Robert Hanna on our Sociable Sociality

= Article. Robert Hanna. Our Sociable Sociality: A Postscript to The Mind-Body Politic. Borderless Philosophy 4 (2021): 57-96

URL = https://www.cckp.space/single-post/bp4-2021-robert-hanna-our-sociable-sociality-a-postscript-to-the-mind-body-politic

Contextual Quote

"Now helping myself to the empirical and conceptual results of a recent historico-philosophical anti-Hobbesian trilogy—by Rutger Bregman, Larissa MacFarquhar, and Rebecca Solnit3—then I can clearly and distinctly demonstrate that Hobbesians neo-Hobbesians, and also Rousseau-ians are not merely mistaken, but actually dangerously and spectacularly mistaken, not only

• (i) that all human beings are inherently egoistic and mutually antagonistic by nature or neurobiology (Hobbesians or neo-Hobbesians), but also

• (ii) that even if they are not so by nature, then all human beings are still inevitably egoistic and mutually antagonistic by virtue of culture, civilization, and society (Rousseau-ians).

These claims are simply false, given the actual empirical facts on the ground, not only the everyday facts about people’s vividly manifest true human need for sociability."

= Robert Hanna [1]

Discussion

Robert Hanna:

"Granting that, and now helping myself to the empirical and conceptual results of a recent historico-philosophical anti-Hobbesian trilogy—by Rutger Bregman, Larissa MacFarquhar, and Rebecca Solnit3—then I can clearly and distinctly demonstrate that Hobbesians neo-Hobbesians, and also Rousseau-ians are not merely mistaken, but actually dangerously and spectacularly mistaken, not only

(i) that all human beings are inherently egoistic and mutually antagonistic by nature or neurobiology (Hobbesians or neo-Hobbesians), but also

(ii) that even if they are not so by nature, then all human beings are still inevitably egoistic and mutually antagonistic by virtue of culture, civilization, and society (Rousseau-ians).

These claims are simply false, given the actual empirical facts on the ground, not only the everyday facts about people’s vividly manifest true human need for sociability during the 2020-2021 pandemic, but also as displayed and documented by the historicophilosophers of The Anti-Hobbesian Trilogy. As a matter of actual fact, many people not only have in the past but also nowadays really do feel, choose, and act altruistically, some of them characteristically, and some of them under specific ranges of contextual conditions, such as disasters, neo-utopian social experiments, progressive political movements, religions or spirituality, and so-on. Therefore, it cannot possibly be true that all human beings are either inherently (by nature) or inevitably (by culture) egoistic and mutually antagonistic. At most, what could be true is that at any time, whether in the past or currently, many people often feel, choose, and act in egoistic and mutually antagonistic ways, and also that some people characteristically feel, choose, and act in egoistic and mutually antagonistic ways. But those are perfectly consistent with the anti-Hobbesian and anti-Rousseau-ian truth about rational human altruism. So even despite their widespread currency, the Hobbesian, neo-Hobbesian, and Rousseau-ian theses alike— not to mention popular cynicism about human nature—are simply scientific and philosophical dead letters.

On the contrary, given the actual empirical evidence—and this will undoubtedly seem, to many, to be two claims that are either deeply “shocking” or ludicrously “utopian” in the classical millenarian, pejorative sense — not only

(i) are all human persons innately capable of altruism, but also

(ii) the capacity for altruism can be regularly activated and cultivated under specific ranges of contextual conditions."

(https://www.cckp.space/single-post/bp4-2021-robert-hanna-our-sociable-sociality-a-postscript-to-the-mind-body-politic)

Human beings are by necessity social animals

Robert Hanna:

"In Meditation XVII of his “Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions,” John Donne poetically and correctly described a fundamental aspect of the human condition:

- No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. (Donne 1624, Meditation XVII).

In other words, human beings are, necessarily, social beings. They both influence, and are influenced by, other people as well as social institutions more generally. But as C. Wright Mills so aptly noted in his breakthrough 1956 study of institutional structures and powerrelations in the USA, The Power Elite: The kind of moral and psychological beings men become is in large part determined by the values they experience and the institutional roles they are allowed and expected to play…. Although men sometimes shape institutions, institutions always select and form men. (Mills 1956/2000, pp. 15 and 123, texts joined)

And as Jan Slaby and Shaun Gallagher have recently noted:

- [T]he notion of a cognitive institution is itself a helpful tool for developing a critical stance that allows us to scrutinize current institutional practices. Critique here takes the form of assessments of an institution’s modes of operation and de facto impacts, analyzed against the background of its official and unofficial aims, purpose and directions. How does the operational reality of an institution and its specific effectiveness measure up to the ideas and principles that have led to its creation? On a more general level, critique also implies asking whether some given institutional procedures improve (or impede, or distort) our understanding, our communicative practices, our possibilities for action, our recognition of others, our shared and circumscribed freedoms, and so forth. (Slaby and Gallagher 2014, p. 6).

- So, in a nutshell: human beings are, necessarily, social animals (Donne); but although people “sometimes shape institutions, institutions always select and form” people (Mills); and “the notion of a cognitive institution is itself a helpful tool for developing a critical stance that allows us to scrutinize current institutional practices” (Slaby and Gallagher 2014, p. 6).

Starting out with those basic ideas, and then adding some of our own, we do two things in The Mind-Body Politic. First, we work out a new critique of contemporary social institutions, by deploying the special standpoint of the philosophy of mind, and in particular, the special standpoint of the philosophy of what we call essentially embodied minds. And second, we make a set of concrete, positive proposals for radically changing both these social institutions and our essentially embodied lives, for the better.7

In this essay, I’m going to make the simplifying assumption, for the purposes of my argument, that Maiese and I have already adequately done what we set out to do in that earlier book. What I want to do now is to add a postscript—in the sense of elaborating and extending, but not in any way contradicting—to the theory of social institutions that Maiese and I worked out in The Mind-Body Politic, by further postulating the possession of something I call sociality by all healthy, sane rational human animals, simply by virtue of their being, necessarily, social animals.

And I’ll also call this, in diametric opposition to Kant’s notion of “unsociable sociability,” our [[Sociable Sociality.

Our sociable sociality, in turn, consists in a set of innate dispositions that naturally manifest themselves as needs for social relationships of a certain fixed number of distinct types. Moreover, these needs naturally vary in level of intensity and broadness or narrowness of scope across individuals, over time, and in different contexts.

And in this way, the theory of sociality I’m proposing is finegrained: not only does it apply directly to individuals and to a fixed number of distinct types of social relationships, but it also allows me to distinguish in various systematic ways between different individuals and their corresponding personal lives, based on the levels of intensity and scopes of their needs for precisely these types of social relationships.

More specifically, then, what I’m claiming—leaving aside the immensely complicating factors of ideology, especially including mores, that is, moralistic normative expectations, and pathological cases, for the moment, although I’ll come back to them later in the essay — is

(i) that all healthy, sane rational human animals are, necessarily, social animals (although that is not all that we are),

(ii) that all healthy, sane rational human animals thereby possess sociality, and

(iii) that sociality naturally manifests itself as needs that naturally vary in level of intensity and broadness or narrowness of scope across individuals, over time, and in different contexts, for seven distinct types of social relationships, as follows:

(iii1) family relationships,
(iii2) intimate relationships, that is, romantic (especially including erotic) relationships,
(iii3) relationships with close friends, 
(iii4) relationships with a wider circle of friends and more-or-less-casual but still friendly acquaintances,
(iii5) relationships involving camaraderie and solidarity, or what the Brazilians call concordar 

or “shared heart,” that is, non-instrumental group projects of various kinds with like-minded comrades who are working or playing together towards shared goals—for example, collective intellectual projects such as co-authorship, collective artistic endeavors, team-sports, clubs of all various kinds, and especially certain kinds of political movements,

(iii6) identitarian relationships, 

that is, relationships with other people defined solely by the sharing of some more-or-less adventitious, more-or less involuntary physical, mental, or social attributes, that I’ll call identity attributes: namely, human attributes that pick out various non-essential features of people (non-essential to their rational human agency or human personhood, that is), over whose original possession they had little or no freely-chosen control, for example, race, biological sex, birth-order, height, weight, body shape, specific abilities/ disabilities, living in the same region or neighborhood, common language, nationality, ethnicity, economic class, religious upbringing, etc., etc.., and finally

(iii7) relationships in the social marketplace, that is, instrumental relationships of all sorts. 

Correspondingly, I’ll say that a social relationship is instrumental if and only if it is entered into for the purposes of furthering, as a means, the self-interested (egoistic) ends of rational human animals.

It’s especially to be noted that when I say that each one of the seven types of social relationships is “distinct” from the others, I don’t mean that they are mutually exclusive types. Instead, what we mean is that they’re non-equivalent, although sometimes or even often partially overlapping, classes of social relationships, each of which has its own characteristic phenomenology and guiding principle(s). Thus it’s quite possible to enter into a social relationship with someone who is, at one and the same time (although not in the same respect): your lover, your life-partner and co-parent of your children, your closest friend, a comrade, a member of (many of) the same identity-group(s), someone with whom you have an instrumental relationship involving, for example, mutual aid, and someone with whom you have an instrumental economic relationship, for example, a shared bank account. And so-on and so forth, with many possible variations for partial overlap. Nevertheless, even allowing for that multiplicity of possible variations, some of the types are mutually exclusive. For example, someone couldn’t be, at one and the same time, your lover and also someone who belonged to your wider circle of friends and more-or-less casual but still friendly acquaintances.

Another claim I’m making about the seven distinct types, is that they are all both ontologically and explanatorily irreducible to any single further factor or collection of further factors, hence that their existence and differences are basic. If this claim is correct, then, for example, social relations are not all or ultimately about human psychological or ethical egoism and mutual antagonism, as classical Hobbesians and neo-Hobbesians like Kant (at least in his exoteric political philosophy) claim. Social relations are not all or ultimately about human gender and sexual orientation, or race and ethnicity, as various kinds of identitarians hold. Social relations are not all or ultimately about subconscious or unconscious (mostly sexual) urges in human animals, as Freudians hold. Social relations are not all or ultimately about human social and political power-relations backed up by coercion or threats of coercion, and overdetermined by hegemonic ideology, and their oppressive application to people who are defined by such identityclassifications as race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation, as Foucauldians hold.

Social relations are not all or ultimately about deterministic human evolutionary biology, as various kinds of Darwinians hold. Social relations are not all or ultimately about human psychological or ethical egoism and rational choice, as many contemporary economists (and, more generally, decision-theorists) hold. And social relations are not all or ultimately about deterministic capitalist economic relations, class antagonism, and hegemonic ideology, as classical or orthodox Marxists think. Above all, we are not machines, whether (neo)Hobbesian moist robots, Freudian moist robots, Foucauldian moist robots, Darwinian moist robots, or Marxist moist robots. This in turn allows me not only to provide explanations that do not oversimplify or explain-away the manifestly real facts and phenomena that constitute our sociality and our social lives, but also resolutely to refuse all such reductive explanations, whether asserted by philosophers or non-philosophers, for example, social media pundits or politicians. And the final claim I’m making in this connection is that any kind of social relationship under any of the seven types is rationally justifiable, morally permissible, or morally obligatory only if it’s also guided by sufficient respect for the human dignity of others and oneself, and by never treating oneself or others merely as means or as mere things, and, more specifically, never coercing other people.

That’s of course a broadly Kantian dignitarian moral thesis.

And this broadly Kantian dignitarian moral thesis, in turn, entails that for social relationships under each of the types, there will be good and right instances, and also bad and wrong instances, to consider when looking at the total set of instances falling under that type, depending on whether they meet that ethical/moral standard of sufficient respect for human dignity and more specifically noncoercion, or not. Correspondingly, one of the most important sources of bad and wrong instances is to impose egoistic, identitarian, or purely instrumental principles, especially when they’re backed up by coercion or threats of coercion, on social relationships whose guiding principles are, other things being equal, inherently non-egoistic, non-instrumental, and non-identitarian, such as family, intimacy, close friendship, and relationships involving camaraderie - & - solidarity.

Does the broadly Kantian dignitarian finegrained theory of sociality I’m proposing have empirical and intuitive force?"

(https://www.cckp.space/single-post/bp4-2021-robert-hanna-our-sociable-sociality-a-postscript-to-the-mind-body-politic)

More information

The Anti-Hobbesian Trilogy

a recent historico-philosophical anti-Hobbesian trilogy—by Rutger Bregman, Larissa MacFarquhar, and Rebecca Solnit

1. Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History;
2. MacFarquhar, Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help; and
3. R. Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster