Abstract
In the cultural framework in which we are currently moving, in Europe and beyond, we experience an ever more generalized sense of uncertainty and disillusionment towards common living. The extremely individualistic culture of ‘do-it-yourself’ and ‘everything-is-possible’ has certainly contributed to this by investing the individual with decision-making powers linked mostly to the emotion of the moment, in private as well as public life, indeed, cancelling the boundaries between public and private. The role of emotions in private daily choices as well as in community and national interest choices has therefore become central, going, however, to the detriment of responsible action and a culture of the common good.
The emergence of some radicalizing tendencies such as populisms draws attention precisely to the leverage plans that today move the common ‘feeling’ between a sense of belonging to an entity superior to the individual and constituting the community that each human being needs to live and flourish, and disillusionment with it, especially on a social level. Starting from these reflections, we develop a phenomenological analysis of the community and people’s dynamics within it. In this regard, the reflections of some phenomenologists including Stein, Walther and Scheler can offer us a framework, within which we can try to understand the progress of the aforementioned phenomena and their apparent success. At the same time, we can recover the value of the relationship between people and the contribution of the individual in support of community forms of coexistence based on a sense of mutual responsibility.
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Notes
- 1.
These German thinkers, all of whom lived between the end of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, were in various ways inspired by the philosophical approach developed by Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), attending his lectures and the phenomenological circles in an intense and vital exchange, among themselves and with other colleagues. Husserl himself gave more space to the analysis of the subject and the gnoseological process at the basis of the sciences, first and foremost philosophy; however, his reflections on intersubjectivity – which run through a little of his entire production – have just recently been re-read highlighting a concept that is decidedly undeveloped in its scope, but clearly social, namely that of the Gemeingeist (common mind), as a key element of Husserlian social ontology (Caminada, 2019).
- 2.
This is the habilitation work developed and presented in 1881 at the Faculty of Philosophy in Kiel under the title Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. It remained for many years as a text of discussion on the subject of community and the social fabric, especially in the light of the definition and distinction it proposes between community and society.
- 3.
It is very interesting how Tönnies ascribes to these three characteristics of the community the meaning of an expression of the community’s soul: being together would represent the vegetative soul – the common consciousness of belonging – living together would be the animal soul – the condition of a common action in the sign of pleasure and well-being, as well as of suffering – acting together would express, finally, the superior part of the rational soul – a superior consciousness of working together for the unity of the spirit and in the search for a common superior ideal (Tönnies, 2012, 226–227). This tripartition of the soul, of Aristotelian origin, then returns in various anthropological studies of the early twentieth century, such as in Stein, Conrad-Martius and Walther. See: Stein, 2000, 2004; Conrad-Martius, 1946; Walther, 1976.
- 4.
The theme of social acts or social action was taken up a few years later by a phenomenologically oriented sociologist, Alfred Schütz, who reinterpreted Weber’s sociological proposal in the light of Husserlian phenomenology. He describes and distinguishes social behaviours and social acts, precisely on the basis of the concept of intentionality used here by Reinach (Schütz, 1960).
- 5.
In a very similar way, Schütz also uses examples of this kind, such as asking: “When I ask you a question, I do not only have the final motive of making myself understood, but also of obtaining from you the answer to the question. Your answer is the ‘what in view of which’ of my question” (Schütz, 2018, 203).
- 6.
The work Ein Beitrag zur Ontologie der sozialen Gemeinschaften is the doctoral research Walther completed under the guidance of Pfänder in 1921 in Munich. This work was published two years later in the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, edited by Husserl.
- 7.
As Salice and Uemura point out, the Reinachian definition of social acts could run the risk of internalism: i.e. describing acts that, in fact, could also be performed by a ‘brain’ outside of a body, but which has all the elements to express a social act as it is ‘addressed to’. If then such an act does not in fact reach the other person, it does not matter (Salice & Uemura, 2018, 31–32).
- 8.
Walther’s study does not only inspire and refer to Reinach, but also to Husserl, specifically to the lectures on Natur und Geist (Husserl, 2002) which she was able to attend in person and in which the teacher developed certain aspects of his social phenomenology. One of these is that for Husserl – as well as for Walther – social acts are constitutive of sociality and specifically give rise to community. See Salice & Uemura, 2018.
- 9.
It should be emphasised that Walther’s anthropological analysis is subsequent to her sociological one, i.e. her movement of reflection leads her from the observation of the existence of communities and societies to the explication of the anthropological structure of the individual as naturally social. This analysis, in fact, was developed only many years after her first doctoral work on the ontological structure of the community (Walther, 1976). Walther, therefore, arrives at results very close to those of her colleague Stein, even though she follows a practically opposite itinerary. While she could be said to take the community phenomenon for granted and from it wants to arrive at an explanation of the individual, Stein starts from the individual and his structure in order to be able to explain his/her relationship with others and thus develop the community phenomenon at various levels. See in this regard: Calcagno, 2019; Mühl, 2018; Pezzella, 2018.
- 10.
The empathy of which Stein, and before her Husserl, as well as other phenomenologists, speaks is neither a volitional nor an emotional act, but a theoretical one; that is, it is a conscious act that induces the individual to identify with the other’s experience and thought in order to understand its content and with it acquire an additional element in the constitution of the self as psychic-spiritual. In the empathic act, in fact, what happens is precisely the perception of the distance and distinction between oneself and others, since the empathising act is proper to the one who empathises, while the content that is empathised is other people’s. (Stein, 1964). However, not all phenomenologists are in complete agreement on this; Scheler is criticised by Stein for his confusion of empathy, and Walther, for example, believes that a state of fusion occurs through empathy – something Stein does not accept at all. See: Hackermeier, 2008; Calcagno, 2019.
- 11.
Taking up Reinach’s and Scheler’s analyses on values, as well as Husserl’s, Stein considers a complete understanding of the human person impossible without a world of values. As Mette Lebech succinctly points out, Reinach develops the question of the apriority of values, Scheler their order and Husserl the act of valuing by linking it to the fact that values are grounded in things (Lebech, 2015, 27–28). For Stein, values are linked to the sphere of motivation that represents the legality of the world of the spirit – otherwise not explicable in terms of causality alone, which characterises the sphere of the psychical (Stein, 2000, First Part). Values constitute the background that moves us to act in a certain way, to prefer or avoid certain situations and/or experiences; they allow us to recognise that we are persons, that is, capable of values and moved in our living and acting by motives.
- 12.
Stein, in dialogue with Scheler, points out how different formations can occur in a community: “We regard as the highest mode of community the union of purely free persons who are united with their innermost ‘personal’ life, or the life of soul, and each of whom feels responsible for himself or herself and for the community. Beside them stand the communities in which only a portion of their members are free and self-supporting persons, determine the mind of the community, and bear responsibility for it. In the third place would be named the communities where although there’s a common living out of a unitary mind” (Stein, 2000, 278).
- 13.
The concept of life power is developed in the first part of the book Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities, where Stein deepens the study of the individual in its psychic and spiritual dimensions. In the stream of consciousness, there is a real and concrete experience of the individual who lives certain experiences, is aware of them and through them acquires strength or is consumed. The life power is the vital source of psychic and spiritual life, through which certain experiences can be sustained, but which is also consumed by some. It is an ‘enduring real property’ of the ego (Stein, 2000, 22). For more, see: Betschart, 2009, 2010; Hagengruber, 2004.
- 14.
In the in-depth analysis that Stein carries out, and which she has not posited here, it becomes clear that “We won’t be allowed to talk about any ‘consciousness’ of the community in the strict sense” as for the individuals (Stein, 2000, 140). The intensity and type of experiences also differ, since the community experience, although resulting from the individual experiences, is not simply a sum of them, but the unity of meaning of them, which, as such, would not be experienced by the individual. Again using the example of the troop: one thing is my personal mourning for a person dear to me, to whom I am particularly attached, quite another is the mourning that I share with my troop mates for one of them. And even in this shared mourning, the personal intensity of each person’s suffering will remain distinct and unique, because it is the result of a personal fabric with its own history and character, as well as of a link with the deceased, which is not in itself interchangeable.
- 15.
A common aspect shared by these phenomenologists is the personalistic view of the human being and the link with the world of values. For reasons of space, we have privileged here the anthropological analysis of Stein and partly Walther, but Hildebrand and Scheler are animated by a personal vision of the human being too. Hildebrand always speaks about it within the ethical discourse on values and love, therefore in a more indirect way; nevertheless, his vision of the person in the balance, properly Steinian, between individuality and substantial completeness (Welt für sich) and belonging and openness to the community fabric is very clear. (For a brief discussion of this, see: P. Premoli de Marchi, 1998; Gaudiano, 2013/Gaudiano, 2020.) In Scheler’s sense, the human person is a free being, a creator and bearer of values, capable of loving, to the point that he even proposes a reinterpretation, apostrophising Descartes, in terms of ens amans (Scheler, 2004, 127).
- 16.
A thorough analysis of this, also with a view to the individual-community relationship and the current of experience generated in it, can be found in Individual and Community (Stein, 2000, 145–167).
- 17.
As Vendrell-Ferran points out, this distinction made by Scheler, which restores to value perception its own autonomy with respect to individual and possible responses to perceived values, seems to avoid the problems that, instead, remain in the Steinian proposal, since it allows us to explain how, for example, it is possible to perceive a certain value, but not to respond to it emotionally (Vendrell Ferran, 2016, 222–223).
- 18.
An extensive survey of this not exclusively human phenomenon can be found in The Nature of Simpathy (Scheler, 2008, in particular The Sympathy, 49–224). Here Scheler discusses it in order to differentiate between the various forms of feeling and to specify the typical character of sympathy, starting from Lipps’s concept of Einsfühlung (unipathy), which Stein also discusses, criticising it in the same way as Scheler’s approach (Stein, 1964).
- 19.
Hildebrand dedicates an entire work to the theme of love, The Nature of Love, and also in his Metaphysik der Gemeinschaft love plays a central role, with respect to Stein’s references in the analyses dedicated to the community, to such an extent that it is not only the element that makes a simple contact a true relationship, but it comes to be the general distinguisher for an authentic community of several people (von Hildebrand, 1955, 2009).
- 20.
- 21.
Stein clearly reports how love and all positive value stances (esteem, sympathy, acceptance, etc.) have a doubly constructive effect: they generate new and positive energies for both those who experience them and those who receive them. In contrast, hatred with all its negative range of stances (sadness, dislike, contempt) consumes both (Stein, 2000, 210–216).
- 22.
Evidently, the typical phenomena of imitation present not only in humans, particularly in their developmental years, but also among some species of higher mammals, can also be understood here. Scheler discusses imitation as a stage of feeling in his study of empathy and in ethics (Scheler, 1973, 2008).
- 23.
Hildebrand speaks in these terms of love and the unitive intention with the object of love: when one loves someone, one invests them through one’s own response of love and the desire for union, which becomes union achieved at the moment in which this love is communicated and reciprocated, subsists and persists in the lover, even when he/she is not in the constant presence of the beloved (von Hildebrand, 2009). Walther, for her part, explicitly asks the question whether feelings of union are the same as attitudes of love, friendship, affection in general and answers, in line with Hildebrand, that love cannot be confused with the feeling of union.
- 24.
On the question of unity between persons, Stein states in a contribution on education that “the human being is at the same time an individual and a member of the community, but not in perfect unity”; a reference model for this is, in fact, for the Carmelite saint, the Trinity, whose divine persons are individuals in community, but who experience full unity because God: “God is one in three persons. An indivisible nature, completely simple and unique – therefore individual in the fullest sense of the word. But a nature that is three persons together and unites them in unity; unity of being and unity of life in knowledge, love and action – hence community in the fullest sense of the word” (Stein, 2001, 18). In us, on the other hand, individual characterisation stands alongside community belonging. For community belonging we have the same way of feeling, thinking, wanting and doing – the one human nature that unites all human beings – or expressing a certain social type; individuality, on the other hand, puts a brake on this belonging in preserving that unique and totally our own trait that cannot be in full unity with that of others.
- 25.
In this sense, Walther comes close to the Schelerian position of the common humanity, also understood as a community subject in a broader sense (Calcagno, 2018). Scheler even speaks of a Gesamtperson (Scheler, 1973), a unique subject of the community, explicitly criticised by Stein for the confusion it may engender (Stein, 2000, 276–278).
- 26.
Walther also mentions a distinction between community and mass, where the members of the mass are precisely individuals who do not recognise each other in a condition of sharing and unity, but who are only together because of a common suggestion; they do not then live certain experiences intentionally, but only because they are driven by others (Walther, 1923, 98).
- 27.
“A single strong leader can suffice to hold a community together and impress upon it his stamp. But if he alone is the soul of the whole thing, then it falls apart with his elimination; or, it barely holds together externally like any accidental formation, to be shattered by the first difficulty that threatens it” (Stein, 2000, 281). Scheler explicitly analysed the figure of the Führer (the guide) in community and societal contexts in the short text Vorbilder und Führer (1911–1921) 2004). Walther also expresses herself regarding the figure of the guide, without a specific elaboration like Scheler, but within her analysis of the community (Walther, 1923, 106–107).
- 28.
Stein, speaking of the life power, makes it clear that there are two forms of it, the sensitive form, which corresponds to psycho-physical energy, and the spiritual form, which is more directly linked to the spirit and its activities (Stein, 2000, 9–128).
- 29.
Stein considers the community distinctly from society and this leads her to consider the former as an absolutely natural fact, indeed, almost prior to man’s very individuality; we find, therefore, positions similar to hers in political thought, but which refer only to society.
- 30.
Human types are determined not only by external traits, manners, clothes and customs, but above all by internal traits, i.e. beliefs, attitudes that mature over time due to influences from the outside world.
- 31.
In this regard, Hildebrand underlines how the belonging of individuals to a community also depends on the general type of the same and introduces a distinction between material and formal community, where the first represents the general-generic for friendship between two or more persons, humanity, the nation, the family – even if this, like marriage and the church, turns out to be hybrids that have in themselves the characteristics of both community expressions – and the second that of association, of the State. Whereas purely material communities are bound by love, mutual choice and a certain degree of closure to the entry of others as members, formal communities arise exclusively from specific social acts that establish them, and in them the members are not necessarily bound by love, nor is there closure, but other members can join (von Hildebrand, 1955).
- 32.
- 33.
The insistence on the relationship between the individual and the community (Gemeinschaft) and not on the social relationship between the individual and the society (Gesellschaft) is dictated by our intention to deal with the dynamics of the community since these are also the ones that determine social action in the most eminent sense. We are given to a common world that is first and foremost a community – not only biologically because we are born into a family, the first community nucleus of non-chosen belonging, but also at the level of people and nation by virtue of blood ties as well as a shared history. The social level, the expression of formal action based on roles and regulations, builds on the community levels. Undoubtedly there are differences, but in the terms of this research it is not possible for us to extend the range to this aspect as well, wishing precisely to support the original foundation from which to read the social and state dynamics.
- 34.
The clear reference here is to every form of individual or mass coercion that underlies totalitarianism of all kinds. The socio-historical study of totalitarianism has, in fact, shown how in such contexts real organised systems of contrast to the spiritual formation of individuals are triggered through the adoption of self-suggestion mechanisms, which generate needs and necessities that did not exist before and which are satisfied in only one way – that of the totalising system – up to the adoption of systematic violence for all those who go off the track or recognise its perversion and do not want to adhere to it. On this, we refer to the extraordinary analyses of Arendt (1976).
- 35.
In this regard, Floridi has coined the term On-life to indicate the lifestyle of today’s generations, especially in countries and contexts where the level of connection is so widespread/accessible that it has created a generalised condition of network dependence (Floridi, 2014).
- 36.
On this aspect, Stein is perhaps the thinker, among those considered, who much more and tirelessly does not give in to the defence of individuality for the best and fullest success of every community, strongly calling into question the pedagogical aspect of education, which should not be a guide towards a pre-established model and therefore the same for all, but towards a model of ideals to be embodied individually, each one developing what is already placed in their own interiority (Stein, 2001).
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Gaudiano, V. (2023). Sense of Belonging and Disillusionment: A Phenomenological Reading of Community Dynamics. In: Baggio, A.M., Baldarelli, MG., Idowu, S.O. (eds) Populism and Accountability. CSR, Sustainability, Ethics & Governance. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20032-8_10
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