RECEIVED PREJUDICE
Homo socialis refers to questions arising from dwelling in a specific cultural and linguistic milieu.
We are our assimilated experience. To what extent are we determined in advance by our initial social and linguistic context? Is it reasonable to say that we are co-authored?
Do we lose our humanity in isolation from others?
Do stories of feral children provide valuable insights with regard to language acquisition and personhood; or are such extreme cases no more than textbook curiosities?
Can we move past our received prejudices? Are all our prejudices negative?
IN CONTINUOUS REFERENCE TO OTHERS
We dwell in a prison of private subjectivity but are primed to develop self-awareness and find meaning embedded alongside others in a particular social and cultural niche. A human being becomes a person and, to a significant extent, only remains a person in continuous reference to others.
PRIMACY OF RECEIVED PREJUDICE
We belong to history. We find ourselves in a particular time and place and learn who we are directly and self-evidently in the context of family, community and society. Our received prejudices are more persistent than reflections on subsequent experience away from home, self-examination, book learning or reasoned judgments.
We seem predisposed to emulate the ways modeled by our peers and our elders. For better or for worse, we learn what we need to learn in order to participate. Our hunter-gatherer brains may be wet-wired for the generic acquisition of language but an extended period of socially construed learning is the only way to receive a native tongue and the embedded cultural assumptions that come with it.
Despite all the collective human experience and accumulated wisdom that may have gone before, each child is a new beginning. Our first hand experiences are ours alone, but cognitively and linguistically we are not blank slates. Always immersed in the finitude of a cultural context, we do not encounter the exigencies of the human condition in isolation or need to rediscover all that we need to know from first principles.
SOURCES FOR HOMO SOCIALIS
Tillich, Paul (1952) The Courage To Be. New Haven : Yale University Press.
.French philosopher [1915-2005]
It was only in specific institutional milieu that the capacities and predispositions that distinguish human action can blossom; the individual, we said then, becomes human only under the condition of certain institutions.
Ricoeur, Paul (1992) Oneself as Another. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
history does not belong to us; we belong to it. Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society and state in which we live... That is why the prejudices of the individual, far more than his judgments, constitute the historical reality of his being.
Gadamer, Hans Georg (1994) Truth and Method. Second Revised Edition Revised translation by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum. (Originally published as Warheit und Methode, 1960.)
German philosopher [1900-2002]
Bruner, Jerome (1996) The Culture of Education. Cambridge , MA: Harvard University Press.children show an astonishingly strong “predisposition to culture”; they are sensitive to and eager to adopt the folkways they see around them. They show a striking interest in the activity of their parents and peers and with no prompting at all try to imitate what they observe.
American educational psychologist [1915- ]
[W]hat the agent is able to do and say intelligibly as an actor is deeply affected by the fact that we are never more (and sometimes less) than the co-authors of our own narratives. Only in fantasy do we live what story we please. In life… we are always under certain constraints. We enter upon a stage which we did not design and we find ourselves part of an action that was not of our making. Each of us being a main character in his own drama plays subordinate parts in the dramas of others, and each drama constrains the others.
He (1984: 33-34) adopts a tone that echoes both Aristotle and Confucius in this vivid depiction of the individual within community:
I am brother, cousin and grandson, member of this household, that village, this tribe. These are not characteristics that belong to human beings accidentally, to be stripped away in order to discover ‘the real me’. They are part of my substance, defining partially at least and sometimes wholly my obligations and my duties. Individuals inherit a particular space within an interlocking set of social relationships; lacking that space, they are nobody, or at least a stranger or an outcast. To know oneself as such a social person is however not to occupy a static and fixed position. It is to find oneself placed at a certain point on a journey with set goals; to move through life is to make progress—or fail to make progress—towards a given end.
Macintyre (1984: 220-221) points to a narrative view of the self rather than a detached, Sartrean version “that can have no history.” He concedes that, from an individualistic perspective, “I am what I myself choose to be,” but goes on to declare that:
the story of my life is always embedded in the story of those communities from which I derive my identity. I am born with a past; and to try to cut myself off from that past, in the individualist mode, is to deform my present relationships. The possession of an historical identity and the possession of a social identity coincide. Notice that rebellion against my identity is always one possible mode of expressing it.
In short: “I can always, if I wish to, put into question what are taken to be the merely contingent social features of my existence.”
Macintyre, Alisdair (1984) After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Second Edition. Notre Dame, Indiana. University of Notre Dame Press.
