Society and the Individual

(2018. This was the final paper I wrote for Social Studies 10, the epic year-long social theory/philosophy survey that all Social Studies students take their sophomore year. It represents a culmination of some of the key ways this course expanded my understanding of the relationship between the individual and society, a question not only at the core of the American experiment, but at the core of what it is to be a human being. I talk about some key intellectual influences on my thinking at the time, Emile Durkheim and Jurgen Habermas, both of whom blew my mind. Society constitutes individuals, who then constitute society. Society is its own thing, a superorganism, a language, the species, the lifeworld, God. Interactions between individuals and society should ideally be based on an orientation towards mutual understanding, towards an alignment of agentic dispositions rather than an alignment of outcomes based on power. These two insights— the primacy of our species-being and the importance of understanding as the telos of language— are core to my theories about what ideal democracy is and could be, which I will develop more in future essays.)

The relationship between the part and the whole, or the individual and the society, is a fundamental question of social theory. Better understanding this relationship would have real consequences for an individual living a life, since we are inescapably tied to the society we are born into. We exist as social beings: how exactly does this work? What does this mean for society? And what does this mean for the individuals who must act within society? This essay endeavors to answer these questions through the scholarship of Emile Durkheim and Jurgen Habermas. These two thinkers each described the constitution of the individual and society from different points of departure, yet their systems align significantly, which speaks to the validity of these conceptions. Although the individual and society are mutually generative, society is the originating term in the relationship; society (or the lifeworld) constitutes individuals and creates the idea of man, which is manifested incompletely and differentially in particular people; this lopsided relationship between the universal and the particular is exacerbated in “modernity” with significant consequences for persons and for society. 

The conclusion to Durkheim’s seminal work The Elementary Forms of Religious Life boldly asserts that religion is the source of society, and he uses this idea to explain the relationship between the individual and society. The religious feeling of connection felt by a group, collective effervescence, creates society by pulling each person outside of themself, making them more than just themself. The part subsumes the whole; “it is society that raises him above himself. Indeed, it is society that makes him” (The Elementary Forms of Religious Life 313). The social part of our minds allows us to think “outside” of our self, to take a universal perspective, to make ourselves an object as well as a subject, to form and communicate ideas in relation to this intersubjective perspective. Society literally puts ideas in our heads and makes us more than we would be alone. “It is by assimilating the ideals elaborated by society that he has become capable of conceiving of the ideal. It is society that, by bringing him into its sphere of influence, has infected him with the need to raise himself above the world of experience and has, at the same time, provided him with the means of conceiving of another” (318). This is what makes humans human, for “man alone has the capacity to conceive the ideal and add to the real” (316). Individual subjects are constituted by this social totality by receiving certain ideals intersubjectively, for “man is made by the whole array of intellectual goods that constitutes civilization” (313); however, “each person understands them in his own way” (318), so it is inherently an imperfect constitution. Individuals are a dependent aspect of society, as “the individual totem” is formed by “the religious force that animates the clan” which “by becoming embodied in particular consciousnesses is particularized itself” (318). Society is the higher form, being a “consciousness of consciousnesses” (339) in two senses: the sense of the individual’s consciousness of other consciousnesses and the sense of the societal consciousness being composed of many consciousnesses. However, Durkheim stresses in his essay Individual and Collective Representations that this composition is not atomic, but molecular, not additional, but multiplicative. “Collective representations are exterior to individual minds… they do not derive from them as such but from the association of minds, which is a very different thing. No doubt in the making of the whole each contributes his part, but private sentiments do not become social except by combination under the action of the sui generis forces developed in association” (Individual and Collective Representations 10). He analogizes it to a chemical synthesis which transforms the synthesized elements, making the collective representations other than the simple sum of their parts. Water is something other and greater than a simple addition of hydrogen and oxygen. “No doubt each individual contains a part, but the whole is found in no one” (11). Society is prior to the individual and it is greater than the individual; not only that, but society is greater than the summation of the individuals which compose it, due to the synthesizing power of association.

This remarkable power of society to pull individuals outside of themselves as formulated by Durkheim has many positive effects for humanity, unleashing rationality and thus “freedom.” This starts with the creation of concepts; the synthesizing power of collective consciousness unlocks “a whole world of feelings, ideas, and images that, once born, obey their own laws. They are mutually attractive and repellent, they fuse, segment, and proliferate” (The Elementary Forms of Religious Life 319). Whereas an animal or isolated individual’s perceptible representations are like a stream, a concept is, “by contrast, outside of time and becoming,” objectified and translated as language, “a way of thinking that is fixed and crystallized” (328). Concepts are collectively created and shared as language, and thus represent how the collective understands the objects of experience. This provides the rationality of the individual with materials to work with. These materials are handled within the general categories of thought; these categories (space, time, causality, totality) are themselves the result of man’s social nature; the existence of others connected with yet different from oneself forces the self to think in relational terms to the “category par excellence… totality” (336) because it forces one to recognize that they are a part of a larger whole. Thought must now account for other perspectives, and thus creates the categories of time and space in order to situate oneself objectively in relation to others, realizing that “the space that I know through my senses, where I am the centre and everything is arranged in relation to me, could not be total space, which contains everyone’s particular spatial scope and in which, moreover, these are coordinated in relation to impersonal reference points common to all individuals” (336). If individuals were not the creation of society and were like normal animals, then “sensations [would be] adequate to guide them automatically” (338). Society inherently gives us rationality through situational categories and through linguistically shared concepts, and this rationality gives us knowledge, power, and freedom, understood abstractly as isomorphic. This knowledge/power/freedom makes us human. The more ideas society gives us to work with, “the more the subject’s movements lose that automatism which is the characteristic of physical life” (Individual and Collective Representations 3). This relative indetermination only occurs in conscious beings, since animals simply do according to their evolutionary and environmental dispositions; they lack our ability to ponder a superimposed ideal environment. Society bestows Foucauldian power/knowledge upon individuals, giving them greater potentiality to act in different ways. “The more elements involved and the more powerful their synthesis, then the more marked is this partial independence. No doubt it is this that accounts for the flexibility, freedom, and contingence” which higher beings demonstrate (13). Because the idea world depends on the whole and not directly on the parts (for both the society/individual relationship and the mind/neuron relationship), society provides the individual more wiggle room, more “freedom” via greater optionality, so that “if some cause induces a variation, that variation will encounter less resistance and will come into existence more easily because it has, in a way, a greater scope for movement” (13). The subsumption of the individual by all-powerful society grants the individual enormous freedom; later we will see the downsides of this power. 

Habermas uses his theory of communicative action to schematize the relationship between the individual and society, and his conception extends Durkheim’s. The concept of communicative action is based on “the intuition that the telos of reaching understanding is inherent in language” (Actions, Speech Acts, Linguistically Mediated Interactions, and Lifeworld 227). He constructs his entire social theory based off of this intuition. Communicative action is the mechanism by which the lifeworld— that is, the shared environment of total intersubjective knowledge where two communicators meet at a situationally defined horizon— produces and reproduces itself. Habermas writes that the three components of the lifeworld, “cultural paradigms, legitimate [societal] orders, and personality structures” are “condensed forms of, and sediments deposited by, the following processes that operate by way of communicative action: reaching understanding, action coordination, and socialization” (247). Culture, society, and persons are all structures of the lifeworld, semantic contents that “remain entwined with one another via the common medium of everyday language” (250) and which reciprocally constitute one another together as the lifeworld. The ego-alter interaction sites in persons are the active nodes where the mutual generation takes place, but “persons are not carriers” (252); they are simply where communicative action is actualized. Cultural traditions are maintained through “the hermeneutic appropriation and further development of cultural knowledge through persons” (252) while those persons are simultaneously educated, enculturated, and formed by that very culture. Similarly, “[e]very process of social integration of action contexts is simultaneously a process of socialization for subjects capable of speech and action who are formed in this process and who for their part in equal measure renew and stabilize society as the totality of legitimately ordered interpersonal relationships” (252). Society and individuals are mutually generative just as culture and individuals are mutually generative; Durkheim didn’t make the cultural tradition/societal order distinction, but the substance that creates individuals is still ideas. Persons are essential for the lifeworld and yet entirely created by it. “Organisms fall under the description of persons only if, and to the extent that, they are socialized, that is, invested with and structured by social and cultural contexts of meaning. Persons are symbolic structures” (251). Thus, like Durkheim, Habermas reveals the totality as constitutive of the individual.

Habermas’ social theory based on communicative action faces the problems of strategic action and systemic processes. Strategic action differs from communicative action based on  “whether natural language is employed solely as a medium for transmitting information or whether it is also made use of as a source of social integration,” whether one employs mechanisms “of exertion of influence, which induces behavior” or mechanisms “of reaching understanding, which motivates convictions” via the bonding energies of language (221). To cooperate authentically within a shared lifeworld requires a switch of perspective “from the objectivating attitude oriented toward success… to the performative attitude of a speaker who wants to reach understanding with a second person” (224). This is desirable because strategic action precludes actors from reaching understandings; they can only encounter others as social facts, as objects which they are thereby alienated from (249). Systems work via strategic action, and facilitate stability in society’s increasingly complex social structures; “[t]he market is one of those systemic mechanisms that stabilize nonintended interconnections of action by way of functionally intermeshing action consequences, whereas the mechanism of mutual understanding harmonizes the action orientations of participants” (Theory of Communicative Action 150). Systemic mechanisms are inherently hollow because they do not fulfill the telos of language. They do not attempt to achieve understanding. They only care about results. Importantly, “[s]ystemic mechanisms need to be anchored to the lifeworld; they have to be institutionalized” (154). This institutionalization uncouples social integration (communicative action) from systemic processes (strategic action), which were previously overlapping in simple societies where religious beliefs created a unified social order and political economy. It is interesting that the origin of social integration for Habermas is in “religiously anchored consensus” (180), which connects his communicative action with Durkheim’s collective effervescence; both are processes of understanding, aligning orientations, getting on the same page. 

The advent of “modernity” brings about a lot of problems for the relationship between the individual and society. As civilization progresses post-uncoupling, both lifeworld and systems will continue to evolve and differentiate, but they will do so divorced since communicative and strategic action are mutually exclusive. The increasing “rationalization of the lifeworld makes possible a heightening of systemic complexity, which becomes so hypertrophied that it unleashes system imperatives that burst the capacity of the lifeworld they instrumentalize” (155). “In the end, systemic mechanisms suppress forms of social integration even in those areas where a consensus-dependent coordination of action cannot be replaced, that is, where the symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld is at stake. In these areas, the mediatization of the lifeworld assumes the form of a colonization” (196). Thus, modernity brings about the marginalization, colonization, and limited destruction of the shared societal/religious lifeworld based on collective understanding, which is analogous to Max Weber’s fears of societal rationalization and disenchantment. When society loses its religious base, its orientation towards mutual understanding, it loses what makes it all work in the first place. People will then only be treated as means for strategic action, not ends as full participants in a shared collective. Thus, the individual is devalued to a simple cog in a system. Modernity is characterized by the sheer mass of existing ideas, structures, and systems making up inherited society. This enormous mass constitutes individuals who are increasingly at the mercy of these expanding forces and systems, and who become increasingly unable to take responsibility for the powers that constitute them. “Media such as money and power attach to empirical ties; they encode a purposive-rational attitude… to exert generalized, strategic influence on the decisions of other participants while bypassing processes of consensus-oriented communication” (183). This influence on the decisions of individuals is not done by mutual understanding, and thus is a somewhat illegitimate form of social interaction for Habermas. Another example is how, in modern states, the rise of institutionalized political power separated from personal bonds means that the many “relinquish the right that participants in simple interactions can claim for themselves: the right to orient their actions only by actual agreement with those present” (171). There is no real consensus here, no understanding, only power. In Durkheim, we see a similar description of the pernicious power of social facts: “Hence we are victims of an illusion which leads us to believe we have ourselves produced what has been imposed upon us externally” (What is a Social Fact? 53). The more differentiated and complex the existing lifeworld is, the more external forces are imposed upon subjects, whether they are conscious of them or not. 

Other authors touch on similar ideas regarding the lopsided relationship between individuals and society in modernity. Michel Foucault’s concept of “discipline” is another example of the way in which society can produce individuals without mutual understanding. “Discipline ‘makes’ individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise” (Discipline and Punish 170); “disciplinary power became an integrated system, linked from the inside to the economy and to the aims of the mechanism in which it was practised” (176). This power of society to produce individuals is not wielded in a way where knowledge/power is equal on both sides, because the individual is being used as a means within a system. The individual is constituted by great powers of which it does not have full knowledge, and thus is precluded from true understanding and self-ownership. Karl Marx raises similar concerns. Like Habermas and Durkheim, he sees man as a “species being”: man “treats himself as the actual, living species… he treats himself as a universal and therefore a free being” (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 75). As a species being, man can make his own life-activity the object of his will, unlike normal animals who simply are their life-activity. Man has the whole species in his head (a la Durkheim) and wants to actualize this; “[t]he object of labor is… the objectification of man’s species life” (75). However, “estranged labor reverses this relationship” making man’s “essential being a mere means to his existence” (75). Thus, the blessing of the ability to subsume the human totality into the individual can easily become a curse if the great powers which beget the individual do so without respect for that individual’s totality. Power can mold individuals to suit power, without understanding on the individual’s part of what is being done to them. This discipline, this lack of understanding, this strategic action, this use of the individual as a means by society rather than as a willfully cooperative end leads to estrangement of man from man. In modernity, there are simply too many structures and powers existing already, weighing more and more “like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” 

How can we as individuals deal with this nightmare weight? For Marx, the solution to the tension between the individual and the species in modernity is communism as the overcoming of private property (84); however, this is not really a plausible or comforting solution for us today, nor would it be acceptable to Durkheim or Habermas, who had both read Marx before writing their own works. However, these two authors do offer their own ways of dealing with life as an individual in a world created by the higher power of society. Habermas writes that “[f]rom the fact that persons can only be individuated through socialization it follows that moral concern is owed equally to persons both as irreplaceable individuals and as members of the community, and hence it connects justice with solidarity. Equal treatment means equal treatment of unequals who are nonetheless aware of their interdependence” (A Genealogical Analysis of the Cognitive Content of Morality 40). Durkheim concurs: “It is humanity that is sacred and worthy of respect, in whatever form it is incarnated” (Individualism and the Intellectuals 23). “Individualism thus understood is the glorification not of the self, but of the individual in general… [i]ts motive force is not egoism but sympathy for all that is human” (24). Durkheim believes that, as humanity becomes more and more individualized over time, all that they will eventually share is precisely their human individuality. Both authors agree that individuals ought to morally disposition themselves in solidarity with the abstract idea of humanity, embracing individualism as a key virtue of shared humanity. We share our essential condition as individuals differently constituted by societal powers, and orienting ourselves positively towards this can help us act morally towards each other— for example, by communicating in order to understand each other in our differences within a shared lifeworld. This outlook on life requires a sort of postconventional morality, a cognizance of the validity of other subjects reminiscent of William James’ essay “On A Certain Blindness in Human Beings.” Indeed, Habermas was hugely influenced by the American pragmatists’ outlook, and the pragmatic method might be the best option we have for dealing with the crushing reality of being a tiny individual at the mercy of an immensely larger source of knowledge/power. After all, if the telos of mutual understanding is inherent in language, then we are obligated to try and understand the knowledge/power that composes us. Understanding them may help to free us from these forces, or at least authentically align ourselves with them. We are subjectively limited and will never be able to learn everything, but striving openly and pragmatically towards knowledge of the forces which comprise us is possibly the best we can do to alleviate the weight of society. Durkheim asks us to “recognize that, in general, liberty is a delicate instrument the use of which must be learnt, and let us teach this to our children: all moral education should be directed to this end” (29). If we are going to be wielding the awesome power that comes with being a species being, the freedom that comes with having the world of ideas in our heads, then we ought to learn exactly what we are wielding so as not to abuse it. If we dislike society imposing upon us, we should be extremely careful not to accidentally impose likewise upon our own children. Society creates the individual, and thus the individual is somewhat at the mercy of unknown forces; however, society is only continued and reified through individuals. Individuals have choices. If we understand, maybe we can do better. Ultimately, the best we can do is strive towards the Oracle’s command: know thyself.