Categories, attribute and basic modes of social reality

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Categories, attribute and basic modes of social reality

S.D. Pyanzin

This article analyzes the dialectic of central concepts in the social philosophy - «society» and «social reality» in their ontogenesis and phylogenesis, and the identification of the content of social reality as a social and philosophical category and finding the theoretical and methodological bases of its definition, because the content of this category is a subject area as social philosophy so the specific social sciences. The author traces the theoretical reflection of social reality in social search to find the common denominator for its adequate understanding. Particular attention is given to identifying the defining characteristics of social reality as a form of society existence. The article clears up the question why social reality is described by ten categories: social essense, material and ideal, objective and subjective, organized, ordered, structured, dynamic, stratified, communicative, institutionalized, and it is necessary to consider the essence of the first of them. The author argues the position that social reality exists only in the specific historical forms, and all historical humanity is the first level of its implementation. This, in turn, allows us to trace the meaning of «society» at different levels of abstraction and to identify the attribute and main modes of social existence.

Key words: social reality, society, category, essence, attribute, modus.

Анотація

П'янзін С.Д. Категорії, атрибут та основні модуси соціальної реальності

Стаття присвячена аналізу діалектики центральних у соціальній філософії понять «суспільство» і «соціальна реальність» в їхньому онто- і філогенезі, а також виявленню змісту соціальної реальності як соціально-філософської категорії та знаходженню теоретико-методологічних основ її дефініції, адже зміст даної категорії і являє собою предметну область як власне соціальної філософії, так і конкретних соціальних наук. Простежується теоретичне відображення соціальної реальності в соціальних пошуках задля знаходження спільного знаменника для її адекватного розуміння. Особлива увага приділяється виявленню визначальних характеристик соціальної реальності як форми буття суспільства. Обґрунтовується, чому соціальна реальність описується за допомогою десяти категорій: соціальне суще, матеріально-ідеальне, об'єктивно-суб'єктивне, організоване, упорядковане, структуроване, динамічне, стратифіковане, комунікативне, інституалізоване та чому саме першу з них необхідно вважати її сутністю. Аргументується позиція, що соціальна реальність існує лише в конкретно-історичних формах, а все історичне людство є першим рівнем її утілення. Це, у свою чергу, дозволяє прослідкувати зміст поняття «суспільство» на різних рівнях абстрагування та виявити атрибут і основні модуси соціального сущого.

Аннотация

Пьянзин С.Д. Категории, атрибут и основные модусы социальной реальности

Статья посвящена анализу диалектики центральных в социальной философии понятий «общество» и «социальная реальность» в их онто- и филогенезе, а также выявлению содержания социальной реальности как социально-философской категории и нахождению теоретикометодологических основ её дефиниции, ведь содержание данной категории и представляет собой предметную область как собственно социальной философии, так и конкретных социальных наук. Прослеживается теоретическое отражение социальной реальности в социальных поисках для нахождения общего знаменателя для её адекватного понимания. Особое внимание уделяется выявлению определяющих характеристик социальной реальности как формы бытия общества. Обосновывается почему социальная реальность описывается с помощью десяти категорий: социальное сущее, материально-идеальное, объективно-субъективное, организованное, упорядоченное, структурированное, динамическое, стратифицированное, коммуникативное, институализированное и почему именно первую из них необходимо считать её сущностью. Аргументируется позиция, что социальная реальность существует только в конкретноисторических формах, а всё историческое человечество является первым уровнем её воплощения. Это, в свою очередь, позволяет проследить содержание понятия «общество» на разных уровнях абстрагирования и выявить атрибут и основные модусы социального сущего.

social reality

Formulation of the problem

A concept “society” is central in social philosophy, however offered in philosophical literature its definitions are very diffuse, contradictory and they complicate the analysis of the realities of public life. Many definitions are too generalized and abstract, except those that determine society through the form of motion of matter or the system of relations. Often “society” is determined through a concept of “activity” and “communication”, when it is regarded as a totality of the historically formed forms of joint activity and communication of the people. Undoubtedly, the activity and communication are the major constituents of society, but these descriptions can not embrace all variety of forms of social entity. Similarly the maintenance of concept “society” can not be reduced to the interpretation of society as totalities of people, ideas, values and so on.

Social philosophy must give the most generalized definition to the concept “society”, because it is its central concept. It is necessary to talk that society is such formation of the universe, that arrives at the root, on the one hand, of the nature, and on the other - it exists as the supernatural phenomenon. Thus - supernatural, but not biological or some other phenomenon, as it has materially-ideal and objectively-subjective descriptions. These descriptions are obvious and have a status of philosophical axioms.

The greatest level and form of existence of society can be only social reality, so as about existence as such (at least in Aristotle's tradition) we can speak out due to another concept, and in our case - due to the reality. In fact reality is existing in general, it is also the objectively presented world, and the fragment of universe, that presents subject domain of corresponding science, and objectively existent phenomena, facts, or entity [5, p. 428]. In our case it is social entity with its attribute and modes. And if it so, only social reality can be the first category for the comprehension of existence of society.

Analysis of the recent research and publications

For the consideration of maintenance of concept “social reality” in social philosophy they additionally use a concept “social reality” (V. Horodyanenko, S. Krapivenskyi, K. Pigrov and others), or, vice versa, they identify these two concepts in spite of the axiom on the impermissibility of equation of social reality and society (within the limits of phenomenological sociology this position was recorded as conceptions of the “social constructing of reality” of P. Berger and T. Luckmann and the “semantic structure of the social world” of A. Schьtz). In first case the social reality is present as an actual possibility of its further development and specification. However not as separate societies, but as social actions. In second case it dissolves in societies, so as how we understand society - it is such as a matter of fact (H. Abels), and outside the societies it as a quality disappears. At the same time, in both cases the social reality becomes the result of comprehension the reality, it comes forward as some structural and fundamental moment of social activity, but not as maximum form of the humanity existence.

Within the framework of sociological nominalism (methodological individualism) in general there is a complete denial of social entity, so as here no specific reality corresponds to the general concepts. However, K. Popper, F. Hayek, R. Boudon and others never could conduct him consistently to the end, so as in fact it is impossible to ignore fully “that obvious, what all philosophy is founded on... Always a single in any case is summarized in general, and the last in any case comes forward as a single” [3, p. 380].

They consider that only within the framework of social realism a society is integral unity that has its method and forms of existence. It is the special objectively-subjective world that develops after own, inherent only to him laws, the world with its peculiar phenomena, processes and so on. Exactly here the interest in the new understanding of existence of society as “a social organism” (Yu. Semenov) regenerates and the necessity of new reflections in relation to social reality is grounded.

Thus, the essencial descriptions of social reality can not be considered as described full enough. Many problems remain today unsolved: there is not unity in going near understanding of social reality, there are different ideas on the question of essence of social reality and society and their dialectics; the categorizing of concept “social reality” is not conducted in general.

Accordingly, the goal of the article is the revealing of basic descriptions of social reality whether the expressions about it, and also of its attribute and modes.

The main material

Thanks to what the social reality was distinguished from nature and specified as society in general? It is most heuristic to consider the labour as such a factor. It admits the participation of other members of the collective in the common actions, the raising of conscious aims and the realization of them by joint efforts. Labour assumes and simultaneously stipulates common existence of the people, it was and is the fundamental condition of vital functions, both humanity and society. Will notice thus that collective actions in the process of labour lean on not the genetic, but on social information and the transmission of it by the language facilities. Social information is fundamentally out of genetic in the biological understanding, but it is genetic in a cultural relation. Labour with a necessity envisages the instruments and the articles of labour, corresponding labour relations, but not simple using of the things of nature as the additional facilities. Finally, labour comes true in the bosom of material and spiritual actions of a man. On the example of primitive tools it is evidently, that in it the human idea is materialised and that this object serves to the achievement of human aims.

The permanent exchange of a substance, energy and information is necessary for the existence of society, it allows to consider the society as dynamic open system, specific in relation to the natural systems. The point is that in character of exchange there are the maximum limits related with natural possibilities of the people. For example, a chemical composition of the air must keep certain proportions, in fact only in this case the metabolism will be able, and a man will breathe. In this sense the society as open and dynamic system depends on nature, it is secondary, at that time as the nature existed, and it will exist always.

Thus, we come to the row of conclusions. Firstly, society is some unit, or a system, that consists of the people connected with each other and with nature by different relations. Secondly, society is not simply the complex dynamic system, but it is the united social organism that develops on its own laws. Thirdly, society is a higher level of development of the living systems, the living element of that are the people put into the different forms of joint activity and relations with each other. Fourthly, speaking about society as such, it is necessary to remember, that all of it is a historical humanity that is the first level of the embodiment of social reality. In the same time the social reality exists only in certain historical forms, in societies. It allows to analyse the maintenance of concept “society” on the different levels of abstracting.

There are two basic interpretations of the reality. First - phenomenalism, that asserts that the reality depends on the cognitive activity of a man, it is proclaimed (constituted) and built by it. Also in phenomenalism the cognition deals not with the objects of the material world, existing regardless of consciousness, but only with a totality of elementary perceptible components (feelings, perceptible data, sensibilies and so on). Considering that all maintenance of the cognition can be reduced to perceptions, phenomenalism acknowledges them the only reality accessible for the man. The second is the realism, that asserts the objective existence of reality that is opened by a man in the process of cognition. Realism asserts the presence of something that lies out of consciousness. We can understand this presence as material or as ideal.

In marxism within the limits of the second interpretation a term “reality” is used in two senses:

а) all existing, or the whole material world, including all his ideal products;

б) objective reality, or a matter in the totality of its different kinds. The reality is opposed here to the phenomena of consciousness and is identified with the concept of matter. The public practice there is the criterion of reality of objects, processes, events, facts, properties and others like that [6, p. 572].

Thus, the principles of analysis of social reality are conditioned by that understanding of reality, that a certain researcher adheres to. However, inspite of the difference between all these approaches, a social reality is known through taking into account next descriptions (categories).

1. Social reality is a reality that is in a that or other degree organized and structured. In relation to the meaningfulness of these signs of social reality the philosophers do not have a consent. Those doctrines in which the importance of principle of good organization is confessed insist on that society is not only efficiency, but a single unit. Then the principle of good organization “increases” to the principle of integrity, of system.

Some doctrines supported a thesis that good organization can not be examined as an absolute description, it depends on situation, so as it depends on the terms of certain society. Therefore at the analysis of social reality it follows to pay attention to not so much system descriptions that form integrity, as on those that do this system changeable, capable easily to reform under a new situation, easily to change a structure and order. Therefore many researchers of 20 century (E. Durkheim, M. Weber, T. Parsons and others) considered, that such characteristics as integrity and good organization, were second-rate and derivative from the social actions of the individuals and the groups.

In the second half of 20 century became popular the conceptions according to that the social reality is not organized according the principle of integrity, but, vice versa, it is chaotic, unsystematic, disconnected. It is the reality that has no a center, and, accordingly, it has not, and can not have a united organization. In such doctrines it is supported the principle that the social reality is various and unforeseeable, in it simultaneously can get along and coexist large number of unreduced to each other realities, each of them is original, and develops on its own rules. And thus, a social reality is not a universal and a single whole. It is the world of enormous variety of senses. Such views are typical for the representatives of post-modernism.

Thus, the principle of good organization and efficiency was spoke out in different after the degree of “inflexibility” variants: from the requirement of integrity to the denial of any good organization in general. It is necessary to say that the denial of good organization and integrity also can be examined as the certain following to the indicated principle. In fact in this case however the attention pays to these descriptions of social reality.

2. Social reality is dynamic; it is such that develops. So, A. Comte divided sociology into two divisions - social statics and social dynamics. The first of them pays attention to the relatively stable parameters of frames of society and is sent to the study of structural elements: social spheres, forms and others like that. At the study of structural elements the integrally-organized order of social reality will be a main description. The structurally organized integrity recreates the space in that it exists, that is why for this division of social knowledge a fundamental role is played by a concept “social space”. It does not deny its changeable character, considering, however, that in certain terms and for certain goals it is possible to disengage oneself from its dynamic nature and to pay attention to the structural components.

Social dynamics investigates the changes in society. Therefore the “social time” here is a fundamental concept. In this case it is possible to talk only about speed, depth, intensity of changes, but nowise about their absence. So there is a whole division of social cognition that studies the law- governed nature of social changes. However some philosophers consider too radically, that static society is an abstraction that does not relate to the reality. They stressed that there are not and can not be the systems that don't change. Here the aspect of “lasting duration” is distinguished in social time. For example, the duration (durйe) in philosophy of H. Bergson, longue durйe in P. Ricњur.

3. Social reality is stratified. This description underlines the fundamentally heterogeneous character of structural elements in the composition of society, it also underlines their subordination and interdependence, and also the arrangement according the scale “higher/below”.

4. Social reality is communicative. The moment of changeability and the dynamic nature of social reality becomes sharp in the concept of communication. Therefore this description is near to the 2-nd, but here the attention pays to the special language character of the changes. However if in conceptions of 19 century the communication was examined as means of translation of information, and that is why was considered as a derivative from social processes, then in 20-30th of 20 century a situation changes. The philosophy of this period is interested in the problems of language, and first of all after works of M. Bakhtin and M. Heidegger, the problems of communication became the most important. Thus the communication is gradually interpreted not as an information transfer, but as the independent reality. Thus as actually social reality, so as if the sociality consists of interactions, then any interaction can be examined in terms of communication.

A concept “communication” in such understanding gives an opportunity to appeal to the study of interaction that lasts “here and now”, and to examine the reality as limited to the scopes of this interaction. And since the social reality can be interpreted as a sequence of such interactions, so far as the social reality is a macrocommunicative process in that all senses and values only at first sight are conditioned by today's reality of the people.

In such understanding of the social reality any link of reality that is examined as a communicant can be the point of counting out; it can be the ordinary citizen or a state in the whole. Also any subject depersonalized to the fact of presence can be the communicant. This fact as the imprint of this subject is read in every artefact.

Possible directions of philosophical analysis of social reality as communicative are set by the typology of communication chains:

a) long and short chains of communication, depending on the amount of mediators. It is the most variant and conditional description the analysis of which allows in one standard action to educe a different amount of the communicants;

b) mutual circulating and one-sided communications. So, in the process of buying of something we can see the unequivalence of types of communications. If a customer and a salesman, interchanging the remarks, are both the “senders” and the “recipients” of reports, then when the question is about the depersonalized subjects, a chain acquires one-sided character. I, as a customer, try to decrypt codes of the got report, the certificate of presence of other people, but does not can here, now and without mediators to pass to them my report.

And in the case when the head of a government addresses to the population, he does not address personally to me. What is more, not always a report of information is the aim of his performance, more precisely the information is present here, but a report is not an aim, the ritual of communication is main here, it is the real aim. A speaker executes a ritual action sense of which is quite not in the pronounced words. Sense of this action is in an action, in the appearance on the screen, where the certain codes - intonation, appearance, manner to talk and others like that are the elements of control;

c) communications are actual and potential. We can identify as potential all possible senses, systems of codes, that exist as the reports set aside on the future and are considered as coming from the investigated situation. For the study of these types of communications the special value has a research accent not so much on what was passed, but largely on what this report held back about. At the same time, on the base of potential communications because of different interpretation of keeping a silence often become the possibilities for manipulation.

5. Social reality is institutionalized. Under institutes we understand proof social forms, schemes of typification, within the framework of which there is a setting of norms and rules of social behavior, an order and standardization of actions are formed. Except the activity of individuals, the social reality is presented by the activity of institutes. Moreover, it is important to mark, that the activity of individuals always has an institutionalized character.

The supporters of institutional approach consider that the social reality can be reduced to the variety of forms of institutionality. It is the conception based on the specifically interpreted principle of integrity and structuralness, and about this conception the talk was in point 1. Here the social institutes are the objectivised social forms, because they are created by the activity of a man, they in course of time acquire the independence of it as the forms of existence.

Seven descriptions (categories) of social entity as we marked are recognized in a that or other degree by all researchers. At the same time, although the representatives of different schools and directions considered all these descriptions mainly important, but they attached great importance only to one or a few of them, and they payed no attention to others. But it is necessary to take into account all of them simultaneously.

Now, finding the main categories of existence of society as such, it is possible and necessary to find the attribute and modes of social entity, and thus of social reality.

A multitude is a philosophical concept that must be examined together with concepts of one, singular, united. It is the determined amount for some reason. However “a multitude it is impossible to think, eliminating an idea about a single, united, as in another case every its part (element) can not be considered as unity, but will be crushed to endlessness” [4, p. 592]. Every multitude is connected with a single, united in two relations: firstly, as some unit, integrity, and secondly, as something made of units. Thus, a multitude - is also a quality.

A multitude is usually understood as a class, totality, association of somebody or something that is provided with common characteristics. Accordingly, one multitude differs from another multitude on the basis of the law of excluded middle. Thus one multitude can combine in some new unit with other multitudes. However such combination of different multitudes takes place to the certain limit. In relation to social reality such limit is the social reality. Thus, social reality is the existence of single, unit in a multitude (through a multitude) and existence of a multitude in single (through one, singular). Thus a multitude and a single, singular has an undoubted ontological status. At last, a multitude is one, and one is a multitude in their dialectics [2, p. 527-528]. And a specific unity of a multitude and a single is the attribute of social reality, and a multitude and one, single are its basic modes.

Conclusions

Thus, social reality is a category of social philosophy for denotation of social pure сущого as a special fragment of the universe, that is materially-ideal, objectively-subjective, well- organized, structured, dynamic, stratified, communicative, institutionalized. The social reality can be described by using of such categories: social entity, materially-ideal, objectively-subjective, well- organized, structured, dynamic, stratified, communicative, institutionalized. Thus the first category - social entity is the essence of social reality, and all others are its descriptions. The unity of a multitude and a single, singular is an attribute of social entity, and a multitude and one, single are its basic modes. The content of this category creates a subject domain of social philosophy and certain social sciences.

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