Życie społeczne jako proces praktyki

Abstract

In textbooks, sociology is usually treated as a study of society, and society in turn is regarded as the object of its research and analysis. However, the discussion of society itself provokes fierce theoretical disputes. At the heart of these disputes is the fundamental – one might say Kantian – question of how society is possible at all. The concept of society was and to a large extent still is identified with the nation-state, both with its mechanisms of internal control, its external relations with other states (societies) and the shaping of a form of collective identity. Irrespective of the adopted theoretical perspectives, the basis for the description and analysis of society understood in such a way is – as Ulrich Beck emphasises – its perception as a specific container, encompassing all social relations and processes. However, the situation is changing with the development of globalisation. Globalisation considerably weakens the obviousness of treating the nation-state as the natural reference for the concept of society. There emerges the idea of a global society as well as new challenges for sociological theory. Therefore, the concept of society itself becomes problematic. It opens up new conceptual categories, but it also poses a much more fundamental question about the subject of sociology, about “what constitutes that which is social”. The solution of such an important problem can be found in another, widely known tradition of thought, which attempts to answer the above question, and at the same time to deal with the contemporary “great challenges of social sciences”. The most consistent attempt to analyse the challenges facing sociology and social sciences was made by Immanuel Wallerstein. The specificity of social sciences, according to Wallerstein, is connected with their internal differentiation and their location in relation to natural sciences and humanities. The deterministic and universalistic image of the social world inherent in them was thus attacked on the one hand by the humanities and the cultural studies developing within their framework, and on the other hand by the natural sciences together with the science of complexity. According to Wallerstein, the changes in both the natural sciences and the humanities, by bringing them closer to each other and to the social sciences, create the contemporary methodological image of science and in this respect impose new demands on the social sciences. Meeting these demands is necessary if sociology and the social sciences in general want to understand the process of globalisation leading to “the end of the world as we know it”. The key element for Wallerstein are the methodological consequences of the development of complexity science, leading to the gradual erosion of the classical, Newtonian model of science and the convergence of natural and social sciences. As a consequence, the Newtonian understanding of the world as a deterministic mechanism, subject to complete description in the form of scientific laws, is replaced by its more complex picture. Disturbances play an important role in the world, and one of the key problems is to explain the process of complexity. Complex systems are characterised by self-organisation, which means that their macroscopic description cannot be deduced from the mere description of their elements. At the same time, the analysis of complex systems is a distinctive feature of the social sciences. Due to the specificity of the object of study of the social sciences, the conceptual framework developed in the study of complex evolving systems, according to Wallerstein, presents a coherent set of ideas for these sciences. This new perspective, combining the approach of natural and social sciences, has – in my opinion – its roots in the tradition of considering social life as a process of practice. In its philosophical expression, global practice is a self-organising process of simultaneous self-creation of the subject and object. Such a perspective, present – although differently expressed – in the Hegel’s and Marx’s tradition, can be reinterpreted in terms of systems thinking, which includes the understanding of the mechanisms of self-organisation. This is particularly true of the theory of dynamic systems and the idea of autopoietic systems. The cognitive consequences resulting from their development allow us to look at the idea of the process of social practice in a new way, both from a philosophical and sociological perspective. Thus, in this book I attempt to analyse the idea of the process of social practice in the works of Georg Hegel and Karl Marx, as well as different ways of interpreting Marx’s thought in this regard. I also recall the basic ideas present in systems thinking and connected to the development of complexity science, especially the chaos theory and autopoietic systems. I discuss the basic assumptions of Niklas Luhmann’s social system theory, an example of sociological application of the idea of autopoietic system. I show the theoretical-cognitive consequences of the systems thinking understood in such a way. Consequently, I propose a certain understanding of the process of practice as a philosophical and social category. The recognition of the theoretical perspective, combining – referring to Hegel – the Marxian interpretation of social life as a global process of practice, at the same time constituting the subject and the object and realised in concretehistorical conditions, together with the theoretical consequences of the systems approach, allows the dual definition of practice itself, as – at the same time – a philosophical category and a social practice; it enables to link its anti-subjectocentric understanding with the recognition of rational subjective actions as the basis of its social manifestation. The philosophical understanding of practice as constituting the subject and the object, constituting – in the language of systems theory – both the system and the environment, captures it as a process “without the subject”. Practice and the environment in which it is carried out are constituted simultaneously. Practice in its evolutionary process is co-determined at the same time by its own structure and the structure of its object. The perception of the environment of the system is thus delivered through practice, and in the unity of cognition and practice. The very distinction between the system and environment exists only in the process of practice. It is the intra-systemic operations inherent in the process of practice that co-determine the structural coupling of the system with the environment. Reality (actuality) is thus a function of these operations. It is an internal correlate of practice, and not a property inherent in the objects of cognition. The logic of observation and the resulting description do not reflect the logic of the observed phenomenon, but rather the logic of the process of practice and the unity of practice and cognition. Practice thus constitutes the cognitive horizon: the world as it is in itself (outside practice) and the world given in the process of practice cannot be distinguished. Social life as a process of practice is, in turn, a totality of subjective and rational activities which together form a holistic structure of a diachronic nature. This totality is internally structured. Practice is the structure of social relations, and the objective conditions of practice are formed by the so-called material social relations (basic practice), that is, the relations into which people enter in the process of production and exchange. Their reproduction is the basis for the reproduction of the whole of social relations. However, the basis for the reproduction of social practice are the subjective premises of social practice, i.e. the conscious (cultural) regulators of rational actions. It follows from this that such premises should also be at the basis of the change of social practice.