Understanding Human Need 2e. Dean, Hartley

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СКАЧАТЬ our understanding of work as human activity that lies beyond wage labour, it extends to the entire arena of social and cultural reproduction as well as to the realm of political engagement. It includes care work – which in turn includes care for children and for frail, sick or disabled adults; creative endeavour – including artistic expression, sporting and recreational activity undertaken for its own sake; all forms of study, learning and scholarly activity; engagement in voluntary and community activities as well as engagement in formal politics. Work is activity. It is quite simply what human beings do. It is the realisation of their species being and, whether or not it is materially productive, it is, potentially and in essence, the expression of human creativity.

      Box 2.1: Bee and human societies compared

      The fable of the bees

      Bees and humans are alike in that both species appear to be ‘socially’ productive. The similarity struck a certain Dr Bernard Mandeville, who in 1705 wrote a poem, subsequently entitled The Fable of the Bees. The fable concerned a hive of bees which collectively decided more closely to emulate human behaviour, such that individual bees by pursuing their own selfish ends succeeded through relentless and unprincipled competition in incidentally meeting the needs of others. The result was an astoundingly efficient and productive hive. But then one day the bees were introduced to certain aspects of Christian teaching and Stoic philosophy, and they decided they should henceforth abandon self-interest and acquisitiveness and devote themselves to honest and peaceful living. The result was disastrous for the productivity of the hive, and the colony dissipated. The moral was that ‘greed is good’; a belief echoed later in the 18th century in the economic liberalism of Adam Smith and by many more recent neo-liberal ideologues.

      The bee and the architect

      A rather different thought occurred to Karl Marx who in his celebrated work Das Kapital reflected upon what it is that makes the productive activity of a human being distinctively human:

      A bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst of architects from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. (1887: 178)

      Marx was not commenting on the imaginary political economy of a beehive but demonstrating that the difference between bees and humans is that the latter have a conscious purpose to their work and, by implication, they have the capacity to change what they do. An architect, unlike any bee, might choose to make an octagonal as opposed to a hexagonal structure or to change the course of architectural history by constructing something radically new.

      Are bees ‘social’?

      Likening a bee colony to a human society is anthropomorphism. A bee colony is in some ways best understood as a single biological organism. It is natural, not social. A human society is an association of interdependent but autonomously conscious beings and is axiomatically social.

      There is a complex division of labour among the bees within a colony, but this is a natural not a planned phenomenon. The colony is established around a single ‘queen’ or egg layer. There are male ‘drones’, which can fertilise queen bees (and will die having done so) but otherwise play no part in the life of a colony: redundant drones are expelled from the colony at the end of each season. The multitude of infertile female ‘worker’ bees are divided between ‘nurses’ (who care for the queen and the larvae) and ‘foragers’ (who go in search of pollen), but these roles are determined not by choice or command but by epigenetic tags. This is an arrangement that has evolved over millions of years and is unchanged even by human domestication. The individual worker bees that drive a hive’s production may exhibit genetically determined patterns of cooperative behaviour, but their functioning is not socially ordered, as in a human society.

      Sociality

      Aristotle, famously, defined the human being as a zöon politikon, a term usually translated as ‘political animal’, though, in historical and etymological contexts, it might also translate as ‘social animal’. Aristotle’s intention was to distinguish human sociality from animalistic herd or pack behaviours. Marx would later observe that ‘the human being is in the most literal sense a zöon politikon, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal that can only individuate itself in the midst of society (1857: 84). The concept of sociality elicited from Marx’s writing by Márkus (1978: 32–5) has two interconnected components, Gemeinwesen (alluding to the communal character of human life) and Gattungsleben (alluding to the generic socio-historic shaping of human life).

      Human life has a communal character in the sense that the human individual is not, and can’t wholly be, the isolated irreducible atom of liberal social contract theory: she is an inherently vulnerable, interdependent creature (for example, Turner, 2006). It is not mere ingenuity, but socially organised care and collaboration that have allowed human beings to survive and flourish despite their limited stature and strength relative to other more physically powerful species and often in spite of adverse natural and climatic conditions. Human beings’ sociality is founded on a loyalty to one another, ‘clinging together against the dark’ (Rorty, 1982: 166). But human beings are also generically social in the sense that ‘clinging together’ is made possible, as we have seen, through shared language, customs, institutions, knowledge and beliefs – all of which are dynamically socio-historically constructed and contested; and which, through social or ‘interpsychological’ processes, shape the personal development of every human being (Vygotsky, 1978).

      From a different perspective, Hannah Arendt has observed that a life not lived among other humans is not a human life. She draws on Hegel in asserting that significance of mutual recognition between human beings ‘as builders of worlds or co-builders of a common world’ (1958: 458). In clinging together against the dark, it is upon the struggle for the mutual recognition and the achievement of sociality that humanity depends. A recent and influential contribution to the philosophy of recognition debate has been provided by Axel Honneth (1995), who discusses three modes of recognition upon which worthwhile human lives depend:

      •Love. It is through intimate relationships that we discover ourselves and who we are; and by which we establish and affirm our self-identity.

      •Solidarity. It is through participation and engagement with others in communities or social groups that we discover what it is that we can do; and by which we establish ourselves as actors, with shared collective identities.

      •Rights. We shall consider the relationship between human needs and socially constructed rights in Chapter 8. But the point for now is that it is through exercising our own and respecting others’ rights that we are able mutually to engage with strangers and more distant members of our species.

      Sociality is a constitutive characteristic of an individual human’s species being in the sense that she is shaped through, and depends for, her identity upon her immediate and historical social context. A human’s being is realised though her mutual interdependence with other human beings. Human sociality is realised and sustained through love, solidarity and rights.

      Historical development

      Human beings, unlike any other species, make their own history (once again, see Box 2.1). When Marx asserted that ‘Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world; the point is to change it’ (1845b: СКАЧАТЬ