Abstract
It is widely accepted in the received literature that the decisive feature in the constitution of community, and indeed its ontological core, is some sort of collective acknowledgement of the community, and mutual recognition between the members. A prominent version of this claim is that communities exist insofar as their members believe they exist, and that the communal bond is mutual sympathy. Yet this view is at odds with rather obvious facts: community members often dislike each other, and are far from acknowledging the existence of any such bond. How can these phenomena be accommodated in the view that community is a matter of attitude rather than of brute objective facts? This paper suggests an answer that is inspired by the work of the German phenomenologist Hermann Schmalenbach (1885–1950). The claim is that the basic communal ties are plural implicit self-knowledge of the participants as members of the community. Implicit self-knowledge is often not reflectively transparent. Community members are plurally self-aware without thinking of themselves in “we”-terms. Where individuals consciously conceive of themselves as members, the community is turned into what Schmalenbach proposes to call a communion.
I am grateful to the participants of the Workshop “Social Reality – the Phenomenological Approach” as well as to two referees for useful comments.
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Notes
- 1.
As far as the general discourse is concerned, a look at Google’s ngram viewer may be instructive – the ngram viewer makes Google’s whole books database, containing publications from 1800 to around 2000, available for checking the relative frequency of words, or combinations of words. Checking the ngram viewer for “community” reveals a rather astonishing career of the term in English book publications, starting at around 1900, and peaking in a quadrupled relative frequency (percentage of occurrence per words used) at around 2000. Tellingly, a check with “society” reveals that while that term has been used much more frequently over all of the history recorded by Google’s ngram viewer, it was finally surpassed by “community” shortly before the end of the twentieth century.
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Schmid, H.B. (2016). Communal Feelings and Implicit Self-Knowledge. Hermann Schmalenbach on the Nature of the Social Bond. In: Salice, A., Schmid, B. (eds) The Phenomenological Approach to Social Reality. Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality, vol 6. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27692-2_9
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