Lecture 13

Social philosophy: subject matter and structure

The aim of the theme is: to brief (lead) students into the subject of social philosophy and to show the specific character of this part of philosophical knowledge, to explain the fundamental categories of social philosophy.

The key words of the theme are: society, social activity, social life, social consciousness, social structure of a society, historical division into periods of the mankind development.

Plan

1. Specific Character of Social Philosophy. Social Being and Social Consciousness.

2. Philosophical Meaning of the Concept of Society. Society as System.

3. Social System’s Structure and Its Basic Elements.

4. Historical Periodization of Social Development.

14.1. Specific Character of Social Philosophy. Social Being and Social Consciousness

Social philosophy is a constituent part of philosophy that investigates society. Society is simultaneously studied by a number of sciences such as history, political economy, sociology, demography, ethics, aesthetics, jurisprudence etc. Each of these sciences investigates the same object – society, but at the same time they have some concrete spheres of society’s life as the object of researches and their own methods of investigation.

Political economy studies the laws of social-productive, that is economic relations at various stages of a society’s historical development. History as a science is interested in concrete events of the past: their causes, the essence and specific features of manifestations in different countries and at definite stages of the mankind’s development. Sociology studies the present day life: the development of interactions between various social institutes, social groups, communities and the influence of definite factors upon social processes.

All sciences mentioned above and many others, which aimed at studying society, have their own objects of researches concerning society properly, but each of them investigates some definite fragments of society’s life, definite types of social relations.

Social philosophy aims at researching society as a whole, as an integral system in interdependence of all its elements. It is interested in some basic fundamental principles concerning the development of both social life as a whole and of any concrete aspect of society. The questions are: Is there any definite connection between economical, political and social relations? Are there any laws and regularities to which many-sided, complicated and contradictory historical process is subjected or do blind contingency and chaos dominate? What are the motive forces of this progressive process?

All these questions are to be answered by social philosophy, which manifests itself as a theory that reveals the most important, fundamental problems of the development of a society as an integral system. Social philosophy is simultaneously a scientific method of investigating every concrete aspect, every concrete phenomenon of social life.

Social awareness has its specificity in comparison with other objects of cognition:

1. Society as a system is a highly complicated multiple structure, in which economical, political, ideological, moral, religious, aesthetic, national and other factors act; they all should be taken into consideration while any social phenomenon is regarded. Hence the deep and profound investigation of social problems is extremely difficult.

2. Society is rather a dynamic organism. Social laws are more complex in mechanisms and forms of action than the laws of nature. They appeared later and they are realized only in men’s conscious activity. These laws are often manifested as “laws-tendencies” that have some definite level of probability, which makes it difficult to clearly understand their objective existence and action.

3. Laws of social development are realized only through men’s activity; so far it is necessary to consider the general tendency, the definite regularity, which takes place in social processes with the activity of some individuals, who have their own purposes, interests and desires.

4) An experiment so often used in natural sciences can be limitedly maintained in society and it should be carefully prepared as real people participate in it.

The basic question of social philosophy is: „What is primary: social life or social consciousness?” The supporters of the priority of social life in relation to consciousness are materialists; and those who believe in the priority of consciousness in relation to life are idealists; dualists insist on the independent existence of both of these factors of social life. The basic problem of the modern social philosophy is man as social being in his relations with other people. Therefore researching the most general principles of society’s existence is undertaken through understanding man’s self-realization and his sense of life. Practical value of social philosophy is in understanding the social world in totality, looking for the most favorable conditions necessary for man to develop his essential forces.

Dialectical materialist conception of the development of a society insists on the primacy of social being over social consciousness. That was done "by singling out the economic sphere from the various spheres of social life, by singling out production relations from all social relations as being basic, primary, determining all other relations". Marxism does not belittle the role of personalities in history, it does not detract from the significance of their ideas, in­terests, and motives, but the truth is that all these are not the initial but the derivative causes of the historical process, ultimately requir­ing an explanation in terms of the material conditions of life. It was precisely such an explanation that was formulated as the principal proposition of materialism in history. It is not men's consciousness that determines their being, as idealists believed, but, on the con­trary, it is people's social being that determines their consciousness; in other words, the real process of material production and produc­tion relations underlie intellectual life. Marx and Engels proceeded from a very simple fact clear to anyone: before taking up science, philosophy, art, and so on, people must eat, drink, have clothes and a roof over their heads, and to have these, they must work. Labor is the basis of social life. Without labor activity, society would have been unable either to emerge or to continue to exist. Thus social being — society's material life and historically evolved objective pro­duction relations — was singled out in being in general. Briefly, Marx formulated the essence of the materialist understanding of history as follows: "In the social production of their existence, men inevit­ably enter into definite relations that are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life."