Does the social reality imply a natural reality?

I’m very interested in understanding where the boundary between what we might consider the (or a) ‘natural’ reality and our ‘social’ reality occurs. Professor Toole offers a compelling account of how the ideology of the ruling class shapes the body of knowledge and the conceptual tools available to understand social reality. Professor Toole’s account seems to imply the impossibility of social structures as being ‘natural.’ That is, the term natural social structure or formation would be an oxymoron. She writes, “social structures are…constituted by our choices and actions,” (4) which seems to indicate that social structures are the result of human choices and actions, and so they cannot exist in the absence of them. This also seems to suggest a division between our ‘social’ reality exclusively defined by and dependent on human action and choice and a ‘natural’ reality of things not affected by humans, say the ocean and uranium.

I am interested in the boundary and relationship between these two realities, and I will explore that in this post. Mirroring the division between the ‘social’ reality and the ‘natural’ reality, I imagine the distinction between the social and natural sciences. That is, the phenomena and areas investigated by the social sciences are centered around and dependent on human action whereas those investigated by the natural sciences are not. While concepts like money and the nation-state would be meaningless in the absence of humans, the rotation of the Earth and the existence of its oceans are not predicated on us. 

At least to some extent, humans and the human experience are shaped by natural forces—those outside of our control. Professor Toole’s critique of ideology aims to uncover those that merely purport to be natural forces, “to objectively represent what is subjective,” (7). This epistemic critique of ideology involves, “unpacking the ways in which ideology is true in the sense that it represents social reality, but false in the sense that it represents that social reality as natural and inevitable” (5). This seems to raise several questions about the interface between the social and natural reality. If they operate within two completely distinct spheres, then no facts or changes in one reality will affect the other. If, on the other hand, they have some sort of interplay, this could suggest some component of naturalness in our social reality. If humans are defined, or at the very least shaped, by our material situations, could those we or our material conditions be affected by forces belonging to the ‘natural’ reality?  If so, would that imply that there is a greater tendency towards certain social structures or creations independent of pure human choice? I do not mean to say that the existence of a non-social reality and non-social entities should justify or necessitate human oppression. Merely, that upon reconstituting a vision of a society that is more just, equal, free, or greater in some other value or virtue, we should consider which elements of that new reality are constrained by, operate as a function of, or are affected by a natural reality—if any. 

Given the difficulty of critiquing ideology, Professor Toole seeks to avoid the status quo bias by employing a, “methodology that does not itself have any normative or ideological commitments,” ( and should, “[undermine] the objective basis of the operative ideology” (6). While the second part of this approach seems more tailored to standpoint epistemology, the first part seems to echo the scientific method which merely aims to describe the world as it is based upon hypotheses generated through extensive testing, observation, and critical scrutiny—exactly the kind of attention the ruling ideology seeks to avoid and confound. An appeal to the procedures employed by the scientific method would seem to endorse critical examinations of the role of ideology as confounding variable in the pursuit of knowledge surrounding social reality. 

This is potentially a tangent, but arguably the line between social reality and natural reality is not so clear cut. While there is much room for discussion as to the effects natural reality and phenomena may have on the social reality, and any implications of that relationship, there is a notable instance in which humans have a direct impact on the seemingly independent natural reality. On the fundamental level of the universe—the size of the smallest particles—human action influences the state of a particle. Ordinarily, particles have the properties of both a wave and a particle and behave as such. In between measurements, a particle will oscillate and behave as though it were a wave—just as if it were a wave in the ocean, fluctuating from one moment to the next. However, experiments have shown that by observing a particle you cause it to act as a particle— the very act of observing directly affects the observed reality. Granted, this effect doesn’t need humans to occur as ‘observation’ can be practically achieved in other ways. Physics has only answered a tiny piece of the relationship between social and natural reality and I am interested to see what others think of the relationship, if any, between natural reality and our social reality.