Q&A: Existence of the Collective
Existence of the Collective
Question
If there really is an ontological status to the collective, as the Rabbi maintains, how does that fit with the topographical model of free choice? After all, the action of each individual who makes up the collective is, in itself, done freely. So in order to grant the collective an ontological status that is expressed through the actions of its individual members, one has to explain how it fits into the topographical structure. I assume it cannot be added to the physical system, nor to the genetic or psychological one. If so, it is not clear to me where exactly it enters in between each individual’s free choice and the set of external circumstances standing before him.
Answer
I have written several times that every person wears two hats: his hat as an individual, and his hat as a member of a collective. Human actions are divided accordingly into individual actions and actions that join together into a collective action. The topographical framework within which the collective operates is the collection of outlines (or at least part of each of them) surrounding the individuals who make it up.
Discussion on Answer
I don’t understand the problem. The collective acts through the set of individuals who make it up. There are constraints that operate on each of them, and that also creates an environment that acts on the collective. And perhaps there is also an environment that affects only the collective dimension without the individual dimension.
I don’t think I understand what it means to say that this creates an environment that acts on the collective. It feels to me that if you hold that each individual has full free choice within his topographical framework, then the accumulation of individuals’ actions becomes a collective, by definition, only in the sense of emergence (like the example you like to bring from John Searle and liquidity).
What, in the Rabbi’s view, am I missing in my last formulation?
Nothing. I just don’t see a question. Indeed, the collective can be an emergent phenomenon. But even a materialist accepts that a biological organism is an existing entity. There is no need to posit some general soul in the style of Hegel.
So the Rabbi agrees that the collective is an emergent phenomenon? If so, I do not understand how one can speak of two hats, since the second hat is nothing more than the combination of everyone’s first hats, even though their shared manifestation takes on a different form.
A person acts both as a member of a collective and as an independent entity. You can have an evil collective made up of righteous individuals, and vice versa.
But if, whether in his collective hat or his individual one, he chooses on the basis of the mechanism of free choice, then what is the relevance of saying that he is wearing his collective hat? In what sense is there an ontological status here for the collective, if all events are interpreted identically according to the person’s choice within his given topographical framework? According to that, the action of the collective is just the sum of each person’s free choices within his own topographical framework.