Articles
Abstract
I. Self-Constituting Humanity
`The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.'
John Milton, Paradise Lost, I.254-5.
1. Human Responsibility
1.1 Humanity has come face-to-face with itself. After 8000 years of accumulating self-consciousness, humanity has formed a certain idea of its self and its situation, an idea which is now filling human consciousness with anguished anticipation. The human animal looks at itself in its own consciousness, as in a mirror, and it sees that it is the most creative and the most destructive of all animals. The human species is the species which creates itself. The human animal is the animal which is its own predator.
1.2 Humanity is called upon at last to take responsibility for itself. The long centuries of accumulating consciousness - so short a period in the history of the species, let alone in the history of life on earth, of the earth, of the universe - have brought forth the familiar phenomena of the moral consciousness of the human individual and the social consciousness of human societies. At the end of an epoch, in one conventional reckoning of elapsed human time, at the end of a century and at the end of a millenium, humanity is beginning to recognize the remaining burden of human consciousness, the human responsibility of the whole of humanity within the universe of all-that-is.
2. Humanity Self-made
2.1 Humanity is a figment of its own imagination. Humanity exists as humanity of and for itself. By its own efforts it has differentiated itself from the rest of what is, for it, the universe of all-that-is. It has identified itself as a particular form of living thing and as a particular species of animal. It has conferred upon itself unique species-characteristics.
2.2 We do not know if other parts of the universe, including other living things and other animals, are capable of conceiving of their own specificity. And we do not know how, if at all, they conceive of us as humans. We do not know that any other part of the universe conceives of us in the way that we conceive of ourselves. We do not know that humanity has any form of existence other than as humanity conceived by and for itself.
2.3 The human species is the species which creates itself.
3. Human Habitat
3.1 In conceiving of itself as humanity, it creates at the same time a universe fit for human habitation, the human habitat. It is a habitat in three dimensions - the natural world, the social world, and the inner world of the human individual.
3.2 The natural world is the human habitat conceived as not merely human, as the universe of all-that-is, in which we find ourselves to be a particular thing-that-is. The natural world takes part in human self-forming, in our self-identification as living things like other living things, animals like other animals. And the natural world takes part in human self-forming as an Other, because we identify ourselves as the species with uniquely human characteristics, including human consciousness.
3.3 The social world is the human habitat conceived as the place of our self-creating as a species, as the human co-habitants of the natural world, as the self-socializing animal. Human self-forming identifies its social world, by assimilation and differentiation, in relation to the natural world and to the inner world of the human individual. Without those two worlds there would be no social world, no place to cohabit, no world-conceiving consciousness.
3.4 The inner world of the individual is the human habitat conceived as consciousness, the place of the self-creating of the human personality. It is the place where consciousness identifies a self which is a unique self in relation to an Other which is the natural world and an Other which is the social world, but a self whose self-constituting is integrated with the self-constituting of those other worlds.
3.5 Humanity constitutes itself in the three worlds of the human habitat.
4. Human Reality
4.1 The self-made human world is reality-for-humanity. Human reality is the material from which we form our consciousness and hence the material from which we form ourselves. Each human being, each human society is a unique formation in and of human reality.
4.2 Human reality thus contains all the possibilities available to humanity. We make the natural world by naming its parts, explaining its functioning, transforming it through human action. Then the natural world, as so conceived, determines our possible relationships to the natural world. We make the social world by naming its parts, imagining its structures and systems, making theories as to its functioning, transforming it through willed action. Then the social world, as so conceived, determines our possible social relationships. We make the inner world of the human individual, relating our self to the natural world and to the social world, conceiving and forming the structures and systems and theories of our own self-constituting. We constitute the universal individual, the possibility which is the human being. And we constitute the particularized universal individual, the possibility of a unique human being, yourself-myself. Then our inner world, as so conceived, determines our possible individual life.
4.3 Our possibilities are our limits. The reality we make makes us.
5. Reality-making
5.1 We have found ourselves to possess two systems within consciousness for forming human reality, and we have named them Imagination and Reason. We can create reality-for-ourselves by causing events in the brain (imagination) and we can order such events into patterns (reason). The resulting patterns have come to be known in the English language as ideas, in the most general sense of that term.
5.2 We have also found ourselves to possess two systems within consciousness for processing ideas, and we have named them Memory and Language. Ideas may be available to us at a time other than the time of their formation (memory). And we can communicate ideas from one human consciousness to another (language).
5.3 By these means, consciousness can constitute actual human individuality, with a personality persisting through time. And, by these means, consciousness can constitute actual society, with a constitution persisting through time. And consciousness can constitute the actual natural world, with a natural order persisting through time. By processes which occur within what we conceive to be a part of the natural world (the human body), we are thus able to make what is, for us, an actual human habitat, an actual human reality, and actual humanity itself.
5.4 Consciousness creates the universal which makes possible the particular which makes possible the actual.
6. The Human Conjuncture
6.1 The human situation is thus not a condition but a conjuncture. Even the idea of humanity (as universal and particular and actual) is contingently determined. That is to say, human self-constituting is not a fact but a process. How humanity conceives itself changes as an aggregated product of the through-time functioning of imagination, reason, memory, and language. And that product is determined conjuncturally, by the interacting of the human capacities with all the actual content of human reality, with all that nature and society and the individual make available as humanity's current possibilities.
6.2 For humanity the actual is the possible. The whole of the actual is the whole of the possible for human self-constituting - the willing and acting of world-historical individuals, the rise to consciousness of nations, the development of world-transforming techniques through science and engineering, developments of philosophical self-conceiving or social self-organizing, the infinity of particular actions making up the universality of social reality.
6.3 Neither a human condition nor a human nature is a permanent human fate. There is no such thing as the human condition. There is no such thing as human nature. Humanity makes its own fate, from day to day.
7. Human Necessity
7.1 Human freedom is human unfreedom. Each human being, at the moment of physical conception, is conceived also into the reality made by human consciousness. Each human being, to be born, is twice conceived, in body and in mind. Birth, in the body and in consciousness, is a process which begins at conception and ends at death.
7.2 In body, the process of birth takes place in the natural necessity of the humanly conceived natural world. In mind, the process of birth takes place in the artificial necessity of the humanly conceived social world. In the womb of the body and in the womb of the mind, the artificial necessity of the inner world of each human being begins to form, as it is formed by, the self-forming individual, self-forming in the natural necessity of the natural world and in the artificial necessity of the social world.
7.4 The natural necessity of the natural world is the systematic uniformity and integrity which human consciousness conceives to be the most general attributes of the universe of all-that-is. We have no means of knowing whether the uniformity and integrity of nature are attributes which would form part of a non-human conceiving of the universe. We cannot know whether they are reflections of corresponding attributes of human consciousness. It may be that when we look furthest into the natural universe we see most deeply into our own consciousness.
7.5 However, the human conceptions of the uniformity and integrity of the natural universe prove their utility, if not their own necessity, in and through human willing and acting. Natural necessity, acting in conjunction with imagination and reason and memory and language, allows us to make predictions of events in the natural world. And that capacity in turn makes possible the artificial necessity of the social and inner worlds of the human being. Natural science, endowed with the natural necessity of the natural world, also makes it possible to make predictions as to the outcome of human willing and acting, including willing and acting in relation to the natural world.
7.6 The artificial necessity of the human world makes possible the continuity of society and of the human being, within an artificial uniformity and integrity which are the constitution of a society and the personality of an individual. Human freedom is the freedom to make human necessity.
8. The Role of Society
8.1 Society is the human species creating itself socially. In society humanity creates its species-characteristics, its species-reality, its artificial necessity. In society humanity makes its possibilities, and makes its possibilities actual. In society humanity universalizes the particular of the inner world of the human individual, and particularizes the natural world of the universe of all-that-is.
8.2 Society is structure and system. A structure is an arrangement of parts. A system is a functioning of parts. The structure determines what parts are contained in the society. The system determines how those parts interact with each other. The constitution of a given society is the structure-system of that society, a unique product of all that goes to make societies and of all that has gone to make that particular society.
8.3 Society exists nowhere else than in the human mind. And the constitution of a given society exists in and of human consciousness, the consciousness of those conceived as its members and its non-members, past and present. Wherever and whenever a structure-system of human socializing is so conceived in consciousness, there and then a society is conceived - family, tribe, organized religion, legal corporation, nation, state...
8.4 At the end of a century and of a millenium, in one conventional reckoning of elapsed human time, humanity has the possibility of reconstituting itself as society, the international society of the whole human race, the society of all societies.
9. The Role of Law
9.1 In law society remembers what it has decided to become. Law participates in society's self-forming, in human self-socializing, by retaining past acts of social willing with a view to their actualizing in future social willing. Law organizes the hold of the social past on the social future by organizing the hold of the social future on the social past. In law-making society speaks to its future, intending that, when the time comes, its future will listen to its past.
9.2 The hold of the social past on the social future is infinitely contingent, infinitely tenuous. The future will be determined by the flowing conjuncture of society, itself the ever-changing resultant of an infinity of actualities emerging from an infinity of possibilities. In law society makes use of particular (law-making) systems of social willing, specially designed to store a particular kind of information, information about what society will do in order to become that which it chooses to become. In law society makes use of particular (law-applying) systems of social willing to retrieve that information and to incorporate it in actual social willing. The present that was the future in society's past becomes, in this way, the past of society's next future.
9.3 So it is that law is social purpose actualizing itself. Without social objectives there can be no law. Social objectives may be actualized effectively by social systems other than legal systems. Legal systems have the distinctive characteristic that they are specifically designed to actualize social objectives. In law society does not merely choose its future; in law society wills its future.
10. Social Reality
10.1 Using socially the self-conceived capacities of individual human consciousness (imagination and reason and memory and language), society constructs great structures of ideas which may be called theories. Theories are social institutions designed to make possible the formation of derived ideas, as to what society is and as to what it shall become. Theories make possible the formation of actual social objectives. And they make possible the formation of actual social values which enter into every event of social willing and hence into all socially willed action. In a more or less arbitrary typology, theories may be given species-names - mythology, religion, morality, custom, history, philosophy, art, natural science... But, for present purposes, what unites them is more important than what distinguishes them.
10.2 Such theories are habitations in which society lives, as much as it lives on this or that piece of land, in this or that building. Theories are features of the landscape in the self-made human habitat. But, because they are present only in the human habitat, they are features which are ever-changing, always in a state of becoming. Theories take their form from the human conjuncture. Since society is process and not merely state, system and not merely structure, society never ceases making the theories with which it makes itself.
10.3 The total social process of a society is theory working on theory. A society is a becoming in consciousness, not a being in time and space. Society is a reality-for-itself.
11. The Three Constitutions
11.1 The self-constituting of society has three faces - a legal constitution, a real constitution, an ideal constitution. In the legal constitution society sees its total self as it has been, as necessity, as obligation. In the real constitution society sees its total self as it is, as actuality, as action. In the ideal constitution society sees its total self as it might be, as potentiality, as desire.
11.2 The function of the legal constitution is to carry the structure-system of society from its past to its future. For this purpose, it uses the artificial necessity of the law to constrain social willing in the present. The function of the real constitution is to enact the social willing in the present by which society achieves its social objectives in relation to the infinite and unique specificity and complexity of the actual, using actual actors generating actual events, including events in the natural world of the universe of all-that-is and events in the inner world of the human individual. The function of the ideal constitution is to lead society to become the society imagined by its social objectives and its social values, to give to a given society an idea of its possible self.
11.3 Humanity invents time and space as the stage on which it may act out the drama of its self-constituting. The three constitutions make possible the self-constituting of a given society, given in time and space, surviving and prospering in time and space.
12. Social Exchange
12.1 At the heart of the social process is a mechanism which may be called the social exchange. Society transforms the willing and acting of human individuals into social willing and acting. Individual willing and acting which serves society's purposes may be recognized by society as social willing and acting. Society offers to respond in particular ways to individual willing and acting which serves society's purposes. Society seeks to affect socially significant action, social significance being determined by society itself. The actual intention of the actor, in willing and acting in a particular way, may be unknowable or unconsidered by society.
12.2 By this means the natural power of the human individual (physical and psychic) is transformed into social power. By this means also, society intrudes into the inner world of the human individual, colonizes it, socializes it.
12.3 The law is the most systematic way in which the social exchange is organized. The law establishes networks of legal relations among human individuals, especially the many different kinds of rights and duties, designed to produce individual willed action which serves society's purposes. If human individuals (contracting parties, neighbours, judges, state officials) act in accordance with the substantive content of actual legal relations, then they are liable to act in ways which conform with society's purposes.
13. The Perennial Dilemmas of Society
13.1 The structure-system of society described above gives rise to a series of systematic dilemmas which every society faces. They are not merely dilemmas of policy-making, although they are articulated or latent in countless perplexing problems of everyday social conflict and debate. They are not merely theoretical models, although they help to conceive in consciousness of the most fundamental processes of a society's total social process. And they are not merely enigmas, reflecting some limit to the capacity of the human mind to comprehend its own self-socializing activity. The five perennial dilemmas of society express in words the specifically dialectical nature of the social process. Humanity socializes itself in particular kinds of systematic tension.
13.2 (1) The dilemma of the Self and the Other is the dilemma of Identity. We are a self in relation to an other which is a self in relation to us as an other. All identity is also alterity. The individual (say, a person, a family, a nation, the human race) is an other in relation to another individual (person, family, etc.), that other being also a part of that individual's self.
13.3 Nationality is, for example, a self-other reciprocating mechanism. The unique selfhood of the individual is negated in the co-selfhood of the nationality; the otherness of other individuals is negated in the co-selfhood of nationality; the co-selfhood of other human beings is negated in the non-co-selfhood of non-nationality.
13.4 (2) The dilemma of the One and the Many is the dilemma of Power. The many of society (individual human beings, individual subordinate societies) struggle with the one of society. The one of the individual human being or subordinate society struggles with the many who are society. A society is a society because it is one. A society is a society because it is many. Social consciousness is one because it is the consciousness of a society. Social consciousness is many because it is the consciousness of individual human beings.
13.5 Political institutions are, for example, reciprocating one-many machines. The many of opinions and human situations are turned into the one of social objectives and decisions; the one of social objective and decision is turned into the many of modified opinions and human situations.
13.6 (3) The dilemma of Unity of nature, Plurality of value is the dilemma of Will. The willed action of society serves society's purposes. But society's purposes are formed in struggle, including the struggle of the perennial dilemmas of society. Society's purposes are not found simply by contemplating the natural order of the universe of all-that-is. Nor are they found simply by contemplating the innermost recesses of the inner world of the human individual. But the social struggle of value is the struggle of a society and of human beings who do conceive themselves as having a natural specificity within the universe of all-that-is and who conceive of individual consciousness as not being exhausted by its participation in social consciousness. Social unity is also human diversity. Human unity is also social diversity.
13.7 Social theories (paragraph 10.1 above) are, for example, reciprocating unity-plurality processes. A social theory unifies all the ideas that it affirms and all the possible ideas that it negates. Without negation there can be no affirmation. Without affirmation there can be no negation. But all unification of ideas, whether by affirmation or negation, is an affirmation of the possibility of all such ideas, including the possibility of their negation.
13.8 (4) The dilemma of Justice and Social Justice is the dilemma of Order. Society is a realm of order within a realm of order. It is a self-ordering within the self-ordering of all that is beyond society, the order of the universe and the order of individual consciousness. Society is a self-contained order which conceives itself to be not self-contained. The superordinate, society-transcending, immanent order of justice is in permanent and irreducible tension with the coordinate, society-forming, contingent order of social justice. Even if both are humanly conceived, each is humanly conceived to be other than the other.
13.9 The differential economic valuation of goods is, for example, a reciprocating justice/social justice process. Value is not immanent in the goods, since the natural order of the universe is not conceived as an order of value, but value is a quality that the goods would have if they were immanently valuable. Value is immanent in the goods, since value is not determined by the inner world of the human individual, either the individual who possesses or the individual who desires, but value is an accident of accidents, modifiable without affecting the substance of the goods.
13.10 (5) The dilemma of New Citizens, Old Laws is the dilemma of Becoming. Society, in making itself from day to day, is for ever surpassing itself, outliving itself, destroying itself. Such is the nature of the growth of living things. Such is the nature of the form of life which is a society. To become what it is, society must cease to be what it is.
13.11 It is in the law itself that this tension expresses itself most openly. Law is necessarily out-of-date, made in the past for application in the future. Law is also necessarily retroactive, since the law-maker cannot know the actual situation in which the law will be applied. Law is applied because it has already been made. Law is made when it is applied.
13.12 Moral judgment is another example of a reciprocating new citizens/old laws process. Moral judgments are always arbitrary and inappropriate, having regard to the infinite specificity of actual given moral situations. But it is the generic identity of actual moral situations that makes categorical moral judgment possible and necessary.
14. The Generic Principles of the Constitution
14.1 Given the self-constituting of humanity in the self-socializing of society and given the structure-system of society as a specific process of dialectical development, it is possible to identify working principles of a society's constitution. Once again, it must be made clear that such principles are categorical, not substantive in character. They are generic, not inherent. They are an operating programme not a compendium of values. They are the operating programme of social power.
14.2 The following are such generic principles.
(1) Law is an integral part of the total social process of society. It cannot be understood except as such.
(2) Law is not a set of rules but a process of transformation, containing that which is transformed, that which transforms, that which becomes.
(3) Legal power is a form of social power, so that all legal power is delegated power, delegated by society to serve its purposes.
(4) It follows also that all legal power is intrinsically limited power, limited by the fact of delegation and by the principle of social purpose.
(5) Since legal power is social power organized with a view to generating conforming willed action by human individuals, all social power is subject to legal power.
(6) Since legal power is social power, that is, power transformed to serve the social interest, all legal power is subject to the social interest.
(7) It follows from all that above that the exercise of all social power, including legal power, is accountable to society. Through accountability power which has been socialized and then actualized re-enters the system as potentiality.
14.3 If there is a principle of all principles it is, perhaps, that public interest is to social systems what gravity is to physical systems. The entropy of social systems is anarchy. A social system counteracts two tendencies - a tendency to disintegrate into the subjectivity (including the irrationality) of the inner world of the human individual and a tendency to disintegrate into the materiality (including the bestiality) of the natural world of the universe of all-that-is. Each society, including self-socializing humanity, orders itself by ordering those other worlds with the energizing force of public interest, a force which seems to be drawn from the self-ordering of both those other worlds.