Man as Biopsychosocial Being

We approach man along three different dimensions of his existence: biological, psychical, and so­cial. The biological is expressed in morphophysiological, genetic phenomena, as well as in the nervous-cerebral, electrochemical and some other processes of the human organism. The psychical ele­ment covers the inner spiritual and intellectual world – conscious and subconscious processes, will, emotional experiences, memory, character, temperament, and so on. But not one aspect taken separ­ately reveals the phenomenon of man in its integrity.

As a biological species man is characterized by the following signs: 1) life expectancy;

2) belonging to the sex; 3) belonging to the race; 4) women’s childbearing age; 5) heredity as certain innate features and inclinations, which are realized only in the society.

A unique set of genes of each person determines his originality and uniqueness. The membership of all people, representatives of all races and nation to the same biological species is a natural basis of legal equality of all people in human rights, that everyone has.

All man’s features and inclinations are laid biologically, but are formed only in a society. Man has an ability to learn language but he learns it only in society. Man’s hand is adjusted to different human activities but man masters these activities in society. Man is an integral unity of biological and social levels, the integrated unity, which leads to the formation of human personality.

Or­ganism and personality are two inseparable sides of man. Man's organism level is included in the natural interconnection of phe­nomena and is subject to natural necessity, while his personality level is open to social being, to society and culture.

The bi­ological aspect is determined mostly by the hereditary (genetic) mechanism, while the social aspect is conditioned by the process of the personality's involvement in the cultural-historical community context. Neither the one nor the other taken separately can bring us closer to an understanding of the mystery of man —only their func­tioning unity can. That does not rule out, of course, the emphasis being shifted either to the biological or to the socio-psychological element in man for various cognitive and practical purposes.

A limited consideration of man either in the framework of the purely culturological approach or in the narrow confines of biology, in particular of genetics, or physiology, or psychology, or medicine, etc. often leads to simplified interpretations of the relationship be­tween the biological and the social. This simplification gives rise to different versions of biologism and sociologism. In the former, vari­ous social disorders and even distortions are explained in terms of man's intrinsic natural qualities while in the latter the entire com­plexity of negative social phenomena is reduced to various political shortcomings. The most recent theories of social Biologism and so­cial Darwinism give an unequivocal answer to the question "Genes or the community?" That answer is firmly, "Genes." Man's biologi­cal destiny is variously interpreted here. Some believe optimistically that the existing system of heredity fully reflects the results of his de­velopment as a unique biological species. Its stability and perfection are so great that it can serve us practically over an unlimited period of time in the foreseeable future. Others insist that man as a biologi­cal species is already moving towards extinction. Thanks to the cre­ation of his own environment and the successes of medicine, man­kind has escaped from the harsh action of natural selection and thus has to carry the load of accumulating mutations. The social storms and explosions mark, from this standpoint, the beginning of the ex­tinction of mankind. Still others believe that man, being a biologi­cally young species, is still carrying too many genes from his animal ancestors. The social environment in which man lives is alleged to have been created by the activities of certain select members of the human species only. This view forms the basis for all kinds of elitism as well as for the reverse side of elitism — theoretical racism.

On the crest of these ideas there emerges a somewhat renovated eugenics, stating authoritatively that, whether we want it or not, science must deliberately control the reproduction of the human race and introduce some kind of partial selection for the "benefit" of mankind. Leaving aside the purely genetic possibilities of selec­tion, we still face a great many moral and psychological questions: How is it to be determined who possesses the genotype with the de­sirable features? And generally, who must and may say what is desirable?

Exaggeration of genetic factors and possibilities of selection characteristic of social Biologism and social Darwinism has as its premises the belittling of the social element in man. Man is indeed a creature of nature, but he is at the same time a social creature of na­ture. Nature gives man considerably less than life in society requires of him.

A few words must be said about the theories which, while recog­nizing, or seeming to recognize, the importance of the biological factor, express too optimistic a view of the possibility of rapid and irreversible changes in human nature for the better through educa­tion alone. History has known a great many examples of social psy­chology being changed (to the point of mass psychoses) by powerful social levers, but these processes have always been short-lived and, which is most important, reversible. Culturological rush work and short-term exhausting spurts are, historically and socially, senseless and merely disorient political will and undermine the effectiveness of the social levers themselves.

Now, in what way are the biological and the social elements in man combined? To answer this question, let us turn to the history of the emergence of man as a biological species.

Man appeared on the Earth as a result of a long evolution which led to a change in animal morphology proper, to the emergence of the erect posture, the freeing of the upper extremities and the at­tendant development of the articulate speech apparatus —an en­semble of factors which entailed the development of the brain. Man's morphology was a material crystallization, as it were, of his social or, to be more precise, collective existence. At a definite level of development, anthropogenesis, stimulated by favorable muta­tions, labor activity, communication, and evolving spirituality, switched from the track of biological development onto that of his­torical evolution of social systems proper, as a result of which man evolved as a biosocial unity. That means that man comes into the world with insufficiently formed anatomical and physiological sys­tems, which complete their formation under social conditions; that is to say, these systems are genetically programmed as uniquely human. The mechanism of heredity which determines man's biological aspect also includes his social essence. A newborn baby is not a tabula rasa on which the environment draws the fanciful patterns of the spirit. Heredity equips the child not only with purely biological properties and instincts. From the start, the child has a special ca­pacity for imitating adults — their actions, sounds, and so on. He is inquisitive, and that is already a social trait. He can be distressed, and feel fear and joy; his smile is innate —and smiling is the privilege of man. The child thus comes into the world precisely as a Human being. And yet at the moment of birth he is only a candidate human being. He cannot become a full member of the human race if iso­lated: he has to learn to be human. It is society that introduces him into the world of people, regulates his behavior and fills it with so­cial meaning.

Consciousness is not our natural birthright. Conscious psychical phenomena are shaped during one's lifetime as a result of education and training, of actively mastering languages and the world of culture. The social element penetrates through the psychical into the biology of the individual, which becomes in this transformed state the basis, or material sub­stratum, of his psychical, conscious life activity.

This leads to changes in the ways of manifestations of the human species traits. For example, hereditary diseases people have learned to treat due to the development of science, production and medicine. Depending on his natural abilities and social preferences - political, economic, religious, moral, aesthetic, etc. man forms his body as a social being (Physique, health, a spiritual state). Thus man actively influences his own development toward a personality; he is not a passive material for the society needs. Man acts as a social creature. Activity is a specific way of man’s attitude to the world. This is the process by which man creatively transforms nature, thereby making himself an active subject, and nature - an object of his activity. Actually material transforming activity and labor people owe their formation and development of human qualities.

The common between man and animals are biological needs. Needs means a special condition of an open system - animal or man, which characterizes the contradiction between the existence and inner abilities of the system to ensure its existence. But the satisfaction of needs by humans and animals occurs in different ways. Animal directly meets the needs while man - indirectly. Here we must pay attention to the inhibition (the ability to inhibit human natural instincts and to satisfy them later in the relevant specified forms and culture conditions.) A number of scholars recognize the important role of the inhibition in the anthropogenesis. The process of life being is the satisfaction and reproduction of needs. In the process of life man does not only meet and satisfy needs but also develop new ones. That is social needs and interests that determine social essence of man as a social being.

- Man’s social essence of the first level: human vital activity, in whatever form it is manifested, is the process of satisfaction, reproduction and giving rise to new needs which is based on man’s active, energetic activity related to the conditions of his existence.

- Man’s social essence of the second level: human life activity is an ongoing process of satisfaction, reproduction, and generation of new needs, which is based on material production, where production of implements becomes a special need. Labor serves as a way of satisfaction and predictors of new needs.

- Man’s social essence of the third level: human life activity is a continuous process of satisfaction, reproduction and giving rise to new needs that are formed in the system of social relations, reproduction of which becomes a special social need. Social relations are first of all formed in material production which people can carry out only collectively by entering a qualitatively new, compared with the animal, communication among themselves and with the nature. Communication means all social relations into which men enter - political, economic, personal, etc. The communication is realized by the language which is a system of coded knowledge. Life activity of society is a complex process aimed not only at satisfaction of needs but also the reproduction of social relations. Moreover, the reproduction of these relations becomes the particular need of human life; it turns into a relatively independent sphere of activity.

- Man’s social essence of the fourth level: human life activity is a process of conscious, relevant and purposeful activity aimed at cognizing and transforming the world to ensure the satisfaction of needs, a process in which reproduction and setting of new goals becomes a special social need. Briefly we can say that this need is goal setting.. Goal setting and its realization becomes a relatively independent sphere of life being.

- Man’s social essence of the fifth level: human life activity is a process of free, creative, transformative activities directed toward the world and man himself to ensure his existence, functioning, development and realization of the need for freedom.

The unity of various levels of human essence suggests that the human individual is not a mere arith­metical sum of the biological, the psychical and the social but their integral unity producing a qualitatively new stage, qualitatively new, open and self-regulating system in which in the complete integrated form all the development of the previous life is represented. Thus man is an integral unity of the biological, psy­chical and social levels, which evolve out of two kinds of elements, the natural and the social, the inherited and the acquired —during the individual's lifetime. Man is a living creature whose vital activity takes place in material production, implemented in the system of social relations; it is a conscious purposeful process, which makes a transforming impact upon the world and man himself to ensure his existence, functioning and development.Прослушать

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