The essays presented in this section try to overcome problems in existing conceptualizations of human beings and social entities.

My reflections on basic concepts for human social entities start from two basic intuitions: first, that there are such things as social entities; second, that these entities are produced by the actions of human beings.

Both intuitions are common sense, but sociological theorizing shows at the same time that it is difficult to articulate them in a consistent conceptual framework. It is apparently problematic to conceptualize human beings, their affections, intentions, and actions in a way that is compatible with a conceptualization of social entities like families, football teams, corporations, economy, and politics as emergent social entities.

An attempt to coordinate both conceptualizations must explicate the concepts on the side of the human beings with an eye already on the social entity they contribute to, and vice versa. A false, for example over-individualized or over-spiritual, definition of human beings blocks the possibility to clarify how these beings could ever communicate and act together in a coordinated way. In other words, such a false definition blocks a conception of social entities that conforms to our intuitions. Similarly, a false idea about how different – for example biological psychic and social – experiences and concepts of the one world we live in can be thought together, can obstruct the formulation of an adequate conceptual framework for the explanation of social entities. Positively formulated: sociological theory needs a notion of “production” or “realization” of compound entities that is compatible with the way in which an action can be a building stone in a social system.

The texts below aim at a conceptualization that recognizes that a human being is an experiencing, intention-building, meaning-giving, reflecting, and acting body. On this basis, special attention is given to a conception of the experience and understanding of other human beings, and of human beings acting together. With regard to social entities I try to describe how acting together on the basis of collective and shared intentions is the way in which mutually related, co-operative actions together build bounded social entities.

This requires a concept of “realization” that allows the thought that actions of human beings are parts of social entities. Such a conception distinguishes several layers in the world, in this case the layer of experiencing, intention-building, and acting bodily entities, and the layer of social entities where the bodily entities covariate their states and operations and thereby build new, higher order, social entities.
It must also be elucidated how human beings can covariate their experiences, intentions, and actions, such that we can say that they are able to understand and communicate and to build new, social entities by means of recurrent communications. Important notions in this respect are “collective and shared intentions” and “collective and shared definitions of situations”. In Without intentions we can, however, neither understand human behaviour, nor the cooperation of actions that build social systems and structures. The cooperative actions of two humans painting a house together, or making an appointment and meeting each other in the city of Breda in the Netherlands can, for example, not be understood without supposing shared individual and collective intentions on the side of both individuals. Accepting this, however, has weighty conceptual consequences.

It demands an understanding of a “basic intention” as a human directedness at the realization of a state of the world without an explicit, conscious reflection. It also demands a comprehension of how human beings could possibly understand each-others intentions. Such an understanding is a presupposition of the coordination of actions. Its possibility is however highly contested in the philosophy and sociology of the past 60 years.

An understanding of “understanding” is only possible, I believe, if the bodily aspect of intentions and their “understanding”, and more generally the bodily nature of human beings, is taken into account. As long as intentions and other psychic phenomena are understood in terms of “pure” meaning and thought, their shared understanding is inconceivable. On the basis of notions of “bodily meaning” and “bodily intention” one can finally attempt a description of the nature and effectiveness of collective intentions, which are understood as unities of intentions of a multitude of human beings, unities that are represented in each of them. Collective action comprises individual creativity of bodies oriented by collective intentions.

In sum, with regard to human beings and their actions the following essays try to do justice to the bodily character of human beings, while at the same time giving a due place to intentions, meanings, and reflections. They attempt to avoid a one-dimensional conception that reduces the human being to organic systems, as well as a dualistic conception of an organic system on the one hand and a spiritual or thinking system on the other.