Designing communities of ideas for the well-being

Abstract

After the repudiation of "grand narratives" our era remained without absolute truths to found value judgments and defend the supremacy of the human subject. Particularly in the middle of the past century, we became witnesses of a rejection of the autonomous rational subject and his replacement by a "docile subject" (Foucault, 1966). Later, we followed the full deconstruction of the subject and the rise of an entity unstable and indefinite, linguistically constructed by diverse meanings and interpretations (Derrida, 1976; Lacan, 1977). Nevertheless, at the end of the 20th century, due to the universalization of communication and to the formation of a global society, the human being came back to the center of the philosophical and political thought. The notion of "objective" emancipation, on which the narration of socialism has been founded, is now almost abandoned.2 Social research gave up the attempts to highlight the phenomenon of objective emancipation as well as to overthrow the causes of its emergence. The common belief of the weakness of the human being to confront the power of information technology and of the new organization of work has turned the interest of social philosophy and sciences to a kind of "subjective alienation. Today, research attention is rather focused on the transformation of the self and its identity under the new conditions. Philosophers and social scientists investigating social pathologies, debate on the question of autonomy or authenticity as the new human ideals, propounding the new validity claims that accompany them. It should be noted that autonomy is regarded as the main normative judgment, of universal validity, since it is based on the belief that it consists the essential quality of the internal core of human beings, namely of the self. Therefore, the self has been raised as the trustee of any normativity. The proposal for a moral, social context, compatible with the anthropological normative core, suggests justice as the supreme value and the guardian of social order. Of course, the obtaining of social order does not necessarily entail a situation of human well-being. The ideal of authenticity is connected with that of self-realization or selffulfillment, as it suggests that a self knows its inward inclinations and desires to bring them in presence. Otherwise, self-realization is accomplished and leads a human being to well-being if it has been conceived not as an internal psychological situation, but as the moral development of a self that pursues its authenticity. The debate concerning the two notions is old and has its roots in the Europe of 17th and 18th centuries, in the writings of Hume, Kant, and Rousseau. In 19th century the same debate, revolved around the nature of the human being and the moral values, which must govern his/her life. Liberalists, such as Locke, Condorcet, and Stuart Mill found themselves face to face with socialists and romantics. In our years, we have a revival of the same debate. Liberalists of different nuances (from Habermas to Rawls, from Milton Friedman to Robert Nozick), cross swords with the followers of the republican thought and the defenders of tradition and community (as McIntyre, Sandel, Walzer, Taylor, Etzioni, Gutmann, and others). The recent debate rotates in the pathologies of politics and state, and particularly in those that touch principles responsible for the integration of contemporary, functionally differentiated societies. Liberalists claim that integration is likely to be succeeded through a centralization of the state administration and a decentralization of market's regulations. On the contrary, communitarians see it as a result of social solidarity obtained by the means of a political-ethical discourse. Communitarians, arguing about ethical discourse, conceptualize it as a process developed in a public sphere-the community-between participants of shared value orientations. Both perspectives, as Selznick (1996, p. 112) writes, "are usefully understood as polar contrasts, that is, as quite different and even incompatible ways of relating oneself to others." Both, in order to found their argument, discuss about a self that possesses an essential core. On the one hand, liberalists following Kantian tradition, adopt the notion of autonomy, and look for an internal normative context, that is, an autonomous self, which could be viewed as the source of any validity regarding the evaluative criteria of social pathologies. On the other hand, communitarians seek a community of values, which is, according to their opinion, the most suitable to provide the necessary validity claims for evaluating human self-fulfillment. Thus, communitarians appear to be the defenders of Lebensphilosophie (as it emerges through the works of Nietzsce, Bergson or Simmel), claiming that the internal psychic core consists of the substantial, innate inclinations and needs of the individual. In summary, liberalists and communitarians hold the intersubjective constitution of subjectivity. They both deny the argument of an existentialist subjectivity and share the idea of a self communicatively constituted. However, the autonomy thesis is more connected with the problem of social order, since it emphasizes the universality of the moral law. On the other hand, the authenticity thesis is more related to the human well-being since it emphasizes particularity instead of universality. For the realization of well-being the notion of community acquires a crucial importance. It is used by communitarians to denote a social place of common understanding and deciding together, as well as a place most suitable for the development of the values of caring, individual recognition and substantive justice. Due to these qualities, communities are represented in communitarian thinking as the loci that allow a human self to retrieve or to be symmetrical with the essential core of him/herself and so, reach his/her wellbeing. However, nobody can be sure that actual communities possess the aforementioned qualities. If this is not completely sure, then it should be defined under which conditions values of caring and substantive justice, together with a common understanding, could be created. Subsequently, the investigation of design's possibilities to contribute to the realization of a similar social locus, becomes a fact of great importance. Nevertheless a similar investigation raises some epistemological problems. Considering that design is an activity guided by the principles of systems thinking, to examine it, as a promoter of well-being should be compatible with systems perspective and not with that of Lebensphilosophie. The latter, especially as communitarian thinking understands it, focuses on a kind of affective and traditional type of action (according to Weber categorizations), therefore it connects well-being with this kind of action. On the contrary, a systems design by its nature as a disciplined inquiry is rather similar to the Weberian categorization of purposive-rational action.3 If this is true, the present analysis should be focused on the possibilities of a purposiverational action, such as design, to lead participants of a discursive context to their self-realization or self-fulfillment. In case that it is not possible, some ideas regarding the transformation of design in order to satisfy the previously mentioned prerequisite will be discussed. In the following section I am trying to investigate well-being in a systems perspective. I am interested in human well-being and not in well-being of organizations already studied by known scholars of design (Churchman, 1989). I continue arguing about contemporary social conditions in which the human being is obliged to live, and which impede seriously the realization of well-being. Immediately afterwards the opportunities allowed by these social conditions or, differently, the "openings" of the social systems for a social transformation, and consequently the chances for a situation of well-being, are outlined. Finally, a new conceptualization of design, able to modify it to a useful means for the realization of these chances, is commented. © 2005 Springer Science + Business Media, Inc.