External analogies in social and philosophical knowledge: prospects and limitations of the approach

Komissarov Ivan Igorevich PhD in Philosophy Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy, Russian University of Transport 127994, Russia, Moscow, Obraztsova str., 9 p. 9 ivekomiss@gmail.com Other publications by this author

Introduction

The work focuses on models of society, in the construction of which their authors used external analogies. The latter refers to such analogies that are drawn between the objects of study of social philosophy (primarily society) and objects that are studied in other ("external") sciences that are not directly related to social science. This work is also a logical continuation of the previous one ^[1] and represents the basis for a subsequent dissertation. The common link between the two publications is the classification of social models constructed using external and internal analogies. The current study will focus on such analogies, which were not paid attention to in previous work – these are external biological (organic), biomechanical, psychological and psychoanalytic varieties of them. They will help us identify critical aspects in the use of thinking by analogy in creating different models of society.

Previously, we have already drawn attention to analogy as a type of inference, which by definition is probabilistic in nature ^[1]. If similarity is established between different objects (or groups of objects) with respect to any common properties, parameters, relationships, then these objects will not necessarily be similar with respect to other properties, parameters, relationships. However, based on research on external analogies, it is not difficult to make sure that they are widely used in social philosophy, including modern philosophy ^{[2, 3]}. For example, Yuri Ivanovich Semenov in his works relies on the concept of a socio-historical organism, also using derivatives from it and other terms referring to biology ^{[4, 5]}. At the same time, the German sociologist Max Weber expressed concerns about the application of organic concepts in the social sciences: their importance may be greatly exaggerated, which in the end may harm the research itself ^{[6, pp. 14-15]}. Moreover, there may be a threat of reductionism – the complete reduction of the entire diversity of social reality to the manifestations of the physical, biological world, as a result of which social science loses its specificity and turns out to be unnecessary ^{[2, p. 76]}. As part of the current work, we would like to highlight in more detail precisely the critical side of the issue, identifying a number of objective limitations of the method under consideration, and at the same time outline possible prospects for using external analogies in future research.

Biological (organic) analogies

Biology is one of the largest sources of external analogies for building social models. The idea that society has a structure similar to that of a living being has existed for centuries, at least since the time of Ancient Greece. Subsequently, it regained popularity in the 19th century along with the development of biological science. In particular, the French positivist Auguste Comte was one of the first to introduce the concept of "social organism" ("l'organisme social") ^[7], but he did not go further than this analogy: it was important for him only to note that society has the same integrity as that observed in representatives of biological species ^{[5, p. 60]}. In addition, Comte's name is closely associated with the formation of sociology, the empirical science of society. In his ideas about what this young science should be, the idea is clearly traced, according to which empirical natural sciences should act as a model for social and humanitarian knowledge. It is no coincidence that Comte first referred to sociology as "social physics", which was divided into "social statics" and "social dynamics" ^[7].

In turn, Herbert Spencer, an outstanding English encyclopedic scientist and social philosopher, carried out a detailed comparison between the development of a social organism and the evolution of biological species. He developed an all-encompassing doctrine of evolution (evolutionism), which covers not only the world of living nature, but also inanimate matter, as well as man and society. It can be said that Spencer carried out the expansion of biology into other research fields, just as earlier mechanists sought to explain any phenomena using mechanics.

So, in his essay "The Social Organism" ^[8], Spencer begins social evolution with an analogy between several hunter-gatherer families (for example, bushmen) at an early stage of socio-economic development and cellular life forms: the components of both types of education can exist separately from each other or unite into groups in which there is no any serious organization or subordination between the parts ^{[8, pp. 277-279]}.

The next stage of social evolution involves a larger association of people with an already advanced social organization, in which two social strata are distinguished: the managers included in the council of chiefs, and the governed – the rest of the members of society, hunters and wars. Spencer finds an analogy to such a society with a small invertebrate coelenterate animal, a hydra, which develops from two germ leaves – an external ectoderm and an internal endoderm. As you can see, these two germ leaves correspond to two marked social layers of managers and managed ones: the physiological division of labor is parallel to the social one. However, this differentiation is so insignificant that just as a hydra can be turned inside out without negative consequences for the body (the outer layer will become the inner one, and vice versa), so the council of chiefs can be overthrown and replaced by other persons from among ordinary hunters and warriors.

In addition, hydra, like tribes with a primitive organization, reproduce by budding: exact copies arise, which, after separation from the parent social or biological organism, can lead an independent existence. But another scenario can also be implemented: other hydroids (a class of invertebrates, which, in addition to single hydra, includes colonial organisms whose life cycle includes a jellyfish and a polyp) form colonies that are made up of numerous copies of the original, parent organism. Similarly, tribes unable to move to a remote unoccupied area remain in the territory adjacent to the "parent" tribe, as a result of which a larger social association is formed: the union of tribes unites into a nation ^{[8, pp. 279-285]}.

The further evolution of the social organism is associated with the development of vertebrates from an embryo with three germ leaves (with the addition of the mesoderm, or middle layer of cells, to the two already mentioned above). The endoderm, from which the digestive and respiratory systems are formed, corresponds to a social class responsible for the production of material goods and engaged mainly in agriculture. The circulatory system, which develops from the mesoderm, is similar to the middle class, engaged in commodity exchange and contributing to the distribution of goods between different parts of the social organism ^{[8, pp. 284-286]}. Spencer was so scrupulous in choosing analogies that he even pointed out to the money supply a correspondence with red blood cells (erythrocytes) involved in metabolism ^{[8, p. 293]}. Finally, the ectoderm, from which the skin and nervous system are formed, is likened to an army that protects the social organism from the outside world, external aggression, and the state apparatus that governs and coordinates the entire society. In the course of evolutionary development, the division of labor deepens in both social and biological bodies: complex organ systems arise that continue progressive change. As a contemporary and subject of Queen Victoria, Spencer considered Great Britain to be the most advanced social organism – a state that had developed a special body of state power, the Parliament of the United Kingdom, which corresponds to a brain endowed with consciousness (representation function) ^{[8, pp. 303-305]}.

Model of the social organism was very interesting and influential idea that conquered the intellectual world of Europe of the XIX century, including England and France ^[9], Germany ^[10], Russia ^[11]. She left a noticeable imprint on the civilizational approach to society (N.Y. Danilevsky, O. Spengler, etc.), in which the use of biological analogies is already more general, metaphorical in nature, and researchers no longer have the goal of making a detailed comparison between society and living beings, as Spencer did at the time ^{[2, pp. 70-71]}.

It is worth noting that the assimilation of society to an organism is also relevant in modern socio-philosophical thought: as an example, one can cite the concept of socio-historical organisms (abbreviated as sociors) by Yuri Ivanovich Semenov within the framework of his global-stadial approach. Socior refers to any separate, relatively independent society that once comes into being, goes through the stages of its historical development and has the opportunity to disappear forever from the pages of world history. Socio-historical organisms, regarding the method of drawing boundaries between them, are divided into two types: demosocial organisms (demosociors) – earlier types of societies whose boundaries are tied to human composition, and geosocial organisms (geosociors): their boundaries are determined by the occupied territory. Sociors can also form a whole system of sociohistorical organisms (or a socior system), which can be understood as: large associations of a civilizational type (society of Western Europe, society of Latin America); "nest systems", or politically fragmented, but from the point of view of language and culture unified societies (Sumerian city-states, specific principalities on the Russia); "ultrasociors" – societies of the type of colonial empires, consisting of the dominant socior-metropolis, or "nucleosocior", and dependent on it, vassal sociors, or "infrasociors" (British Empire) ^{[4, pp. 21-35]}.

As you can see, Semenov uses many neologisms, which critics of his concept also pay attention to, calling such an invention of terms superfluous and making it difficult to understand. In particular, A.V. Samokhin argues that the concept of a socio-historical organism is essentially equivalent to an ethnos ^[12], and A.N. Tarasov speaks of "demosociors" and "geosociors" as terms that unjustifiably replace: in the first case, the tribes and unions of tribes familiar to us, which are already initially understood as ethnic groups of people who are not tied to the territory, and in the second case – countries, states that, on the contrary, have such a link ^[13].

Biomechanical analogies: synthesis of living and inanimate

It may seem at first glance that the biological and mechanical models of society are not compatible, but the integration of the two ideas took place in reality, moreover, it is possible to bring different points of view on this subject. Thus, the synthesis of organic and mechanical analogies can be traced back to Thomas Hobbes. In the famous Leviathan, we find analogies that were drawn between the state and an artificial mechanical man, that is, Leviathan himself. This man–made, artificial humanoid being possesses supreme power (or sovereignty) as an artificial soul that gives movement to the entire political body, in which judicial and executive officials are artificial joints, their encouragement and punishment are nerves, the welfare and wealth of society is its physical strength, advisers are memory, etc. Hobbes' combined model is actually based on a mechanistic picture of the world in which organic bodies are the same mechanisms as any other mechanical products. As a result, the role of mechanical analogies dominates the meaning of biological parallelisms. The state is an artificial product of conscious human activity, which thus imitates itself as a creation of God. In turn, God is in the same relation to nature as a watchmaker is in relation to a mechanical watch ^{[14, pp. ix-x]}.

Another interesting example of the use of biological analogies under the "patronage" of the mechanistic worldview is Lametri's description of man as a plant ^[15]. According to the French materialist, the root system of plants corresponds to the gastrointestinal tract, the leaves perform the same function as the lungs, both organisms have an extensive vascular system, reproductive organs, etc. However, as in the case of Hobbes, Lametri's ideas about plant and animal organisms are based on a purely mechanistic approach, in which all living beings are considered as more or less complex machines. Thus, we are actually facing another manifestation of the mechanical model than an attempt to present a fundamentally different point of view. In defense of mechanicism (no matter how outdated it may be from the point of view of modernity), we can add that this idea still represents a certain originality, since society and man, who is already a representative of living nature, are modeled here by analogy with objects of another, alien, inorganic world.

French sociologist Emile Durkheim is widely known for defining the mechanical and organic types of solidarity that characterize primitive primitive and advanced civilized societies, respectively ^[16]. Mechanical solidarity refers to a society formed from homogeneous social molecules endowed with a common collective consciousness that suppresses the individuality of each of its elements. This centripetal force that binds people together is illustrated by analogy with cohesion ^{[16, pp. 101-102]}, which means "the adhesion of molecules inside a material under the action of attractive forces" ^{[17, p. 14]}. As you can see, Durkheim's mechanical connection refers not to an artificial mechanism, but to a homogeneous chemical compound, which forces us to classify his model of primitive societies as elementary (chemical). Primitive society here is likened to a drop of water, which is formed under the influence of the mentioned cohesion. The French sociologist's designation of such solidarity as mechanical is a tribute to the tradition leading to the mechanicism of Modern times; and under such a designation, the concepts of "inorganic", "inanimate", "artificial", and not "inherent in any mechanism" are already actually hidden.

In contrast, organic solidarity, which refers to the interconnectedness of organs within biological bodies, is based on social interdependence resulting from the social division of labor. An organic solidarity society consists of individualized individuals whose personal interests (egos), like a centrifugal force, push them away from the collective, social consciousness. At the same time, such a divided society does not disintegrate, since its parts, just like individual organs performing specialized functions, are not able to exist independently, becoming no less dependent on each other than people who were under pressure from artificial, mechanical solidarity ^{[16, pp. 101-102, 150]}.

It can be said that Durkheim, within the framework of his model, reconciles not only inorganic and organic approaches to society, but also ideas about the homogeneity or heterogeneity of the elements included in society, which, for example, was separately expressed in the social models of Quetelet and Carey, respectively ^[1]. The ideas of the French sociologist are more advanced, since they include the idea of social evolution ^{[16, pp. 119, 132]}, suggesting a progressive movement from a homogeneous society of mechanical solidarity, in which people are barely distinguishable in relation to work, to an economically heterogeneous society, the integrity of which is based on an organic connection. However, Durkheim, of course, was not the first to propose an evolutionary model: his predecessor Spencer also described the evolutionary development of society, but did so using purely biological analogies. As we could see, the English evolutionist's society is moving from homogeneous "cellular" forms to a heterogeneous structure with developed organ systems, which arose as a result of the "physiological division of labor."

In social philosophy, there is a different approach to combining the concepts of a "social mechanism" and a "social organism". In particular, our compatriot Nikolai Ivanovich Kareev described society in a combined image, which simultaneously has the features of both a mechanism and an organism. Like a machine, society has no purpose in itself, but serves other people, who, however, are not outside, but inside this social machine, like cells in an organism. At the same time, people, as particles of society, in contrast to how tightly organic cells fit together inside an organ, do not merge into a whole, which is similar to natural "mechanisms" (like planets in the Solar System). At the same time, people are living beings with consciousness and will, and not objects of inanimate nature. Kareev concludes that society is an entity that is much more complex than just an organism or than just a mechanism, therefore it deserves such a designation as "a product of supra–mechanical and supra-organic development" ^{[18, pp. 276-277]}.

Kareev also supports the idea of social evolution, which is moving towards the establishment of a "critical society" – the main goal of social development. Critical societies are able to question their way of life, leaving aside outdated ideals and natural prejudices that can slow or hinder social development, which is found in archaic, primitive (or, as Kareev put it, purely mechanical or purely organic) forms of social structure. Thus, Kareev associates social evolution with the movement from a natural biological organism (or mechanism) to a society that is becoming more and more an artificial product of conscious human activity or a kind of work of art ^{[18, pp. 277, 337, 350, 365]}.

At the end of the review of biomechanical models of society, we also point to an approach similar to Kareev's, which was supported by the French thinker Alfred Fulier ^[19]. His description of human societies also simultaneously unites two seemingly opposite and incompatible concepts: the model of a natural organism and the model of a voluntary social contract (the latter refers to Hobbes' mechanistic model). The goal of social evolution, according to Fulier, is to transform society into a "contractual organism" that simultaneously accumulates both natural and artificial features ^{[19, p. 394]}.

Psychological and psychoanalytic analogies

Concluding the classification of social models constructed with the help of external analogies, let us pay attention to socio-psychological and psychoanalytic theories that provide social philosophy with a variety of both meaningful and meaningful and ambiguous interpretations.

The French sociologist Gabriel Tarde, in his "Social Logic", marked the transition from biology to psychology in relation to the source of borrowing external social analogies. According to the social thinker, society is not an organism, but only one specific organ of it – the brain: individual individuals, like nerve cells, make up the collective brain of society ^{[20, p. 156]}. The public soul has two distinctive features: the ability for religious thought, which over time should evolve into science, and the ability for political activity, which imposes rights and obligations on people and forces them to obey the law regardless of their opinion about it. Both social activities, according to Tard, find a correspondence in the abilities of the human psyche to judgment (mind) and will (desire) ^{[20, pp. 112-117]}.

Further, the French sociologist drew more detailed parallelisms: the individual soul is characterized by logical pairs of categories: Matter-Force and Space-Time, Pleasure and Suffering, whereas the social soul is Divinity and Language, Good and Evil. Moreover, the first pairs of categories (from the individual and society) reveal the ability to judge and religion, the second pairs – the ability to will (desire) and politics ^{[20, pp. 117-118]}. Looking at these analogies, it is difficult to get rid of the idea that they are at least controversial, since the ideas of good and evil permeate any religion, which, in turn, throughout human history has played an important role in regulating social relations, establishing norms of behavior (in the form of all kinds of rules, taboos, customs traditions, prohibitions, etc.), often closely intertwined with politics.

As for Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis focused on the parallelism between the structure and development of the psyche of an individual, on the one hand, and the structure, origin, and development of a civilized society, on the other. Freud developed a structural model of the psyche that includes "It", "I" and "Superego" (or "Id", "Ego" and "Superego"). Preceding the other two parts of the personality, It has a structure in every person since birth, contains instinctual drives to life and death and acts according to the principle of pleasure. However, in the course of interaction, confrontation with the outside world, in order to survive, the child is forced to learn to control his instincts, as a result of which the structure of the Ego develops, which acts in accordance with the principle of reality and is an intermediary between the natural instincts of the Ego and the need to survive in the world around him. Finally, the latter forms the structure of the Superego, which accumulates externally perceived parental, sociocultural attitudes about what is good and bad. The Superego is able to punish the Ego with guilt for inappropriate behavior, thus forming another source that I have to cope with. If I am unable to resist the pressure exerted on him by the two above-mentioned personality structures, as well as the outside world, then mental disorders and neuroses arise, due to which a serious distortion of a person's perception of reality can occur ^[21].

Similarly, primitive, uncivilized groups of people (Freud also gives them the designation "primitive horde" ^{[22, p. 164]}) at the dawn of human culture were strongly influenced by Eros and Thanatos, tormented by libidinal and aggressive drives. However, due to the need to survive in an aggressive external world, they are forced to limit these instincts, as a result of which numerous laws, religious customs and taboos are introduced. The first prohibitions – on incest and on killing a totemic animal – appear after overcoming the Oedipus complex postulated by Freud (a concept that refers to individual mental development), which arose in a group of brothers and caused them a strong sense of guilt after they killed their harsh repressive father ^{[22, pp. 164-167]}. "It can be argued that society also develops a Superego, under the influence of which cultural development takes place" ^{[23, p. 88]}. This structure is also based on the impressions left by great leaders, who are subsequently elevated to the rank of a social ideal that everyone should emulate.

The transition from childhood to adulthood for a personality is associated with traumatic events, the most intense of which can lead to acute neurotic disorders. Growing up, humanity also experiences similar mental growth pains: according to Freud, "religion is comparable to childhood neurosis" and "humanity will overcome this neurotic stage in the same way as many children outgrow their similar neuroses" ^{[24, p. 53]}. However, restrictions related to laws, customs and traditions, unattainable social ideals and neurotic religious illusions impose such a heavy burden on society that people in it become more neurotic and dissatisfied. Freud believed that such a society needs serious socio-analytical therapy, and these and other social pathologies still require more careful study ^{[23, p. 91]}.

It can be said that the American social psychologist of German origin, Erich Fromm, realized Freud's wishes by publishing the work "A Healthy Society" ^[25]. Like a person who can be described in psychological terms of mental health, sane or insane personality, society as a whole can also be characterized in terms of his mental health and maturity or ill health and infantilism. According to Fromm, a healthy society develops creative work, love for one's neighbor, critical thinking, and self-esteem. On the contrary, an unhealthy society condones mutual hostility, distrust, turns a person into an automaton devoid of self-esteem and serving as an instrument of exploitation in the hands of other people ^{[25, p. 70]}.

In addition, each society has a certain social character, according to which human energy is accumulated and directed to maintain the vital activity of the whole ^{[25, pp. 76-77]}. Modern Western society (the 50s of the XX century) is diagnosed by Fromm as predominantly pathological and suffering from mental disorders. The social psychoanalyst concretizes the diagnosis by drawing analogies between social evolution and the mental development of personality: the social pathology of Western civilization takes the form of schizoid self-alienation, which manifests itself in regression to earlier stages of human history. A degraded society is akin to an adult who behaves like a child and as such is recognized as suffering from a severe mental illness, probably schizophrenia ^{[25, pp. 38-39, 68-69, 210, 352]}. Fromm not only makes a diagnosis, but also outlines a course of treatment for the described social ailment, including the same actions that the patient must perform to heal from individual neurotic disorders. This is the acceptance of suffering, which speaks of the mental disintegration of the personality and is caused by conflict with genuine human nature; awareness of exactly which parts of the personality have been repressed and suppressed; performing persistent actions aimed at changing the worldview, value system and current situation in order to overcome suffering, reintegrate the repressed parts and eventually gain a holistic mentally healthy personality ^{[25, pp. 266-267]}.

French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and French psychoanalyst Felix Guattari continued their psychoanalytic studies of social pathologies. Their joint two-volume book with the telling title "Capitalism and schizophrenia" ^{[26, 27]} is replete with various external analogies, not only related to psychology: at least one can distinguish conceptual borrowings from biology, physics, mathematics and, no doubt, from psychoanalysis. It should be noted here that the postmodern approach to merging terminology from various fields of knowledge is widely criticized. For example, physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont ^[28] claim that the mentioned French thinkers in their various works use terminology taken, for example, from Godel's theorem, Cantor's theory of transfinite numbers, Riemann geometry, quantum mechanics, etc., however, this rather indicates the superficial erudition of the authors than their a consistent multidisciplinary approach, and for a specialist their statements seem either meaningless ambiguities or banal statements ^{[28, pp. 154-168]}.

Nevertheless, if we try to deconstruct a more or less understandable model of society outlined in "Capitalism and Schizophrenia", then first of all we should note that, according to French thinkers, capitalist society is completely schizophrenic: "schizophrenia permeates the entire capitalist field, from one end to the other" ^{[26, p. 246]}. People and, apparently, all forms of life that make up this mentally ill society are described by the concepts of "producing machine", "desiring machine", "schizophrenic machine" ^{[26, p. 2]}. The society of "schizophrenic social production" forces the family to transform social alienation into mental ^{[26, pp. 360-361]}, whereas the cash flows passing through this capitalist social existence are "completely schizophrenic realities" ^{[26, p. 246]}.

The joint work of Deleuze and Guattari resembles a "melting pot", where barely compatible analogies are intertwined into a discourse rhizome ^{[27, pp. 3-25]}, which, in our opinion, can be matched with an external psychological analogy with schizophasia (a speech disorder in which the correct construction of meaningless phrases is observed). Returning to the question of what a society is (or "socius" in the authors' special terminology), we encounter already familiar concepts of a social organism ^{[26, p. 342]}, as well as a social machine ^{[26, p. 32-33]}; in addition, this "socius" suffers from schizophrenic social mechanisms ^{[26, p. 360]} and forced by the capitalist machine to become a body without organs ^{[26, p. 33]}. Not only the objects of social philosophy and history have undergone schizophrenization ^{[26, p. 53]}, but also some areas of natural sciences: "molecular biology itself is schizophrenic – as well as microphysics" ^{[26, p. 289]}.

Although Fromm and the French intellectuals have markedly different styles in terms of clarity of presentation, they nevertheless share a number of common socio-philosophical ideas. We are talking about the alienation and robotization of members of society, as well as about total social schizophrenization, which suggests an analogy between an unhealthy capitalist society and a person with schizophrenia. However, it should be recognized that Fromm was more restrained in his criticism and hoped for a cure from social schizophrenia, total robotization ^{[25, pp. 353-355]}, whereas Deleuze and Guattari postulated schizophrenization, the mechanization of people and society as an accomplished, inescapable fact: "Everywhere there are machines consisting of machines for eating, talking machines, breathing machines, numerous organ machines like a milk production machine, which shows what a woman's breast really is" ^{[26, p. 1]}.

Conclusion

Finally, we can finish the review of socio-philosophical models built using thinking by analogy. Based on two works, the systematization of analog models was carried out, most of which were represented by concepts where external analogies played a leading role: we noted mechanistic, elementary (chemical), geological, biological, biomechanical, psychological and psychoanalytic analogies. In the previous article, models based on internal analogies were also considered ^[1]. As you can see, the use of various comparisons and parallelisms is widespread in the field of social philosophy: Rather, it will be difficult to find a social model that would be completely devoid of at least some analogies. Nevertheless, based on the review of the concepts discussed in this article, it seems important to talk about both the obvious disadvantages and the advantages and prospects of the way of thinking under study.

First, it is worth noting that almost any science "external" to social science and social philosophy can serve as a valuable source of analogies used to describe and interpret society; moreover, this applies to both natural science and humanitarian knowledge. Moreover, it seems logical to us to assume that in the event of the emergence of any new branch of science or the implementation of a scientific revolution within any existing field of knowledge, it is likely that the results of these scientific achievements will be used to build a new analog model of society corresponding to this knowledge.

Secondly, it is impossible to ignore the obvious dependence of social models constructed using external analogies on the ability of this external, "donor" field of knowledge to properly reflect reality. This means that in an unsuccessful scenario, a social philosopher may initially choose the wrong analogy, not even suspecting its falsity, which may not be revealed immediately, but only in the course of the progressive development of scientific knowledge over decades or even centuries. A vivid example of this is the mechanistic concepts, according to which the laws of mechanics are able to exhaustively describe any phenomena of the surrounding world: both natural and social. However, research in the field of electromagnetism, the subsequent formation of the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics destroyed the universality of the laws of classical mechanics and, as a result, this comprehensive mechanistic thesis.

A similar situation exists with a number of biological references by Lametri and Spencer, which are considered outdated or unconfirmed from the standpoint of modern knowledge in the field of biology. In particular, Spencer was a proponent of Lamarckism, a view (which contradicts the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin and is not widely confirmed) about the heredity of physical characteristics that the parent organism acquires during its life through the use or non-use of any organs ^{[29, 30]}. So, the giraffe has a long neck, because for generations it has purposefully practiced stretching it and taking leaves from the tops of trees. Similarly, Spencer represented the development of public bodies: for example, a large demand for woolen goods leads to an increase in wool production (functional activity), the development of the wool industry, "fueled" by profit ^{[8, pp. 289-291]}.

As for psychoanalysis, there is a debate about the very scientific status and the real effectiveness of this psychological theory. Despite the fact that the ideas of Freud and his followers had a tangible impact on psychology and psychiatry, as well as on the philosophy of the twentieth century, their scientific validity was constantly questioned. Karl Popper, a representative of the philosophy of science, who put forward the principle of the fundamental refutability of scientific knowledge, just cited Freud's psychoanalysis as an example of pseudoscience that is unable to meet this criterion: one cannot imagine human behavior that would contradict psychoanalysis; or any human behavior psychoanalyst is always able to interpret as confirming his theory (just as an astrologer is always able to find excuses explaining the discrepancy between astrological predictions and real events in people's lives). As a result, Popper equates psychoanalysis with Homeric mythology ^{[31, pp. 48-51]}.

There are also more detailed studies that criticize the central concepts of psychoanalysis. Among others, Joel Kapfersmid's work "Does the Oedipus complex exist?", where the author, based on an in-depth analysis of many sources, comes to the following conclusions: "(a) there is no convincing data confirming the position that monkeys or early man lived in the environment of primitive hordes; (b) even if the society of primitive hordes when- that existed, there is no conclusive evidence that the sons got together, killed their father, and entered into an agreement prohibiting incest; (c) even if the sons did all of the above, it is unknown how these events could have been passed down from generation to generation; and (d) even if such events could somehow The methods used in psychoanalysis are so strongly influenced by the bias of the psychoanalyst and suggestion that one cannot be sure of the authenticity of the content of such memory traces" ^{[32, p. 546]}.

Thirdly, there is the problem of misuse or abuse of analogies themselves in socio-philosophical works. Unlike the previous remark, the problem here lies not in the external field of knowledge, but in the methodology itself used by the author to comprehend and interpret society. Above, we have already noted the criticism regarding the comparisons of Semenov, Tard, as well as Gilles and Deleuze. In the first case, analogies may indicate excessive word-making by the author, in which the already generally accepted terminology is replaced. In another case, the usual usage of words can be used, but analogies in general seem speculative, although more or less understandable. In the third case, the use of terms from various fields of science makes it more difficult for us to understand the author's idea of society than it facilitates it, while the use of highly specialized terminology by specialists themselves is questioned. It can also be said that the presence of serious questions regarding postmodern works indicates the impossibility in the conditions of modern science (when even representatives of related fields of knowledge find it difficult to understand each other) to achieve the ideal of encyclopedism – building a comprehensive picture of the world (according to the type of universal mechanicism), absorbing and uniting completely heterogeneous fields of knowledge.

Finally, fourthly, we note that the analogies considered in the work (and here we mean even those that cause critical comments) have the prospect of being reused in other research fields, where they may be able to play an equally significant role. For example, the analogy between the brain and the Tard society may work in the opposite way in the framework of research on human consciousness. So, the American philosopher Ned Block proposed a thought experiment "The Chinese Nation", in which people taken in large numbers (it may be a billion Chinese) simulate the work of the brain: an individual is like a neuron and communicates with other human neurons via a walkie-talkie ^{[33, 34]}. As you can see, in this case, the objects of study of the social sciences are a source of external analogies for the philosophy of consciousness.

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