From: thant@void.esd.sgi.com (Thant Tessman)
Newsgroups: sci.econ,talk.politics.theory
Subject: Re: Philosophy 101
Date: 6 Oct 92 15:40:25 GMT
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.  Mountain View, CA

gcf@panix.com (Gordon Fitch) writes:

> My existence is dependent on being in a society.  Human beings
> are extremely social animals.  Very few of us could survive in
> isolation from human society.  And without language, a tool
> or mental organ that does not exist apart from society, I
> could certainly not conceive of political or philosophical
> ideas, much less post them on Usenet.  I could make free
> judgments, perhaps, about which banana to pluck....


A methodological nit to pick:


From Human_Action by Ludwig von Mises:

Praxeology deals with the actions of individual men.  It is only in the
further course of its inquiries that cognition of human cooperation is
attained and social action is treated as a special case of the more
universal category of human action as such.

This methodological individualism has been vehemently attacked by various
metaphysical schools and disparaged as a nominalistic fallacy.  The notion
of an individual, say the critics, is an empty abstraction.  Real man is
necessarily always a member of a social whole.  It is even impossible to
imagine the existence of a man separated from the rest of mankind and not
connected with society.  Man as man is the product of a social evolution.
His most eminent feature, reason, could only emerge within the framework of
social mutuality.  There is no thinking which does not depend on the
concepts and notions of language.  But speech is manifestly a social
phenomenon.  Man is always the member of a collective.  As the whole is
both logically and temporally prior to its parts or members, the study of
the individual is posterior to the study of society.  The only adequate
method for the scientific treatment of human problems is the method of
universalism or collectivism.

Now the controversey whether the whole or its parts are logically prior is
vain.  Logically the notions of a whole and its parts are correlative.  As
logical concepts they are both apart from time.

No less inappropriate with regard to our problem is the reference to the
antagonism of realism and nominalism, both these terms being understood in
the meaning which medieval scholasticism attached to them.  It is
uncontested that in the sphere of human action social entities have real
existence.  Nobody ventures to deny that nations, states, municipalities,
parties, religious communities, are real factors determining the course of
human events.  Methodological individualism, far from contesting the
significance of such collective wholes, consideres it as one of its main
tasks to describe and to analyze their becoming and their disappearing,
their changing structures, and their operation.  and it chooses the only
method fitted to solve this problem satisfactorily.

First we must realize that all actions are performed by individuals.  A
collective operates always through the intermediary of one or several
individuals whose actions are related to the collective as the secondary
source.  It is the meaning which the acting individuals and all those who
are touched by their action attribute to an action, that determines its
character.  It is the meaning that marks one action as the action of an
individual and another action as the action of the state or of the
municipality.  The hangman, not the state, executes a criminal.  it is the
meaning of those concerned that discerns in the hangman's action an action
of the state.  A group of armed men occupies a place.  It is the meaning of
those concerned which imputes this occupation not to the officers and
soldiers on the spot, but to their nation.  If we scrtinize the meaning of
the various actions performed by individuals we must necessarily learn
everything about the actions of collective wholes.  For a social collective
has no existence and reality outside of the individual members' actions.
The life of a collective is lived in the actions of the individuals
constituting its body.  There is no social collective concievable which is
not operative in the actions of some individuals.  The reality of a social
integer consists in its directing and releasing definite actions on the
part of individuals.  Thus the way to a cognition of collective wholes is
throgh an alalysis of the individuals' actions.

As a thinking and acting being man emerges from his prehuman existence
already as a social being.  The evolution of reason, language, and
cooperation is the outcome of the same process;  they were inseparably and
necessarily linked together.  But this process took place in individuals.
It consisted in changes in the behavior of individuals.  There is no other
substance in which it occurred than the individuals.  There is no
substratum of society other than the actions of individuals.

That there are nations, states and churches, that there is social
cooperation under the division of labor, becomes discernible only in the
actions of certain individuals.  Nobody ever perceived a nation withot
perceiving its members.  In this sense one may say that a social collective
comes into being throgh the actions of individuals.  That does not mean
that the individual is temporally antecedent.  It merely means that
definite actions of individuals constitute the collective.

There is no need to argue whether a collecive is the sum resulting from the
addition of its elements or more, whether it is a being sui generis, and
whether it is reasonable or not to speak of its will, plans, aims, and
actions and to attribute to it a distinct "soul."  Such pedantic talk is
idle.  A collective whole is a particular aspect of the actions of various
individuals and as such a real thing determining the course of events.

It is illusory to believe that it is possible to visualize collective
wholes.  They are never visible; their cognition is always the outcome of
the understanding of the meaning which acting men attribute to their acts.
We can see a crowd, i.e., a multitude of people.  Whether this crowd is a
mere gathering or a mass (in the sense in which this term is used in
contemporary psychology) or an organized body or any other kind of social
entity is a question which can only be answered by understanding the
meaning which they themselves attach to their presence.  And this meaning
is always the meaning of individuals.  Not our senses, but understanding,
a mental process, makes us recognize social entities.

Those who want to start the study of human action from the collective units
encounter an insurmountable obstacle in the fact that an individual at the
same time can belong and - with the exception of the most primitive
tribesmen - really belongs to various collective entities.  The problems
raised by the multiplicity of coexisting social units and their mutual
antagonisms can be solved only by methodoligical individualism.

[Later in the book there is a more detailed critique of the collectivist
theory of society.]



    If praxeology speaks of the solitary individual, acting on his own
    behalf only and independent of fellow men, it does so for the sake
    of a better comprehension of the problems of social cooperation.
    We do not assert that such isolated autarkic human beings have
    ever lived and that the social stage of man's history was
    preceeded by an age of independent individuals roaming like
    animals in search of food.  The biological humanization of man's
    nonhuman ancestors and the emergence of the primitive social bonds
    were effected in the same process.  Man appeared on the scene of
    earthly events as a social being.  The isolated asocial man is a
    fictitious construction.  [...]