Topic: 5. IS HUMANITY A SOCIAL RELATIONSHIP?
1.History of the Word Humanity
The earliest members of species Homo sapiens had, of course, no idea of "humanity." They were a single species, in our modern scientific meaning of the word; but these people had no idea of science, no idea of the extent of their planet or who or what lived on that planet. Outside their immediate bands and local groups, they had little awareness at all of one another. Even their immediate neighbors appeared more as monsters and alien beings than fellow humans. The condition of hominids and hominoids at that period could only be called one of isolation. These early men till then were until entirely recent times happily ignorant of the whole idea of humanity or a human race. This is how things stood throughout the Upper Paleolithic cultural period. It was only long after humans had appeared as a species--defining species as biologists define it, as individuals capable of interbreeding--that the idea of "humanity" appeared. In the meantime there could be no comprehension of the species as something distinct in nature, not to say the possible basis of a social relation. That humanity could be the basis of a social relationship waited until relatively recent times. Society such as existed in that early day, on the other hand, was the result of personal relationships within the band itself, the relations, in other words, that existed among hunters working together and families living together. Yet, as a matter of fact, societ--in these sense understood by Force Theory--had long existed. Society has already been defined here as a simple agreement between two persons. Thus we may assume that society did not wait, at any rate, for the idea of humanity in order to appear. Humanity is not an idea necessary to society. The real question now is: is humanity a concept that can be understood at all as a social relationship? The question as to whether or not humanity is a social relation can be answered by first asking whether humanity is an agreement.
2.Humanity is a highly abstract and arcane idea.
Humanity is an idea moreover that appears in certain settings and contexts. But generally, far and wide throughout the landscape of human culture, there almost nowhere is a hint of the idea, . The Africans and other primitive cultures have no such idea other than through missionaries. Humanity is not a part of primitive religions. In the case of larger, more complex civilizations any real or vital sense of the word is absent among laypeople. Humanity belongs to the arcane ideas of a culture along with God and Justice and such words. This is the way things stand almost universally regarding the word "humanity." On the other hand, as I just said, "humanity" appears central to the sacred documents of a given land; the word is basic to the mission statement of universities--places of "universality." I have already mentioned religion. The utter absence among people generally of any sense of humanity as an idea, and on the other hand the absolute centrality of the word in the esoteric culture of a given place, is a contradiction which has to be resolved by Force Theory. I want to suggest that "humanity" replaces the word God in sacred documents, and in this capacity is a symbol of impersonal unity. We may now attempt to formulate our theory in very simple terms. Humanity is not an idea through which human beings have a relationship, so much as it is an idea about which they have a relationship. But this consideration--that humanity is the thing about which people come together--relegates humanity to a wide range of things about which, or over which, humans come together. Humanity is not an agreement. The basic conditions of agreement are absent if humanity is considered by itself. That is, people do not agree to become humans. But they may agree to, in conjunction with one another as a sort of ritual of group behavior, "express" the idea of humanity. They may "affirm" the humanity of people in general. This they may do as they do any group activity. The only idea that qualifies as a true social relationship--in the way Force Theory defines "society"--is the idea of an agreement itself. Moreover, while certain humans--or entities capable of understanding an agreement--are within an agreement, others are outside. Thus clearly, if a humanity is the thing about which certain humans agree, anyone--Homo sapiens or not--not in the agreement is not "social" vis-a-vis the agreement. The history of religions is an unequivocal reminder of this principle. Religions which are about humanity in general can be highly exclusive and mutually hostile groups. Force Theory explains this paradox.
3. Humanity as a "Moral" Idea
Humanity is an idea as I say entirely divorced from, and alien to, the scientific category Homo sapiens. Humanity is a concept that cannot at all be "about" members of the species Homo sapiens. Humanity is an idea like other such ideas--God is an example we have already given--which can be properly thought only as a pure idea, uncorrupted in other words by an taint of contact with reality. Humanity is an abstraction from the fact of Homo sapiens, which abstraction has become divorced from Homo sapiens. The two ideas--the scientific and the moralistic [new word-check] ideas--have finally little or nothing to do with one another. Earlier [cite] I talked about purity of ideas and their necessity to likewise pure human relationship. A relationship through God, which is what marriage is theologically proposed to be, is a "pure" relationship. I am taking inspiration from the painter Philippe Guston who said, "Art is never pure." Art says Guston is always corrupted in the viewing by real people. Hegel, my second inspiration, said that a pure idea passes, by the process of logical thinking itself, into its own opposite. These are points I will be thinking about now. The Logical Positivists [cite] shed light on this issue: they are the ones who sought in philosophy to purify terms otherwise corrupted by use into pure, uncorrputed terms. I am saying that humanity is an idea that is intolerant of any taint of corruption through real people. Humanity frequently is seen, then--because all positive ideas are capable of corruption--of passing abruptly into its own opposite. Humanity becomes in these terms, to remain "pure," inhuman. This tendency is a paradox that has been identified before. Only "Christian" nations, it has been said, could be capable of the bilateral excesses of World War II.
4.Humanity as a Word Evolves from "We"
Before humanity could be understood as a social relationship, human beings--members of Homo sapiens--had to be capable of understanding itself. The phrases "mutual understanding" and "human understanding" suggest themselves. Clarifying these terms would go a long way to defining the word humanity. Humanity here would be rather an understanding, or, in terms of this philosophical blog an agreement, than simply a taxonomic designation. Humans in order to rise to the level of "humanity," or an idea of humanity, would have to have language, of course, at first; but they would have to share knowledge. Humanity rose, I am saying, not out of the perception of the individual of "many persons," but out of shared experience made possible by language. The notion of humanity appeared first, perhaps, as "those persons with whom I can talk understandably." The suggestion here--since early humans were not taxonomists and biologists--is that the notion of humanity arose through language. Human beings in these terms would be a community of language, or we should say a common language. There were from the beginning of language itself any number of different, mutually unintelligible languages. The Greek word barbaros was coined out of the Greek perception of foreigners, that their languages sounded like "ba ba." Human beings form their communites out of a certain mutualism, that is not language itself but requires language. So, in addition to distinctions humans made on account of band membership and family, there were differences in dialect. A sense of "humanity" must have first arisen on the level of language. It is a special feature of language that, unlike the biology of one's own body--which significantly separates one from other people and objects--it, language, is inherentlyshared.
6.More: Critique of the Idea "Humanity"
Language in these terms can be referred to as a "shared identity." The sense we have of humanity is that it, humanity, too, is a shared identity. Language itself is an "understanding," which may not be, but certainly prefigures, an agreement. I have talked about agreements at length. Humanity is a product then, first and foremost, not of biology but of language. The idea would be in these terms is that persons share their humanity in the same way, on on the same basis, that they share a language. Of course, there are many languages. There are in that sense many humanities. What social theory has attempted to do, but only in historical times, is to derive a common humanity of Homo sapiens out of the fact of the capability of language. This would be to say that all Homo sapiens members belong to humanity because of their potential to understand one another in a uniquely human way, through language. Presently however humans, because of language differences, do not understand one another--except through translations of their languages.
In my earlier blog on Philtalk, now verschoben, I raised the very important philosophical question posed by Koko the talking gorilla (this material can be accessed by computer). (The Germans seemed ignorant on the subject of Koko and wanted to deny she existed! This is the sad condition German scholarship is in now!) That question is: if Koko can talk, is she human? The answer I gave was that, if we understand a human being to be one capable of language, then it is true: Koko is human. There is no escaping this conclusion. The taxonomic species, in other words, and the classification of human being as one capable of human understanding, are mutually independent categories. We come to a breakdown, finally, of the word "agreement." "A" is Latin to or toward; "gre" is the prefix to gregarious. An agreement is a "to-be-drawn-together.":| [this needs work.] Through the twists and turns of argumentation we arrive at the possibility, or tentative conclusion (still to be supported), that a person, human or humanoid, of species Homo sapiens or one of the higher apes, is "of humanity" only through an agreement. That is to say, humanity is something not about persons but between them; there must be mutuality in any notion of humanity. Humanity itself in these terms is a an object or topic of an agreement but not the agreement itself.. The agreement itself assumes that a party to the agreement will be capable of understanding the agreement. What is being proposed in this phase of our argument is that the general elements of "humanity" appear, in outline, in the elemental agreement. All that was ever meant by the word "human" was, or has been, "party to an agreement." There is a fundamental distinction made by humans between what is outside an agreement and what is inside an agreement. Speaking of the word "humanity," such an entity would not properly exist but could be made to exist, theoretically, by defining beings as party to an agreement--or an a-gretation--formed through language, promises and the other elements of agreement.
7.The Moral Issue
Humanity has been talked about, traditionally, not so much as an agreement--religion and universalism (dogma of the universities) do not speak of anyone agreeing or refusing to be human--but as an obligation. Human beings, by virtue of their being born into the so-called human race--are "obligated" to one another. Obligation is a word we can talk about here. Let us say a mother somewhere in the world tells her daughter (presumably the culture is primitive) to carry some water. This is the command of the larger and stronger parent to a smaller person, a child. This sort of command is issued every day in every culture throughout the world. We may ask what sort of relationship this is between commanding parent and obedient child: is it a social relationship. I would say that obligation is a transitional relation, mediated by common understanding, between brute force on the one hand and agreement on the other. The child may not want to carry the water but sees that he or she must do this. Also the child is fully capable of understanding that there is a "clear and present" need for the water to be carried. I think this relationship is made possible by a human--sapient--level of intelligence, even with regard to the child, and is somewhat above the level of behavior of a gorilla or chimpanzee. The child does not agree to the request, in the sense of being a willing participant, so much as the child "understands" the request. Everyone in the culture believes that this child should carry the water. We may reasonably say that the child by virtue of membership in this group is, and believes him- or herself to be, obligated to do tasks of this sort. This is the way people grow up in any culture. As they grow older, on the other hand, these sorts of obligations give way to more voluntary associations. The individual person may choose or not choose, as the result of "personal considerations," to do this or that requested task. The individual may ask for quid pro quo, something in return. Because he or she is now a larger person, and prominent in the community, a certain deference is accorded by the people of their community. This person has a higher standing. In that sense, then, an agreement is now required. That is, no longer being obligated to do a task the person must now agree to do that task. This is all that is meant by the term freedom. Freedom is a concept that is, like other abstract ideas, capable of corruption from real situations. Freedom is an abstract idea, but it is also relative to individual situations and personalities, always changing. To agree is to enter into an agreement. But within that agreement, and in accordance with the terms of that agreement, the person is now "obligated" to carry out terms of the agreement--or face a penalty. The person must be "as good as his word" to remain a credible member of his society.
The issue now appears as to whether humanity could be an obligation. We have seen that humanity is not an agreement, and therefore not a fully developed social relationship, on account of the fact that persons do not enter humanity voluntarily. Nor--and this is another feature of a true agreement--is there in any way a reciprocal relationship. The person which the agreement is about is not involved in a reciprocal relation: one person is thinking of another as the object of an agreement; but this object is not thinking of the party to the agreement. This we have already concluded. Because humanity is not an agreement, it is also not a social relationship.
Fascism Revisited: The Social Program of Force Theory
Fascism, as the word is defined in Force Theory, means: obligation with understanding. There may be agreements but these come into being and pass away; agreements are subordinate to an overall concept of social order. Human beings within a Fascist society are not equals but are in a "State of Nature" in regard to one another, which order includes a kind of primal bossiness that characterizes the relationship of obligation in the smallest family and band unit. Fascism models itself upon, and essentially becomes, a family--a family large enough exist in a world of forced, anti-evolutional humanity. Fascism thereby reconciles human concerns and proclivities with those of the biological species Homo Sapiens: mindful, that is, that the species is vital and progressive only through its individual forms. Race is at issue here.
I.Fascism includes in its program a central idea of race, which is an idea based in reality. Where understanding exists there is also a common sense of "clear and present" need. Clear and present need must be, for understanding to exist, also a common experience. Therefore people who are more closely related through nature--race--are capable of this understanding. Force is an option. That is, humans may be forced to do what they do not immediately want to do. On the other hand, it may be assumed by persons of authority that what they are being forced to do they need to do. This is for the good of the whole group. Such a "fascist" concept excludes, or renders unnecessary, any concept of "humanity," for much the same reason that no one, particularly, throughout the world and in diverse cultures, understands humanity. Agreements that there are are temporary and ephemeral. Race determines what must and must no be made to happen; and also who is to make these things happen.:|
II.Fascism includes the idea of obligation. This would be the same obligation that compels a child to obey its parent. This is obligation without agreement. Fascism in this sense is grounded in what Rousseau would call a State of Nature; but at the same time is a "humanization" of that State. Fascism is modeled on the Spartan conception of Socialism, accepting as it is of a "certain" qualified slavery.
III. The Fascist society is exclusive, accepting some persons as members but rejecting others. The kind of trust--which is not an abstract trust but an instinctive acceptance--in Fascism is not borne from agreements, in the legal sense of the word agreement, but is the result of a prolonged shared and evolved coexistence.
Last edited by richard_swartzbaugh (2009-09-09 18:55:26)