ultimate responsibility of the individual to the collective person (life community) nor an ultimate responsibility of the collective person to the individual (or majority of individuals) as in society, but both the collective person and the individual person are responsible to the person of persons, to God, in terms of self-responsibility as well as coresponsibility.
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l Here solidarity takes on a new sense: change from representable solidarity to unrepresentable solidarity—the individual person is coresponsible for all other individual persons ‘in’ the collective person not only as the representative of an office, rank, or any position in social structure but also as unique personal individual and as bearer of individual conscience.
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l The principle of solidarity is an eternal component and fundamental article of the cosmos of finite moral persons.
l Total moral world becomes one encompassing whole
l Every person, both individual and collective, participates in this according to his special and unique membership
l Two propositions of principle of solidarity:
l 1. community of persons belongs to the essence of a possible person
l 2. a priori structure of mutuality, reciprocity of social acts such as love, esteem, promising, etc.Our task then is to intentionally rise from life-community to bring society (where there is no solidarity) to the totality-person, where genuine solidarity reigns