SOCIETY AND UNITY - ORGANISMIC MODEL: MUTUALITY AND HARMONY BETWEEN MEN AND WITH NATURE

• Published date: 31 December 2022

On the organismic model, in any of its forms, the individual is pushed back into the background. On its individualistic interpretation, the individual being the basic component, he is relegated to a secondary position; while on the ecological interpretation, he is pushed back one step farther inasmuch as now the basic components are the ‘sub-groups' rather than the individuals, who compose the sub-groups. The social organization, on this model, is the result of mutual interaction of the components, individuals or sub-groups, which moves towards a more and more stable equilibrium. Such a position tends to over-organization of the society which Iqbal has condemned on the ground that in an over-organized society “the individual is altogether crushed out of existence”.

In dealing with such a subject as the nature of social organization it is not easy to decide upon the point of departure. If society were a mere addition or conglomeration of individuals, one would directly take a start from the ‘individual'; but the things are not so simple, for what complicates the matter is that the ‘individual' and ‘society' both need a mutual reference inasmuch as they are reciprocal and interdependent. It is, however, customary, and also in line with the scheme of the programme of current meeting of the ISM, to take a start from the individual, and to decide upon the nature of ‘society' in the light of our view on him. Our theory of the society, then, will draw on whatever view we take of the individual and the ‘interrelations' which obtain among the individuals constituting the society.

I must sound a warning at the very outset that any approach from the individual to society is at best only tentative, for there may be conceivable an ideal society the members whereof have yet to be discovered (we may call such a society a ‘null society' after the fashion of the concept of a ‘null class' in class-algebra or a ‘null set' in modern mathematics). George H. Mead has suggested a very concrete start, i.e., we should rather begin with an ‘interactional field' of interdependent organisms in an environment. 1 I, however, chose to make a start, a tentative one though, from the individual.

As said before, our view on society will, in large measure, be dependent on our view of the individual. If we were to conceive of an individual as a colony of ‘windowless monads' after the fashion of Leibniz, then there would be no genuine social set-up even thinkable, for there would be on ‘interaction' among the individuals in any intelligible sense. There is, however, a rich wealth of the views which permit of the requisite interaction, and these views may be broadly classified into three kinds:

(i) the materialistic views, culminating in mechanism, which conceive of the individual as a rigid, discrete entity, or at best, system explicable in terms of laws of dynamics or the behaviouristic ‘stimulus-response' frame-work, hardly allowing any place to mind except, at best, if any, as an...