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The Philosophy of the Present
Chapter 4: The Implications of the Self
CHAPTER IV
THE IMPLICATIONS OF THE SELF
I have indicated the position which I assume over
against the so-called epistemological problem, namely, that knowing
is an undertaking that always takes place within a situation that
is not itself involved in the ignorance or uncertainty that knowledge
seeks to dissipate. Knowledge is not then to be identified with the
presence of. content in experience. There is no conscious attitude
that is as such cognitive. Knowledge is a process in conduct that
so organizes the field of action that delayed and inhibited responses
may take place. The test of the success of the process of knowledge,
that is, the test of truth, is found in the discovery or construction
of such objects as will mediate our conflicting and checked activities
and allow conduct to proceed. Knowledge is inferential and always
implies that a datum is involved in the inference. Reflection is the
operation of inference in the field of ideation, i.e., the functioning
as symbols of contents and characters of things, by means of which
constructions of objects sought can be carried out.
Evidently ideation arises within what we term consciousness, and
consciousness therefore calls for consideration. The lowest form of
consciousness that we ascribe to living things is feeling. In general
we do not judge that living forms without central nervous systems
possess feeling, though there is difference of opinion on this. What
naive judgment comes back to is the evidence that response is called
forth by what is good or bad for the animal. We assume acceptance
and rejection, and ascribe pleasure and displeasure (69)
respectively to these two attitudes. There is evidence of acceptance
and rejection even in the behavior of some unicellular forms, and
we accordingly find biologists and psychologists ascribing consciousness
in this lowest form even to these organisms. Pleasures and displeasures
come under what we call organic experiences, at least in the situations
to which I am referring, and our instinctive tendency to couple them
with acceptance and rejection indicates an assumption that states
of an animal's own organism enter into its experience. At this lowest
limit of what we may call the emergence of consciousness we assume
that the organism reacts to conditions in its own life process. So
general a statement as this doubtless brings many of the reactions
of plants within its sweep. What keeps plants out of our customary
generalization, however, is the fact that plants do not react as a
whole in their acceptances and rejections.
Thus the first condition of consciousness is life, a process in which
the individual by its action tends to maintain this process both in
itself and in later generations, and one which extends beyond what
goes on in the organism out into the surrounding world and defines
so much of the world as is found within the sweep of these activities
as the environment of the individual. The second condition is that
the living form in its teleological process can react, as a whole,
purposively, to conditions of its own organism. However, I have defined
emergence as the presence of things in two or more different systems,
in such a fashion that its presence in a later system changes its
character in the earlier system or systems to which it belongs. Hence,
when we say that the lowest form of consciousness is feeling, what
is implied is that when living forms enter such a systematic process
that they react purposively and as wholes to their own conditions,
consciousness as feeling arises within life. I have assumed (70)
that a certain systematic physico-chemical process arises which so
selects what it reacts upon as to maintain the process, and that this
process, appearing within the physical world, emerges as life. Into
this situation there now comes a form that not only lives but makes
its own organic conditions, favorable or unfavorable to life, part
of the field to which it reacts or within which it lives. A conscious
form is one that can make phases of its own life-process parts of
its environment. An animal that selects certain of its own living
states, as the rootlets of a plant select water when the plant needs
water, not only lives, as does the plant, but is also thirsty. Feeling
is the term we use for this added element in life, when the animal
enters in some degree into its own environment.
Now the biological mechanism by which this seems to take place is
the nervous system, for this not only enables the animal to select
appropriate stimuli, but also makes the functioning of such surfaces
of its own body as come into contact with the selected food a part
of the object to which the animal responds. He not only ingests food,
he also tastes it. I have also called emergence an expression of sociality.
The animal is a part not only of the inanimate but also of the animate
world: the conscious animal not only selects objects, but senses them
as well. Thus, he is on the way to becoming part of the world within
which he lives. The earlier form of consciousness lies in the field
of contact experience. Here the animal responds to the object and
in so doing responds to himself not as a whole, but only to the functioning
of the contact surfaces. Later distance-stimuli come to be involved
in his responses to his organic conditions and enter into the conscious
field. The animal thus becomes more and more intimately a part of
the world of objects about him. But the great advance comes with the
development of the encephalon. This is primarily (71)
the nerve center of the important distance senses. As these become
more powerful and refined in their discriminations, the contact experiences
to which they respond are delayed, and possibilities of adjustment
and of choice in response are thus increased. In the innervations
of the attitudes that distant objects call out the animal feels the
invitation or the threat they carry with them. He experiences his
own repressed responses in his response to the distant stimulation.
His responses to his own tendencies to act provide the control that
organizes all his responses into a coordinated act, so that these
inner feelings wax in importance in the development of the mechanism.
Of equal importance is the separation, involved in the distance stimulation,
between the content of the experience and the immediate response.
It is here that we first meet the stuff of ideation. Of course in
itself the distance stimulation is just that and nothing more. It
is only as the organism gets itself into this distance stimulation
that it comes into the field of so-called consciousness. It is from
the awakening of delayed and mutually conflicting responses that the
stuff for ideation is derived.
Let me state again the situation within which consciousness appears.
Primarily living forms react to external stimulation in such fashion
as to preserve the living process. The peculiar method that distinguishes
their reactions from the motions of inanimate objects is that of selection.
This selection is due to the sensitivity of the living form. Among
inanimate processes the nearest approach to selection is catalysis.
One may say that a living form is continually catalysing itself. Its
own condition determines the objects and influences to which it will
respond. The conscious animal carries selection into the field of
its own response. It responds to the influence or effect the outer
world has upon it. The immediate effect of food upon the animal is
(72) ingestion, and the peculiar character of life
is exhausted in the animal's selection, through sensitization of the
organism, of that substance to which it will respond-in other words,
of its food. We can by mechanical devices sensitize a photographic
plate. The structure of such a plate is maintained by mechanical forces.
If a plate through the operation of these forces were to sensitize
itself to light, it would be a living form. The operation of light
upon an animal or plant is a photo-chemical process as mechanical
as upon a kodak film. In the same manner the reaction of the form
to the food-substance brought into contact with it is mechanical.
As a living form it has selected what it will ingest, and mechanics
takes care of the process of ingestion. But if in the process of ingestion
the animal finds a stimulation to direct, to enhance or to inhibit
this process, an activity of its own has become the object of its
selection in maintaining the life process, that is in eating. In this
case the animal has become conscious. The primary difficulty in dealing
with these matters lies in our tendency to cut off life and consciousness
at the boundaries of the organism. Selection undoubtedly lies in the
living form, but such a form can only live in a physical environment
of a definite sort. Living processes include active relationships
with objects in an environment, and conscious living processes also
include such objects. The response of the organism to its own response
to food undoubtedly lies within the organism, but only as a part of
a whole process of eating that includes also the food. To confine
consciousness to the response of the organism to its food is not only
to take it out of its setting but also to fail to recognize that it
is only one phase of the eating. Conscious eating is tasting food,
and to translate the tasting of food into other responses of the organism
to its responeses toward things not only involves a hopeless snarl
but deprives such responses of all (73) meaning.
Life becomes conscious at those points at which the organism's own
responses enter as part of the objective field to which it reacts.
This brings us to the sensory characters of things. The animal's
conscious pleasure in the flavor of food is the state by which his
organism responds to his eating of a food with certain characters.
The selection of those characters of the food is part of the life
process, and may be quite peculiar to a particular individualize --
de gustibus non est disputandum. Is the flavor his in the
same sense in which the pleasure is his? The animal senses the flavor
as really as he senses his own pleasure. The conscious phase of this
sensory process lies in his use of selective discrimination in sniffing
the food, but while the smelling is his, evidently the smell is not.
But so far as his own responses get into the odorous object, that
is, so far as this object is something to be seized or rejected, it
is evidently an affair of consciousness. If we go farther than this
and ask whether the color, or odor, or warmth, or smoothness of the
object, apart from any response of the organism in the way of sensing
it, belongs to the animal, we are probably asking two questions. The
one question-whether the odor belongs to the organism as the pleasure
does-we have already answered in the negative. The status of the pleasure
would come nearest to what we mean by the phrase, "state of consciousness."
The other -- whether the so-called sensory quality apart from the
sensing of it is a state of consciousness, as we have defined conciousness--
is already answered; but the further implication that the sensory
character would not be there if the animal were not there, takes us
into the relation of the form to its environment. As parallel lines
meeting at the horizon would not exist apart from some sort of optical
apparatus leading to the convergence of the lines, so we may say that
color would not exist apart from the apparatus of a retina (74)
and the mechanism behind it. The comparison is unfortunate because
we can construct an optical apparatus with reference to which parallel
lines do converge, while we cannot construct a retina with reference
to which the world takes on colors. But what really lies back in our
minds is the idea that the real surface is made up of vibrating molecules,
so that the color cannot be on the object, and must be put into consciousness
for lack of any other habitat. That vibrating molecules are not yellow
surfaces is true. But that vibrating molecules may not exist as colored
surfaces for animals with certain retinal apparatuses is not rendered
impossible by that fact. There may be what we may call sensory perspectives
as well as spatial and temporal perspectives. In any case, it means
nothing to call color a state of consciousness, in the sense in which
I have used consciousness.
And yet perceptual objects, with their sensuous qualities, belong
to the realm of consciousness; for distance-experience exists as the
promise or threat of contact-experience, and the way in which this
future gets into the object is through the response of the organism
to its own responses. In the perceptual world the future that is already
there in the moving present is built out through the purposive responses
of conscious organisms. The distant object thus comes to be what we
can do to it or with it or by way of it or what it can do to us. To
say that it exists instantaneously as we perceive it is but to demand
confirmation of what is given in the perception. These purposive responses
are there in the organism both as tendencies and as the results of
past responses, and the organism responds to them in its perception.
We frequently call this latter response imagery. Certainly much of
what we perceive is made up of such imagery. In so far as it is distinguishable
imagery, it is evidently of the same sort as the sensuous material
of things, and so is marked (75) as belonging to
the present, and is spoken of as in the mind and as put into things.
In dreams and hallucinations it is the largest part of our objects.
Its relation to the nervous system is very obscure. Its appearance
is presumably dependent upon conditions in the central nervous system
due to past experiences, but it can no more be placed within the brain
than can percepts; and if we may refer to the "stuff" of
images, it is of the same sort as that of percepts. Imagery belongs
to the perspective of the individual. He alone has access to it, and,
finally, it is always stuff that has appeared in earlier perception.
It constitutes a most important part of the environment of the human
individual. It is however generally so merged with the objects and
attitudes with which it functions, and, especially in speech, with
incipient muscular reactions, that it is difficult to define and isolate
it in our actual experience. It functions largely in the building
out of the past and the future.
Ideas are closely related to images. They also have been regarded
as sure evidence of a substantial mind postulated in order to provide
them with a habitat. Since the symbols with which we think are largely
recognized as word images, ideas and images have a very close consanguinity.
The relationship is of course the same as that between a spoken or
written word and its meaning; but, since the auditory or visual image
of a word seems to be in the mind where the idea is placed, it is
not uncommon, when we desire to distinguish between the words we use
in speech and the meanings which they connote, to identify the meaning
with the inner words with which we carry on our thinking. In any case
one part of the idea as it appears in experience is some perceptual
symbol, whether it is of the type of so-called imagery or of something
seen or heard. The other part of the idea -- the logician's and metaphysician's
universal --- comes back to what I have referred to as attitudes or
organized responses (76) selecting characters of
things when they can be detached from the situations within which
they take place. Particularly do our habitual responses to familiar
objects constitute for us the ideas of these objects. The definitions
we give of them are the sure signs by which we can arouse identical
or like attitudes in others. I am not interested in the logical or
metaphysical problems they have called out, but in the fact that as
organized responses of the organism they do enter into the experience
we call conscious. That is, the organism responds to these organized
attitudes in their relations to objects as it does to other parts
of its world. And thus these become objects for the individual.
Now it is by these ideational processes that we get hold of the conditions
of future conduct as these are found in the organized responses which
we have formed, and so construct our pasts in anticipation of that
future. The individual who can thus get hold of them can further organize
them through the selection of the stimulations which call them out
and can thus build up his plan of action. It is my contention that
the past is always constructed in this fashion and therefore always
with reference to the situation which calls out this deliberative
attitude. I have been merely detailing the conditions in an emergent
evolution which have made such deliberative situations possible.
In dealing with sociality I have laid stress upon the passage in
emergence from the old system to the new, emphasizing the fact that
in this passage the emergent lies in both, and is what it is because
it carries the characters of both at once. Thus a moving body has
an increase in mass over against the system within which it is moving,
a living organism has a selective power in maintenance of the life
process in the midst of inanimate things, and a conscious individual
reacts to his own responses. Ile thus gains a new type of control
in the maintenance of the living organism, and invests with (77)
values the objects of his environment. The other dimension of sociality,
where this term expresses the determination of the nature of an object
by the natures of other objects belonging to the same system, is evident
in the conception of energy systems, in the development of multicellular
forms in which the life of the whole system is the integrated life
of the differentiated cells that make it up, in the social systems
involved in the propagation of the species and in the integration
of societies, from those in which at first balance is reached between
reproduction and the consumption of one form by another, up to those
in which a social process is mediated by differentiation of individuals.
In all these the nature of the individual is in varying degrees the
expression of the natures of other members of the system or society.
The difference between these two dimensions of sociality is temporal.
A system can conceivably be taken at an instant, and the social character
of the individual member would in that instant be what it is because
of the mutual relationships of all members. On the other hand, an
object can be a member of two divergent systems only in passage, in
which its nature in one system leads to the transformation which its
passing into another system carries with it. In the passage itself
it can be in both. I have sufficiently illustrated this in the case
of change of mass with increase in velocity. In the case of living
forms we are as a rule presented with a fait accompli. The situation
in which there exists a cell living its own life and finding itself
commencing to live the life of a multicellular form must have arisen
in the evolution of these forms, but the origin of such a situation
we can only dimly trace in embryonic development where the higher
rate of nutrition of certain cells in comparison with that of others
appears to lead to differentiation. As a further example we may consider
the instant at which the material we now know as the sun first took
on its (78) planetary nature, or that at which, under
tidal and other influences, a double star appears.
The striking fact in relativity is that changes in spatiotemporal
and energy dimensions are not starting-points of new structures. There
must be some change in those systems in which a body increases in
mass, but these are not incident to new orders. The differences, so
to speak, are cancelled by corresponding changes in other systems.
It is this situation that so strongly favors the assumption of a reality
lying behind the different perspectives, to which the reality of experiences
under different frames of reference belongs -- a Minkowski space-time
with its events and intervals. There is, however, another possibility
in the case of relativity with its different perspectives, viz., that
of occupying in experience alternative systems. Whitehead for example
refers to a double consciousness of cogredience, in which the observer
identifies himself both with the space-time of a train and with that
of the landscape through which the train is moving. Evidently relativity
as a doctrine would have been impossible but for this type of consciousness.
Einstein's doctrine has been called one of signals. It involves the
realization of different meanings of the spatio-temporal order of
events in different systems at the same time. Now I have presented
consciousness as the response of an organism to its own responses,
with the corresponding change which the environment undergoes in its
meanings. The world is a different world to one man from what it is
to another, as is illustrated by the fact that a dollar means one
thing to one man and a different thing to another. The man who can
take both points of view is able to order and price his goods successfully.
Out of this capacity there arises an abstract value for the dollar
as a means of exchange -- a value which it has in the worlds of all
three. The Minkowski world should be such a meaning attaching to actual
experiences of persons in (79) different systems
moving with reference to each other, but it does not so appear. It
appears rather as a system of transformations and the constants that
shake out of them, where these are made into symbols of entities that
cannot enter into experience. In older views of relativity, differences
in perspectives due to motion could be translated from one system
to another with the same relative change in the position of the objects.
There was no change in the character of the object in one because
of its motion in the other. Usually there was a preferred system to
which all others were transformed for common comprehension. So we
could take the coordinates of the fixed stars as a basis for understanding
the motions of the stars with reference to our system. What was common
to all systems was the identical relative positions of the objects.
Electro-magnetic relativity, on the other hand, has shown a difference
in the spatiotemporal and energy dimensions of things in motion with
reference to the system within which they move, so that we cannot
simply translate from one to the other, and especially we cannot set
up any common structure of the things in whatever system they may
be. The mathematical apparatus for transformation becomes very complicated.
The metaphysical question is, can a thing with changing spatio-temporal
and energy dimensions be the same thing with different dimensions,
when we have seemingly only these dimensions by which to define the
thing? It has seemed simpler to say that the real thing lies behind
these experiences which are subjective and phenomenal. But let us
instead accept passage as the character of reality, and recognize
that in passage there is change in the structure of things, and that
because of passage objects can occupy different systems. If we then
recognize that there is a form of sociality within which we. can go
from the one to the other by means of a system of transformations,
and so occupy both systems, (80) identifying the
same objects in each, it becomes possible for passage to take place
between alternative systems that are simultaneously mutually exclusive.
The set of transformations and the mathematical structure built upon
it are as much parts of nature as anything else. They are attitudes
answering to meanings of things brought under our control by symbols.
Passage from a system in motion to the same system at rest, while
the rest of world passes from rest to motion, means passage from the
one to the other in what we call a mind. These two aspects exist in
nature, and the mind is also in nature. The mind passes from one to
the other in its so-called consciousness, and the world is a different
world from the standpoint of one attitude from what it is from another.
We say the world cannot occupy both meanings, if they are mutually
exclusive; but passage in a mind enables it to do so by means of transformations.
All that we need to recognize is that the world had the one aspect
from one point of view and that it now has the other aspect from another
point of view, and that there has been the same passage in nature
from the one to the other as has taken place in the mind, just as
there is a passage from one price to another in stocks on the market
because of the changing attitudes in men's minds.
The question at issue here is, what is there in nature that answers
to the transformation in the mathematician's mind? If we accept mind
as existing in nature and recognize that mind, by means of the temporal
dimension in sociality, passes from one system to another, so that
the objects to which the mathematician refers in one system appear
in the other in different spatio-temporal and energy dimensions, by
means of transformation formulae; and recognize also that the minded
organism has the other dimension of sociality as well, so that what
appears now as in one system and now within another, lies, since it
has an identical character to (81) the organism,
in a system in the world answering to this character of the minded
organism; th en we can assume that the reference of the constants
in these different perspectives is not to entities outside possible
experience but to this organized character of the world that appears
in what we call mind. To state the matter less cumbrously, the relativist
is able to hold on to two or more mutually exclusive systems within
which the same object appears, by passing from one to the other. I
have already referred to the experiential form of this passage in
which the man in a train passes from the system of the movement of
his train to that of the movement of a neighboring train. His train
cannot be both moving and at rest, but the mind of the passenger can
occupy in passage both systems, and hold the two attitudes in a comprehensible
relationship to each other as representing the same occurrence from
two different standpoints which, having a mind or being a mind, he
can occupy. If he accepts the two mutually exclusive situations as
both legitimate, it is because as a minded organism he can be in both.
It is to such an organization of perspectives that the constants
in the mathematics of relativity may refer. We state this summarily,
and with avoidance of philosophical complications, by saying that
these mathematics give us a more accurate method of formulating and
measuring the physical world; but this still leaves the seeming contradiction
of an object possessing at the same time differing spatio-temporal
and energy dimensions, when it is only by these that the object can
be defined. There would be no difficulty if we could set up one definition
as the correct one and refer others to illusory factors-we should
then simply regard our own train as moving. We do the same sort of
a thing when we say that the two systems are simply the structure
which the objects have under different frames of reference. Both are
then illusory. But in this case we must relegate the reality (82)
to a Minkowski world. My contention is that they are both real for
a mind that can occupy in passage both systems. The other illustration
which I have given is that of price in the economic world; but I have
indicated the difference that both individuals in the different perspectives
here come back to a common entity of price in terms of exchange, which,
in the form of money, is an identical affair for each, while the two
individuals in the systems moving with reference to each other cannot
find such common realities in their experience. They get instead a
set of transformation-formulae. What they come back to is what Russell
refers to as a common logical pattern, and what I am maintaining is
that two individuals in the systems which Einstein presents, connected
with each other by light signals so that each individual places himself
in the system of the other as well as in his own, are living in a
common world, and that a reference to a Minkowski world is unnecessary.
Individuals living together in such systems would soon carry with
them constantly these two definitions of everything, just as we carry
two systems of time when travelling. What would be impossible would
be the reduction of this common world to an instant. The temporal
dimension of sociality is essential to its existence. One cannot be
in Chicago and Berkeley at the same instant even in thought; but even
if we did not have the same earth under us, which can be the same
at an instant, we could hold in our passing present in thought a common
life. I have clung to this illustration because it presents an extreme
example of the organization of perspectives which sociality accomplishes
in both of its dimensions when they can appear in minded organisms.
The self by its reflexive form announces itself as a conscious organism
which is what it is only so far as it can pass from its own -system
into those of others, and can thus, in passing, occupy both its own
system and that into which it is (83) passing. That
this should take place is evidently not the affair of a single organism.
Shut up within his own world that which answers to his stimulations
and responses-he would have no entrance into possibilities other than
those which his own organized act involved. It is only as his activity
is a part of a larger organized process that such a possibility can
open. Nor is this the only prerequisite. The social organization of
a multicellular form is one in which each cell in living its own life
lives the life of the whole; but its differentiation restricts its
expressions to the single function to which it has become adapted.
Only in a process in which one organism can in some sense substitute
for another could an individual find itself taking the attitude of
another while still occupying its own. Its own differentiation must
never be so complete as to restrict it to fulfilling a single function
only. It is the high degree of physiological differentiation among
insects that presumably precludes their highly organized communities
from reaching self-consciousness.
There remains the mechanism by which the individual living his own
life in that of the group is placed in the attitude of taking the
role of another. That mechanism is, of course, that of communication.
There may be a type of communication in which the condition of one
organ stimulates others to their appropriate responses. There is in
the physiological system such a system of communication carried out
by the hormones. But this is only an elaboration of the interrelation
of highly differentiated organs functioning in a common life-process.
Communication as I shall use it always implies the conveyance of meaning;
and this involves the arousal in one individual of the attitude of
the other, and his response to these responses. The result is that
the individual may be stimulated to play various parts in the common
process in which all are engaged, and can therefore (84)
face the various futures which these different roles carry with them,
in reaching finally the form that his own will take. Thus the life
of the community to which he belongs becomes a part of his experience
in a higher sense than would be possible for a differentiated organ
within an organic whole. The final step in the development of communication
is reached when the individual that has been aroused to take the roles
of others addresses himself in their roles, and so acquires the mechanism
of thinking, that of inward conversation. The genesis of mind in human
society I will not here discuss. What I wish to bring out in the first
place is that it is a natural development within the world of living
organisms and their environment. Its first characteristic is consciousness,
that emergent which arises when the animal passes from the system
in which it formerly existed to an environment that arises through
the selectiveness of its own sensitivity, and thus to a new system
within which parts of its own organism and its reactions to these
parts become parts of its environment. The next step is reached with
the dominance of the distance senses and the delayed responses to
these. The selection and organization of these responses, together
with the characters of the objects which they have selected, now become
objects within the environment of the organism. The animal comes to
respond to an environment consisting largely of possible futures of
its own delayed reactions, and this inevitably emphasizes its own
past responses in the form of acquired habits. These pass into the
environment as the conditions of his acts. These characters of the
environment constitute the stuff out of which values and meanings
later arise, when these characters can be isolated through gestures
in communication. The systems to which I have referred are in all
cases interrelations between the organism and the world that reveals
itself as environment, determined by its relationship to the organism.
(85) Any essential change in the organism brings
with it a corresponding change in the environment.
The passage, then, from one system into another is the occasion for
an emergence both in the form and in the environment. The development
in animal life has been steadily toward bringing more and more of
the activity of the animal within the environment to which it responds,
by the growth of a nervous system through which it could respond both
to its sense processes and also to its responses to these, in its
whole life activity. But the animal could never reach the goal of
becoming an object to itself as a whole until it could enter into
a larger system within which it could play various roles, so that
in taking one role it could stimulate itself to play the other role
which this first role called for. It is this development that a society
whose life process is mediated by communication has made possible.
It is here that mental life arises-with this continual passing from
one system to another, with the occupation of both in passage and
with the systematic structures that each involves. It is the realm
of continual emergence.
I have wished to present mind as an evolution in nature, in which
culminates that sociality which is the principle and the form of emergence.
The emergence in nature of sensuous qualities is due to the fact that
an organ can respond to nature in differing systematic attitudes and
yet occupy both attitudes. The organism responds to itself as affected
by the tree and at the same time to the tree as the field of its possible
future reactions. The possibility of the organism being at once in
three different systems, that of physical relation, of vital relation
and of sensuous relation, is responsible for the appearance of the
colored rough shaft and foliage of the tree emerging in the interrelation
between the object and the organism. But mind in its highest sense
involves the passage from one attitude to another with the (86)
consequent occupation of both. This also takes place in nature. It
is the phase of change in which both states are found in the process.
An acceleration in velocity is the out. standing illustration of this
situation, and the whole development of our modern physical science
has been dependent upon our isolation of this entity in change. But
while this concurrent occupation of different situations at once occurs
in nature, it has remained for mind to present a field within which
the organism not only passes from one attitude to another and so occupies
both, but also holds on to this common phase. One can pass from the
situation within which a dog appears, to that in which a toad appears,
and so on to an elephant, and be in all attitudes at once in so far
as they all include the common attitude toward "an animal."
Now this is the highest expression of sociality, because the organism
not only so passes from one attitude to another, by means of a phase
which is a part of all these attitudes, but also comes back on itself
in the process and responds to this phase. It must get out of itself
in the passage and react to this factor in the passage.
I have indicated the mechanism by which this is accomplished. It
is that of a society of organisms which become selves, first of all
taking the attitudes of others to themselves, and then using the gestures
by which they have conversed with others to indicate to themselves
what is of interest in their own attitudes. I will not spend time
in discussing this fascinating field of mental development.[1]
I wish to emphasize the fact that the appearance of mind is only the
culmination of that sociality which is found throughout the universe,
its culmination lying in the fact that the organism, by occupying
the attitudes of others, can occupy its own attitude in the role of
the other. A society is a (87) systematic order of
individuals in which each has a more or less differentiated activity.
The structure is really there in nature, whether we find it in the
society of bees or that of human beings. And it is in varying degrees
reflected in each individual. But, as I have already stated, it can
get into the separate individual only in so far as he can take the
parts of others while he is taking his own part. It is due to the
structural organization of society that the individual, in successively
taking the roles of others in some organized activity, finds himself
selecting what is common in their interrelated acts, and so assumes
what I have called the role of the generalized other. This is the
organization of those common attitudes which all assume in their varied
responses. It may be that of a mere human being, that of the citizen
of a definite community, that of the members of a club, or that of
a logician in his "universe of discourse." A human organism
does not become a rational being until he has achieved such an organized
other in his field of social response. He then carries on that conversation
with himself which we call thought, and thought, as distinct from
perception and imagination, is occupied with indicating what is common
in the passage from one attitude to another. Thus thought reaches
what we call universals, and these, with the symbols by which they
are indicated, constitute ideas.
Now this is possible only in the continual passage from attitude
to attitude; but the fact that we do not remain simply in this passage
is due to our coming back upon it in the r6le of the self and organizing
the characters which we pick out into the patterns this social structure
of the self puts at our disposal. The stretch of the present within
which this self-consciousness finds itself is delimited by the particular
social act in which we are engaged. But since this usually stretches
beyond the immediate perceptual horizon (88) we fill
it out with memories and imagination. In the whole undertaking these
serve in place of perceptual stimulations to call out the appropriate
responses. If one is going to meet an appointment, he indicates to
himself the streets he must traverse by means of their memory images
or the auditory images of their names. And this involves both the
past and the future. In a sense his present takes in the whole undertaking,
but it can accomplish this only by using symbolic imagery, and since
the undertaking is a whole that stretches beyond the immediate specious
presents, these slip into each other without any edges. A loud noise
behind one's back picks out such a specious present. Its lack of relevance
to what is going on leaves it nothing but the moment in which the
sound vibrated within our ears. But our functional presents are always
wider than the specious present, and may take in long stretches of
an undertaking which absorbs unbroken concentrated attention. They
have ideational margins of varying depth, and within these we are
continually occupied in the testing and organizing process of thought.
The functional boundaries of the present are those of its undertaking
-- of what we are doing. The pasts and futures indicated by such activity
belong to the present. They arise out of it and are criticized and
tested by it. The undertakings belong, however, with varying degrees
of intimacy, within larger activities, so that we seldom have the
sense of a set of isolated presents.
I wish to make as emphatic as possible the reference of pasts and
futures to the activity that is central to the present. Ideation extends
spatially and temporally the field within which activity takes place.
The presents, then, within which we live are provided with margins,
and fitting them into a larger independent chronicle is again a matter
of some more extended present which calls for a wider horizon. But
the widest horizon belongs to some undertaking, whose past and (89)
future refer back to it. For instance, the present history of the
sun is relevant to the undertaking of unravelling the atom and, given
another analysis of the atom, the sun will have another history and
the universe will be launched into a new future. The pasts and the
futures are implications of what is being undertaken and carried out
in our laboratories.
It is interesting to note the lack of historic significance in Aristotle's
account of the universe. At most there were the pulses of reproduction
or of the succession of the seasons. Its past had no other function
than that of repetition. Even Plato's Day of judgment was a recurrent
affair. In the highest reality-thought thinking itself-past and future
fade out entirely, as they do in the contemplation of timeless reality
in a Platonic heaven. St. Paul and Augustine ushered in the history
of the world, which gave a defined cosmical horizon to the undertaking
of every soul in its search for salvation from the wrath to come,
or for the beatific vision. The Bible and the monuments of the church
became the chronicle of Christendom, for in them men found the means
of salvation. It was not until scientific research became an independent
undertaking that it was possible to substitute another chronicle.
But the import of the biblical history was found not only in the salvation
of men's souls. The Church was the structure of Western society and
the undertaking to conserve the values of this society found its essential
past and future in the plan of salvation. It is this larger undertaking
to which as social beings we are committed that provides to-day the
horizons of our pasts and future. But this undertaking includes among
its values the work of research science and the implications of that
rational process which has freed us from the isolation of individual
organisms and made us not only members of the Blessed Community but
also citizens of the republic (90) of all rational
beings. But even in the sweep of these most universal undertakings,
their pasts and their futures are still relative to the interests
involved in the undertakings themselves. We determine what the world
has been by the anxious search for the means of making it better,
and we are substituting the goal of a society aware of its own values
and minded intelligently to pursue them, for the city not built with
hands eternal in the heavens.
This view then frees us from bondage either to past or future. We
are neither creatures of the necessity of an irrevocable past, nor
of any vision given in the Mount. Our history and our prognostications
will be sympathetic with the undertakings within which we live and
move and have our being. Our values lie in the present, and past and
future give us only the schedule of the means, and the plans of campaign,
for their realization.
We live always in a present whose past and whose future are the extension
of the field within which its undertakings may be carried out. This
present is the scene of that emergence which gives always new heavens
and a new earth, and its sociality is the very structure of our minds.
Since society has endowed us with self-consciousness, we can enter
personally into the largest undertakings which the intercourse of
rational selves extends before us. And because we can live with ourselves
as well as with others, we can criticize ourselves, and make our own
the values in which we are involved through those undertakings in
which the community of all rational beings is engaged.
Endnotes
- Cf. pages 200 ff.
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Gordon Ward and Robert
Throop
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