Abstract
This chapter elaborates on the idea that, in order to jointly actualize our ability to feel-towards together, we have to be able to exist as our group. It articulates the following proposal: the faculty we human individuals have to emotionally respond to certain occurrences in a genuinely joint manner is grounded in the ability we have to exist in certain situations in terms of some possibilities we share with concrete others—the ability we humans have to jointly be our (shared) possibilities. The chapter begins with a clarification of what it means to have a justifiable sense to the effect that we (the involved individuals) constitute some particular social group. By means of a sort of case study I then explore some intuitions concerning the idea of a number of individuals caring with one another about something. I suggest that we can best cash out this idea in terms of the image of a number of persons existing in the relevant situation in light of some possibility they feel able to jointly actualize. I propose that in these situations the involved individuals are, in virtue of a non-purely instrumental actualization of their ability to be the relevant group, pursuing a joint actualization of some of their personal abilities—of some existential possibilities. To understand this idea is fundamental in order to make sense of the following suggestion: in those situations in which we are jointly actualizing our ability to feel-towards together we are caring about something ultimately for the sake of a group we take ourselves to co-constitute. This discussion allows me to further clarify the sense in which emotionally responding to some occurrence in a genuinely joint manner can be understood as a characteristically human ability.
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Notes
- 1.
This image of an affective bond holding together a group of individuals has been particularly important for those sociologists and social psychologists who, elaborating on Charles Horton Cooley’s ([1909] 1956) debated notion of a ‘primary group’, have sought to develop the idea of a feeling of we-ness. Max Weber’s ([1921] 1972, pp. [220ff.] 238ff.) notion of Gemeinsamkeitsgefühle (usually translated as ‘feelings of belonging to a community’) also has to be mentioned here, despite of being a notion that is much more specific than the general idea of an affective bond—in that it refers to the peculiar bond that holds together individuals who share an ethnic, or at least a political, community. The reason why Weber’s notion is worth mentioning here is because it aims at capturing the genuinely affective character of the tacit ‘self-recognition of a people as a demos [that] has an empirical frame of reference, which encompasses a (usually undivided) territory settled together and a history understood as “concerning all of us”’ (Offe 2000, p. 65). Weber is eager to differentiate these Gemeinsamkeitsgefühle from what he calls a Gemeinsamkeitsglauben (a belief in community).
- 2.
I shall address the issue in terms of what it is like for an individual to be a member of a group. To offer an answer to this question, however, is to begin to offer an answer to the question as to what it is like for a number of individuals to jointly be a group. It is a mistake, I think, to believe that we have to be able to understand a group as a sort of supraindividual centre of conscious sentience in order to answer (or meaningfully pose) the question concerning whether there is something it is like to be a social group.
- 3.
Indeed, Gilbert presents herself as one of the first philosophers who have articulated an explicit notion of a social group. She writes: ‘On the whole, those who have focused on the above questions have tended to work with a relatively inarticulate, intuitive understanding of the nature of social phenomena in general, and of social groups in particular’ (1990, p. 1).
- 4.
- 5.
Gilbert begins her influential paper ‘Walking Together: A Paradigmatic Social Phenomenon’ (1990) by pointing to what she characterizes as an ontological problem. But as Sheehy, who seems to be offering a criticism along the lines just mentioned, points out, Gilbert’s basic goal is to specify the central features of a particular perspective. Sheehy writes: ‘The main aim of plural subject theory is an interpretation and elucidation of the collective standpoint: the perspective from which we possess shared goals, beliefs, values, and so on’ (2002, p. 378; my emphasis).
- 6.
By bracketing those claims of Gilbert’s plural subject theory that clearly have a metaphysical intention, thereby focusing on her brilliant elucidation of what it is to adopt the perspective of a member of a group, I shall try to articulate an answer to the question concerning what it is like (for a number of individuals) to jointly be a social group.
- 7.
Gilbert makes the following remark which suggests that she is concerned with elucidating a particular way of being-oriented-towards-worldly-occurrences; a form of intentionality that can be said to be at the heart of any social group: ‘First, plural subject concepts apply only when certain individual people are in specific psychological states, that is only when they are jointly committed with certain others in some way. Second, one cannot employ a particular plural subject concept without employing the concept of the relevant psychological attribute […] such as belief, having such-and-such goal, and endorsing such-and-such principle’ (1996, p. 9). For a discussion on the position she calls ‘Intentionalism’, see Gilbert (1989, Chapter 3).
- 8.
This is an assumption many philosophers who understand themselves as ‘realists about the social’ find particularly problematic (cf. Sheehy 2002).
- 9.
A, to some extent, contrary intuition brings Sartre to suggest that a number of interacting individuals only come to constitute a group or community when an (external) observer—to whom Sartre refers using the term ‘the Third’—brings them to see themselves as constituting a group by objectifying (or alienating) them (cf. [1943] [1956] 2001, pp. 389ff.). Arguing for the primacy of the experienced subject-we—of the pre-intentional sense of belonging together—, Schmid criticizes Sartre by writing: ‘The experience of the third’s view cannot create but only help to reveal or discover joint intentionality that was already there. A joint intention can be revealed in the third’s view only if it was already latent in the original situation of action (i.e., before the third’s appearance)’ (2009, p. 176).
- 10.
This is the central tenet of the position to which I have referred above by the term ‘Intentionalism’.
- 11.
By ‘additive strategy’ I mean the attempt to arrive at the idea of some individuals going for a walk together by complicating the idea of an individual solitarily going for a walk.
- 12.
Gilbert continues this thought by writing: ‘This is true even if each has averred: “I intend to do all I can to achieve my goal. For instance, if you draw ahead without noticing, I plan to call out to catch your attention. Given your own goal, this should help me attain mine.” This does not seem crucially to change things. In the case now envisaged [he] will, if you like, be “entitled to expect” that [she] will call after him if he unknowingly draws ahead, and [she] will be “entitled to expect” that he will not be surprised at her doing so. This might make her less timid about doing these things. But here, saying that they are “entitled to expect” these things is just another way of saying that their evidence is such that they can infer that performance will take place, all else being equal. No one yet seems to have the right type of obligation to perform or the corresponding entitlements to rebuke and so on’ (p. 6).
- 13.
Gilbert observes that ‘joint commitments are not necessarily brought into being with any clear conscious intent to do so’ (2000, p. 6). That is to say, this already-having-adopted-the-perspective-of-a-member-of-this-group does not imply having at some point decided to do so. Very often it is, rather, a matter of, as we may say, ‘having fallen into’ or ‘having been brought to adopt’ this perspective.
- 14.
Gilbert completes this idea by writing: ‘For now, let me sum up by conjecturing that in order to go for a walk together each of the parties must express willingness to constitute with the other a plural subject of the goal that they walk along in one another’s company’ (p. 7). Since this is not an exposition of Gilbert’s plural subject theory, but an attempt to make fruitful some of her suggestions in order to spell out what it means to pre-thematically understand oneself as a member of a given group, I will not comment further on Gilbert’s central—and controversial—notion of a plural subject.
- 15.
The phenomenological reading of Gilbert’s account that I have been proposing averts one’s eyes from the problem concerning how the normative expectations discussed above come to be a part of group membership. In claiming that this normativity can be understood as a structural feature of the very perspective of a member of a given group, i.e. as something that can be said to always already be there when a number of individuals come to constitute a social group, I do not mean to suggest that we do not need the idea of a joint commitment in order to account for the constitution of this experienced normativity. I am just pointing out that, as far as our purely phenomenological attempt to understand what it is like to be (a member of) a group is concerned, we can suspend this central ontological issue, thereby evading (and not solving) the problem of vicious circularity mentioned in the main text. Moreover, the discussion on the sense of togetherness that follows will be structured around an example that, in order to explain the participants’ sense of togetherness, explicitly invokes a joint commitment. But the claim that this particular sort of normativity can be understood as a structural feature of the perspective of a member of a group could itself be objected to be controversial, as an anonymous reviewer of the manuscript of this book has made me aware of. For it may be argued that there are social groups without the kind of rights and obligations that Gilbert assigns to group membership. An example would be a cooperative endeavor that emerges in the frame of what Tuomela and Tuomela (2005) call I-mode cooperative action. I agree that we often use the expression ‘group context’ to refer to these sorts of situations. But to the extent to which the individuals involved in such a situation are cooperating with one another in order to achieve their respective (formally individual) intentions they can be said to be cooperating (with one another) alongside each other. Indeed, Tuomela and Tuomela observe that ‘the assumption of a group context need not be made in the case of I-mode cooperation’ (2005, p. 81). Moreover, they underscore that it is absolutely central to distinguish, in the first place, ‘between acting fully as a group member and acting as a private person within a group context’ (ibid.).
- 16.
Gilbert, as already mentioned, is interested in moving forward the discussion I have just reconstructed in such a way as to answer the question concerning what a social group is. She writes: ‘I have argued that those out on a walk together form a plural subject, and that there is some reason to suppose that our concept of a social group—that concept by virtue of which we list families, guilds, tribes, “and so on” together—is the concept of a plural subject’ (p. 12). As mentioned above (in Sect. 3.2), for Gilbert, a social group is a plural subject, and any plural subject is a social group.
- 17.
Once a group has been constituted, Gilbert writes, ‘[none of the involved individuals] can release himself from the commitment; each is obligated to all the others for performance; each is (thus) entitled to performance from the rest’ (1990, p. 8).
- 18.
At a minimum, this person could be made accountable for having broken the joint commitment at issue.
- 19.
Gilbert is aware that the situation is very special in the case of a dyad, since, in violating the relevant commitment, the party at issue is, in a sense, destroying the group (she or he is actually making it impossible that this concrete group persists). In this context, Gilbert refers again to Simmel (cf. Gilbert 1990, pp. 11–12).
- 20.
Note that he could not do so, either, even if he were willing to do or avoid certain things in order to promote the ‘wellbeing’ and ‘flourishing’ of the group they used to constitute.
- 21.
Most theorists involved in the debate on collective intentionality use the terms ‘social group’ and ‘collective’ interchangeably. I, too, take these two terms to be generally interchangeable. This is the reason for here introducing a technical notion. (The asterisk is intended to mark the technical character of this term.) This is a notion I will not really exploit after having made the point I am seeking to make here.
- 22.
Observe that this would allow us to, given certain conditions, talk of a jogging-collective* even in the case that you and your partner were to jointly commit yourselves to going for a walk together every morning only until the end of the conference week.
- 23.
This is something I have tried to show using the example of Dania (in Sect. 6.3).
- 24.
Note that, in making this suggestion, I am differentiating the sense of togetherness qua sense of being a member of a particular group (with certain kinds of rights and obligations) that we have been discussing in this chapter from the structures of experience I call feelings of being-together discussed in Chap. 6. As specified above (in Sect. 6.4), the latter amount to a felt liability to experience certain emotions as feelings that are part of some joint feeling apt to manifest our joint caring. But the relationship between these two notions may be objected to remain obscure, since both the sense of togetherness discussed in this chapter and the feelings of being-together discussed in Chap. 6 may be understood as background structures of experience that allow the involved individuals to participate in what I call moments of affective intentional community. The key to understanding the extent to which these notions are not overlapping (but complementary) ones is to understand that the sense of togetherness discussed here, understood as a sense that experientially actualizes the participant’s belief in the community they constitute, is experienced as the discussed sense that there are some obligations and rights—a sense that structures the relevant acts as a part of their doing something together (in a permissive sense of ‘doing’). Put another way, the sense of togetherness discussed here does not consist of some additional feeling to the effect that we (the participants) are doing something together. On the contrary, the background structures of experience I call feelings of being-together are conceived as ‘sedimented’ affects that, so to say, experientially testify a common history of emotional meetings and dispose us (the participants) to have emotions that are experienced as our joint emotional responses to some occurrence: as we-emotions (or acts of feeling-towards together, as I call the emotions by virtue of which a number of individuals participate in a moment of affective intentional community).
- 25.
As we have seen above (in Sect. 7.3), in many cases this can be said to be a matter of our having come to be rather passively projected (by our situating affectivity) into these possibilities.
- 26.
Gilbert writes: ‘I shall refer to the intention of a single human being as a singularist intention’ (p. 169).
- 27.
Gilbert writes: ‘a personal intention is understood here as an intention of a human being that is expressible by him in a sentence of the form “I intend…”’ (p. 171). It is important to recall that Gilbert’s account is not exhausted by the idea of some intentions being collective in form. In other words, and as we have seen (in Sects. 3.2, 3.3, and 8.2), Gilbert’s approach is not a ‘we-intentions approach’, but a ‘joint commitments approach’. (For a brief comparison of these two positions, see Gilbert 2010.) At the beginning of the paper I am quoting from, Gilbert characterizes the view she is seeking to oppose as follows: ‘a popular option is what I shall call the personal intentions perspective, according to which the singularist-intentions in question are personal intentions’ (2009, p. 171). The central assumption of this view, which Gilbert takes to ‘probably [be] the most prevalent perspective among theorists’ (ibid.), can be captured in a statement that does not employ the adjective ‘personal’: all the intentions of the ontic subjects involved in a case of collective intentionality are intentions that have a singular (or individual) phenomenal subject.
- 28.
I am not merely suggesting that, as many philosophers have observed (among them Gilbert and Bratman), some of our, in their terminology, ‘personal’ intentions could be thought to be embedded in (or derived from) a shared intention.
- 29.
The idea is that an occurrence that is apt to elicit a genuine emotion can be said to really be an issue for the person in question. If some worldly occurrence can be said to really be an issue for a given individual, it can be said to be so because her being a particular sort of person is an issue for her. Something can be said to really be an issue for someone in case it does not merely amount to a recognizable problem—to an unsettled or open question that is waiting for an answer, as it were—, but appears to the relevant person as something she has to deal with. That is to say, something that really is an issue for a given person cannot be easily ignored by her, for its ‘being in her view’ is accompanied by an imperative sense that she has to do something with it. This imperative sense that a certain sort of response is merited is what we call an emotion.
- 30.
The intuition that is operative here concerns the idea that we—beings for whom our own being is an issue—seem to, in the end, always care about something that matters to us personally.
- 31.
For an observer who were not aware of the fact that Gareth is particularly interested in standing out from this team it would be difficult to recognize in the face of this single episode that Gareth is celebrating alongside those other individuals whose joyful response has been elicited by the event at issue. But by taking into account other episodes in which certain occurrences may be rationally expected to call for certain affective responses this observer could eventually come to recognize that, while celebrating his successful shot, Gareth was not celebrating with the relevant others. Were another player of his team, for instance, to score a goal just a few minutes after he has scored, Gareth could ‘fail’ to celebrate this joyful event. And were such a ‘failure’ to exhibit a repetitive character, the constancy of the ‘failure’ could come to undermine the initial impression that he was celebrating with the rest of the ‘group of celebrants’.
- 32.
Indeed, despite the fact that he is in this context functionally contributing to a goal of a team to which he can be taken to belong, we could imagine Gareth to be inclined to, in a number of situations, refer to the group by using the pronoun ‘them’, rather than the pronoun ‘us’.
- 33.
For the distinction between relatively deep and relatively shallow forms of caring, see Helm (2001, pp. 100ff.).
- 34.
In the section from which I have taken this excerpt, Helm makes an effort to spell out the difference between mere caring and caring in the mode he calls ‘valuing’, i.e. the difference between ‘those things one [just] cares about and those things that have import to one at least in part because of an understanding of the kind of person one finds worth being’ (p. 101). As he suggests, however, even if a person is merely caring about something, i.e. not taking the projection at issue to be ‘fundamental to his sense of himself’ (ibid.), this person is identifying himself with the pertinent pressing-ahead-towards.
- 35.
In my view, exclusively in those situations in which (joint) acts of felt understanding can be argued to be involved we are allowed to talk of an episode of collective affective intentionality (or of a moment of genuinely affective intentional community).
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Sánchez Guerrero, H.A. (2016). Being Our Possibilities and Feeling Together. In: Feeling Together and Caring with One Another. Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33735-7_8
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