Social relation: Encyclopedia II - Social relation - Types of social relations

Social relation - Types of social relations

In broad terms, we can distinguish six basic levels of human awareness:

• sub-conscious awareness (studied by e.g. Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Milton Erickson).
• conscious subjective awareness (dissociated, focusing inward on the inner world, or expressing an inner state outwards) (studied e.g. in phenomenology and general psychology).
• intersubjective awareness (an awareness which occurs in association with other people and is internal to that association) (studied e.g. in social psychology and sociology).
• objective awareness (dissociated, focusing outward to a world that exists mind-independently, as is developed e.g. in science to a high level).
• reality-transforming awareness (transitions in practical action reframing the boundaries of different forms of awareness and changing consciousness, or connecting different forms of awareness - occurring in work, play, love, activism, politics etc.
• transcendent awareness (going beyond personal knowledge or experience - some would include intuition and spirituality under this heading; it is the subject of much writing in religion and New Age thought).

Corresponding to these levels of human awareness, we could also define different kinds of social relations, i.e. the different ways in which humans might experience the connections among their own kind:

• subconscious social relations (for example at the level of the collective unconscious or between parents and children,
• social relations which exist only in subjective awareness or subjective perceptions (a person might act as though a social relation exists),
• intersubjective social relations involving shared meanings conveyed through communication,
• objective social relations which exist whether someone is aware of them or not (they might nevertheless be communicated insofar as we communicate with everything we are and do);
• social relations in the process of being transformed from one kind into another, or being interrelated with each other;
• spiritual or intuitive social relations of some kind.

As illustration, we can apply the foregoing to the notion of a group.

• A person might almost out of instinct identify with a group or relate to it;
• s/he might imagine being a member of a group, regardless of whether this is really the case;
• a group might exist only in the form of intersubjective relations among its members;
• a group might exist as an objective description, or as an objective reality, even regardless of whether one was aware of belonging to it;
• a group might be forming or dissolving, or both at once, and it might be changing its boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, perhaps overlapping with other groups;
• a group might also exist at the level of a common spiritual affinity or identification (Cf. the notion of a noosphere).

However the group may exist, or be perceived to exist at some level - with the obvious consequences that has for the kinds of social relations involved - it is clear that understanding different kinds of group relations require different methods of inquiry and verification.

Precisely because social relations may be experienced at different levels of awareness, they are not necessarily transparent at all. Indeed, Karl Marx wrote ironically in this respect that "science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided".

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Types of social relations", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki