Exotic Journeys: A Tourist's Guide to Philosophy
brought to you by Ron Yezzi
Emeritus Professor of Philosophy
Minnesota State University, Mankato
© Copyright 1986, 2015, 2020 by Ron Yezzi
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Author's Note: This account is adapted from Ron Yezzi, Directing Human Actions: Perspectives on Basic Ethical Issues (Lanham: University Press of America, 1986) p.169.
Individuals and Society:
Introduction
Society is composed of individuals: this obvious and basic fact no philosophy, whatever its pretensions to novelty, can question or alter. Hence these three alternatives: Society must exist for the sake of individuals; or individuals must have their ends and ways of living set for them by society; or else society and individuals are correlative, organic to one another, society requiring the service and subordination of individuals and at the same time existing to serve them. Beyond these three views, none seems to he logically conceivable.
John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy
Although John Dewey delimits the logical possibilities in the above passage, we very quickly become aware of considerable variation in both interpreting the meaning of each possibility and envisioning its implications. For example, the terms "individual" and "society" do not have the same meanings for everyone. There can be social interpretations of what constitutes human nature that differ from the common view that individuals are separate, self-directing entities. And persons may conceive the term "society" differently―some associating it with "the public interest," others with "accepted social institutions," and still others with a "person representing the unity and sovereign power of the state."
Each of Dewey's three listed possibilities above might even spawn a different view of what constitutes a democratic society. Furthermore, the first possibility, taken as an assertion of extreme individualism, might serve better as a foundation for some form of anarchism rather than of democracy; and the second possibility, taken as an assertion of extreme "societism," might serve well as a foundation for some form of totalitarianism. Accordingly, there can be numerous ways (certainly more than three) in which we might conceive what ought to be the relation of an individual to the society.
In examining possible conceptions here, we will take positions in pairs for the purpose of providing comparisons. We will consider: Plato and Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes and Jean Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill and Max Stirner, Karl Marx and John Dewey, John Rawls and Robert Nozick. Although these ten positions are very helpful in considering possible relationships between individuals and society, we should also he aware that they do not exhaust the possibilities.
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