Thomas Khurana: Living by Recognition: The Sociality of the Human Life-Form

Colloquium lecture by Thomas Khurana, organized by the Department of the History of Philosophy

It is a common idea that human beings are social animals. The question I want to raise in this talk is how we shall understand the nexus between our life-form and our sociality expressed by this phrase. The most common understanding is this: sociality is one of the many characteristic features of the specific animal kind we belong to. In this lecture, I want to suggest that we need to consider a different way of understanding the connection of our life-form and our sociality, if we want to understand the sociality of human life. Sociality is not just an attribute predicated of us by virtue of the life-form we fall under. Rather, it characterizes the way in which we have and participate in this life-form. Sociality is not one of the many attributes of the kind of animal we are, but determines the whole way in which we are an animal and actualize ourselves as members of our life-form. If the human life form is of this sort, membership in it is both more open and more precarious. The paper will consider some fundamental social institutions as responsive to this peculiar predicament.