What is Social Natures about?

Portuguese readers go HERE

==> Society

==> social natures

==> social orientations (value oriented declarations)

==> elementary states of spirit (human potentialities and limits)

To compare social structural analysis and state-of-spirit analysis read HERE

The state of spirit sociological theory try to develop scientifically an analytical and experimental level of reality in order to understand and use better what is sociological society concept. I mean society as a natural emergence of human being condition at the level of mental regulation, conscious or not, rational or not, of personal proactive actions.

As Durkheim asks us to do, social natures conceive society limited to certain levels of reality: the evanescent social consciousness. Society does not include every real thing and sociology is not able to explain or understand every thing we want or need. At that level, Durkheim asks us to find and build social facts, in order to discuss them as scientific problems. In the Elementary Forms of Religious Life he looked at essentials of human knowledge, as theological very simple knowledge. Knowledge as ability to change from one state-of-spirit to another, from profane sate-of-spirit to a radical different way of living, using a religious state-of-spirit, announced and prepared when it comes de social time of unite all people of the tribe, who lives most of the time apart, at long distances.

Durkheim distinguishes the sociological knowledge from psychological knowledge (see suicide) from economic knowledge (see social division of labour). He develops a horizontal distinction. We need more. We need to study vertical distinctions (reality level distinctions linked to different scientific disciplines), as Comte proposed at first and Peter Berger e Luckmann (2004/1966) use at the beginning of theirs knowledge theory. The inorganic chemistry, the physiology up to social behaviour, in the same way António Damásio (2003) thinks his bio-neuronal theory of personal emotions, feelings and social emotions.

Social theory should be able to understand how social phenomena are built from life and how they differentiate from non social phenomena, as biological or normative phenomena, for instance. Sociologists need to know more and better how to deal with vertical and horizontal differentiations of reality we use to think and to act. We need to know better the limits and the potential (moral and therapeutic, or harmful) of our kind of specific knowledge. This knowledge will able us to be critical to the social uses of sociological knowledge and ideologies. Doing this we will be able to use the best way possible, our own way, the common sociological knowledge. And we will better prepared to critize and take profit of other kind of knowledge, scientific or not, such as military, political, economic, medical, law, religious, psychological and others kind of knowledge.

I find especially important now-a-day to discuss Durkheim proposal about the priority of morals (his social consciousness) in the social changing processes, prior than economics, technologies or politics. Especially important for us is to take seriously our SSF commitment to put forward, as sociologists, human rights and solidarity. For that propose Durkheims´s fact theory is short, passive, turned to the past, static.

Social natures as a topic, as a sociological concept, is a pointer to help to organize a scientific discussion to know how cosmos differentiate into matter and energy linked together as twins, how the inert mater turn into life forms, how from life emerge human consciousness and how that consciousness make us to feel the need to make sense of the universe and of life, our lives. How reality produces different levels of reality and how we can, as sociologists, to focus on one specific level of reality: the society?

Berger, Peter L e Thomas Luckmann, (2004/1966) A Construção Social da Realidade – um livro sobre a sociologia do conhecimento, Lisboa, Dinalivro.

Damásio, António (2003) Ao Encontro de Espinosa – As Emoções Sociais e a Neurologia do Sentir, Lisboa, Europa-América.

It seems like we are trying to understand the nature of the social lives of oppressed and marginalized people, which includes women (an important issue we have not discussed yet), as well.

Bob

All lives are oppressed and marginalised, because we are what we are very shortly in space/time, even we are powerful between humans. We are trying to understand the nature of human experience as a life experience taken from mater and energy cosmic combination in the surface of the hearth.

If we do open the inquiry perspective as such, we will find easy to see how equal we are, as human beings, to any human being, compared to other animals or to inert materials. Let's focus on the equality characters of human beings and find how repulsive and unreal (ideological and irrational) is the idea that our individual or cultural differences explain or cause social exclusions and justifies oppressions.

That is why any human can always decide to emancipate him/her self. Even if emancipation means to die for new conditions for others that remain alive, as many suicide people think they are doing. That is the war, is not it?

Women are not condemn do live oppressed and marginalized lives. And many times they refuse to live like this. The problem is that human social natures develop easily anti-women social ideologies and relationships. We, as sociologists, must understand why and how it works. Why we do not?

My answer is: because main stream social theory is submitted to political bias in favour of Social State, which has been built to oppress women. Even if women liberations movements are - in politics - used as a political tool against other civilizations (has human rights or ecology or socialism). Politicians to support democratic institutions need to show support social movements, in order to better used their social strength to private proposes. That is why social theory prefers to support democracy as it is (for taking jobs from political decisions) instead of using social aspirations as paths to be researched for better social possible futures.

In my view, is not enough to focus on the future - as Alain Touraine does, for instance. For taking in account women as part - a big part - of human social nature we need to consider reproductive practices (not only specialized family sociology) as a bio-ethic phenomena that, in time, every human being is called to address. It means that society organise (or not) reproductive practices in different very conflictual and violent ways that should be address by main social theory proposes. It is not scientifically acceptable to forget or to ignore or to hide social reproductive practices. To do so, as social theory does, is to reinforce the dependence of human kind of violence (one of the more present social natures of humans), namely domestic violence (which one of the most hide secrets of all) and other kind of violence, namely military, judicial and political violence.

As consequence of the difficulty to turn around the violent social nature of human beings, the less strong (men, women, children, old people, disable people, foreigners with less social capital, etc.) becomes victims when the time comes.

APD