What Is A “Social Creature”? Reflections on Education and Order

The question of social cohesion or cooperation has been a recurring one for me. It inevitably involves questions about human nature, since what it reveals is that human beings are “social creatures” in a particular sense that I have tried sporadically to develop.

Eric Voegelin has been a touchstone for me in this context, especially his distinction between ancient philosophy, represented above all by Plato, and the modern derailment (relatively speaking) of philosophy represented in this context by Hobbes. If the question concerns the initial constitution and ongoing cohesion of society, the Hobbesian answer posits an aggressive and violent human nature that must be held in check by laws. People consent to follow laws, for Hobbes, out of fear of the worst evil, namely physical death. For Plato, society is held together rather out of love for the highest good — which, for fear of inevitably hypostatizing the concept of “God,” I will instead call nous, so that the focus is shifted from that which is loved to the act of loving.

Nous amounts to thoughtful wonder, on my gloss. “God” or “Divine Being” is for Voegelin far from a straightforward concept. It’s owing to what Voegelin calls the “metaxy” — a notion he takes over from Plato and transforms into a full-fledged (and central) concept — or the “in-between” character of human existence that our fragile attachment to the divine pole of reality is what constitutes us in our humanity. This is to say that “man in his mere humanity [i.e. in presuming to be severed from divine reality and thus self-created] is demonic nothingness.” I take it that the word “demonic” here is referring more or less rigorously to the ancient concept of the daimon, which according to DF Krell situates human beings “between gods and dogs.”

Later on I will adopt Hannah Arendt’s quite different usage of the concept of the daimon, and here I’m only suggesting a possible reason for Voegelin’s provocative formulation, on which it is perhaps advisable not to get hung up. The point, as Voegelin writes in relation to Aristotle, is that “The very study of the nature of man reveals it as something which man does not flatly have, but as a potentiality which requires actualization in the process of life. And if actualization is not too successful, the carrier of human potentiality is still man. The fulfillment of human nature emerges against the background of the mystery of its failure.”

This struggle against dehumanization is both universal and ineluctable. The figure of the philosopher is characterized not necessarily as the most fulfilled human type but seemingly as the most aware of the problem of unfulfillment. Philosophy itself receives a quite startling definition from Voegelin: “Love of being through love of Divine Being as the source of its order.”

With regard to the distinction between Plato and Hobbes, above, or between love and law, it might be said that for Hobbes, “law and order” is the very condition for the possibility of philosophy, whatever “philosophy” may be. Philosophy can’t begin to get off the ground in a violent, brutish state of nature. It can do so only after the social contract arises through which members of the newly formed society suppress their inclination to act on their natural hostility toward each other, and instead empower a sovereign to enforce order, ensuring the basic safety and security necessary for anything like philosophy to be practiced. For Plato, order is nothing that can be sustainably or even effectually enforced; it rather emerges spontaneously and incidentally through the practice of philosophy. It is like what Eva Brann says regarding liberal education:

“…deep, disinterested theoretical thought seems to be [a good or even the best] prelude to worldly engagement,” such that liberal education is “an end in itself that happens incidentally to be practically useful” for, seemingly, the creating and sustaining of order. Sheer delight in the Great Books — thoughtful wonder about them — might be said to have the unintended effect of enabling students to see being as lovable and thus to cooperate with the others who constitute the world.

Helena Rosenblatt has said similarly that a liberal society depends on the existence of liberal citizens, whose liberality is cultivated in liberal education — liberality meaning “a noble and generous way of thinking and acting toward one’s fellow citizens. Its opposite was selfishness, or what the Romans called ‘slavishness’—a way of thinking or acting that regarded only oneself, one’s profits, and one’s pleasures. In its broadest sense, liberalitas signified the moral and magnanimous attitude that the ancients believed was essential to the cohesion and smooth functioning of a free society.”

There’s some ambiguity in the role of liberal education in this. It’s not clear whether and when this type of education has been intended for the production of sympathetic and capable leaders of society or rather for the cultivation of good, kind, generous, freedom-loving citizenship among ordinary people. Rosenblatt appears compellingly to adopt the latter view: “A liberal constitution, it was said [in the eighteenth century], required liberal citizens—in other words, men who were freedom-loving, generous, and civic-minded, and who understood their connectedness to others and their duties to the common good.”

I want to circle back now, having broached the idea of human interconnectedness, to the question of what it means to be a social creature, with which I opened this essay. 

Since my latest reading, or creative misreading, of Hannah Arendt’s Human Condition a few years ago, I’ve carried around two ethical principles in my everyday life, those of humility and charity. Humbly, I don’t believe my doing well or good implies my being essentially or exclusively good, and nor, charitably, does your doing bad or badly mean that you are exclusively or essentially bad. Humility and charity thus are grounded in a refusal, contrary to Arendt, to read back from doing into being: I don’t think our doing defines our being, though it might be common sense to assume it does.

“…the ‘who’, which appears so clearly and unmistakably to others, remains hidden from the person himself, like the daimon in Greek religion which accompanies each man throughout his life, always looking over his shoulder from behind and thus visible only to those he encounters” and not to himself.

Such is what I’m calling Arendt’s daimonic theory of human selfhood, articulated toward the end of the Human Condition. We’re in some basic sense blind to ourselves, and thus rely on the opinion of others in developing our own self-understanding. Perhaps contrary, again, to common sense, we ought therefore to care what other people think of us, though perhaps not excessively. And we ought therefore to care for others themselves, if only because we need them to tell us who we are — that we’re okay ultimately, that we’re decent and worthwhile.

Yet Arendt’s claim that one’s “who” is “implicit in everything [one] says and does” should, I think, be taken with a grain of salt. She doesn’t appear really to qualify this assertion, as far as I remember, and I no longer recall whether it’s a normative or a descriptive claim. If it’s a normative claim, it might also be a pragmatic one: in the interest of safety and security, we should read back from doing into being even if there’s no good evidence justifying this — we should allow ourselves the illusion of certainty — because this might make disorderly behavior easier to handle. In extreme cases, we can simply lock the offender away in a prison, whereas if vicious behavior doesn’t necessarily imply anything about the agent in question, the problem of how to reduce or eliminate this kind of behavior might be far more intractable.

But even in less extreme, more ordinary cases of questionable behavior, Voegelin’s critique of Hobbes might hold true: Hobbes mistakes the disordered state of pathological unfulfillment for “normality,” and seeks the “remedial action” of the law to “keep it in check.” In everyday life we might punitively and suspiciously “keep each other in check” in such a way that forecloses the possibility of greater human fulfillment (and by extension better societal order) which may be achieved through love.

If Arendt’s claim is a descriptive one, maybe she’s describing what common sense already takes for granted: that we can know each other, or at least that assuming we can is pragmatically easier than bearing the burden of uncertainty regarding who our loved ones, our acquaintances, and our adversaries really are or might be. It might also be true that casting judgements on others is a way of conjuring greater certainty with regard to oneself. It might be a way of distinguishing them from oneself, and thus presuming to know oneself to a greater extent than Arendt’s daimonic theory would seem to allow.

I first read selections from this book in an undergraduate Heidegger/Arendt seminar, then returned to the first 100 pages informally during graduate school, and then finally read the rest of it — again informally — a few years later. I suspect that however I might need to amend my interpretation to stay more faithful to the text, the principles of humility and charity will remain valid and vital in orienting me in the world. But Arendt herself does write, along the lines of what I’m calling charity, that “trespassing is an everyday occurrence […] and it needs forgiving, dismissing, in order to make it possible for life to go on by constantly releasing men from what they have done unknowingly.”

This type of forgiveness, however, might not apply “to the extremity of crime and willed evil,” she writes. I suppose charity has its limits. One question then is where precisely to draw the line. A more fundamental, and less extreme, question is whether the “who” is something we discover or something we construct — and who precisely is doing the discovering or constructing. If my who is visible to others but not to myself, it is they who will tell me who I am. Arendt’s phrasing above — that they see me “clearly and unmistakably” — suggests that it’s a matter of sheer discovery rather than interpretative construction. Yet the fact that others may have conflicting opinions about oneself leaves us with the perhaps irresolvable question of who to trust. And maybe our actions reveal more about who we’ve trusted than about our essential selves. 

To be a social creature thus involves both a constitutive blindness to oneself and a vulnerability to others’ opinions about oneself, as well as a presumption to fully see and understand others on the basis of their behavior alone. But my usage of “social creation” aims to go a bit further than just this, and I take a cue from Richard Rorty’s philosophy of education in doing so. According to Rorty, the purpose of K-12 education is to produce competent citizens and the purpose of college is to facilitate self-created individuality. In my view he gives K-12 students both too much and too little credit: too much because “competent citizenship” might actually be a lifelong pursuit, and too little because individuation may be pursed by anyone at anytime; it doesn’t require the rigorous background socialization that Rorty assumes it does.

I’m paraphrasing his little essay, “Education as Socialization and as Individuation.” Yet to understand what’s meant by socialization it might be better to turn to an essay collected in “Contingency, Irony, Solidarity,” where he writes of Proust:

“He did not want to befriend power nor be in a position to empower others, but simply to free himself from the descriptions of himself offered by the people he had met. He wanted to be not merely the person these other people thought they knew him to be, not to be frozen in the frame of a photograph shot from another person’s perspective. […] He redescribed them as being as much a product of others’ attitudes toward them as [he] himself was a product of their attitudes toward him.”

This last line is about as explicit as I’ve seen any writer be on the topic of what’s recently been called “relational autonomy,” although Rorty doesn’t call it that. Natalie Stoljar and Catriona Mackenzie have written that to think autonomy relationally is to consider “that social relations influence and perhaps constitute agents’ sense of themselves and their capacities.”

Rorty apparently adopts something like the stronger view (where we are constituted and not just influenced by social relations) when he claims we’re products of our attitudes toward each other. Unfortunately this provocative assertion is unsupported by what little else I’ve read in Rorty. But I think it’s an insight worth dwelling on. With regard to the essay on education, I think it allows us to consider that individuation, which is indeed the aim or certainly one of the aims of any serious education, has less to do with “self-creation” (which is sheer fantasy) than with developing a more thoughtful, humble, charitable, and realistic approach to social relations — or in a word developing the capacity to cope with the primordial fact that human beings create each other and are in no sense self-created. But I suspect that this has to remain only an incidental aim, if liberality is best cultivated through disinterested learning, or in other words love of Divine Being.

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