Methodological Prospects of S.L. Frank’s Social Ontology

The article attempts to critically examine S.L. Frank’s social ontology from the perspective of sociological methodological needs. The fundamental differences between Frank’s ontological constructs, presented in the work “The Spiritual Foundations of Society” (1930), and the views developed by the author in the “Essay on the Methodology of Social Sciences” (1922) are revealed. It is shown that Frank’s socio-ontological concept, which was introduced to the history of social and philosophical thought under the guise of “Spiritual Foundations of Society”, combines several independent perspectives, namely, psychological, theistic, philosophical objective-idealistic, systemic, phenomenological, sociological and humanistic. The psychological perspective is based on the idea of the social as a “mental phenomenon”; the theistic perspective asserts the existence of Divine Providence in relation to human social existence; the objective-idealistic (neoplatonic) considers social being as the embodiment of objective ideas dating back to the incomprehensible “all-unity”; the systemic perspective is based on asserting the objective laws that underlie social forms; the phenomenological stems from the idea of the primordial “unity of ‘we’ ” inherent in human nature; the sociological perspective forces to recognize the actual existence of the world of real human interactions and to look for mechanisms for implementing conciliar (sobornost) principles within it; the humanistic perspective affirms the dignity of man, not allowing him to be considered as a “cog” inside social mechanisms. These approaches do not always agree with each other. As a result, in Frank’s social ontology, according to the author of this article, the conceptual relations between the ideal-objective and subject-dependent status of social ideas, the “medium”and decisive role of a person in the realization of his social existence, the initial “unity of ‘we’ ” and the ideal meanings of specific social forms, the grace of Divine Providence and the imperfection of human society remain not fully clarified. Ultimately, the relationship between “conciliarity” and “community” remains unclear. At the same time, Frank’s social ontology contains a number of ideas that are of methodological importance for sociology. These are the idea of objective meanings of social interaction having a “trans-psychic” nature, which is of fundamental importance to his philosophy; the idea of an immanently inherent to human nature sense of “unity of ‘we’ ”, which epistemologically provides him with intuitive, direct access to social reality; the idea of the objective nature of values and the inescapability of the ideal-moral spiritual principle in people’s lives.

S.L. Frank, social ontology, phenomenology, Slavophilism, “conciliarity” (“sobornost”) and “community”, “objective living idea”, “the unity of ‘we’ ”, “we” and “you”/“they”/“it”, metalogy, theodicy