| Society v/s India idual |
The greatest of our philosophers, no matter what his faults, said man is a social being. The statement itself has many connotations, perhaps distorted to one's convenience. It has two concepts: the concept of man and the concept of social or society.
Who is to be a man? In aristotle's time, the standards were different. There was no concept of a woman as an individual entity. But since people change with time, so every second on the geological clock has to have it's own philosophy. So I distort his statement a little bit and remove the dimensions of gender:
Who is an individual? What is his/her identity? And what is the limit of society's influence on this identity?
If something exists, it has an identity. This means anything with an existence has identity. But this doesn't mean that existence leads to consciousness. If something is conscious, I.e. Can think to further it's own life...it has identified it's existence. And that is alive.
In the case of humans, we talk of a community with a capacity to produce, create, and have emotions. But an individual unit of this community cannot act for his own destruction. Hence anyone that identifies his rational self interest and gas the reasoning faculty is an individual.
Such individuals when voluntarily start dealing with each other, they form a society but in such kind of voluntary dealing, they protect their individuality...their own identification.
In our age, the society has a different connotation. It refers to a barbarous institution that Doesn't take mercy on anyone who disobeys it's code of conduct. So it becomes a war. A futile one at that..as society is a voluntarily accepted concept. But if there is a strand of social criminals existing, then there is a contradiction. And contradictions do not exist in the premise of logic.
Where is the conflict? If there is any...
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