What is the fundamental process that governs social or physical existence? This is a very old sounding question in that the Greeks wondered which of the four elements predominated in the makeup of the world. Was it air, fire, earth or wind? And, later on in the ancient world, there was a search for the greatest good, the most perfect emotion. Was it stoicism or cynicism or pleasure? Far from being put away, this same question crops up in modern thought. When I was a graduate student, people discussed whether Hobbes had found out the true secret of social life, that the fundamental force was violence; that was what guaranteed social order and so economic forces and other social forces paled in comparison with the ability of violence to dominate the scene. Hobbes had discovered not invented a solution, never mind that Hobbes thought reason rather than violence governed human interaction or that violence is useful under certain conditions but that under other circumstances money and prestige are more important motivators. People die for their country for a reason and arms merchants are motivated by greed. Violence is useful only when there is anarchy in the air or when there is foreign invasion or there is a crime of passion.
The most obvious candidate for the fundamental process that underlies life is truth as that is understood to be both the universal presence of logic, for which no reason can itself be provided, and the truth of particular facts, in that it will always be true that I went to a particular grocery store yesterday afternoon at three P. M. That fact may not be true in that I did not go shopping yesterday but whether that happened or not is not subject to doubt, even if one can quibble whether a 3:05 P. M. visit qualifies or whether I made a mistake about which grocery store I visited. On such truths all of life depends and one puts oneself at peril by disregarding facts as when a caveman disregarded the warning that a sabre toothed tiger had been seen in the area. Rumors may be wrong, but facts aren’t.
The Nineteenth Century and early Twentieth Century philosophers who advocated that logic and facts were the foundations of the universe maintained, for example, that a sentence would make no sense if it did not refer to a real thing and that every sentence asserted a proposition that was either true or not. They were countered by those later philosophers who noted that language had other functions than to point out the truth, but that is to quibble, because we can all recognize the social uses of obfuscating language or language simply used for the purpose of making believe a conversation is going on while understanding that the paydirt of language is that it is to express truth however wrong or perverted are the statements being peddled as truth. Someone invoking the spectre of black helicopters on the horizon is claiming something to be real even if is an expression of a paranoid political point of view.
There is a readily available answer to those who think that reason and facts rule the roost. It is those who think that life is ruled by opinion. They think so because clearly the overwhelming number of people do follow custom or received opinion in how they handle their lives and will not let the reasoning of others interfere with that. But those who point out the relativity of all argument, that it always serves the interests or cultural affinities of someone or another and so is always untrustworthy, are themselves subject to the same argument, which is that their relativism is itself culturally conditioned and so not to be relied on, whether because one’s class or one’s psyche dictates what one thinks, and so these truth tellers are in the same pickle as everyone else in that they too are invoking the idea of a truth that underlies other truths, that being relativism, and so cannot avoid the dilemma of defending a point of view as being in some sense true or truer than other candidates. There is no way out of being logical.
Actually, there is and that is by avoiding the quandary of truth versus opinion entirely and turning to some other feature of life as the fundamental process. Consider aesthetics as the fundamental quality that rules social life-- and, if you want to push it, natural life, in that peacocks grow their plumes so as to attract a mate. When I got engaged with civil rights, the instructor from the Congress of Racial Equality told us joiners who were white that not all black women looked like Lena Horne, which we laughed at because we were embarrassed to admit that most of us found many black women to be unattractive. One of the accomplishments of the civil rights movement from the Sixties through the Eighties was to show black women and not just Dorothy Dandridge as attractive, and so to rehabilitate the race. Diana Ross played her part by dressing so fine and being so carefully done up, and so did Diahann Carol. That was before the African supermodels. That changed the perception of black people as a foreign commodity in that you could now find them sexy. The same thing happened when FDR served hot dogs to King George VI at Hyde Park in 1939. It made an impression on the American people and made them prepared to go into the war on the side of Great Britain. We fight wars to protect people who are like us and we fight wars against people who are unlike us. The Israelis are like us and the Saudis are not and the Soviets, in their blunt peasant ways, were made to be appealing for a little while during the Second World War.
The same point can be made on a larger and more philosophically valid scale. Certain styles of argument are appealing during certain periods of time because they seem like the way arguments are meant to be formed, they following the form that a plausible argument takes, and so philosophical argument to be taken as a kind of literary genre, which means it is the way people feel comfortable expressing themselves for a period of time. Systematic philosophy was the way it was done in the Seventeenth Century, whether you were conservative, like Leibnitz, or liberal, like Spinoza, or simply materialist, like Hobbes. You began with basic premises and then argued your way to complex and controversial conclusions that were, by the time you got there, inevitable, at least according to your system. That is not the way it always is. Sometimes, as in the plain style of English and American analytic philosophy, as that was practiced from G. E. Moore on, you present a single argument to refute a specific point, as Moore does in his rejection of idealism, or instead, construct an argument that is so tightly wound around its essential paradox, like St. Anselm’s proof of God, that it can be presented in a few paragraphs. Styles change even if basic philosophical questions change even more slowly than that. So aesthetics have their part in what might seem the most transcendental of disciplines.
A third candidate for the basic or fundamental process of social and natural life is morality, which might seem a weak reed on which to place so much weight in that people sacrifice morality all the time for what they regard as their own interests or what are the opinions of the moment, the South converting from the time of the Kansas Nebraska Act, according to McPherson, from a place that wanted to negotiate with the North so as to keep its control of the federal government, into a people crying out for Northern blood. Moreover, it is not cynical to treat international relations as a place where the competing actors consult only their own interests and use morality as simply a way to cover the way nations think it necessary to deal with other nations. Gentlemen diplomats do look into the mail of their adversaries. But in that morality is an appeal to what society sanctions as right and inevitable, it remains a remarkably powerful force to quell what might be temporarily held sentiments, morality a recognition of whatever is inevitable in the social compacts that tie people together. Every society needs a rule against murder, even if not one against killing, and so will come up with it. And it is also possible to think that, as King put it, the the curve of history is toward justice, toward the achievement of a more perfect union, even if one does not agree with Kant that morality is the trump in any deck of cards, the final arbiter of what is necessary behavior rather than simply preferred behavior. For Kant, a great deal of life is taken over by obligation rather than choice in that we have no choice but to carry out our moral obligations for to do otherwise is to surrender our humanity, which is quite a heavy penalty for occasionally treating people, like women or employees, as a means to our ends rather than as ends in themselves,
That leaves us with a modern presentation of that perennial trinity of truth, beauty and goodness as the fundamental and irreducible forces of human life. Can we do something to further the discussion? One way to do so would be to propose another fundamental force or process to join the perennial three. The idea of social structure is invented in the Eighteenth Century by two Scottish moralists: Adam Smith, who invented systematic economics whereby economic transactions are treated as examples of the process of economic activity, relative advantage and supply and demand becoming abstracted out of actual life into an independant force, as also happens when Adam Furgeson discovers the division of labor as an inevitable feature of developing civilizations and when at about the same time, the Englishman Thomas Malthus discovers the laws relating population increase to agricultural increase. Sociology as a name for these activities does not develop until a few generations later in France.
The idea of social structure can, however, be reduced to one or another of the perennial three. Certainly the earliest sociologists thought so. For them, sociology was a form of truth, just about a different subject matter, and so no different from the natural sciences, and with the ambition to make itself a quantitative science, which certainly happened with economics and, so some thought, to sociology what with the advent of large scale statistics, data collection and mathematical models, as those were deployed by James Coleman to reduce a prose statement of his theory to a set of equations. That idea persisted until recent years when sociology was used to say that everything was a matter of opinion rather than of truth because you could always point to the social circumstances that led to one belief or another.
The idea of social structure can also be reduced to the idea of goodness or morality, and that was true of ancient theories of social structure. For Plato, society was reduced to a three caste system, the worker, the soldier and the philosopher, these three aspects of the state reflected in every person, the spirit of one of these three more prominent in some souls than in others. That made everyone have a position in society appropriate to their natures and so created a just system. Aristotle may have moved the discussion on by propounding a thesis whereby the nature of a government was tied to a different abstract characteristic, which was the size of a population and the dominance of one social class of people rather than another, so that a democracy meant mob rule, and a stable society was one ruled by the middling classes. The underlying thesis of the justice of natural social arrangements remained. And social structure can even be reduced to the idea of beauty in the sense of what seem to be satisfying forms of organization. So “the great chain of being”, a phrase which has been used to characterize early modern sense of society asks a person to contemplate how everything has its place within the hierarchical order as if there cannot be any other form of order,people therefore finding themselves ensconced in a sense of contentment and wonder, which is an aesthetic appreciation of life.
The treatment of social structure as an independent force in social life runs up against the following rejoinder favored by Catholic theologians who do not want to see, for example, an increase in the number of deadly sins. What appear to be new sins are versions of the standard seven, and so consumer acquisitiveness is nothing new but either a form of gluttony or pride. It is the Protestant theologians who want to extend the ways in which people can be sinful, and so would recognize existential angst as a new kind of disorder rather than the despair which has always been recognized in Catholicism as a state of spiritual distress into which people can enter. For otherwise, theology simply becomes a way of repackaging secular ideas and that way lies the end rather than a new opening into faith.
The same can be said for getting around the trinity of goodness, truth and beauty as the three qualities to which people and social life aspire. You take the life out of a new object by baptizing it as having something other than one of these three names. So drop alienation as a basic category because its opposite, incorporation or identification, can be as onerous as the rejected condition and, anyway, alienation is better understood as separation from all three desired objects, truth, beauty and goodness, rather than just an objectification and generalization of a relation to land or rights. The moral message is: don’t invent philosophical categories too quickly. They clutter the imagination and are likely not to be as essential as they are first thought to be.