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

The phenomenon of joint collective human existence is called sociality. People create each other both physically and spiritually. People are not only characterized by their individual properties, but they have general meaning conditioned by the circumstances of their life in a society: material production, social system, political organization, the level of spiritual culture, etc.

The concept of “social” characterizes people’s coexistence, which is different from their biological nature. Social is an aggregate of social relations of individuals and groups of individuals in the process of their mutual activity, which is realized in their attitude to each other, to their own role in the society and to various events and processes of social life.

Social relations are the connections formed by people in a society. They are of various modalities: bloody relations – in a family; friendly relations – in a class or in a students group; economic relations – in a labor unit; political relations – in a state; spiritual relations – in an intellectual social activity. So, society is a form of coexistence of people. To understand the essence of a society it is necessary to regard the development of the conceptions of a society in the history.

Thinking about the world people were always striving to grasp the sense and the purpose of their existence, the sense and the purpose of the development of a society, the role of a human and his consciousness in this objective process. Their efforts are represented in various sociological doctrines.

From the history of philosophy we know the antique mythological and religious model of a society with the cosmological interpretation of its essence and sources of existence. Cosmic order in a society was guaranteed by a just and rational organization of life. Society was identified with a state that provided citizens’ defense, norms of coexistence, means of education etc. Plato represented his ideal society model in “Republic”, in which individual interests were expected to be subordinated to the common good. Aristotle shared the idea of justice too.

Later on the basis of philosophy of the Middle Ages there was a theological doctrine of a society exposing its inequality and vices as eternal principles of social life. The social world as temporal and sinful was sharply contrasted to the celestial, ideal world. This idea was exposed in the conception of two cities of Saint Augustine. The City of God is marked by people who forgot earthly pleasure to dedicate themselves to the eternal truth of Christian faith. The City of Man, on the other hand, consists of people who have immersed themselves in the cares and pleasure of the present, passing world. In accordance with his looks, the mankind is in motion from the earthly city to the Divine city.

The rationalized philosophy of the Modern Ages set forth the idea of a social contract between people as the initial principle of a civil life organization (T. Hobbes, J. Locke, and J.J. Rousseau). The essence of this convention consists in voluntarily limitation of individuals’ rights for the sake of a peaceful coexistence. One of the mechanisms of such limitation is forming a government which will regulate a civil society.

In the Modern Ages a naturalistic conception was spread. It regarded social phenomena to be a result of the natural influence: physical, geographical, biological etc. Following this doctrine the type of a society and the character of its development are determined by the climate and geographical position (I. Mechnikov, V. Klyuchevsky), by the racial and genetic characteristics of people (Social Darwinism: Th. Maltus, Goumhlovich, Racial-anthropological school: Gobino), by the cosmic processes (O. Chizhevsky, L. Goumilev). In naturalistic conceptions man is regarded as a mere atom in the mechanical aggregate of similar atoms seeking for their individual interests. The natural component in human connections is exaggerated while the social one is evidently underestimated or ignored.

The idealistic model of the social life on the contrary isolated man from the nature making its spiritual sphere an independent and self-sufficient substance. In Hegel’s philosophy the Absolute Reason was the universal initial point while in the subjective idealism it was human unlimited spiritual activity.

The dialectical materialist conception of a society worked out by Marx and Engels had an intention to overcome the disadvantages of the previous approaches having applied the principle of materialism to the interpretation of the laws and the motive forces of a society development.

There are also some modern approaches to the essence of a society. The most well-known doctrine is Max Weber’s interpretation of a social action, the conception in which he insists on human possibly rational behavior in all spheres of their connections. The social action is far from being mere natural. The nature of a society should be interpreted by a social action.

A society as a unity of different ideas, religious, moral, aesthetic, legal and political beliefs was interpreted by E. Durkheim.

The theory offered by H. Spencer estimated that society is a whole organism whose development corresponds to biological patterns.

The conception of Methodological individualism of Karl Popper regards society to be the result of an individual interaction. The social essence of individuals is determined not only by a society but also by cosmic, natural, productive and social being. Human realizes his cosmic spiritual potential in communities.

Thus, in the history of philosophy there is no definite answer to the question: what society is. Society in different times was regarded as a large living organism, as a part of nature, as a product of a social contract and others like that. So what is a society? How does the modern social philosophy answer this question?

A human society is the most complex, in its essence and structure, of all the living systems. The concept of a society covers not only the men living now but all the past and future generations, the whole mankind in its history and perspective. The vital basis of a society is men's la­bor activity. That is precisely the difference between the history of a society and the history of nature: the former is made by people, the latter just occurs. Men do not act as blind tools but on the basis of their needs, motives and interests, pursue definite goals and are guided by different ideas, that is to say, they act consciously. Economic, political, ideological, family relations and others inter­weave in a society in extremely intricate ways. The natural reality is objective and material, while the social reality is supra-personal, supra-individual which is primary in its connection to man, who has his biological and psychical organization and who can exist only in a social environment.

Society is not a sum total of people living in it but rather the relations and connections between them, as people do not exist independently of each other. Interactions between people stimulate the development of a society, which is a complex system, the integrity of all constituent elements, a single whole. Society is an aggregate of people united by the historically developed forms of their mutual connections and interactions. Society is a real, objective aggregate of some collective life conditions.

Society is an integral social organism which differs from the essence of its elements in the following:

1. It is able to a historically long and autonomous existence. No individual element of a society (a man, a family, a social group or an organization) is capable to long a historical existence outside the process of interaction with the social surrounding.

2. Society is self-sufficient and relatively independent. Though interacting with other societies it is capable to live and develop as an independent social organism for rather a long period of time that is for several generations.

3. It is a system interacting with the environment, exchanging substance and energy and preserving its existence. Synergetic investigates society as a system, as integrity.

Society as a system is characterized as follows:

1. A self-organizing, self-regulating and self-developing system: its structure is formed, preserving all basic features; its complexity grows as a result of the internal causes and processes that take place, under no influence from outside. Social relations, connections and interactions between social groups and communities are the basis for the formation of the social structure of a society that is the society’s social sphere;

2. A dynamic system – the specific form of its interaction with the environment is material production, which forms the economic sphere of a society’s life (meaning production, distribution and assumption);

3. A complex hierarchical system – self-organization of a human society is linked with the development of social control forms and the phenomenon of power. Struggle for power defines the society’s political sphere;

4. An informational system – every society information acquires some supra-natural quality: the sense, which provides a new type of informational process that does not exist in nature, but appears only in a society. It becomes social information, the bearer of which is not an individual, but a society as a whole. Society’s informational area is culture. Every individual is both the source and the receiver of social information who is capable to produce, to perform, to perfect, to preserve and to use it in his own purposes and goals. Informational system is the basis for spiritual sphere of society’s life;

5. A determined and stochastic system – as far as people possessing will, consciousness, passions are active participants of history, the development of a society is possible due to two opposite tendencies: conscious and spontaneous which are relatively conscious operating social laws and their spontaneous realization;

6. An adapting and adopted system,

7. An open system – it constantly interacts with the environment, exchanging substance and energy. The natural world is simultaneously the area of man’s existence and the means and the product of his life-activity, the basis of his existence.