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LECTURE 15

Social philosophy: the subject matter and the structure.

  1. The specific character of social philosophy. Social being and social

consciousness.

2. Philosophical meaning of the concept of a society. Society as a system.

3. Social system’s structure and its basic elements.

4. Historical periodization of social development: formational, civilization, axial and wave approaches.

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 society’s historical development. History as a science is interested in concrete events in 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 taking place.

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 basic fundamental principles concerning the development of both social life as a whole and 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 explains 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 multiply 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 then the laws of nature.They appeared later and they are realized only in men’s conscious activity. Often these laws are 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, definite regularity, which takes place in social processes with the activity of individuals, who have their own purposes, interests, 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 –idealists; dualists insist on independent existence of both of these factors of social life. The basic problem of 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, which 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."

The phenomenon of joint collective human existence is called sociality. People create each other both physically and spiritually. People are characterized by not only 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 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 society it is necessary to regard the development of the conceptions of society in the history.

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

From the history of philosophy we know antique mythological and religious model of society with cosmological interpretation of its essence and sources of existence. Cosmic order in society was guaranteed by justice and rational organization of life. Society was identified with a state that provided citizens’ defense, norms of coexistence, means of education etc.(Plato and Aristotle idea of justice) Later on the basis of philosophy of Middle Ages there was a theological doctrine of 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. In accordance with his looks, mankind is in motion from earthly city to 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, 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 there is forming a government which will regulate a civil society.

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

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

Dialectical materialist conception of 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 the development of the society.

There are also some modern approaches to the essence of society. The most well-known doctrine is Max Weber’s interpretation of 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 society should be interpreted by social action.

The conception of Methodological individualism of Karl Popper regards society to be the result of individual interaction. The social essence of individuals is determined not only by 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 social contract and others like that. So what is society? How does 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 society covers not only the men living now but all the past and future generations, all mankind in its history and perspective. The vital basis of society is men's la­bor activity. That is precisely the difference between the history of 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, they pursue definite goals and are guided by different ideas, that is to say, they act consciously. Economic, political, ideological, family and other relations inter­weave in society in extremely intricate ways. Natural reality is objective, material, while social reality is suprapersonal, supraindividual which is primary in its connection to man, who has his biological and psychical organization and who can exist only in 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 their 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; only society as the integrity can.

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 the following, it is:

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 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 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 – in every society information acquires some supranatural 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 the spiritual sphere of society’s life;

5. A determined and stochastic system – as far as people possessing will, consciousness and 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.