Friday, March 9, 2018

The Value of Sociality

The third area of fundamental value for us as human beings which I will discuss is that of what I will refer to as sociality. Sociality is the way we are related to other selves as selves. It involves culture and communication. I have already noted that I believe we develop as selves through sociality, but I will not presuppose that here. Instead, I hope that this post helps motivate my earlier stated view.

To begin with, notice that all of our arguments thus far could be run from any point of view and remain valid. This means that we must recognize others acceptance of those arguments as valid. This does not yet get us the claim that we should all value each others' lives.

Language is an essential part of sociality. It is a manifestation of culture and a means of communication. In language, all that we can refer to are shared realities. That is, any term we can learn a word for is a term which multiple of us can understand the use of. Thus, when any of us claim to be aware, awareness must be understood as something which both hearer and speaker are aware of if the term is to have meaning. This eliminates the possibility of a consistent solipsism, or at least of arguing consistently for solipsism.

Now, the value which attaches to my life for me attaches to it in virtue of its being, not just my having a world, but there being a world. The methodological solipsism through which that argument works is such that it operates as if each life correlates with a world, so that the value of a life is the value of the world it correlates with. Such worlds are worlds centered on perspectives and interlock with one another in a real, shared world. Thus, the methodological solipsism does not give way to either an epistemological or a metaphysical solipsism.

Because the value of my life is the value of a world, not the value of my having such a world, to be consistent I must also value others' worlds, not merely their valuing their possession of them. I must, then, value others. A brake is placed on this, however, by the fact that it is not as basic a value as my own valuing of my world. The value I place on my own world is the basis on which I build other values. Those further values are then able to compete and interact. Thus, I am not required to treat the lives of others identically to my own, although I am supposed to treat others' lives as equal in value to my own. Each self is in a privileged position with respect to their own lives, such that it is proper for them to act with respect to nearer values more than farther values. Elsewhere I may go into this in more detail, but the basic idea is that, while the values are the same, our proper response to the value of a phenomenon depends on to what extent we ought to notice the phenomenon. Two phenomena can be of equal value and yet one may require greater attention from me in virtue of being "in my face," as it were.

At this point we can say that we ought to value others, and we ought to respond to the values of those close to us in certain, albeit as yet undefined, ways. We can also say that we must presume that terms we share have a shared meaning. One big question remains: must we value interaction with others, which is what both culture and language presuppose?

First, notice that we cannot but interact with others. We are born, and if we are to become anything like what we are supposed to become, we must be raised by other humans. As soon as we are born, we begin to learn language, and are thus inextricably entangled in a culture.

Some children are literally raised by wolves and survive, albeit not in a manner most of us would recognize as flourishing. Such humans still have the same human nature which we might say should have given rise to sociality. Furthermore, such humans still utilize aspects of their social capacity to learn from the creatures around them by mimicking them. Thus, even in cases where the capacity is starved, it is naturally utilized as much as possible.

This brings me to another point: sociality includes learning. To learn any skill requires one of two things: either another who can teach or the ability to engage in a subject with an experimental attitude. In the first case, we take what the teacher offers and incorporate it into how we live. In the second case, however, we still operate through a latent sociality. This is because the experimental attitude through which we discern what actions will produce what effects involves an abstraction from ourselves. Skills are not merely abilities, nor are they merely learned abilities. Rather, a skill is distinct from a conditioned behavior by opening on a world of values and reasons. To learn a skill is to have the world articulated in a new manner, one which provides a new way of thinking about a subject. To find a new way of thinking requires the ability to entertain hypotheses and imagine what would make one wrong. To learn a new way of thinking, likewise, involves learning what those who have the skill consider when they utilize their skill.

Skills, then, involve acquiring others as interlocutors within oneself. To learn a skill from a teacher involves gaining from the teacher that teacher's manner of thinking, mediated through language and bodily action, and thus involves acquiring a way of talking and acting which belongs in the first place to the teacher but now also to oneself.

None of this is to say that we should be with others all the time. However, since sociality includes learning, and insofar as language use is a skill (and, in some ways it is, along with walking, the prototypical skill, although it is in other ways sui generis), we all carry others along with us wherever we are. We are never purely alone by ourselves, but ourselves always include others who have taught us and whose way of thinking is carried with us.

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