How Heidegger shows us the meaning of society
What is society?
It isn’t a thing or an object like other things or
objects are. In that sense, Margaret Thatcher was broadly right in saying: “There is no such thing as society”. But we do
use the word widely to refer to an ‘it’ – society
– so though we cannot pin it down in the physical real world, society undoubtedly
has a reality in consciousness, for us. We might for example think of it as a
‘subjective object’, albeit something which is not so much thought as felt.
The philosopher Martin Heidegger never wrote directly about
society as far as I am aware, but his reflections on the nature of ‘being’ – of
human beings and other beings, including the inanimate objects of our world – show
how we are each connected into the world of other people and objects. As such
he sketches out how what we might call the architecture or internal wiring of
society works, and thereby provides us with a powerful way of conceiving what
it is that makes ‘us’ us.
One of the few examples Heidegger gave in his writings on
the being of objects is the hammer. The hammer’s ‘being’ is wrapped up not so
much in its attributes like size, weight and the materials used in its
manufacture, but in its being a hammer which we use for hammering – in this
sense it is ‘ready-to-hand’ for us to hammer with.
A hammer, for hammering |
But if I was a small child or came from a completely
different culture and had never come across a hammer before, I’d be clueless
about it. I wouldn’t know its name, what it was for or how it came into
existence. Links of familiarity, significance, common language and customs give
objects like hammers their meaning in our social world – this is what their being
is all about in our everyday lives.
Taylor Carman, in his introduction to Heidegger’s Being and Time,
says:
“Being is entities making sense (to us) as entities – even if only tacitly, dimly, unconsciously. Unlike entities themselves, then, being in a sense depends on us; it is not “out there” like some alien or occult phenomenon but resides entirely in the most mundane human experience.”
This mundane example of the hammer shows us something
that we share with other people – an
instant appreciation of what the object is, how to use it, and what to use it
for. This is integrated into our own being as well as into the hammer’s being. What’s
more, it is social, in that others share the same sort of relationship to a hammer.
The hammer is therefore not primarily a separate object in terms of its being;
it is physically separate yet at the same time bound up with the world of human
beings who buy and sell it, use it and store it. It is part of us and us a part
of it.
We would be justified in describing this way of looking
at the world that Heidegger explores as a different dimension – an existential
dimension of being that is radically different to the traditional dimensions
that mainstream philosophy and everyday language uses. Those conventional
dimensions of height, width, length and time for example are simple and
familiar to us once we understand them. This existential dimension of being
which Heidegger sketches out meanwhile carries human meaning and significance. In
this dimension objects are defined (defined as what they are) always in relation
to people, dependent on rather than abstracted from the understandings of
those people. There is no validity or right and wrong here except as relations
to particular understandings and interpretations. The hammer may be a hammer to
me and you, but other people may understand and use it in a completely
different way.
While the hammer’s being as a hammer unites those who are
familiar with it in that way, it excludes those who are unfamiliar. This is
nothing to do with exclusion by conscious thought and will; it rather follows
automatically from what we might call ‘living in another world’ – either the
world of a child who has not yet been socialised or of someone else who is not
part of the same ‘society’ and would need to become attuned to the various
understandings, familiarities and significances (like hammers being for
hammering) to be a part of it.
Obviously this is almost always a question of degrees,
not of being absolutely ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ a whole world of shared
understandings, but this is the meaning of society which Heidegger’s insights
point towards. It is an ethereal dimension in which the 'we', or 'us', is
constituted.
Society is what we
share
In this way, we might say that society is what we share. We
can find it in the connections, understandings and familiarities that link us
to objects in our world and to each other. A shared understanding and familiarity
of what to do when we meet someone (shake hands? A hug? a kiss on the cheek? a
kiss on both cheeks? ‘How Are You?’ ‘Fine’) – to do the appropriate thing – is
a basic constituent of society. It is perhaps noteworthy that the English and those who share England as a space are often unsure what to do
in this situation, which we might see as an element of how English society is
not as strong, integrated and confident as some other cultures.
You can be a member of a society with people you have
never met and will never meet. Likewise some people you know quite well might
seem to be – and feel themselves to be – part of a different society, possessing
different meanings and practices and using different reference points (for
example watching television from their former home countries). In our
globalising world, we can feel multiple overlapping familiarities and
detachments with people and entities from all over, an indication of how we are
getting even further from any idea of ‘society’ as a collection of people
simply sharing space, like within the borders of a nation-state for example.
The ‘we’ or ‘us’ that we use in conversation is therefore
open to many more interpretations and confusions. I might say: “We should
question ourselves more,” but who am I talking about or talking to? It is far
from clear, and is therefore a less rigorous statement than it might have been
in earlier times. Indeed it is more like talking to the air, which is what an
awful lot of political activity entails nowadays. As a writer for example you are
speaking to a certain restricted audience while perhaps seeking to address a
different, or wider, one. The most successful writers tend to address the
audience they are speaking to, but often find themselves in silos by doing so,
telling folks what they want to hear and not affecting many others or changing
many minds.
Society and
democratic politics
This increasing inability to conceive of the ‘we’ and
‘us’ readily is problematic for democratic politics, for it is more difficult
to build up unified social and political movements based on shared goals and
understandings when shared goals and understandings have dissipated. Indeed, our
political parties find themselves determinedly dividing and demarcating voters
into groups, making assumptions about them and targeting specific messages and
policies at them as discrete, separate social units – effectively as
micro-societies based on certain criteria (gender, ethnicity, age, occupation,
and religion for example).
As they put us into boxes and treat us as part of grids like
this, so they reduce our individuality; but they also take us away from any
idea of a greater, wider society.
What Heidegger’s account of ‘being’ offers us is a distinctive
way of looking at society – as not so much who we are as what we share with
each other. (So, to provide one example it is less about what we look like, and
more about what we do with what we
look like – how we dress, do our hair, apply makeup etc.) On one level sharing refers
to our basic understandings, familiarities and practices. But on another level is
the more active meaning of sharing, as a deliberate act. (Again, this drawing
in of others from the outside to the inside is something that those of us who
share English or British culture tend to be rather weak at.)
When what we share gets stronger or weaker, so society as
a meaningful ‘thing’ does also. Yet this ‘thing’ of society appears as what we
might call an existential or metaphysical object, not a physical one. We can
feel the strength and comfort it gives, and can also feel it ebbing away when
we find ourselves in situations where we don’t share much with those around us.
But we cannot reach out and touch it, nor can we see, hear or define it – because
the dimension on which sharing exists is not physical but relational.
There is perhaps a lesson for political parties in this,
my thoughts being on the Labour Party, of which I’m a member.
There is a tendency for all organisations and institutions
to become increasingly mono-cultural over time as shared understandings,
significances and practices get promoted within them and become more
established. But by doing this they lose their wider affiliations and links into
a wider society.
There is no getting around insider-outsider distinctions,
and indeed those distinctions are part of the essence of democratic competition.
But nevertheless it would be a good idea for Labour and other institutions to
promote shared understandings and practices that come from a deeper place (the meaning
of the institution itself for example) rather giving free rein to dominant
groups to impose their particular ways across the board. Doing the latter can
make the institution seem strong and united, but only on a limited basis with
limited scope. If it is seeking widespread and even national legitimacy, it
needs ways of reaching way beyond these groups and bringing in others.
This is one of the big challenges for democratic parties
in the diverse world in which they find themselves: they need to actually build society themselves, on a wider
basis than their existing tribal groupings, or else face further loss of
legitimacy.
For more on similar topics, see Philosophy, thought and literature page.
For more on similar topics, see Philosophy, thought and literature page.
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