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VIII Social and Political Philosophy Social and political philosophy deals with questions of social justice: why do we need government? How should wealth be distributed? How can a fair social order be ensured?

General and social philosophy

Social Philosophy Schopenhauer did not create special works on social philosophy, but from his disparate statements one can draw up a fairly complete picture of his views on this subject. Elements of Hobbesian contract theory are intricately intertwined in it.

Bloch's Marxism and His Social Philosophy Not only did Bloch himself favor Marxism, he was also perceived as a Marxist. The extent to which his texts correspond to classical Marxism will not be discussed here - this is a topic for a separate discussion. One thing is clear: Bloch, clearly

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Department of Philosophy

Department of Philosophy

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TEST

in the discipline "PHILOSOPHY"

Subject: « Philosophical and sociological
views of M. Weber»

Option number 5

Completed: 2nd year student

Speciality:

Organisation management

Max Weber (1864 - 1920) - German sociologist, social philosopher, culturologist and historian. It can be safely called the Leonardo da Vinci of philosophy and sociology. His basic theories today form the foundation of sociology: the doctrine of social action and motivation, the social division of labor, alienation, the profession as a vocation.

The achievements of Max Weber are simply impossible to enumerate, they are so huge. In the field of methodology, one of his most important achievements is the introduction of ideal types. M. Weber believed that the main goal of sociology is to make as clear as possible what was not such in reality itself, to reveal the meaning of what was experienced, even if this meaning was not realized by the people themselves. Ideal types make historical or social material more meaningful than it was in the experience itself. real life.

Weber's ideas permeate the entire structure of modern sociology, forming its foundation. The creative heritage of Max Weber is huge. He contributed to the theory and methodology, laid the foundations for the branches of sociology: bureaucracy, religion, city and labor.

M. Weber himself created many scientific works, including: "Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism" (1904-1905), "Economy and Society" (1921), "Objectivity of Social-Scientific and Socio-Political Knowledge" (1904), "Critical Studies in the Logic of Cultural Sciences" (1906), "On the Categories of Understanding Sociology" (1913), "Basic Sociological Concepts".

Thanks to Max Weber and his colleagues, the German school dominated world sociology until the First World War.

In the term "understanding" Weber puts his own special meaning. This is a rational procedure for learning actions social actors(micro level), and through them - the study of the culture of a particular society (macro level). As you can see, Weber was a supporter of social nominalism. Nominalism is a theoretical and methodological orientation, suggesting that the nature of individuals, their actions, ultimately determines the essence of society. One of the central points of Weber's theory was his allocation of an elementary particle of the individual's behavior in society - social action, which is the cause and effect of a system of complex relationships between people.

According to the philosopher, the analysis and typification of people's social actions is the main subject of philosophy. However, not every behavioral act of an individual can be considered a social action. Human action acquires the character of social action if it contains two fundamental points:

1. Subjective motivation of an individual who puts a certain meaning into his act;

2. Orientation to the behavior of other people.

Weber notes: “We call an action a person’s action (regardless of whether it is external or internal, whether it comes down to non-intervention or patient acceptance), if and insofar as the acting individual or individuals associate a subjective meaning with it. "Social" we call such an action, which, according to the supposed actor or actors, meaning correlates with the action of other people and focuses on it.

It follows from the definition that an action that a person does not think about is not a social action. Thus, an unintentional fall of a person or an involuntary cry of pain cannot be attributed to social action, because they simply lack a thought process. An action in which a person simply does not see a real purpose is not a social action. So, unintentional or unconscious participation of a person in one or another gathering, campaign, political action cannot be attributed to social action, because in this case there is no thought process and consciously purposeful activity.

The philosopher did not consider actions to be social if they were purely imitative, when individuals are guided by some natural phenomenon (opening umbrellas by many people during the rain) or when they act like crowd atoms, which is characteristic of reactive behavior (behavior as a reaction to a certain stimulus e.g. "danger").

Emotional outpourings, involuntary cries, manifestations of joy from meetings with heroes and leaders, or outbursts of anger against "enemies" also cannot be attributed to social actions, because they simply do not have an active rational principle as a person's ability to reflect and comprehend the world without distorting its real content. excitement or fear.

The action is not social and in the event that it does not affect the interests of other people, it remains unnoticed by them. An example of this is Manilovism, a dreamy-inactive attitude to the environment, which, as Gogol showed in Dead Souls, is very typical for many Russians, who probably do not even realize this.

Another important remark that Weber makes is that the subject of his concept is the actions of individuals, not collectives. When using the concepts of state, corporation, family, military unit, etc., one should keep in mind that these and other social structures are not in themselves subjects of social action. Therefore, from the point of view of Weber, it is impossible, for example, to understand the action of a parliament or a presidential administration, a firm or a family, but one can and should strive to interpret the actions of their constituent individuals.

Weber identified four types of social actions of individuals, which differed in the degree of rationality present in them. It goes without saying that in reality a person does not always know what he wants. Sometimes people's behavior is dominated by some value orientations or just emotions. Focusing on the possible real behavior of people in life, Weber identifies the following types of action:

1. Purposeful;

2. Value-rational;

3. Affective;

4. Traditional.

Let us turn to Weber himself: “Social action, like any other behavior, can be:

1. Purposeful rational, if it is based on the expectation of a certain behavior of objects of the external world and other people and the use of this expectation as "conditions" or "means" to achieve one's rationally set and thought-out goal;

2. Value-rational, based on faith in the unconditional - aesthetic, religious or any other - self-sufficient value of a certain behavior as such, regardless of what it leads to;

3. Affective, primarily emotional, that is, due to affects or the emotional state of the individual;

4. Traditional, that is, based on a long habit.

From this classification it follows that there can be a social action in which the meaning of the action and the meaning of the actor coincide, in which there is a clearly expressed goal and meaningful means adequate to it. Such an action was designated by the philosopher as a goal-rational action. In it, both of the above points coincide: to understand the meaning of an action means to understand the actor and vice versa.

An example of goal-oriented actions can be the behavior of people who consciously make a political career and make their own decisions. In such behavior there is a sense of action that is understandable to others, prompting the latter to take adequate independent acts that also have meaning and purpose. Purposeful actions can include the behavior of a student who wants to get an education, respectively, aimed at the successful assimilation of the subjects studied.

If, for example, a strong and courageous person, after being hit on one cheek, turned the other, then we are talking about a value-rational action that can be understood only taking into account the ideas of this person about the values ​​of certain religious dogmas. Value-rational action is based on belief in certain unconditional values, commandments, ideas about goodness and duty. Their absolutization leads to the fact that in such actions a certain component of irrationality inevitably appears. So, if for people the value of their own lives is nothing in comparison with the belief in the unconditional rightness of the leader, the course of the party, for the sake of fulfilling the “infallible predestinations” of which they are ready for deprivation and even self-sacrifice, then they just perform value-rational actions.

Affective actions can be observed quite often in team sports - these or those involuntary, emotional reactions of players. They, as a rule, are determined by the emotional state of a person - passion, love, hatred, etc. Naturally, they go beyond the limits of the conscious, meaningful activity of the individual.

Traditional actions include everyday behavioral acts performed simply out of habit. People behave almost automatically because they have always done it. As a rule, they do not realize why they do this, because they simply adhere to the usual mores and customs. There is almost no goal-setting in such actions, and there is no reflection on the choice of means for their implementation.

M. Weber believed that social philosophy, which he characterized as theoretical sociology, should primarily study the behavior and activities of people, whether it be an individual or a group. Hence, the main provisions of his socio-philosophical views fit into the theory of social action he created. According to Weber, social philosophy is designed to explore the relationship of all spheres of human activity - economic, legal, moral, religious, etc. Society appears as the interaction of individuals and social groups based on the coordination of their interests, language, religion, morality.

According to Weber, social actions constitute a system of conscious, meaningful interaction of people, in which each person takes into account the influence of their actions on other people and their response to ϶ᴛᴏ. A sociologist, on the other hand, must understand not only the content, but also the motives of people's actions based on certain spiritual values. In other words, it is extremely important to comprehend and understand the content of the spiritual world of the subjects of social action.
It is worth noting that, having comprehended ϶ᴛᴏ, sociology acts as an understanding one.

In his "understanding sociology", Weber proceeds from the fact that understanding of social actions and the inner world of subjects can be both logical, meaningful with the help of concepts, and purely emotional and psychological. In the latter case, understanding is achieved by "feeling", "getting used to" the sociologist in the inner world of the subject of social action. It is worth noting that he calls this process empathy. Both levels of understanding of social actions, from which the social life of people is formed, play a role. At the same time, according to Weber, it is more important to have a logical understanding of social processes, their understanding at the level of science. He characterized their comprehension by "feeling" as an auxiliary method of research.

From one point of view, exploring the spiritual world of the subjects of social action, Weber could not get around the problem of values, incl. moral, political, aesthetic, religious (it is primarily about understanding people's conscious attitudes towards these values, which determine the content and direction of their behavior and activities) On the other hand, a sociologist or social philosopher himself proceeds from a certain system of values. This he must take into account in the course of his research.

M. Weber proposed a ϲʙᴏe solution to the problem of values. Unlike Rickert and other neo-Kantians, who regard the above values ​​as something supra-historical. eternal and otherworldly, Weber interprets value as “the setting of this or that historical epoch”, as “the direction of interest characteristic of the epoch”. In other words, he emphasizes the earthly, socio-historical nature of values. This is important for a realistic explanation of people's consciousness, their social behavior and activities. Material published on http: // site

It should not be forgotten that the concept of ideal types occupies the most important place in Weber's social philosophy. Under the ideal type, he meant a certain ideal model of what is most useful to a person, objectively meets his interests at the moment and in general in the modern era. In ϶ᴛᴏm, moral, political, religious and other values, as well as the attitudes of behavior and activities of people, rules and norms of behavior, traditions, can act as ideal types.

Weber's ideal types characterize, as it were, the essence of optimal social states - states of power, interpersonal communication, individual and group consciousness. By virtue of ϶ᴛᴏgo, they act as ϲʙᴏlike guidelines and criteria, based on which it is extremely important to make changes in the spiritual, political and material life of people. Since the ideal type does not completely coincide with what exists in society, and often contradicts the actual state of things (or the latter contradicts it), it, according to Weber, bears the features of a utopia.

And yet, ideal types, expressing in its interconnection a system of spiritual and other values, act as socially significant phenomena. It is worth noting that they contribute to the introduction of expediency in the thinking and behavior of people and organization in public life. Weber's doctrine of ideal types serves for his followers as a kind of methodological setting for understanding social life and solving practical problems related, in particular, to the ordering and organization of the elements of spiritual, material and political life.

Weber was based on the fact that in the historical process the degree of meaningfulness and rationality of people's actions grows.
It is worth noting that especially ϶ᴛᴏ is seen in the development of capitalism. “The way of managing the economy is being rationalized, management is being rationalized both in the field of economics and in the field of politics, science, culture - in all spheres of social life; the way people think is rationalized, as well as the way they feel and the way of life in general. All ϶ᴛᴏ is accompanied by a colossal strengthening of the social role of science, which, according to Weber, is the purest embodiment of the principle of rationality.

Weber considered the legal state to be the embodiment of rationality, the functioning of which is entirely based on the rational interaction of the interests of citizens, obedience to the law, as well as generally valid political and moral values.

Without ignoring other forms of cognition of social reality, Weber preferred its scientific analysis. This applies primarily to economic and political phenomena and processes. It is worth noting that he was based on the fact that “a sign of scientific knowledge will be the objective significance of its conclusions, i.e. truth." From the standpoint of truth, Weber believes, a person's worldview is connected with "the interests of his class."

Not being a supporter of a materialistic understanding of history, Weber to some extent appreciated Marxism, but opposed its simplification and dogmatization. It is worth noting that he narrated that "the analysis of social phenomena and cultural processes from the perspective of their economic conditionality and their influence was and - with careful application, free from dogmatism - will remain for the foreseeable future a creative and fruitful scientific principle" . Such is the conclusion of this broad and deep-thinking philosopher and sociologist, which he made in a work under the remarkable title "The 'Objectivity' of Social-Scientific and Socio-Political Knowledge."

As can be seen, Max Weber dealt with a wide range of problems in social philosophy in his writings. The current revival of interest in his teachings is due to his profound judgments about the solution of complex social problems that concern us today.

Social action theory: from M. Weber to phenomenologists

E.I. Kravchenko

Kravchenko Elena Ivanovna - Candidate of Historical Sciences, Associate Professor, Department of History and Theory of Sociology, Faculty of Sociology, Moscow State University named after M.V. Lomonosov.

In every field of knowledge there are questions that affect the essence of the subject of study itself. For sociology, such a question is the relationship between the free creativity of man and the social foundations that restrain him. How are these two things compatible, and are they compatible at all? To what extent is a social worker free and to what extent conditioned? Doesn't the idea of ​​strictly scientific sociology idea of ​​a free social worker?

One way or another, every sociologist sees the need to raise these questions. However, theories that describe social reality as a sphere of subjectively meaningful and purposeful actions are directly related to it. Thus, in the bosom of sociology, the most elusive and reverent thing is kept - the free creative will of man. That is why the theory of social action becomes their pivot point.

Max Weber is considered to be the father of the modern theory of social action. Sociology itself, according to his deep conviction, "is a science that seeks, by interpreting, to understand social action and thereby causally explain its process and impact." Weber defines action (regardless of whether it manifests itself externally, for example, in the form of aggression, or is hidden inside the subjective world of the person, like suffering) as such behavior with which the acting individual or individuals associate a subjectively posited meaning. "Social" action becomes only if, according to the meaning assumed by the actor or actors, it correlates with the action of other people and focuses on it.

Awareness, meaningfulness - the key to the theory of social action by Max Weber. But what does it mean to “make sense of action”? To give meaning means to realize oneself in one's relation to the world. In the act of conveying meaning, in the process of giving meaning, a person puts some object (material or ideal, animate or inanimate) in connection with his microcosm. On the other hand, it makes sense that does not leave people indifferent, that in one way or another affects our lives, that is, significantly. Insignificant things that are not correlated with the needs and interests of things, events remain outside the sphere of our attention and have no value for us. The communication of meaning is thus at the same time the giving of value.

Value, according to Weber, is a form of human thinking, a way of reasoning. It cannot be characterized in the categories "positive - negative", "relative - absolute", objective - subjective", etc. Value, or significance, is also a correlation, correlation of a person with the world of things, people and spiritual phenomena. It is not directly related with the utilitarian purpose of these things and events, practical use, although it can be reduced to the latter.The bearer of values ​​is a person who comprehends them in the experience of internal acceptance or rejection.They are necessary for her to distinguish between the goals that the human will sets for itself.Their place motivation for action is much deeper than goals and interests.It is the attribution to value as giving meaning, on the basis of which the goal is formulated, that shows us the most important thing that determines human behavior.Accordingly, as Weber believed, if we can understand what is the value on which the goal is oriented human action, we will understand this action itself, and the mission of the sociologist will be fulfilled.

Returning to the definition of social action, it is easy to see that Weber emphasizes the subjective nature of meaning-making. Therefore, it is assumed that in some way it is possible for an outside observer to penetrate the consciousness of the direct performer of the action. But Weber himself, it would seem, deprives us of this opportunity. He reasonably writes that "the highest" goals "and" values ​​", which, as experience shows, human behavior can be oriented, we often cannot fully understand, although in some cases we are able to comprehend it intellectually; the more these values ​​differ from our own, the most important values ​​for us, the more difficult it is for us to understand them in empathy through empathy, the power of imagination.

Weber finds a way out of this situation thanks to two assumptions. The first of them separates ordinary consciousness (or a person's partial attitude to what is vitally important for him, practically useful) and science (or an impartial, objective attitude of a researcher to the subject of analysis). The cultural researcher, by whom Weber calls a sociologist, works with the latter. He highlights "not common to all (studied objects), but significant to all (studied subjects)" . Thus, giving meaning as a reference to value in Weber is outside the sphere of psychology, individual experience. We understand not the acting person himself, but the meaning of his action as it is revealed to us by the procedure of referring to value.

The second assumption concerns the very point of reference, or value, by which we can determine the meaning of human behavior and make a universally valid (for the acting subject, for the analytical scientist and for the scientific community as a whole) judgment. Weber's attribution to value is a comparison of the meaning of an action with the "installation" of the contemporary historical epoch, the "direction of interest" characteristic of this epoch. Weber sees in value only a historical education that has nothing to do with eternal truths, ethical precepts, although it belongs to the sphere of culture.

However, this is not the end of Weber's concept of value choice. The subject of science, he writes, is "life based on itself and understood from itself", and therefore embodying a huge number of contradictory life positions, "the eternal struggle of the gods" ". The fate of man, the only owner of will and self-consciousness, is inevitable choice between these gods or ... demons. The goal, according to Weber, is always an "idea", a "value ideal" underlying it. Setting a goal, a person "weighs and makes a choice between values ​​... as he is told by his conscience and his worldview". Thus, at first, a private theory grows to a worldview, a way of perceiving and scientific understanding of human life and activity in the world. And the essence of the "understanding", or interpretative, approach proposed by Weber to the knowledge of social life becomes the problem of the relationship between freedom and conditionality, creativity and normative restrictions, which a social figure decides for himself every time in the process of giving meaning to the world on the basis of a value choice.

Sociologists who more or less adhere to this view of social action in Western social thought include phenomenologists, ethnomethodologists, mostly adherents of symbolic interactionism and authors of a sociological version of existentialism. With all the differences between them, they share two positions that are fundamentally important for understanding not only the ways of development of world sociology, but also social life itself.

The first point is that the supporters of these sociological trends are alien to the idea of ​​a person as a being deprived of the right to vote, some kind of non-specific object of study. Equally, they do not share the view of the social environment as independent of human consciousness and experience. People, they write, do not come to a frozen world of rigid forms, but to an unfinished creation, completing it every second in communication. Moreover, unlike mechanical, natural systems, the life of the human community depends not so much on previous events, on what has already happened to the present moment, but on what has not yet been revealed, but exists only as an idea, intention. “In our understanding, the goal is such an idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthe result,” Weber wrote, “that becomes the cause of the action, and just as we take into account any cause that contributes to a significant result, we take into account the given one.”

The reactive, reflex paradigm granted to social science by Descartes acquires a worthy rival - an activist model of social action, according to which meaningful actions of people are the root cause and essence of social life. It is no coincidence that in American historiography all the trends inheriting Weber's methodology were called creative. Such an understanding of life activity corresponds to the data of psychophysiology, which proved on the basis of experimental material the invalidity of the causal, or reflex, explanation of human behavior. In accordance with its postulates, life itself as animation appears only when the reflex, or response to a stimulus, is replaced by an active attitude of the living system to the problems that arise in the course of its development. The cause of the action becomes its goal, that is, the model of the intended result, its informational equivalent. We act in accordance with the set goal ("in order to"), and this goal determines the way we act ("because"), on which, in fact, Weber insisted. Thus, the determining factor of current behavior moves from the past (which was characteristic of the reflex theory) to the future. This is how the "pre-reflection concept" arises.

The second point is connected with the recognition of Max Weber's theory of social action as an organic and natural basis, the primary source of all subsequent interpretations of the social world as a world of personally meaningful, creative interaction between people. Then Weber's "understanding sociology" turns into a kind of analytical tuning fork against which the sociologies we have mentioned are compared.

Appeal to the meaning of action inevitably becomes an appeal to a social figure, this meaning is creating. Without denying the possibility of the existing order of things, he, at the same time, refuses to mechanically accept it, rightly believing that his life world is his life world. It is within the power of man not only to react passively to external stimuli and provocations, but to actively respond to them according to his own understanding.

The openness of society to the goals-projects that a person plans for himself (that is, not yet happened, but already thought) reflects the "pliability" of the social world. G. Simmel also wrote about this, defining society as individual, "private processes of synthesis", which we collectively call our joint being, or being-society (Gesellschaft-Sein) . Between the individual as a "social self" and the objectively existing social structure, another, third dimension of social life appears - the possibility of social experience, subjectively meaningful reality.

However, it is precisely the interpretative trend in sociology that provides a systematic development of this idea. According to him, man is no longer a victim of either social organization or natural instincts. He is the owner (to a greater or lesser extent) of free will, which allows him to make a variety of decisions. However, whatever decision he makes, his behavior is unthinkable without a value choice. The man-doer not only truly reflects the reality around him, but explains, interprets it for himself, based on the learned criteria, the chosen coordinate system. This always happens, regardless of how much the person himself understands or, on the contrary, does not realize this. The relationship between the world of possibilities opening up to us and our knowledge of this world is never "external", "as if existing world already well described before we have given a description of it, and our task is to discover the "already well described world"". To act is to devote oneself to the service of a certain value, thereby giving meaning to one's own existence. And interpretive, they are also - creative, constructivist) sociology make the chain "value - goal-setting, initiative - and in the limit responsibility" clear.

Obviously, in the case of the reflex theory of action, values ​​are completely dissolved in the social norm, the ways in which social systems direct, rigidly determine and control the individual choice of a social actor. Therefore, a mechanical synthesis of the theory of action in its creative interpretation with the institutional theory of systems, which does not detract from either side, seems absolutely unpromising. The combination of these methodological perspectives - outside the value field, the ethical unity of the individual - inevitably leads to the absorption of the person-actor by the structure, normative regulations and restrictions.

Indeed, social action as a "pre-reflection" presupposes that adherence to norms requires more or less free consent on the part of the individual, for a norm becomes a norm only if people recognize it as such. The activist model of social action excludes the simple replication of social norms. Even our integration into social life, that is, socialization, is never a passive assimilation of the norms and values ​​offered by society.

Socialization is a double-edged process, active on both sides: both the trainee and the teacher. They are subject to mutual influence. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Any social prohibition or rule is assimilated and put into practice by a specific, unlike everyone else, person. The role-playing uniform given to him by society in accordance with the tasks performed, status and designed for some ideal, typical figure, still takes on the forms and proportions of its owner. It is clear that individual characteristics are outside the sociological field of vision. However, the merit of the theoretical and methodological systems we are considering is that these features are necessarily stipulated as not subject to "strictly scientific" sociology, but no less essential moment of social life.

Following Weber, who wrote about the great conventionality of what we call "subjective comprehension," the head of the phenomenological school, A. Schutz, writes about the elusive sphere of direct Umwelt experience, in which, in fact, people's true life together takes place; G. Garfinkel - about the "reasonable oafs" so beloved by sociologists, meekly following social standards, and therefore lifeless; George G. Mead - about "I", that human hypostasis, which is hidden behind an empirically manifest appearance, like James's "soul", or Kant's transcendental one; I. Hoffman - about the true face of the actor, barely guessed under the social mask. Let's consider this in more detail.

A. Schutz divides the world of the modern sociologist into two spheres: inaccessible and accessible for sociological study. The first of these, Umwelt, involves direct interaction between people face to face. This is the space of an unpredictable experiment of a person with social reality, the area of ​​directly experienced experience of people's communication. The second, Mitwelt, incorporates the mediated experience of anonymous communication. Here the figures perceive each other as social types, devoid of biography, unpredictability and freedom. Actually, they are no longer living people, but simulated homunculi (homunculi), characteristic characters both for each other and for the scientist.

Social activists-homunculi completely manage with those socio-cultural "recipes" that the sociologist provides them with. These recipes help to get a standard result in a standard situation by standard means. The homunculus has no doubt: his act will cause a response corresponding to expectations. Mitwelt is a reactive world, where a certain stimulus is followed by a presumed response according to a known pattern. Each subsequent action is determined by the type created by previous experience.

However, every type once arose "from a situation of an adequate solution to a problematic situation that cannot be dealt with with the help of an already existing stock of knowledge, but only by revising existing experience" . The situation is complicated by the fact that in real life my perception of the world depends on "my current historical situation or ... on my pragmatic interests belonging to the situation in which I find myself here and now" . Therefore, whatever our actions are, they are always the result of a meaningful decision we have made. "With the term 'action'," writes Schutz, "... we designate thoughtful human behavior, that is, behavior based on a project drawn up in advance. By the term 'act' we will designate the result of an unfolding process, that is, a completed action. ... Not future action, and the future act is anticipated in the project.

In this connection, Schutz draws attention to one more moment that is extremely "inconvenient" for sociology. What does knowledge of one's own actions or the actions of others mean to laymen or scientists? "We, as a rule, "know" what the Other is doing, why he is doing it, why he is doing it at this particular time and in these specific circumstances. This means that we perceive the actions of another person in terms of motives and goals" . However, it is difficult to scientifically describe the motives of human actions. According to Schutz, even Max Weber failed to adequately elucidate them.

Schütz divides motives into "in order-to" (in-order-to) and "because, because-of-that" (because). At the same time, he immediately makes a reservation: both are very subjective and inaccessible to the researcher. Perhaps the motif "because" is somewhat more "submissive", because it describes what has already happened, what has already been revealed. But remembering Schutz's skepticism regarding the knowledge of the events of the past (Vorwelt), which we will never be able to visit, we should not be deceived by the unrealizable. All the more impregnable for us is the motive "in order to". Not only is its space an indefinite future (Folgewelt), "in order to" is immersed in the deepest layers of human consciousness (duré e). Nevertheless, the "in order to" motif is necessary for Schutz, who is trying not to completely lose - albeit as a background, tonality - a human creator.

A parallel with Weber is appropriate here. Only purposeful, meaningful actions can become the subject of scientific consideration. The goal is the starting point from which it is possible to describe the structure of the action. The project outlined by the figure in this case is the goal-cause of his act. This is exactly how, according to a number of authors, Schütz sees a living, untypified social action - the action "in order to".

Schütz acknowledges that the first and initially objective solution to a problem depends largely on the individual's opinion of what is subjectively relevant. Phenomenological sociology is based on the concepts of subjective meaning, personal meaning. “It is this understanding by the actor of the dependence of the motives and goals of his actions on his biographically determined situation that the social scientist has in mind when he speaks of subjective meaning... Strictly speaking, the acting person, and only he alone, knows what he is doing, why he is doing it ... ".

Denying science the opportunity to study real, direct interactions face to face, Schutz nevertheless recognizes them as the ontological basis of phenomenological sociology. Ultimately, the phenomenologist must come to understand "how meaning is constituted in the individual experience of the individual Ego...". For the purpose of sociology is to form an understanding of "the processes of determination of meanings and understanding that take place within individuals, the processes of interpreting the behavior of other people and the processes of self-interpretation" .

However, all this - and awareness of the cause of one's own action, and consideration of its alternative ways, and the final choice, and, finally, the very implementation of the action - is the area of ​​Umwelt, or "we-relationships", which are determined by the process of individual consciousness. In it, partners know each other personally and take a direct part in each other's life, personally knowing the other from their own experience. It is social actions in the sphere of direct experience of Umwelt (however, only in it that they really exist) that fill the world with new meanings and meanings, leaving behind a person the right to freedom, that freedom that eludes social science.

Following phenomenologists, ethnomethodologists also consider social action as a process of understanding and interpreting the social world. This is the only way to avoid turning actors into "reasonable oafs" (judgemental dores). We understand the world as we define it and act as we understand it. This means that our actions and relationships with each other depend not so much on objectively existing structures and norms, but on our "feeling", "feeling" of these structures (a sense of social structure).

Structures and norms are nothing more than the surroundings, the circumstances of our daily activity. On their own, apart from the importance given to them by social actors, they are of little interest to ethnomethodologists. The latter is occupied by "how society is continuously completed in the practical activity of rational individuals" . According to ethnomethodologists, writes J. Alexander, society can offer only an "external" form of an event, which social figures fill with meaning, complete "from the inside". However, while phenomenologists stubbornly try to penetrate into the social mechanism of the activity of human consciousness, ethnomethodologists, carried away by empiricism, do not make such attempts in principle. Following the behest of G. Garfinkel, they are sure that the processes of human mental development are outside the limits of their science. "There is no reason to look inside the cranium, since there is nothing interesting to be found there except for brains," writes Garfinkel.

More than anyone else, ethnomethodologists may be in danger without much remorse (unlike phenomenologists) of reducing interpretation to following "recipes," personal search to following rules, and the agent to "homunculus." At first, Garfinkel avoids this temptation with all his might, but the so-called "documentary method" he uses (which, however, he borrows from K. Mannheim) testifies to the futility of his efforts. According to the documentary method, spoken phrases are considered "as a 'document', or 'something that indicates' or 'represents' the intended structure underlying them". In other words, if ethnomethodologists see the essence of social action in interpretation, then the essence of interpretation lies in the search for the so-called "normal form" (searching for normal form). For example, in the event of an unexpected hitch or a growing misunderstanding between the interlocutors, one of them with a gesture (whether it be a disapproving look, a sarcastic smile or a wave of the hand) will necessarily signal to the other about the need to return to the generally accepted form of interaction in this situation. Order is born from the ability inherent in our consciousness to typify what is happening again in accordance with already known patterns.

In the same vein, Cicourel defines sociology as a science that seeks to answer the question: how do we make sense of our environment in a socially acceptable way? Fragments of the social world, Sicourel explains, appear to us recognizable thanks to language, which "manifests" the cultural patterns of our communication, ordering and structuring it. Confirming the human ability to create social reality, Sicourel identifies the rules of its interpretation with the fundamental rules of grammar. They allow the agent to "develop appropriate (usually innovative) responses to changing situational environments".

It is clear that to interpret does not mean strictly and unambiguously following the model proposed by society, but to endow what is happening with meaning, content, equally based on both personal experience of social life and the characteristics of interaction in this particular situation. Interpretation is a negotiation process, which J. Mead especially insisted on. Sicourel himself does not deny this, considering interpretation to be a constant mutual process, where the structural similarity of the context with other known events ("sense of social structure"), coupled with the intentions of the individual, constructs a new reality.

However, the "folk model" proposed by Sicourel still shows us a shift towards structuralism. Following anthropologists, Sicourel considers the "folk model" a cognitive system shared intersubjectively, a cultural model of our Everyday life. It is basic knowledge, a kind of phenomenological "recipe" that allows you to orient yourself in the world. In the late 1970s, Don Zimmerman put forward a similar concept of the so-called "natural language" (natural language) - the basic structure of interaction between interlocutors: a change in order, the nature of attempts to smooth out misunderstandings and pauses that arise. The sociologist defends the invariant nature of its properties. Moreover, Zimmerman is impressed by the idea of ​​synthesis of ethnomethodology with the theory of social structures. He considers their mutual enrichment "an open question and an intriguing possibility." And in the late 1980s, G. Garfinkel directly says that ethnomethodology (albeit by slightly different means than traditional sociology) explores the formal structures of a rationally comprehensible discourse, a standardized, uniform and repetitive mechanism (machineru) of our daily activity. Heritage and Atkinson also refer to "institutionalized structures of conversation" as the object of modern ethnomethodology, regardless of how aware the speakers themselves are of them. Thus, the boundary between the concepts of "forced" and "indicating" becomes difficult to distinguish. There is less and less mention of a person's understanding of his own actions as goal-setting, thinking about possible alternative solutions to emerging problems. Ethnomethodologists almost completely break the connection between social action and value choice.

It would seem that a striking antipode to such a view of social action are the views of interactionists and, first of all, J. Mead. Emphasizing that social action is based on a dialogue with "society within itself" or with oneself from the perspective of socially significant norms, Mead identifies the social actor with his reflexive self-perception "Self" - self-perception, self-concept. Mead writes: "I want to show clearly that the characteristic feature of Self is the attitude towards itself precisely as an object. It can be both a subject and an object", knowing and being known by itself at the same time, creating and being created. This ability, according to Mead, is based on the dynamic, more precisely, dialogic nature of "Self", which does not have a permanent, pronounced center and works in "two modes", within the framework of the conversation "I" and "me"1.

The facets of "Self" highlighted by Mead are by no means complete and clearly outlined by its components. These are conditional, functional poles, modes of existence, possibilities of "Self". According to Mead's figurative expression, "me" exists "there" (there), in the sphere of generally accepted, intersubjective meanings. It is the system of initial installations adopted by us, thought out and conscious, anticipating our actions in any situation. And yet, no matter how verified (by social norms and personal experience) our plans, “the resulting action is always somewhat different from everything that a person could foresee. This is true even when he just walks. puts him in a situation slightly different from what is expected, in a certain sense a situation of the unknown (novel). This movement into the future, so to speak, is the step of the ego, or "I". It is something that is not given in me ". "I" chooses from the luggage of "me" what he considers necessary and applies it in the form in which he considers it necessary, rejecting what does not suit him. It is because of "I" that we never fully know who we are, being surprised by our own actions.

Ego, or "I", is responsible for all innovations, changes; "me" performs the duties of a censor, setting the boundaries of what is permitted. "I" lives only in the present. Being conscious, it instantly turns into "me". "If you ask me where exactly in your own experience I enters, the answer is: it enters as a historical figure."

"I" gives a sense of freedom, initiative. Let us have information about ourselves and the situation in which we are, but we do not have accurate information about how we will act in this situation. It will appear with us only after the action. Social action extended in time is preceded at the very beginning by the old "me"-system and is considered completed with the advent of the new "me"-system. The "I" of this moment is present in the "me" of the next moment, each time reviewing what has been worked out once. As a given, "I" is "me", but "me" which was "I" before.

Consequently, "I" characterizes the creative beginning of the human "Self", its individual characteristics, the immediacy of our momentary existence, spontaneity. "... I both evokes me and responds to it. Taken together, they constitute the personality as it appears in social experience. Self is essentially a social process that occurs through these two distinct phases. If it were not for possessed them, then there would be no conscious responsibility and there would be nothing new in experience.

"Me" is associated with tradition, cultural and institutional limitations of our perception, with the influence that others have on us, with their participation in the formation of our "Self". As conceived by Mead, "me" not only leaves the freedom of action for "I", refusing its complete predestination, but is itself in a certain sense a derivative of it. After all, the experience of "me" is not so much the result of the assimilation of social experience as the assimilated reactions of "I" to this experience. In its own experience, the ego can feel itself as an acting subject and can reflect on its actions. I can relate to myself.

However, we should not forget that the ratio "I - me" characterizes "Self", that is, human reflection, conscious and ordered experience. This pair cannot be considered as "unconscious - conscious", "irrational - rational", "emotional - rational", "intuitive - logical". "I" by definition must participate in the meaningful existence of "Self". Meade finds himself in a rather difficult position. On the one hand, his attempts to preserve for a person, albeit in his "Self" image, the freedom of creativity, the ability to improvise, the multidimensionality of existence are obvious. On the other hand, he clearly identifies the "social man" with the man who has "an explanatory mind." In order to find a compromise between these hard-to-combine assumptions, Mead introduces two new concepts: "immediacy of perception" (immediacy) and "living reality" (living reality).

He refers to the "immediacy of perception" in order to remove the contradiction between the spontaneous and, at the same time, the reflexive in the character of "I". Despite some freedom of explanation, which Mead himself admits, he rightly considers the presence in our perception of elements of evaluation, judgment about what is happening, moments of its interpretation inevitable. This is a peculiar, implicit reflection of the first order (not comparable with scientific reflection), the inescapable correlation of the perceived with the perceiver. In this case, however, the immediacy and urgency of the "I" is an ease that organically and without hesitation includes prudence, and the "I" itself, as a result of Mead's explanations, becomes more and more illusory. In the end, Mead admits the impossibility of any clear interpretation of the nature of "I" - this is a question outside the bounds of science. "I have no intention of raising the metaphysical question of how a person can be both I and me at the same time, but I am asking about the significance of this separation from the point of view of behavior as such" . Decades later, the efforts of conscientious followers of Mead will make the illusory nature of "I" indisputable.

Another attempt by Mead to overcome the notion of the entirely rational comprehensibility of human life in society is the concept of "living reality", the pre-reflexive basis of "Self". In the most general approximation, it can be defined as the process of life known to us, the natural force of a biological organism that has a unique perception, subjectivity. She is the deus ex machina that Mead resorts to in cases of logical "breakdowns" of the "I - me" mechanism.

What is happening in the present is still inaccessible to consciousness, that is, to our "Self". And Mead decides to resort to "living reality" as the fundamental principle, the existential beginning of "Self". It is thanks to her that the "destruction" of "Self" does not become fatal, but anticipates its renewal.

J. Mead creates a "social person" in a way that is very characteristic of all major social thinkers: combining the balance and logical consistency of his scientific constructions with an intuitive need, and often an urgent need to break out of the limits of those restrictions that this or that special science imposes, into the subject her philosophical, metaphysical depths. However, this breakthrough immediately causes counteraction of disciplinary restrictions, which throw the scientist back into the boundaries of "permissible". And now the qualities with which philosophical thought endows human existence are communicated in a very peculiar and risky way to its derivative - "Self", a temporary, situational category of action. Freedom as an essential, natural characteristic of a person becomes the freedom of a very limited choice among the possibilities offered by society.

Obviously, Mead does not think of freedom in isolation from responsibility. But what is meant by it? Its synonym is moral necessity or the same responsibility for rational actions, the same step into the future from the present, prepared by the past, for which the identified cause-and-effect patterns are a condition for the already chosen future, and not a condition for choosing this future itself. . And in this sense, the opinion of a number of American researchers that Mead's social action reproduces the reactive nature of the relationship between the individual organism and its physical and biological environment seems no longer so harsh.

Nevertheless, no matter how we evaluate Mead's contribution to the theory of social action, it is difficult to deny him the following: the plot of his sociological scenario does not differ too much from the intention of phenomenologists and, moreover, ethnomethodologists. In particular, we are talking about the so-called “paradox” of social life discovered by these scientists: the better and more detailed a person is familiar with social institutions, the easier it is for him to bypass them or step over them, to be cunning. In real life, social action inevitably leads to a refinement, and often to renewal of the social routine. It is this idea that underlies the sociology of I. Hoffmann.

In the modern world, writes Hoffman, social action is increasingly becoming an activity of managing impressions. The participants in the interaction, or actors, pursuing their own goals and embodying their own intentions on the social stage, play a game of "fooling" each other. The legal rules of this game require that each of the participants in the interaction adhere to certain standards of behavior, deliberately emphasizing and exaggerating them. "... Whenever we're given a uniform, we're actually given leather."

Obviously, in this case we can talk about a person as a certain social mask, nothing more. In life, the mismatch between the role and the actor, the forced conflict between the "all-too-human self" as a performer and the "socialized self" as the basis for performing the corresponding role is possible, and sometimes even inevitable. It is he who opens the veil to us over the innermost and sacred "Self" of human nature, personal identification, which grows stronger in the struggle of the conflicting parties. “It is in the struggle against something that our true Self is born,” concludes I. Hoffman. there is no stable Self.Our sense of our being as a person with a particular face can only be extracted from immersion in a larger social context.Our consciousness of our own individuality arises from those inconspicuous ways and means by which we resist violence Our status rests on the indestructible building of this world, while our sense of self-identity is hidden in its cracks.

The third hypostasis of Hoffmann's man is a natural consequence of his approach to the essence of human life, its goals and motives. Speaking about the existing distance between a person and the role he plays (role distance), secondary adaptations of the performer (secondary adjustments) to the existence between himself and the role he plays, I. Hoffman comes to the conclusion that the nature of a person who feels this distance and suffers from its inevitability. True "Self" is both the result and the basis of interaction and mutual repulsion between the actor and his role. Our authenticity is a kind of matter, acquiring visible outlines of social characters and dramatic roles lying on the surface. Therefore, our roles are functional derivatives of their indecomposable basis - "Self".

And although homo sociology is alive and well in sociology - a very schematic, but very easy-to-handle model of a person-actor, built according to normative models, - the above-mentioned authors try to dissociate themselves from it. They understand that an actor deprived of inner freedom is not capable of making a responsible value choice. And trying to avoid it does not destroy it. Antinomy, the confrontation between the world of freedom and the world of necessity is eternal, and it is born only by man and within man.

All the more unacceptable is the sociological version of existentialism. K. Jaspers also noted: "Genuine existential philosophy appeals, questions, thanks to which a person tries to come to himself again ... When mixed with sociological, psychological and anthropological thinking, it only falls into a sophistical masquerade" . However, the supporters of the existential approach in sociology themselves are very cautious about their theoretical experiments, furnishing them with a number of conditions and warnings: "Existentialism could attack the trail of more vital, more fruitful ways of penetrating the essence (of social life, - E.K. ) than pure phenomenology. But he is still compelled to take lessons from the phenomenology that preceded him, and especially from Husserl."

The very problem around which existential sociology tries to gather its authors is primordial for the theory of social action: man is the creator and at the same time a product of the social environment; he is free to set his own goals, but is inevitably limited by existing norms. The question is different: is it possible for a sociologist to solve it by resorting to an existential vision, a philosophy of existence?

"...Sociology is an integral part of the existential whole of society..." writes E. Tirikyan, thereby endowing the latter with a personal, responsible openness to being. Existence, which is inherent precisely and only in man as an embodied spiritual being, possessing consciousness and freedom, is objectified to the level of social community. A rather strange substitution, contrary to the very spirit of existentialism, is taking place. Society, social phenomena are rather not objective for everyone, but essential, significant for everyone. "Psychological reality", created by the intersubjective consciousness of acting individuals, is present in their existential experience, and therefore cannot be reduced to supra-individual facts, a structure fixed in time and space. Trying to preserve the existential flavor of his sociological views, Tirikyan is unable to retain even the phenomenological one. As a result, the American theorist is forced to focus on the external conditions for the course of action, norms and restrictions.

On the contrary, Weber, and phenomenologists, and ethnomethodologists, and interactionists write about social action as the embodiment of a conceived project, a goal with an eye on social order. And in this the ingenuity of their heroes knows no bounds. Creation of new and replenishment of old intersubjective meanings, "recipes" of action in phenomenology; the so-called "search for normal form" in ethnomethodology; Meade's individually colored game by the rules; manipulation of legalized samples by Hoffmann.

Indeed, social creativity, as B.P. Vysheslavtsev, "there is an" art of combination ", a game of possibilities and alternatives. Freedom is not limited to the choice between what is permitted and forbidden, between yes and no. "There is freedom to choose between different and opposite yes, between different creative possibilities"... These possibilities are truly inexhaustible. However, The less obvious is the connection between social action and value choice, the less viable and analytically reliable are social figures. As a result, the rejection of interpretive analysis in favor of structural-functional analysis becomes inevitable.Thus, for example, phenomenologically "normal", intersubjective is not identical to "normative", but the line between these concepts is very thin.Ethnomethodologists overcome it effortlessly.

The author of the article defines the revealed pattern of the loss of the value bases of human life as a trend in the development of the theory of social action in Western interpretive or creative sociology of the 20th century. In the works of interactionists, phenomenologists, not to mention ethnomethodologists, and even more so the creators of an existential version of social action, what was for Weber the initial metaphysical premise of human life activity - a value choice - takes the form of reasoning about some elusive, not subject to strictly scientific study of the moment of social life - individually colored, unique properties of the subject. Thus, the model of social action as a "anticipatory reflection" loses its axiological, personal basis.

A direct consequence of the extra-value interpretation of social action is the striving of sociologists to strictly delineate the sphere of their interests and the interests of related sciences. However, the more sociology closes within its boundaries, the more it tends to reject the considerations of related (primarily humanitarian) disciplines, the less voluminous, multifaceted and integral becomes its own world. P. Berger and T. Luckman wrote: “It is assumed that sociology is one of the sciences that deal with man as man; in other words, in this special sense, sociology is a humanistic discipline. An important consequence of this concept is that sociology should either be in constant dialogue with history and philosophy, or lose their own object of study. Nevertheless, the sociology of the West slowly but surely disembodies the social figure, replacing him with his own social creations (anonymous types, iconic means of communication, etc.). The existential depth of the man-doer, about which Max Weber tries to speak in the language of sociology, leaves the works of his followers. We hear only its echoes, tonality.

Of course, it can be argued that Weber himself is to blame for the costs of subsequent interpretations of the theory of action. Due to sociological specifics, he focuses his attention on the spatio-temporal, historical, conditional properties of values, thereby depriving them of an unconditional, transcendental beginning. Meanings are alienated into the sphere of culture, and the social figure loses his true scale. However, Weber never hindered his leader in the search for the coveted "god or demon." To depart from this is to lose sight of a number of Weber's remarkably subtle insights into social action.

First, according to Weber, scientific creativity itself fits well into the framework of social action - purposeful activity using appropriate means to achieve the desired result and designed to be understood by colleagues and society. And this also means that there is not and cannot be once a recognized, unified and final interpretation of social life. And not only because the latter is boundless and changeable. The main thing is that knowledge of social life "is always knowledge from very specific, special points of view" depending on the value preferences of its owner.

Every scientific work inevitably reflects the personality of the author, for it is in his power to proclaim the principle necessary for the selection of material, and to explain social reality on the basis of this principle. A person constructs social reality not so much by creating a material environment of his habitat, physical objects of a certain purpose, but by a certain view of it, depending on which aspects of it he relates himself to. The orientation of his faith, "the refraction of values ​​in the mirror of his soul" determine the nature of the scientific search and the results obtained. The latter should be generally valid and logically convincing, and the reference value should be culturally significant for a given era, but this significance itself is identified and confirmed by a specific researcher, and in this sense, the prerequisites scientific work always subjective.

As a consequence of what has been said above, the theory of action requires a very special technique for studying social life. The "ideal type", the principle of "reference to values" and "freedom from value judgments" are special cases of Max Weber's intention to seriously reconsider the status of social science and the requirement of "objectivity" imposed on it. In line with this approach, the meaning of any event or phenomenon public life, as well as its cause, "cannot be derived, justified and explained with the help of a system of laws and concepts, no matter how perfect it may be, since this meaning involves the correlation of cultural phenomena with ideas of value" .

Secondly, the meaningfulness of action is not just a methodological assumption, a logical principle around which the ideal space of sociology is formed. Being a point of intersection, a coincidence of the interests of the researcher and the researcher, cultural value contributes to the formation of a coherent system of personal meanings. The internal unity of our actions, as A.N. Leontiev, is conditioned by some ultimate reality, giving rise to a "semantic vertical", or a "non-specific personal principle of connection" between things and actions. This principle is subject to the actions performed and provides us with vitality and moral integrity, and the semantic criteria for our perception are proclaimed as the initial premise in the description of social reality.

Weber's theory of social action calls for thinking about what we prefer in a particular situation, in relationships with people, in life. After all, everything that attracts and worries us, as modern psychophysiological studies show, is imprinted in us even at the cellular, neuronal level. It endows scientific creativity with enormous educational power. Weber's call to "remember the consequences of one's actions" can hardly be called anything other than a judgment of a moral and practical nature.

Sooner or later, we all discover the fundamental contradiction of social action, the Weberian antinomy between the "ethics of responsibility" (in the spirit of Machiavelli) and the "ethics of persuasion" (in the spirit of Kant). A leader guided by the ethics of responsibility - responsibility for the consequences - is ready to resort to any means, including violent ones, in the name of a common cause, even to the detriment of saving his own soul. The doer, guided by the ethics of persuasion, defends his ideas, regardless of what the consequences of his actions will be. He wants to be clean, first of all, before himself. Of course, Weber believes, the ethics of responsibility and the ethics of persuasion are not absolute opposites, but complementaries. In society, "the genius or demon of politics lives in internal tension with the god of love," but this tension "can burst into irreconcilable conflict at any moment." As a matter of fact, before us is an overtone of the same penetration of the value-rational action into the goal-rational action, which are so close to each other in real life. What we prefer - compromise or choice - is a matter of our conscience. Science, according to Weber, is designed to lead us to an independent decision, making this antinomy obvious.

However, as the history of sociology testifies, recognizing a person as a co-creator of social life, an active, active principle, and not a victim of normative restrictions, is not enough to consistently and fearlessly talk about scientific creativity as a social action, sharing with Weber all the consequences of such step.

Let us suppose that both interactionists, and phenomenologists, and ethnomethodologists tend to see in behavior (including research work) outwardly manifested meaningfulness. Let us assume that all of them, with more or less enthusiasm, defend the researcher's right to his own vision of the subject of his research. But as soon as it comes to what exactly underlies their preferences, what determines their research perspective, Weber's axiom about the inevitably subjective-value character of the starting point, even before touching the empirical material, becomes an insurmountable obstacle for them.

As a result, the fundamentally important idea of ​​"attributing to value" fades into the background, giving way to discussions about the free choice of scientists "of their span, their level" of social reality "without any justification" (in Hoffmann), up to doubts about the right of sociology to study social action (in Mead). The question of one's own motives for the study of this particular level and precisely in the way proposed is not raised in principle.

Now we are dealing rather not with what the researcher considers important, motivationally significant for his era, but with what is important for themselves, the real performers of the action (in fact, without adjusting for the initial and inevitable refraction, if not distortion, of the "picture" by the gaze its highly educated interpreter).

What are sociologists' arguments in their defense?

First of all, they prove that the section of social life chosen by them deprives any sense of dividing social figures into ordinary people and scientists. Both the former and the latter are inevitably rooted in it. This is how the sphere of primary knowledge about the world is defined - the sphere of everyday, ordinary thinking - to which both the observed and the observer equally belong. From this, the conclusion is also drawn about the coincidence of their value preferences, which ensure the semantic unity, the intersubjective depth of society. Ethnomethodologists refer to the substantive coincidence of the objects under study and the methodologies applied; phenomenologists - to the fact that "the constitution of the world through acts of interpretation is equally characteristic of both the participant in events and their observer" .

The process of accumulation of these general interpretations testifies, according to Schutz, to their perception as the Good. Otherwise, they would be rejected or revised. “Value actions (acts) and values ​​in him,” writes T. Lukman, “participated directly in the construction of proto-morality as universal conscious constructions - assumptions.” The good, the moral are essentially identified with the intersubjective and valuable. Value becomes the tacitly implied basis of action, a priori the same for the direct subject of the action and for the sociologist. And this, in turn, leads to what Max Weber, the discoverer of the theory of action in its classical form, fought so courageously and resolutely against. The concept of "objectivity" of socio-scientific cognition developed by him is losing its color, "dissolving" into claims for "exhaustive objectivity", a la Durkheim's sociologism.

The correspondence of the classic of structural-functional analysis T. Parsons with the phenomenologist A. Schutz and the comments of the former on the theory of social life by J. Mead testify to the consonance of the views of these seemingly completely different oriented scientists on a number of points essential for science. For phenomenologists, for example, it is no longer a person-actor and his sociocultural limitations, but sociocultural, semantic limitations and a person-actor who opposes them, not always with due success, are forced (as Schutz emphasizes) to become an object of study.

At the same time, the pedagogical pathos of the theory of action disappears, which, according to Weber, is designed to compel a person who "has eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil" to think about his actions and ideals. And although the thinker himself did not leave us direct indications that there is that truly Weberian theme that unites all of his numerous and diverse works, why not, following W. Hennis, formulate it this way: "Is there such an intellectually responsible way that can to awaken a person from within, or are the possibilities of education exhausted by adjusting the personality to its application in practice "in production" in an institution, in an office, in a workshop, in a scientific or factory laboratory, in a disciplined army? .

However, whatever the variations on the theme of the theory of action, Weberian intonations, albeit in a "residual" form, are indestructible in them. Even in those cases when the followers of the German theorist voluntarily or involuntarily sacrifice its pure sound, the feeling of incompleteness, understatement makes us remember the primary source of their scientific search - the value basis of social action.

Weber's theory of social action is not limited to the theory of rational action, but contains in a concise form all the main problems of human existence: (1) the burden of freedom (goal setting); (2) being-with-others as being-for-others (or orientation towards others) and (3) the inevitability of understanding one's actions (the subjectively assumed meaning of social action) on the way to the main life choice - giving meaning to one's own life. Otherwise, Weber would not have charged scientists with the obligation to help a person choose a position in life that would correspond to his "highest ideals". And if sociology is not turned into a scientific variety of "glass beads game", into "a realm devoid of reality of far-fetched abstractions, trying to grasp the flesh and blood of real life with their withered fingers, but never reaching it", then its right to exist can only be justified by such a mission. .

Here it is especially important to understand that any choice is the result of self-determination, but only the existential level of this self-determination can be described by the "value - path - responsibility" scheme.

The theory of action cannot fully exist outside the value field, and, therefore, the ethical unity of the individual. Summing up the results of the next international conference on the problems of human action in Winnipeg (Canada, 1975), Illinois University professor I. Thalberg said: other most obvious indicators that coincide with the action.None of them should be identified with the action ... We have failed ... ". A common methodological approach for all forum participants in the spirit of Cartesian dualism did not allow us to consider a person as a whole. The main thing was lost: the human personality is not reduced to the sum of its diverse manifestations. It is one at all levels of its existence. Therefore, action should be considered as contours, outlines in which and through which the visible embodiment of this unity takes place.

From this point of view, all the sciences of human behavior are only talking about different aspects of the same thing - our choice in the proposed circumstances. Each science sees it the way industry methods and limitations allow it to do so.

Thus, the meaningful unity of a person implies an attitude to action as an integrity built around some system-forming factor. In systems physiology, this factor has become the goal-cause of our actions; in sociology, the subjectively implied meaning behind which our value choice stands; in philosophy - personal meaning, existentially, morally colored. A serious sociology of action is inconceivable without reference to the axiological, metaphysical foundations of our being. Rising from the natural disciplines through social knowledge to the humanities (goal setting - socio-historical value - personal meaning), the sciences of human behavior acquire a real opportunity to restore the fullness and dignity of a person-actor, without losing subject certainty.

1 "I" - (English) first person singular personal pronoun, "I"; "me" - (English) all indirect case forms derived from the first person singular "I".

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Introduction

The object of social philosophy is social life and social processes. Social philosophy is a system of theoretical knowledge about the most general patterns and trends in the interaction of social phenomena, the functioning and development of society, the holistic process of social life.

Social philosophy studies society and social life not only in structural and functional terms, but also in its historical development. Of course, the subject of its consideration is the person himself, taken, however, not "in itself", not as a separate individual, but as a representative social group or community, i.e. in his social network. Social philosophy analyzes the holistic process of changing social life and the development of social systems.

A famous contribution to the development of social philosophy was made by the German thinker Max Weber (1864-1920). In his writings, he developed many ideas of neo-Kantianism, but his views were not limited to these ideas. Weber's philosophical and sociological views were influenced by prominent thinkers of different directions: the neo-Kantian G. Rickert, the founder of the dialectical materialist philosophy K. Marx, as well as such thinkers as N. Machiavelli, T. Hobbes, F. Nietzsche, and many others.

In my test, I will consider "social action theory", "understanding sociology" and the concept of "ideal types".

"The Theory of Social Action" by M. Weber

Max Weber is the author of many scientific works, including "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism", "Economy and Society", "Objectivity of Social-Scientific and Socio-Political Knowledge", "Critical Studies in the Logic of Cultural Sciences", "On some categories of understanding sociology”, “Basic sociological concepts”.

M. Weber believed that social philosophy, which he characterized as theoretical sociology, should primarily study the behavior and activities of people, whether it be an individual or a group. Hence the main provisions of his socio-philosophical views fit into the theory of social action. What is social action? “Action,” wrote M. Weber, “should be called human behavior (it doesn’t matter whether it is external or internal action, inaction or undergoing), if and insofar as the acting (or inactive) associates with it some subjective meaning. But "social action" should be called one that, in its meaning, implied by acting or inactive, is related to the behavior of others and this is oriented in its course. Thus, the presence of objective meaning and orientation to others appear in M. Weber as decisive components of social action. Thus, it is clear that only a person or many persons can act as the subject of social action. M. Weber identified four main types of social action: 1) goal-oriented, i.e. through the expectation of a certain behavior of objects of the external world and other people and using this expectation as a "condition" or as a "means" for rationally directed and regulated goals; 2) holistically rational. “i.e. through a conscious belief in the ethical, aesthetic, religious or otherwise understood unconditional own value (self-worth) of a certain behavior, taken simply as such and regardless of success”; 3) affective; 4) traditional, “i.e. through habit.

M. Weber, of course, did not deny the presence in society of various general structures, such as the state, relations, trends, etc. But unlike E. Durkheim, all these social realities are derived from a person, personality, social action of a person.

According to Weber, social actions constitute a system of conscious, meaningful interaction between people, in which each person takes into account the impact of his actions on other people and their response to it. A sociologist, on the other hand, must understand not only the content, but also the motives of people's actions based on certain spiritual values. In other words, it is necessary to comprehend, understand the content of the spiritual world of the subjects of social action. Having comprehended this, sociology appears as understanding.