THE PERSON, SOCIETY AND THE S TATE

BRONIUS KUZMICKAS

In the European cultural tradition it is almost unquestionable that pers onhood is the essence of the human being, making one a being of moral worth. However, there are innumerable philosophical, psyc hological and sociological theories or conceptions about what personhood is, that is, what it means to be an indiv idual, a pers onality, a person.

In the history of philosophy we can distinguish two main philosophical conceptions of person. Both attempt to interpret an evident fact, namely, that the person, understood as an individual having spi ritual life, contains in itself an awareness of self-identity, is capable of performing free acts, and realizes itself as a social agent engaged in various areas of social life in relation to other persons. Representatives of one current of thought emphasize the indi vidual as the primary human reality and affirm that one's social relations have an external or peripheral, rather than an essential, character. As a person each is what he is in his own right as a unique individual or autonomous ego . Relations with other persons, social relations of various kinds, are secondary and can add nothing fundamental to personhood. Supposedly all relationships could be stripped away one after another until all that remained would be the person as pure, indivisible individuality.

According to another current of thought, on the contrary, the essence of the person consists in mutuality, interpersonal relations or involvement in the life of the community or society. One theory sees the primary and fundamental human reality as persons-in-rel ation. Others see the individual as involved in a variety of social relations, cultural contexts and historicity from birth to death. During their lifetimes all are directly or indirectly interrelated on various levels of social reality--from empirical face-to-face contacts in everyday life to the metaphysical unity of all mankind with G od. Interpersonal relationships and relations between the per son and commu nity are intrinsic to the personhood of a man, for only through one's interpersonal context can a person express the uniqueness of one's individuality, develop one's individual creative abilities and manifest oneself as a free social agent. Were the relations among people, between the person and the community, to be taken away the person would disappear and individuality would lose its meaning or become "empty."

Both of the above-mentioned points of view reveal essential elements of the human being, but also contain weaknesses; both can become extremely one-sided. Either the person is dissolved into so ciety, loses his autonomy or capability of performing fr ee acts, and is reduced to a passive element in the chain of social determinism; or the person is treated as a unique individual, a subject of limitless free actions, an unconceivable mystery.

- the fact that the person manifests him/herself as a self-aware individual, but also that every act of self-awareness implies the awareness of a being-in-the-w orld;

- being-in-the-world is seen as being-in-comm unity and for-community, as sharing with other persons a situation, historicity, choice and responsibility, and ultimately a common destiny as mortal beings;

- the temporality and histori city of the person, essential incompleteness, and the fact that personal fulfillment and completion is achieved through involvement in various levels of community; and

The matter is not that one or another philosophical theory is better or worse with respect to its consistency and to the extent to which it corresponds to the facts of human reality. Philosophy is an inexact kind of knowing in comparison to scie ntific knowledge, while human reality, including so ciety and cu lture, is so complicated and specific that we must reject the desire to have one trustworthy theory which would give most or all of the answers. We must give equal treatment to several theories explaining human reality in terms of real ism or nomi nalism, universalism or singularism, determin ism or indeterm inism, eternalism or temporalism, and so on.

As a unification of per son and soc iety, the human being exists in a concrete historical context. The same could be said of various theories, their applicability and their meaning for real life. Most philosophical theories are not engaged in social reality, nor do they pretend to be, but function rather as abstract models, as phenomena of culture. However, some theories of society do pretend to be effective forces in the reconstruction of social relations and in cultivating a "new man." But solutions to problems of person and society on a theoretical level do not always help to solve problems of persons in actual society. We are confronted with the cases of disillusionment in history, when supposedly good programs, based on humanistic theories, in practice give highly undesirable consequences. Mankind has numerous bitter experiences of this. In such cases we must differentiate strictly the fundamental theoretical models from their political interpretations and practical incarnations. Throughout history these deceptions resurrect old problems, give them new meaning and stimulate new solutions. The practical embodiment of social theories as well as the capability of theoretical thinking to reflect an historical reality requires new theories to treat the relation between th eory and pra ctice.

Society is characterized by such attributes as spontaneity, the self-contained social, economic, political, cultural and religious activity of its members, and their capacity to interact and cooperate. One of the essential dimensions of society is its political organization, embodied in the institution of state. Usually, society and the state are connected by mutual relations. The state exerts an influence upon society through a network of governmental institutions--admin istrative, leg islative, political, ide ological, etc. The character of the direct or indirect interrelationships between society and the state determine to a great extent the character of the person's place in society. Notions characterizing the person's life in society as regards righ ts and d uties, just ice, freed om, respon sibility, citize nship, as well as ind ividualism and colle ctivism, acquire different meaning depending upon the character of the relationship between society and st ate. Therefore, in considering theoretically the problem of the relation of person and society it is very important to pay suitable attention to the concrete hist orical experience and to specify concretely the society which is being treated.

In the Twentieth century we experience an historical reality which in essence may be defined as "a violent decrease of the contractual relationships in favor of compu lsory (mainly) and (to a lesser degree) family forms. The contractual relationships, which functioned so successfully in the preceding era, in the postwar period have been in a decisive and rapid decline."¹ In the history of this trend there emerged a kind of state corresponding to this political theory and aimed at the fundamental reconstruction of society. In this social reality the interaction of society and state is so one-sided, that the st ate prescribes and controls all important social relationships--all institutions in all the significant fields of social and cultural life. The state exaggerates its own role and practically becomes an end in itself and for itself. Almost no area of relationship between person and society is left to mutual choice and the free contractual decision of the parties involved; all is authoritatively regulated and controlled. The political ideology of the state becomes a kind of state religion. Superior to all other social institutions, it is imposed on all members of society under the severest penalty for unfaithfulness. Ideological solutions are treated as infallible statements, and provide the principles for solutions in all other fields of social life.

Ideological loyalty is a main criterion of civil loyalty. The law itself must obey the state and its ideo logy. All laws which are not consistent with the superiority of the state are eliminated, as are any such scientific theories, moral convictions or religious beliefs. Therefore, la w loses its validity; it ceases to be a system of norms which assures the free activity of persons, and becomes instead an apparatus of social pressure and constraint. In such a political situation every theoretical proposition concerning the problem of per son and soci ety acquires an additional, at times transformed and perverted sense.

The ideol ogy declares that in this society man is the supreme value; that human life is most precious; that the ultimate end of all social and state efforts is the creation of social conditions which enable everyone to become a well-rounded, developed personality; and that the higher standard of development of one person serves as a precondition for the higher development of others. Here, however, the problem of means and ends arises and the means leading to this great end remains quite vague. The question emerges: to what extent can the life of a common man be sacrificed for the sake of the future? (There seems to be an essential difference between the unavoidable social reality in which man unintentially becomes the means, versus the deliberate use of man as a means for society, for the state, for the happiness of future generations, or whatever.)

The indistinctness of this questionn is not merely theoretical in nature. When ide ology has unquestionable supremacy in the structure of a given society, lawfulness is largely neglected. As a consequence, in real life the common man is neglected or even disregarded as a person and citizen. On the ideological level it is supposed that in the face of great historical purposes the needs of today's man are quite insignificant. In this type of society the legal, juridical sphere of a man's life is considered non-essential. While from an official point of view every man is considered to be a builder of the "new life," in actuality to a great extent he is deprived of the possibility of realizing himself publicly as a morally worthy pe rson, a citizen and an active subject of social life. As a consequence, in reality man has almost unlimited duties imposed by the state, but very few rights which juridically are exactly defined and practically guaranteed. In many cases he is called upon to sacrifice himself, to work hard without adequate payment. People are unlawfully convicted without trial or investigation; many ethnic and national groups have been exiled from their homelands. A great humanistic ideal loses its authentic content and turns into an ideological screen, helping to justify the political omnipotence of the state.

As Marxi st philosophy affirms, human reality is essentially social, for man as a personality can be realized only in a social context. One of the practical consequences of this general outlook is an emphasis upon colle ctivism as a mode of life--as the sole means by which personality can achieve its fulfillment and social integration. But there are different forms of collectivism. In one form it is a social unity of free and worthy persons joined together by general goals and views. Here everyone's interests are respected, the primacy of the person is preserved. However, there is another form of collectivism in which the person is neglected, while the collective interest is considered primary and superior in comparison to those of the person. It is precisely this kind of collectivism with which we are dealing here.

Collectivity of this kind is unable to unite men on the level of their highest aspirations. It reveals itself not to be favorable to personal development, but on the contrary to restrict personal growth. Such co1 lectivity functions as the safeguard of mediocrity; it stimulates and maintains an attitude of conf ormism, double-facedness and hypocrisy. There is no such thing as effective unity between persons based upon that continuing trust on which a normal community depends. Mutual affection decreases and nearly disappears.

Such collec tivism is typical in a society ruled by authoritarian principles. Essentially in such cases the collective itself functions not as an autonomous social unit, but as subdued by the state, just as the individual is subdued by the collective. Therefore, a collective in the true sense of community is almost impossible, for society is so subdued to the state by which it is suppressed that it is near extinction. In a paradoxical way we may speak of a society in which there is no society as characterized by self-contained activity on the part of its members. Here the question arises--what kind of personality is typical in this kind of system?

In a collective which is subjected to state institutions personal features which overstep the standard of mediocrity are hardly tolerated. Any kind of originality, abilities, non-stereotypical opinions, creative aspirations or deep-rooted morality are not encouraged. Personality is identified with the social role of the individual, or with one's official post: the inner man is neglected. Thus, it becomes difficult to develop a per sonality with an independent and rich inner world, freely manifesting itself in society as an active citizen with a deep-rooted feeling of social responsibility. Instead, there is an official commanding superior, on the one hand, and obedient, submissive subordinates on the other.

Granted that person hood is essential to human existence, we can distinguish in it roughly two dimensions: person ality and per son. Man is an integral, though multidimensional being, existing at the cross-road of fre edom and dete rminism. As personality, however, one is orientated to the realm of values and is rooted in fre edom; as a person one is subject to causa tion and is rooted in social and historical determin ations and conditions. This does not mean that as a person one is excluded from the area of values and freedom, but only that values and freedom are not essential for the person.

As a person man is a rule-following being, a bearer of social roles; he performs free acts only in accordance with concrete social norms and patterns--whether administrative, judicial or political. Personality, however, is the whole of an individual's spiritual life, the center of which is conscience, a feeling of personal identity, fre edom and striving for an authentic and meaningful life. Thus, whereas a person one is submissive to the outer world, socialized through social roles, involved in a chain of social determination, and changes with the changes of social reality, personality, in contrast, is "the unchanging in change, unity in the manifold."²

Per son and personality to some degree correspond, although not entirely. This depends on such factors as whether the kind of activity is creative or non-creative, the correspondence between aspirations and objective possibilities, and the type of society. In the society described above, where through an authoritarian collective one is subdued to the state, person and personality in most men are mutually alienated; as a rule one's inner world is more or less split into two faces: one official, the other inner or private. This division in man's inner world reflects an alienation of the social life, which "manifests itself as a splitting of the objective conditions for human existence into the public and the private conditions."³ To a certain extent this takes place in every society, but not to such a degree as in the society we are considering. There, man's inner split becomes a profound, if not essential, feature of his existence.

The inner face--covering almost the entire spiritual life of a man and including one's opinions, doubts and hesitations, one's conscience and feeling of responsibility--is private, deeply hidden and carefully masked. Also hidden is one's conscience; inner freedom is restricted; and the sense of moral responsibility is suppressed. Man has no possibilities; afraid of publicly expressing his own inner world, one's personality is suppressed.

Of course, one experiences a painful tension; the conflict and contradiction of the two faces bear grave consequences for the development of personality. One person may find it quite useful to be deliberately split, another endeavors to introduce an inner harmony by sacrificing some commitments in favor of others. But in the long run the two-facedness is regarded as something quite normal: the tension between the inner and outer sides of personal life fades, the two sides become closer and finally grow together in such a way that the priv ate face is more and more subdued to the official one. One's spectrum of values narrows as one's capability for free thought, evaluation and action weakens. Personality becomes suppressed by person, or more precisely by the state through imposed social roles. Consequently, by-passing society, the state gains primacy over personality.

In such situations socialization of the individual means in part one's depers onalization, especially when we have in mind socialization on the level of the institutions of the state and its official ideological patterns. The more one climbs in civil service, the more one takes the risk of losing positive qualities of personality and turning into a passive object of manipulation. The state strives for the total ideological socialization of individuals, which means their total deper sonalization. The criterion for the evaluation of human life is found rather in personality: not in the higher values in which personality is rooted, but in the state's organization and ideology. When personality is suppressed, evil spreads uninhibited in society. Persons become only tools of the state, the party or any other political force. When a state disregards and violates humaneness, the per son unwittingly becomes a tool of evi l. In such social situations in which man becomes so depersonalized, an acute double problem develops: one is the personal fulfillment of the individual, the other is his or her social significance.

As a thinking being one can live a fully satisfied life only if one understands its meaningfulness and thus can answer the fundamental question, "why?". Like other fundamental phenomena of human spritual life the phe nomenon of life's meaningfulness is constituted by the unity of two aspects--the subjective and the historical or objective. On the surface, life's meaningfulness presents itself as a subjective phenomenon, that is, as a feeling of authentic employment of one's abilities, of authentic fulfillment of one's life. In contrast, senselessness or meaninglessness present themselves as feelings of inauthentic and false employment of one's energies, of an inauthentic filling of time. These experiences, with their differing degree of emotional strength, all depend for their content upon the values of a culture, the ideals of a society.

A constructive or nonconstructive employment of one's capacities divides the responses to the demand for meaning. Greater meaningfulness for an individual's life is associated with free, constructive and personal engagement in the pursuit of value s and higher goals. At the level of concrete social life, for most people the main condition for a meaningful life is constructive engagement in everyday work and interpersonal relations, the possibility to relate the fulfillment of personal life to higher values. A necessary subjective condition for a meaningful life is to overcome the split of the inner world.

It is from culture that an individual draws concepts and ideas in the light of which he identifies and rationalizes his own valuational, sense-endowing experiences, and judges the norms and criteria which underlie his beh avior and the course of his life. It is participation in a particular context of cul ture and hist ory that shapes the content and articulation of a man's subjectivity and the orientation of his pers onality. Through the internalization of the basic values of a spiritual culture one's personality is constituted and an individual person comes to participate in culture as a whole, to act as a responsible agent in history and to relate his destiny to the culture and history of his nation. This kind of integration into culture is the main condition for the meaningfulness of one's life. Under the influence of all-permeating ideological patterns, and the pressure of a bureaucratic system of education, however, most people cannot normally internalize the values of culture or develop an authentic personal value system which serves one's life orientation and shapes one's quest for a meaningful life.

Having no possibility of socialization on the level of higher cultural values, an individual has a very limited possibility of satisfying his fundamental need for authentic self-realization by the manifestation or objectification of his creative energies in the domain of culture and history. Individual persons, and even some social groups, often find themselves in a situation where the values and goals of their social context produce no positive subjective response: an individual finds no subjectively significant content in the objectively, officially posited values. This might be called a deva luation or "wearing down" of values. This is not merely a case of some officially posited values and ideals losing their sense for some people; it is rather the case of social activity and the sharing in historicity itself turning mean ingless and irra tional. Since the domain of official values and ideals is in many ways alienated from the actual historical experience of men, it has lost much of its ability to affect their subjectivity. Personal authenticity then is sought beyond social processes which are permeated by official ide ology. Lending mea ning to one's life becomes a purely private or personal affair, while official values and ideals are treated as false or useless.

Lack of free, constructive employment of a person's abilities makes life less meaningful or even deprives it of any personal value. One who is overburdened, wearied and exhausted by unfree, nonconstructive work feels acutely the lack of an authentic employment of one's abilities or prospects for meaningful activity, for personal engagement in the pursuit of higher values and goals. Because of this a sense of meaningles sness of life, leading to social apathy and moral indifference becomes widespread.

The supremacy of the st ate over soci ety, of politics over other fields of social life exerts upon society a destructive influence. Society falls into separate parts, becomes atomized and partially paralyzed. When the role of the state is exaggerated, man as personality is ruined. One is reduced to being a passive performer of imposed social roles and one's capacity for social initiative and one's feeling of responsibility is almost extinguished. Without a developed personality deeply rooted in universal values, one can hardly give meaning to what one is doing, to how one's energies are realized; one can hardly be an active and responsible citizen. The society in which personality is diminished is doomed to economic, political and cultural stag nation.

When socially crucial periods of historical development occur persons are caught up in a swirl of events, the social significance of which are not matched by their own conception of meaning. As a result, to a great extent they are left without the possibility of authentic choice and authentic self-fulfill ment in an area of historical activity. Lack or scarcity of subjectively significant historical values can be compensated for only by personal spiritual seeking and creative activity. When historical values present themselves in ways that are too indefinite and ambiguous, personal effort is needed.

As we have seen, a political situation in which the state or a certain political party dominates as an absolute ruler the rest of the social structure is extremely unfavorable for man as a personality and for pers onhood in general. However, such a political situation cannot be changed for a more suitable one by a single political act such as a palace revolution. It can be changed only by a long-term process of gradual democratization of a society, during which persons would have real opportunities to revive as personalities and citizens capable of free social--including political--actions.

1. P. Sor okin, Social and Cultural Dynamics, Vol. 3 (New York: Porter Sargeant, 1970), p. 118.

2. N. Ber dyev, Slavery and Freedom (New York: Scribner, 1944), p. 22.

3. D. Kap aciauskiene, "The Moral Nature of Man," in The Philosophical Understanding of Human Beings, p. 31.

4. B. Kuz mickas, "The Meaning of Life: Subjectivity and Historicity," ibid., (Vilnius, 1988), p. 44.

5. W.G. Je ffko, "Action, Personhood and Fact-Value," The Thomist, XL (1976), 121.