Beyond Social Relations

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The sentence "the human essence is the ensemble of the social relations" is absolutely the greatest shield in this world for those people who feel good about themselves while being intellectually impoverished. This view, which comes from the sixth thesis of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach, completely wipes out the diversity and abstract side that human beings should originally possess, and then uses so-called historicization to package this absurd act. It can never explain whether the desires, fears, aesthetics, and personalities that human beings possess must all ultimately be explained as some kind of social relation.

 

The most shameless part of this theory is that it takes sophistry to its absolute extreme, because the fact that human beings are shaped by social relations can never be equated with the claim that human beings are the sum of social relations. Different environments of growth, family environments, and educational environments can absolutely form different values, but beyond this layer there are still a series of factors such as genetics, temperament, personal reflection, and physiological conditions. Measuring all of them by the sum of social relations is simply playing dirty.

 

A teenager born into a highly conservative family can become a radical anti-traditionalist. A child raised in a religious family can become an atheist. A person who grows up in collectivism can also become an extreme individualist. Of course, you can also argue against me and say that these so-called acts of resistance are themselves shaped by other social relations. But the problem is exactly that anything can eventually be casually explained as the product of social relations. Whether you obey society or rebel against society, whether you are the same as everyone else or different from everyone else, everything can finally be reduced to being caused by the environment. Then this theory, from beginning to end, is simply an unfalsifiable universal rogue.

 

People who can believe this sentence fundamentally do not treat human beings as human beings, but treat them as objects. They completely underestimate the ability of human beings to think. Ask yourself, how many people in this world, after arguing with their parents, have never thought, “I will absolutely never live my life the way my dad/my mom does”? In other words, the way human beings absorb values has two layers. The first is what the environment gives them. The second is self-examination. People who believe this sentence fundamentally do not need the second part. But the problem is that human beings do have the ability to reflect on values. To end by quoting the view of the great existentialist Sartre—human beings are always choosing within a certain situation, but the situation itself cannot make the choice for them.

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