Everyone is prone to some form of addiction. Most often, we are dependent on public opinion, which influences the formation of our stereotypes and lifestyle. What is social dependency And is it worth it to fight?

To begin with, it should be clarified that two terms should not be confused: “dependence on social networks” and “social addiction”. Psychologists have begun to deal with addiction to social networks quite recently. The growth in demand for such a resource has led to the fact that a lot of teenagers and young people have become dependent on virtual communication. The reason for this can be called some hidden complexes and unfulfilled desires that everyone has. Social networks provide an opportunity for communication, which, for certain reasons, is not enough in real life. In them, you can freely communicate with strangers, live a different life, introduce yourself as a different person. Social networks and virtual communication give a certain feeling of psychological security from the opinions of others.

Dependence on social networks is characterized by the fact that a person begins to spend most of his time at the computer monitor, constantly being in a social network. The desire to be interesting to others and constant virtual communication are the main signs of addiction.

Social dependence is different from the above. Here people become completely dependent on public opinion. It is impossible to completely protect yourself from society, so many begin to listen to public opinion. Thus, people begin to change their lives and actions in such a way as to receive approval from others. Since everyone is among other people, almost everyone has a similar addiction.

Another negative manifestation of social dependence is the inability to make decisions independently. Thus, a person simply follows the stereotypes that have already formed in his head: “my decision does not mean anything”, “we must listen to the opinions of others”. Social dependence forces people to submit to the system: without instructions and examples from the outside, it is not possible to work.

Social addiction greatly affects self-esteem. People become completely dependent on the evaluation of others. If a person is constantly praised, supported, called beautiful and smart, as a result he will receive an inflated self-esteem. To underestimate self-esteem - constant criticism will be more than enough. No one is born with a formed personality. In the process of forming their own "I", people constantly listen to others, to their opinion, as if trying on other people's requirements, opinions and feelings. Thus, we ourselves create our dependence on others.

Social addiction requires not only the fight against it, but also its awareness. Since each of us depends on the opinions of others to one degree or another, it can be advised to simply understand that others do not care about our lives. No need to make excuses for your actions and mistakes. Only parents and very close people can really worry about us.

To get rid of social dependence, you should understand what exactly it can attract, and why it is so difficult to give up your usual life. Like any habit, social addiction can be replaced with something else that is harmless to the psyche. Psychologists often advise choosing a few new hobbies that will help shift your attention to other aspects of life. There are new interests that cover new areas of life, hitherto unknown.

Relaxation also helps to get rid of social dependence very well.. To do this, you can go to nature, take a walk in the forest or go fishing. You can do handicrafts. You just have to try to be alone, and it's not so scary. Over time, everyone realizes that social dependence and the opinions of others should not affect his life.

Before proceeding to further consideration of the problem of relations, it is necessary to dwell on the clarification of the problem of social dependencies. Without going into the general definition of dependence, which can be found in the textbooks of general methodology, we emphasize that the term "social dependence" can mean either dependencies that arise between people living in the same society, or dependencies arising from conscious influences on each other as members society. These are two different questions. In the first case, the expression "A depends on B" means that A in his undertakings must take into account the existence of B, with his circle of rights and obligations, that the existence of B creates a certain framework for A's undertakings. Dependence here arises from a common belonging to an organized system. In the second case, the expression "A depends on B" means that B can directly impose a certain behavior on A. In other words: in the first case, we are dealing with a structural-functional dependence arising from the fact that A and B operate within the same structure; in the other case, with an intentional dependence arising from B's immediate intentions in relation to A and - an essential condition - from the possibility of realizing these intentions, which B has. This essential condition allows for a broader definition of social dependence, as Cheslav Znamerovsky did: “B depends on A when A has the ability to perform

some action that creates a state of affairs that affects B, and some state of affairs that concerns one B, whether it is a state of the body or soul of this B, or the state of his affairs (stan jego tworzywa). In other words, B depends on A for certain items or values ​​that are important to B but are at the mercy of A.

This definition has many advantages. It covers both structural-functional and intentional dependencies, without specifying, however, whether A and B are in direct contact, whether they are aware of their dependence, whether they mutually define each other and establish interaction with each other on the basis of this subjective definition. Consequently, it covers dependencies due to belonging to economic, political, religious and other systems, as well as intentional dependencies arising from moral, customary norms governing social relations.

The concept of dependence plays an important role in sociology in that the analysis of dependence is the basis for establishing laws. For the question arises whether social dependencies, being dependencies arising from the possibility of forming someone else's behavior, allow us to explore ourselves in the same way as the dependencies between objects, phenomena and processes occurring in nature, and therefore, whether it is possible to establish permanent dependency laws that allow us to make predictions . We mention this here only to emphasize the importance of the concept of dependence in sociological analysis, without intending to discuss this problem in more depth.

We emphasize that we are talking here about "social dependencies" and about "social relations", and not about dependencies and relations in general, which is why the addition of the adjective "social" introduces an essential qualitative characteristic.

Let us now return to the consideration of social relations and pose the question: is it possible to put an equal sign between these concepts? We think not. Dependence is a certain element of social relations, but it does not exhaust it. A social relationship is a complex system in which a certain dependence arises between partners, arising from the nature of the link and from the nature of duties, but the relationship is also something more than a system of dependencies. In colloquial language, we would say that addiction is one of the relationships that bind people. This is just an abbreviated way of saying. When we say, for example, that A and B are connected by a relationship of service dependence, we mean that A is the leader of B, that they are partners in a relationship in which A is the leader and B is the performer, that the connecting link between them is institutionalized activity. a certain kind, that within the framework of their mutual duties towards each other, they realize some tasks and that in this division of labor A performs guiding functions. Service dependency is only one of the elements of this system, since their relationship covers much more than just service dependency.

We introduce here only the concept of social relations, without trying to carry out either classifications or systematizations. Relationship theory is an important area of ​​general sociology. After all, they are the main component of the social connection that unites groups and other social communities.

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Moscow 1969
Translated from Polish by M. M. Gurenko Ya. Shchepansky ELEMENTARY CONCEPTS OF SOCIOLOGY Editor O. Popov Artist

From the publisher
The book “Elementary Concepts of Sociology” brought to the attention of the reader was written by Jan Szczepanski, a well-known public figure, a prominent Polish scientist, president of the International Sociological

Subject and scope of sociological research
Generally speaking, the subject of sociological research is the phenomena and processes of the emergence of various forms of joint life of people, the structures of various forms of human communities occurring in

Sociology and other social sciences
Even this cursory enumeration of the branches of sociology shows that it must maintain close contacts and cooperate with other social sciences. Therefore, for the sociologist

Philosophical and methodological premises of sociology
Sociology, like any science, relies on a certain set of basic premises relating to the reality it studies. First of all, these are ontological prerequisites, that is, talking about how

Objectives of the present work
This work is not a systematic reference to sociology and does not represent the results of research and the state of knowledge in certain areas of specific or general sociology. She serve

Bibliographic index
COMMENT. In addition to the works indicated in the notes, which give a broader idea or supplement information about the problems under consideration (mainly works in Polish), bibliographic indications

Natural foundations of social life
The study of human societies and the phenomena and processes occurring in them begins with the study of the basic conditions in which they arise and which determine their "life". We distinguish between natural, economical

The concept of social life
We will use the concept of "social life" to denote a complex of phenomena arising from the interaction of individuals and communities located in a certain limited space. Floor volume

Animal communities
The study of animal communities is even more interesting for sociology, since stable connections can be seen in animals based on the connection of motives that have

Biological foundations of human social life
We refer to the biological foundations of social life, the features of the human body, the physiological processes occurring in it, the mechanism of inheritance of properties, impulses,

Geographic conditions of social life
Another set of factors that make up the natural foundations of social life are geographic, or, more broadly, geophysical conditions. Man is a zoological species. He lives n

Demographic foundations of public life
Speaking about the biological foundations of social life, we had in mind the biological processes that occur in the body of individuals and determine their mental, and as a result, social processes.

Bibliographic index
"Historical Materialism", Ed. corresponding member Academy of Sciences of the USSR Konstantinova F.V.. 2nd ed., M., 1954, chapter II. Robert Bierstedt, The Social Order, New York, 1957, ch. II. "The Na

public life
As a biological organism, man is a part of nature. But this belonging to the world of nature is not a condition that completely determines his activity and his social life. For man put on

Bibliographic index
Oskar Lange, Ekonomia polityczna, t. I, Warszawa, 1961. Z. Madej, 0 funkcjonowaniu gospodarki socjalistycznej, Warszawa, 1963. Andrzej Malewski, Empiryczny sens te

Definitions
It is difficult to imagine a term more ambiguous and more widespread than "culture". This term appears in many meanings not only in everyday language, but also in various sciences, and in philosophy.

Internal structure of culture
Culture is always localized in space and in society. It does not exist outside of human communities. However, several distinctions must be made. Namely, one should distinguish between the personal culture of the Indian

Bibliographic index
J. Chalasinski, Kultura amerykariska, Warszawa, 1962. O. Kosven, Essays on the history of primitive culture, Ed. 2nd, M., 1957 V. G. Childe, Postep a archeologia, Warsza

Sociological concept of man and personality
The reasons why sociology should deal with the problems of the human personality are very simple; social life is a set of phenomena and processes occurring between people, therefore, especially

Various theories of man
The seemingly simple question, what is a person, was answered by theology, philosophy, anthropology, both physical and cultural and philosophical, psychology and sociology. Theological views

The concept of human nature
The concept of human nature was formulated by philosophers and psychologists of the earliest times, who believed that each person has the same, in principle, mental or psycho

The Problem of Instincts
This problem has troubled the social sciences for many years. Around 1860-1925 there were discussions about the role of instincts in human behavior. These discussions were

Social personality and its constituent elements
We are now aware of the complexity of the problem. On the one hand, the progress of research into the biological and physiological mechanisms of human behavior, then experimental psychology

Integration of personality elements
The biogenic, psychogenic and sociogenic elements of the personality, which are presented above separately, as if in a dissected form, are mutually adapted to each other, are conjugated and constitute an integral unit.

Bibliographic index
N. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills, Charakter and Social Structure, New York, 1953. N. Gross, W. S. Mason and A. W. McEachern, Explorations in Role Analysis, New York, 1958.

social connection
In the course of the previous presentation, we touched on the problems of the natural, economic and cultural foundations of social life. We also outlined the process of formation of a person's personality in e

Spatial contact
Any relationship between people should begin with some kind of contact in space, with mutual observation and with the establishment of the fact of possession of one of the individual

Psychic contact
Observations of certain traits may prompt an interest in them. This interest is born on the basis of the already existing needs of the observer. Not prejudging at the moment

social contact
Mental contact can turn into social contact if A and B meet and begin to interact with each other in order to achieve an exchange of values, regardless of whether

Interactions
Interactions develop on the basis of social contacts. Social contact already involves a certain amount of action, but these actions refer to an object or other value that is

social actions
Here we must dwell in more detail on the characteristics of the social actions themselves. Following the general theory formulated by F. Znaniecki, we consider social actions or actions as

social relations
Interactions lead to the formation of stable social relations. We should start by defining what we mean by this so ambiguous term. Under the influence of

We have said that social relations are the main element of the social connection that maintains the stability and internal cohesion of groups. A relationship lasts as long as its long

social control
Considering institutions, we said that they are an integral element of the system of social control. What is control and what is its relation to social bonding? Let's start with the "naive" questions. Ka

social organization
In this chapter, we have focused on Tim, how the social bond that unites communities is created and maintained. Metaphorically speaking, this connection is, as it were, a system of ropes and threads entwining the members

social connection
We have thus completed the analysis of the complex of factors, forces and phenomena that form a social bond. At the beginning of this chapter, we defined a relationship as a collection of relationships and dependencies

Bibliographic index
E. T. Hiller, Social Relations and Struktures, New York, 1947. R. T. LaPierre, A Theory of Social Control, New York, 1954. F. Znanieski, Social Organization and In

Definitions
The social connection connects individuals into certain stable associations, which can act in different forms and different forms. Let us dwell on what forms of such stable associations we m

General characteristics of the community
After these introductory remarks and after the introduction of the basic terms, let us move on to a more detailed characterization of the individual types of community. Pair or two. This is the shape

Group structure
All these constituent elements of the group are located in a certain way that ensures the functioning of the group. We call the system of constituent elements of a group and the principle of their mutual ordering a structure.

Group types
Many different classifications of groups can be found in the sociological literature. American sociologist Eubank (E. E. Eubank), who collected and analyzed ways of classifying groups, meetings

Target groups
The family is a special type of social life that satisfies purely personal needs, which, however, are extremely important for the stability of the group, therefore their satisfaction is of interest and finds

Bureaucracy
In considering the target groups, we must also consider a phenomenon that has arisen from them and has become of great importance in modern societies, namely the bureaucracy. In the sociological sense of this

Territorial communities
We call territorial communities those communities whose members are bound by ties of common relations to the territory in which they live, and by ties of relations arising from the fact of living in a common

Communities identified on the basis of culture individuals
These communities are sometimes also called ethnic. We refer to them tribes, nationalities, nations. Evolutionists created a theory of the development of ethnic communities, according to which the family was their beginning.

Commonalities Based on Similarity in Behavior
With such a complex name, we define a number of relatively free social formations, which, however, can sometimes develop an amazing ability for activity, without possessing and

Global Society
In the course of the foregoing presentation, we very often used the terms "society" or "global society" without defining them more precisely. In addition, the term "society" is used in everyday language and in

Ontological problems of social reality
In the course of consideration of communities, groups, we repeatedly had the question: what exactly is a social group? Is it the sum of the individuals that compose it, or is it due to the fact

Bibliographic index
Wilson Logan, The Sociography of Groups, in: Twentieth Century Sociology, 1945, p. 139-171. F. Znanieski, Social Groups in the Moderns World, in: M. Vergeri in. eds., Freedom and Control in Modern S

social processes
Let us briefly recall the content of the previous presentation: on natural and economic foundations, as well as within the framework of a certain culture, human personalities are formed; satisfying your needs,

The concept of social process
We will call processes a relatively homogeneous series of phenomena connected by mutual causal or structural-functional dependencies. For example, the growth of an organism is a process, since

social mobility
The next category of life processes occurring in communities are mobility processes. Let's distinguish between horizontal and vertical mobility. To horizontal mobility m

Bibliographic index
M.H. Neumeyer, Social Problems and the Changing Society, New York, 1953 R. E. L. Faris, Social Disorganization, 1955 D.R. Taft and R. Robbins, International Migrations, New York,

Technical and scientific inventions
Technical inventions usually arise through new ways of combining already existing elements of technology and their gradual modification. Therefore, technical inventions have a cumulative character.

Interpenetration of cultures
The uneven development of individual societies is a historical fact, and we will not be concerned here with its explanation. From it follows an important process called the diffusion of cultures, which consists in the exchange

social movements
Social movements usually arise on the basis of economic and cultural changes, on the basis of transformations in the material basis of society, or on the basis of new ideas brought in from other societies. Traces

Law as a factor of social development
All reform and revolutionary movements strive to consolidate the changes carried out in the form of laws. From a sociological point of view, law is a set of formalized

social progress
Around the problem of progress there were also many discussions and polemics. Some theories of social progress assume that development is also progress, then

Bibliographic index
H. G. Bamett, Innovation: The Basis of Cultural Change, New York, 1953. S. C. Gi1fi1an, The Sociology of Invention, Chicago, 1935. M. Ginsberg, The Idea of ​​Progress, Boston, 195

Afterword
The author of this book is a prominent Polish scientist and public figure, director of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of Poland, president of the International Sociological Association. Released back in 1965

industrial society- a society that has replaced the traditional, agrarian society and in which the main production is not agricultural, but industrial (industrial) goods, where the urban population prevails and most of it is employed in industry.

Integration- the process of mutual adaptation, expansion of economic cooperation between the national economies of two or more states, leading to the formation of a single economic complex.

Keynesianism- The theory of J. M. Keynes and the policy based on it, characteristic of the period of industrial development. The emphasis is on active government intervention in the economy, on encouraging demand so that mass production of standard products is matched by mass consumption. The main thing is the fight against unemployment (and not against inflation). Therefore, the state must increase public spending and not be afraid of inflation, which pushes for the expansion of production, absorbing unemployment.

Clientelism(from Latin "client") - a form of social dependence of a person (client) on the owner (patron).

Communism- political ideology (one of the variants of the ideology of socialism), stands for the achievement of the ideal of social justice through revolutionary violence, social revolution, the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the elimination of private property and the bourgeoisie as a class; aims to build a communist society in the future. Communism became the ideological basis for the establishment of totalitarian communist regimes.

Conservatism- political ideology, which puts fidelity to traditions and order in the first place; defends private property as the basis of stability in society; among democratic principles, he gives primacy to the idea of ​​the independence of the judiciary; considers inevitable injustice and inequality in the world; stands for state support, patriotism and the dissemination of religious values, which, according to conservatism, should ensure justice and high moral behavior of a person. Variants of the ideology of conservatism are neo-conservatism and Christian democracy.

Corporatism- one of the options for organizing power in a fascist state using a system of corporations.

Leninism(Marxism-Leninism) - a political ideology based on an attempt by V. I. Lenin to adapt the ideas of Marxism to the revolutionary activities of the Bolsheviks in Russia. If K. Marx believed that the transition to socialism as a result of the revolution should take place in the most developed countries, where the positions of the working class are strong, then V. I. Lenin put forward the idea of ​​the victory of socialism in a single country - Russia with a predominantly peasant population, which should become an outpost for advancing the world socialist revolution.

Liberalization- weakening state control.

Liberalism- a political ideology that puts human freedom in the first place; upholds the principle "Everything that is not prohibited by law is allowed"; protects private property as the basis of personal freedom and freedom of trade; proclaims the need for social reforms to smooth out contradictions in society; stands for the introduction of the principles of liberal democracy (separation of powers, independence of the judiciary, free competitive elections, etc.), which, according to liberalism, ensure freedom of choice and responsibility of a person and thus serve as the basis for establishing justice in society and the basis for high moral behavior of a person .

Maoism- the ideas of Mao Zedong, based on the approaches of Marxism and Leninism. What Maoism has in common with Marxism and Leninism is the slogan of the elimination of private property and capitalism, the idea of ​​a world socialist revolution. The difference between Maoism and Marxism and Leninism is that the main revolutionary force in the world is not the working class, but the peasantry and the poorest sections of the population; the world revolution must unfold not in the developed, but in the poorest countries; an accelerated transition to communism is possible with the help of paramilitary communes.

Marginal- located on the edge, on the sidelines.

Marxism- one of the variants of the political ideology of communism. In a broad sense - a system of philosophical, economic and socio-political views, the founders of which are K. Marx and F. Engels. Includes philosophical materialism and materialist dialectics, a materialist understanding of history (the theory of social formations, the rationale for the economic laws of the movement of capitalist society, the theory of classes and class struggle, the theory of the proletarian revolution, the transition to a communist society). There are various interpretations of Marxism - Leninism, Eurocommunism, Maoism, etc.

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Social dependence is a social relationship in which the social system St (can be an individual, a group or a social institution) cannot perform the social actions necessary for it 1b if the social system S2 does not perform actions d2 - In this case, the system 32 will be called dominant, and the system St - dependent.

The term social dependence can reflect two aspects of the problem: firstly, the dependences that arise between people living in society, and secondly, the dependences arising from the conscious influences of people on each other as representatives of society. In the first case, the expression A depends on B means that A in his undertakings must take into account the existence of B, with his circle of rights and obligations, that the existence of B creates a certain framework for A's undertakings.

The theory of social dependencies is closely related to the theory of obligations. Awareness by agents of social dependencies, as a rule, leads to the assumption of obligations. In RII, commitments are usually viewed as cognitive structures. Therefore, the analysis of obligations is carried out within the framework of the theory of knowledge representation and manipulation. Commitments are not agreements, although there is a close relationship between them. In some cases, there may be agreements without obligations and obligations without agreements. This paper explains the difference between collective and social obligations. In addition, the collective obligation is not always equivalent to the sum of the individual obligations.

How social dependence is classified based on the type of its functioning. What is the difference between structural and latent types of dependence.

There are no definitions of collective dependence in the theory of social dependencies: dependence of one agent on a group and dependence of a group of agents on one agent.

In the theory of social dependencies, two main types of dependencies are considered: 1) dependence in relation to action and 2) dependence in relation to a resource. Denote by AST (a) the set of all actions that agent a is capable of performing, and by RES (aj) the set of all resources available to him. Let pl (aj) be the action plan of the agent & to achieve his goal Oj. In practice, most often the set of individual resources and the repertoire of individual actions of the agent ai are insufficient for the implementation of the plan.

On the basis of these social dependencies, all social life is built both at the micro and macro levels. The question arises: to what extent this dependence determines the behavior and consciousness of a person. Or - to what extent the individual influences the social environment and changes it.

In standard social dependency theory, only one needy agent and only one provider of resources are considered in defining a dependency relationship. Situations involving multiple agents needing the same resource and multiple providers of that resource are not modeled. Also, the possibilities of collective use of resources and simultaneous assistance to one agent by several agents are not taken into account. In other words, dependency relationships are considered independently of each other.

In this regard, the relations of social dependence and power are the main ones in the analysis of social structures and processes taking place in them.

If we analyze the above two aspects of social dependence, we will establish that in both cases, a person (or group) builds his behavior in accordance with these dependencies, behind which are empirical individuals. Thus, the behavior of the subject becomes socially oriented.

The imperialists are trying to keep the former colonies in networks of economic and social dependence, to slow down their social and cultural progress. However, the peoples do not intend to remain the object of imperialist exploitation. They seek to consolidate and strengthen their independence, they are looking for a path of economic and social development that would enable them to solve the complex problems facing them in the shortest possible time. They see before them a real example of how the national outskirts of Russia, oppressed by tsarism, relying on the support of the victorious Russian proletariat, in a short historical period, eliminated economic and cultural backwardness, achieved remarkable achievements in all areas of public life. This can be seen in the example of the Mongolian People's Republic, which is successfully building socialism.

The imperialists are trying to keep the former colonies in networks of economic and social dependence, to slow down their social and cultural progress. However, the peoples do not intend to remain the object of imperialist exploitation.

However, the real crawling out of a separate society, one national economy from the swamp of social dependence is possible only if a sub-periphery is created, i.e. a weaker environment, which in turn will have to give its resources to build the local kernel. Despite the fact that Russia remains a power of regional importance, this is a fairly realistic prospect of countering the expansion of more powerful partners, but it comes into significant conflict with the new political ideologemes of society. Note that the notorious sociological cynicism, in fact, consists in noticing and fixing what is, and not what should be or want to be. We often do not want to notice the humiliating retreats of the state from its previously dominant political, economic, military and other important positions, but victory is impossible without understanding the reasons for the defeat, and the pleasure of being an empire is impossible without expensive pay.

Its essence lies in the fact that the collective activity of any agents is always based on the relationship of social dependencies and public power. It is believed that these are the constituent components of the cognitive structures of agents.

The evolution of social forms

The historicity of the structures of human experience. - Schemes of activity as links of being and standards of communication. – Development of elements of social thinking. – Formation of the concept of an isolated individual, abstract social connection, social quality of things. - Isolation of abstract forms of the social process and the possibility of the emergence of social science. – Economics as a metaphysics of social production. – Social being in the temporal dimension. – Social science and real abstractions for building his paintings. – The search for scales to characterize the social process.

§ 1. The origin of habitual schemes

Until quite recently, the idea of ​​“neutral” or unchanging forms, which, in contrast to specialized scientific or practical forms, exist as a kind of constant values ​​of human existence, was widespread, including in philosophy.

New cultural schematisms are attached to them or built on top of them, but they themselves remain constant measures of human activity, naturally accompanying the actions of every normal person.

Only in recent decades, this view has begun to be crowded out by scientific provisions and practical assumptions related to the understanding that it is the forms of everyday behavior and thinking that must change, and change faster, so that people solve the problems of modern life with less stress.

The feeling of novelty of the changing forms of human activity was reinforced in scientific studies of the archaic history of mankind, in a careful description of the first months and years of the formation of the human personality.

It turned out that both in the history of the genus and in the history of the individual, patterns of behavior, before becoming natural norms for a person, had to go through a long study in the communication and activities of people. Only then did they acquire the meaning of quasi-natural automatisms of human behavior, only then could they "hide" the historicity of their origin. The independent use of human objects by a one-year-old child in this case seems quite natural. And an attempt by a person to introduce a new scheme of action, if it does not fit into existing forms of communication, can be regarded as unnatural. In general, individual innovation of this kind is, apparently, a relatively late product of human history: at first, such neoplasms were actually evolutionary in nature and went “above” the slow flow of human everyday life. The history of reproduction and the history of modification of the patterns of human activity gradually diverged. In the division of the joint activities of people, this divergence became quite evident over time.

The discrepancies and contradictions of ordinary reason and scientific logic are just a problem indicating that the pace and rhythms of ordinary and scientific thinking have ceased to be combined, have acquired their own special “metric”, and have presented different requirements to people. Each of these ways of understanding reality began to develop its own history, and each of these stories depended on people in its own way, was built into their consciousness in its own way, dictated to them its own logic of thinking and behavior.

In the foreground of the history of forms of human activity is the growing variety of schematisms of human behavior, the linking of these schemas into various "bundles", "rows", aggregates, etc. But the historicism of these schemes is most clearly seen in the change in the nature of man's attitudes towards these schemes at different stages of social evolution, towards their role in the life and development of the human individual.

In the early stages of social history, the individual accepts patterns of activity as the natural law of his being. He actually identifies himself with the sequence of schemes that the clan offers him: a person is formed and lives as an individual embodiment of a clan ritual, a clan myth, repeating (and thereby preserving) long-established forms of communication and action in his behavior.

In the course of the development of the practical possibilities of society, a rigid schematization of the behavior of individuals becomes difficult and further inappropriate. Schemes are developed that specify only general forms of interaction between people in accordance with special social positions, types of occupations, and generalized situations. So, for example, in the field of morality, the strict regulation of prohibitions is replaced by a number of basic commandments, and those, in turn, are concentrated in generalized norms and principles of human relationships. Relatively speaking, “master schemes”, which completely subordinated human behavior, give way to “landmark schemes”, outlining a person’s field of life and activity, highlighting a vivid image of the world ahead of him or surrounding him. Naturally, there is a distance between "chart-schemes", "schemes-symbols" - on the one hand, and everyday human experience - on the other. A person has to adapt on his own to his life the schemes of activity at his disposal: now, at the individual level, the problem of mastering and developing life forms arises, and therefore the problem of an individual path, a special human biography, personal choice.

A century ago, this problem seemed peripheral to the life of the bulk of people, to society, and was described and perceived in an individualistic and romantic spirit. However, the pace of social change forced society and individuals to take a different look at it, because the ability of people to transform the patterns of their activity has become one of the necessary conditions for maintaining a normal human existence. "Schemes-landmarks" and "schemes-standards", thus, become dependent on the self-realization of people, on the agreed, but dynamic and changeable process of their event.

So far, I am only sketching the plot of a person's relationship with the forms of the social process to which he submits, which he reproduces, changes, and creates. It is important to emphasize the involvement of the person himself in the development of these forms, their conjugation with the "internal" and "external" life of human individuals, with the schemes of their activity, communication, and consciousness. The evolution of these forms in time is diverse and in a certain sense is analogous to biological evolution, if, of course, we have in mind not the structures of organisms, but the patterns of their behavior. It is diversely represented in the space of human history, in various geographic, ethnic, national systems of human interaction.

Here we are faced not only with variations of “schema-standards”, “schemes-guidelines”, “schemes-concepts”, but also with unequal needs in the schematization of social forms, with preferences of “schemes-images” “schemes-signs” or “schemes -concepts" "schemes-symbols".

Culturologists, for example, have noticed that in the Russian logos preference is given to "schemes-symbols", that there is a certain a priori preference for indefiniteness (not-before-definiteness) over certainty, that "schemes-orientations" open up some space of thought or action, but do not outline specific contours of the field of application of human forces. In such a logos, there is and continues to be an attitude to overcome narrow, "schematic" definitions that highlight and emphasize the minimum of features of objects. On the contrary, it is assumed that the object is not subject to definition, the inability of definition to be an expression of the being of the object. Such a fluid, blurry, unfixed vision of nature, sociality, and man is, of course, supported by the real behavior of people, which contradictorily combines creative openness and the absence of traditions of clear objective thinking.

The clarity of the schemes of human activity and their substantive meanings indirectly points to the practical elaboration of these schemes, to their formation in history. Thousands of years pass before a person begins to distinguish himself from those connections and dependencies, according to the forms (or logic) of which he acts. There must be great and lasting changes in the experience and culture of mankind before people begin to look at things through the prism of connections and actions that use these things. The vision of a wheel in rotational processes and a circle in a wheel - no matter how we relate to the problem of authorship - is a vision developed by generations. This is a scheme-idea that permeated the experience of not only an individual. And in this regard, the form is not psychological, but a form developed, modified by people in the course of its use, a historical and cultural form.

Accounting for the changing "life" of the patterns of human activity makes it possible, albeit tentatively so far, to say that any human experience, any human psyche, any "common" sense contains more or less definite structures, developed or perceived. The human psyche inevitably turns out to be psychology, for it latently or explicitly contains the logos, the connection of things and people, "passing through" the person. Therefore, it is, at least to a small extent, consciousness, because it connects people's dependencies, strengthens their direct and indirect ties. It turns out that human experience cannot be neutral in the cultural-historical sense, and therefore one cannot simply attach cultural, social, epistemological forms to it, as it seemed to many philosophers and psychologists before.

The problem, therefore, is not to oppose the integrity of (personal first of all) experience and the clarity of logical, rational, technical, legal schemes. It is to understand why schemes are distinguished from the initially undifferentiated (more precisely, poorly differentiated) experience of people, how it is expressed in terms of external material and practical, how - in terms of conscious-psychic, spiritual, what it gives the human personality, what " takes away" from human individuality.

The problem of the historicism of the schemes of human activity includes one more aspect, which cannot be ignored here. It is about the transition from schema-images to schema-signs, about their genetic connection, about expanding the scope of the latter, about attempts to use schema-signs and their combinations to move from a spatial representation of things and states to sequential expressions of processes and their relationships.

The transition from figurative representations to sign-symbolic expressions should not be understood in this case as a replacement of the first by the second, or as an extension of the latter to the first. Images of human consciousness, since they are included in the jointly divided activity of people, necessarily turn out to be signs, i.e. pointers to cooperating individuals, to the means, methods and possible results of their activities. The image of an object turns out to be, among other things, a sign of a tool, the image of a tool is a sign of another person, the image of a person is a sign of action, the image of action is a sign of communication, etc. It is possible, apparently, to speak about the initial fusion of the image, symbol and sign in the pictorial representation of the object, about some subordination of the symbol and sign to the image, about their “inscription” in the latter. To some extent, probably, this is also connected with the “grasping” of properties and qualities by a person in an object, which are not visually represented in it. Here, probably, lies the possibility of describing objects that are not bodily formed and spatially not defined (or not defined). Having pointed out this possibility, let us return to the actual culturological aspect of the problem.

So, there is a historical trend of "husking" out of complex (albeit undivided) images of schemes-orientations, schemes-meanings that generalize specific images and objects of human activity. At the next stage, abstract, deindividualized patterns of behavior are separated from specific types of activity and stable forms of communication. The simplest, elementary functions become "atoms" from which the interaction of various people can be built. We emphasize that the simplest, "elementary", is not historically initial in this case: "elementary" schemes turn out to be the historical products of an increasingly complex social and human process. In this regard, the problem of schemes turns out to be the problem of their isolation from the directly individual being of people, from the cultural and other features of specific human communities, from the "shop" features of individual activities. This is the problem of working out and, in this sense, cultivating, “cultivating” the everyday experience and behavior of people, creating means of building life that are generally significant and accessible to every person. Such cultivation of the schemes of human activity, of course, contributes to the fragmentation of the pictorial perception of life, dividing it into relatively independent fragments and connections. She also subjects orientation schemes, schemes-meanings to a strict test, “falling through” into their blurring and incompleteness. However, one way or another, such a cultivation of schemes produces elements of social thinking. And it is worth dwelling on this in more detail.

§ 2. Social forms as real abstractions of human experience

The question of the position of people in the social process becomes the subject of special study in the middle of the 2nd millennium AD. Physics then developed coordinate systems to determine things, their positions and interactions. Public practice has cultivated a system of measurements linking and uniting the geographical space of human activity. The social world begins to noticeably change. There is a need for means that determine social evolution, its special phases, steps, transitional states. Attempts are being stimulated to reveal the general logic of social evolution, to determine its line. At the same time, attention is growing to the diversity of human communities and their characteristics. There is a problem of correlations between different social forms, their subordination or inconsistency.

In some European societies, as a result of violent revolutions, economic, political, and legal orders are changing before the eyes of a generation. People directly record social changes, begin to think about the impact of their own actions on social institutions. Thus, the question of the position of a person in the social process gradually grows into a set of questions about the influence of human individuals on social evolution, on the forms in which it proceeds, on that system of measurements that serves to streamline and cognize it. The completion of geographical discoveries establishes the actual commonality of human history. A single space is being formed for the total activity of people, gradually filled with economic interactions, the struggle of political interests, scientific ties and cultural contacts. There is a need to create a common language that describes space, giving geography a social meaning. The map of the world becomes a preliminary blueprint for various human relationships.

There are new opportunities for human forces, cooperation and fixing them in special structures of production, economy, technology, law, science, education. These structures acquire, as it were, an independent existence, they “overgrow” with real, external forms in relation to people, they themselves begin to influence the structure of relations, activities, and thinking of people. They do not just objectify and freeze, like ancient giant structures: they are reproduced, "work" and set a certain cyclical rhythm in people's daily behavior. Moreover, unlike nature-earth, which from time immemorial has accustomed a person to the cycles of its being, they create “organs” or tools that allow changing rhythms and accelerating the pace of human activity, they change and force people to change.

The era of geographical discoveries is ending: the possibilities of discovering new spaces seem to be exhausted. But the era of the discovery of time begins, the discovery of its new sections and dimensions.

Time reveals its meaning of connection between different people. It connects the life of generations, resumes the production of goods, builds the days and labors of an individual. The present time reveals volume, depth and perspective, it never ends, it constantly appears in the role of present continuous time. The activity of people is grouped around it, and already the order of this activity in time, and not the order of things in itself, begins to determine the forms of cooperation between people.

The use of time is associated with an increase in speeds: the movement of things, the manufacture of goods, the transportation of goods, the training of workers, the circulation of capital, the receipt of interest, etc. This kind of competition of different human activities in speed presupposes "pure" time, i.e. time, cleared of all specific human, material, cultural and other signs. The common space and "pure" abstract time of human interactions create conditions for the consolidation of people's activities, for a deeper cultivation of non-human and human nature.

A new stage begins in the domestication of things by man and the formation of his own forces. The new level of penetration of man into the world of things is due to the fact that man has practically prepared the means for using not the things themselves, but individual useful properties extracted from things, connected into rows and systems. He creates special tools and their combinations, mechanisms and machines for "distillation" of specific things into "pure" materials and elements. The interactions of these materials and elements begin to obscure and replace the concrete-material image of the natural world in the human mind.

The ongoing changes cannot but affect the person himself. Having discovered his new relationship with time, he begins to feel and understand himself more and more as the power of being, as its special element, the quintessence, which is not exhausted by any specific - class, physical or guild characteristics. However, the need to condense activity forces him to do with his powers and abilities about the same thing that he does with natural things. He begins to cultivate in himself properties that are not so much the properties of his personality, but the properties of those producing systems - including education, science, politics, culture - into which he is included in the course of his activity. Mastering the "depths" of human nature, cultivating the field of human activity, as it were, is torn off from the direct development of the human personality: the image of personality - as the actual and potential integrity of an individual - is constantly present in the life of a real individual, but as an unmanifested, shadow reflection of it.

The taming by man of his new active forces is possible only if they are taken outward, into the system of generalized space and abstract time, only due to their dressing in an instrumental, thing-like form.

Their formation and development in such forms, of course, poses a threat of “detailing”, “fragmentation” of the concrete existence of human individuals, creates the problem of adapting external social forms to the needs of a particular person.

The changing structures of being can take on complete forms, “closing themselves” in the minds of people, in the structure of their psyche: new structures begin to work only when the corresponding picture of being appears in front of people’s eyes, and the corresponding generalized scheme of the life process begins to function in their activity, or ontology. The new logos of being must take root in the psyche of people, connect external social forms with the realization of some forces of individuals, open access to the organics of the inner being of the individual for some external forms. It is clear that a complete coincidence of external and internal forms does not occur. But some features in the structures of external and "internal" activity of people must coincide or, in any case, clearly correspond to each other, "translate" into each other's language with sufficient completeness.

In this regard, we especially emphasize the formation of developed images of time, procedurality, and continuity in the consciousness of a new European person. These images or schemes turn out to be rather abstract records and projects of activity as a special kind of duration, in successive intervals of which various human forces coalesce, add up and multiply. Such a consciousness of a person flowing in time gives him an understanding, a concept of distant events, an abstract, abstract concept, but nevertheless quite definitely influencing the construction of his behavior by a person. The figurative structure of human consciousness acquires depth and perspective, spatio-material forms are organized by their deployment in time, the question of a person's place in the social world, in fact, is replaced by the question of a person's position in the social process.

The identification of the individuality of a person, his isolation, immersion in the social process, of course, is consistent with the changes taking place in the nature of social ties. They are increasingly losing the meaning of “strings”, which make a person directly dependent on a person, on an estate, on a workshop, on a specific and limited social space. The isolated human individual turns out to be historically singled out precisely from these direct social ties, and, consequently, separated from the direct “attachment” to those forms of activity that were previously associated with his social affiliation.

If we talk about the concept of an individual not in a logical, but in a concrete historical sense, in which it became practically significant for many people, built into new forms of relationships and activities, then it characterized a person primarily as a carrier and owner (subject) of active forces, who has the ability to apply these forces to solving various life problems and is free in this regard both from class restrictions and from direct social support. The being of the individual and his activity were freed from a concrete social form and began to acquire social significance, coming into contact with impersonal means of activity, penetrating through them into the world of abstract social dimensions. In terms of space, the individual appeared in the image of a special acting (and thinking - Descartes) thing (and this was fixed for a long time in everyday consciousness and some philosophical ideas). But in terms of procedural, temporal, a deeper, non-physical meaning of human existence was revealed, and this became one of the most difficult problems of philosophy. The human individual has stood out from the tangle of direct social dependencies, his connection with society, a group, other people has ceased to be direct, tangible, contact. It acquired an indirect character - through the conditions, means, results and the process of activity itself. It became a social relationship in the proper sense of the word, for it unfolded as a process of correlating, juxtaposing and synthesizing activity.

It measured the various efforts and abilities of people with abstract standards (and, above all, abstract time) and thus showed the social significance of these abilities and forces.

In other words, the social significance of the individual, ceasing to be a form of his direct dependence on the estate, workshop, clan, received an indirect expression in abstract forms of construction and implementation of activities. Sociality slipped away from the direct coherence of human existence, from its figurative, pictorial and emblematic definitions, and revealed itself more and more indirectly, as it “spread” in time, “distributed” in complex relationships of individual acts, series and levels of human activity.

So, an isolated individual as a certain historical form (and a corresponding concept) is associated with a certain form of social connection, which excluded the direct dependence of a person on a person, group, society, turned into a social relationship, into a quasi-independent real abstraction.

The human individual is liberated from direct social dependence, and it becomes a social connection separated from the person, a social connection outside him, a social relationship that functions, as it were, apart from him as a special kind of thing. On the “other side”, a thing or a system of things of a special kind, separated from individuals and their direct dependencies, is production. The tools and means of activity begin to “break away” from the individual forms of human existence, gather and group in aggregates and ranks, create a special sphere of social life, new norms of human behavior, the realization and development of human forces. Production was formalized as a set of material conditions, tools, means, combined to obtain material products that preserve and replenish people's existence. People who enliven the process of production also appeared primarily from their “material side” as carriers of energy, as bodily motive power. And even social relations, having taken the form of mediated human dependencies, acquired a material character. Production, unfolding as an objective structure, a special mechanism of human existence, seemed to give all other aspects of people's life a material form and a way of manifestation.

But it was not physical laws, not the logic of things that determined the preservation and growth of production. Things in it move and interact according to the forms of human activity, and people in it must be adapted precisely to these forms. Of course, it seems strange that production, separating itself and developing according to the forms of human activity, at first “consumes” the worker as muscular energy and physical strength, that it appears and is interpreted (by many still) as the production of things. In essence, the production of things is only a moment of reproduction of materialized social forms and human forces. In other words, a person in production comes into contact not with things, but with the forms of movement of human forces expressed in them. Therefore, from the worker - the further, the more - the ability to control these forces is required, and not just be a bunch of energy that excites them. And this is no longer physics that characterizes production from the point of view of natural laws. This is metaphysics, which considers the production of things as a moment of the social-human process.

The “first metaphysics” of production arose in economics as a special dimension, a special concept that characterizes the production process from the point of view of its effective saturation with human forces and relationships. I speak of economics as the first metaphysics of production because culture and history were to give both the "second" and the "third" metaphysical interpretation of the social-human process and show, in particular, the limitations of "economic metaphysics", its ability to see only abstract forms of the realization of human forces, and therefore, the impenetrability for it of many important aspects of human existence. However, at first, it was economics that led human thinking to an understanding of production as an objective body of civilization, an objective “condensation” of interrelated human forces. Having presented production as a special system of things, economics initiated the identification of social forms in this system, the use of these forms as indicators of the effectiveness of human actions. This is also the source of the divergence of two interpretations of activity: as a quasi-natural process and as an objective synthesis of human forces and connections.

The economy has highlighted the functioning and development of communication between people through production. Thus, it also determined a new system for measuring human strengths and abilities, natural things and cultural values. All this acquired a common abstract measure, independent of the specific properties of people and things. Let us emphasize the fact that human qualities turned out to be included in situations of comparison and measurement in a number of other things, i.e. as reified forms separated from their subjects.

The economy, by its abstract dimension, as an all-pervading radiation, has revealed the internal connections and functions of various subsystems of society. In the context of economics, the concepts of state, law, science, and culture acquired a new dimension and depth. Some of them, for example, the concepts of state and law, had to change significantly, thus determining the prospect of practical changes in the relevant areas. Others, such as the concepts of culture, art, morality, "resisted" the economic dimension with their whole being, however, they also experienced a powerful pressure of real abstractions that stimulate the "economic metaphysics" of human existence.

The acquisition of new characteristics by social concepts meant a change in the structure of people's everyday behavior and their thinking: concepts became a means of adapting people to the new principles of the functioning of social relations, to their abstractness, anonymity, "extension" and reproducibility in time. Getting used to the deployment of one's social being in time meant for a person the development of new forms of understanding, new forms of linking concepts. Concepts that “stretch” along the time axis, linking, for example, the scheme of an employee’s actions with the scheme of his employee’s actions in a time-separated activity, lost their direct figurativeness, picturesqueness and acquired the forms of schemes or sign records. Concepts-representations were replaced by concepts-schemes, and concepts-schemes were replaced by concepts-signs, schemes-“notes”: such was the inevitable price of thinking for an attempt to express the procedural nature of social being. Or let's put it this way - people's thinking needed to mobilize its expressive reserves (schemes-signs and schemes-"notes") and develop new means in order to continue to effectively serve a person in a changing system of social ties.

Such an orientation of thinking, in a certain sense, began to isolate it from everyday experience, from the "living" feelings and impressions of the human individual: mental schemes that take a person beyond the framework of what is happening at the moment turned out to be necessarily formal. However, this formalism of thinking is not something fundamentally new; each of the previous eras imposed on the individual its own formalism of thinking: the ritual formalism of antiquity, the class formalism of the Middle Ages. The peculiarity of the new European formalism is that it is not directly imposed on the individual, it gives him the opportunity, with the help of thinking, to fit himself into any abstract connections, but at the cost of dissolving his individual properties in these abstractions. And if in previous eras the formalism of thinking fit into the structures of the individual being of people, now formalizing thinking begins to go far beyond the boundaries of individual being, and it needs its own territory to master the growing array of abstract objects of knowledge and practice.

The new time gives rise to a new science (some researchers believe that science in the proper sense only appears at this time). This is no longer a science about things, but about the connections and relationships in which things appear; their properties form special forms, "elements", objects. Science, in fact, works with these "secondary" things that hide the connections between their generation and functioning. It captures the relationships encrypted in things and tries to introduce them into the sphere of practical use and into everyday human experience. But, since hidden relationships are not built into the images and representations of ordinary human experience, science gives them an indirect expression in the language of sign-symbolic formulas. This corresponds to the state of things in science: here they represent not themselves, but certain series, types, systems of relations, i.e. they actually function in science as symbols and signs of some processes.

All this must be taken into account as a condition for the emerging social science (later - sciences). Social science, as it were, has been prepared by reality itself for the objects of study: isolated individuals, their isolated relations, a special sphere of production. And all this can be studied as things: calculated, measured, weighed, without referring to the subjective testimony of people, i.e. all this can be done in the same way as "normal" natural science does. However, this orientation towards the general scientific ideal and standard is fraught with a trap, and the emerging social science certainly falls into it: the thing-like appearance of the objects of social science masks their nature, hides the “springs” that set them in motion: moreover, the coincidence of the objects of social science with their the material, directly represented form also turns out to be an illusion. As a result, a “birth trauma” of social science: defects in methodological vision, ignorance of one’s own cognitive capabilities, uncritical assimilation of research standards of natural science, moreover, not sufficiently comprehended by natural science itself. Under the influence of this defect, social science practically did not notice the metaphysical nature of its objects, especially the objects of the natural sciences. All this subsequently gave rise to a complex of issues that amounted to in the 20th century. the main problem of science. But at first, social science turned to the description and measurement of its objects as a special kind of thing.

One way or another, but the concepts of the main constituent elements of social life, of the main "things" on which people's lives are built, were clarified, formalized and acquired the form of tools constantly used in people's daily activities. They contributed to the inclusion of people in systems of production, law, culture, and science that separated from them, in increasingly complex forms of communication, and helped people to explore new spaces and times.

The emerging scientific social science lined up social "elements" and "things" in certain rows, aggregates, grouped and measured them. There was a problem of representing society as a system with relatively strong structures and "mechanisms" of reproduction. But the same problem, taken in the future, pointed to the possibility of understanding society as the entire human community, uniting various social systems, not subject to a rigid linear logic of development.

However, at first, scientific social science was more interested in the question of the existence of stable forms of its reproduction in the social process, the means of studying them, using them, and managing them. This was probably prompted by the example of natural science, which revealed regular dependencies in nature and images of natural laws embodied in cultural traditions, and the concept of legal laws, which become the basis for the functioning of civil society.

1. From what elements is the picture of society built?

2. What is the history and logic behind the selection of these elements?

3. What are the changes in social ties based on?

4. How do social forms that compare people and things influence the formation of scientific social science?

5. If individuals are autonomous, how are they connected?

6. Why did knowledge about society before the 19th century not considered scientific?

7. What does it mean to give a scientific explanation of social life?

Main literature

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2. Berger P., Lukman T. Social construction of reality. M., 1995. 57

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additional literature

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4. Butenko I. Social knowledge and the world of everyday life. M., 1987.

5. Moss M. Society. Exchange. Personality. M., 1996.

6. Theoretical premises of social construction in psychology // Social. and humanite. science: Ref. magazine Ser. 11. 1998. No. 3.

7. Turner J. The structure of sociological theory. M., 1985. Part III, IV, V.

8. Phenomenological alternatives // New directions in sociological theory. M, 1978.

9. Jung K. On the archetypes of the collective unconscious // Jung K Archetype and symbol. M., 1991.