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The Philosophy of the Present
Supplementary Essay 5: The Genesis of the Self and Social Control
VI
THE GENESIS OF THE SELF AND SOCIAL CONTROL
It is evident that a statement of the life of each
individual in terms of the results of an analysis of that which is immediately
experienced would offer a common plane of events, in which the experience
of each would differ from the experiences of others only in their extent,
and the completeness or incompleteness of their connections. These differences
disappear in the generalized formulations of the social sciences. The
experiences of the same individuals, in so far as each faces a world
in which objects are plans of action, would implicate in each a different
succession of events. In the simplest illustration, two persons approach
a passing automobile. To one it is a moving object that he will pass
before it reaches the portion of the street that is the meeting-place
of their two paths. The other sees an object that will pass this meeting-point
before he reaches it. Each slices the world from the standpoint of a
different time system. Objects which in a thousand ways are identical
for the two individuals, are yet fundamentally different through their
location in one spatio-temporal plane, involving a certain succession
of events, or in another. Eliminate the temporal dimension, and bring
all events back to an instant that is timeless, and the individuality
of these objects which belongs to them in behavior is lost, except in
so far as they can represent the results of past conduct. But taking
time seriously, we realize that the seemingly timeless character of
our spatial world and its permanent objects (177)
is due to the consentient set which each one of us selects. We abstract
time from this space for the purposes of our conduct. Certain objects
cease to be events, cease to pass as they are in reality passing and
in their permanence become the conditions of our action, and events
take place with reference to them. Because a whole community selects
the same consentient set does not make the selection less the attitude
of each one of them. The life-process takes place in individual organisms,
so that the psychology which studies that process in its creative determining
function becomes a science of the objective world.
Looked at from the standpoint of an evolutionary history, not only
have new forms with their different spatio-temporal environments and
their objects arisen, but new characters have arisen answering to the
sensitivities and capacities for response. In the terms of Alexander,
they have become differently qualitied. It is as impossible to transfer
these characters of the habitats to the consciousness of the forms as
it is to transfer the spatio-temporal structure of the things to such
a so-called consciousness. If we introduce a fictitious instantaneousness
into a passing universe, things fall to pieces. Things that are spatio-temporally
distant from us can be brought into this instant only in terms of our
immediate contact experience. They are what they would be if we were
there and had our hands upon them. They take on the character of tangible
matter. This is the price of their being located at the moment of our
bodies' existence. But this instantaneous view has the great advantage
of giving to us a picture of what the contact experience will be when
we reach the distant object, and of determining conditions under which
the distance characters arise. If the world existed at an instant in
experience, we should be forced to find some realm such as consciousness
into which to transport the distance or so-called secondary qualities
of (179) things. If consciousness in evolutionary
history, then, has an unambiguous significance, it refers to that stage
in the development of life in which the conduct of the individual marks
out and defines the future field and objects which make up its environment,
and in which emerge characters in the objects and sensitivities in the
individuals that answer to each other. There is a relativity of the
living individual and its environment, both as to form and content.
What I wish to trace is the fashion in which self and the mind has
arisen within this conduct.
It is the implication of this undertaking that only selves have minds,
that is, that cognition only belongs to selves, even in the simplest
expression of awareness. This, of course, does not imply that below
the stage of self-consciousness sense characters and sensitivity do
not exist. This obtains in our own immediate experience in so far as
we are not self-conscious. It is further implied that this development
has taken place only in a social group, for selves exist only in relation
to other selves, as the organism as a physical object exists only in
its relation to other physical objects. There have been two fields within
which social groups have arisen which have determined their environment
together with that of their members, and the individuality of its members.
These lie in the realm of the invertebrates and in that of the vertebrates.
Among the Hymenoptera and termites there are societies whose interests
determine for the individuals their stimuli and habitats, and so differentiate
the individuals themselves, mainly through the sexual and alimentary
processes, that the individual is what he is because of his membership
within those societies. In the complex life of the group, the acts of
the individuals are completed only through the acts of other individuals,
but the mediation of this complex conduct is found in the physiological
differentiation of the different (179) members of the society. As Bergson
has remarked of the instincts, the implements by which a complex act
is carried out are found in the differentiated structure of the form.
There is no convincing evidence that an ant or a bee is obliged to anticipate
the act of another ant or bee, by tending to respond in the fashion
of the other, in order that it may integrate its activity into the common
act. And by the same mark there is no evidence of the existence of any
language in their societies. Nor do we need to go to the invertebrates
to discover this type of social conduct. If one picks up a little child
who has fallen, he adapts his arms and attitude to the attitude of the
child, and the child adapts himself to the attitude of the other; or
in boxing or fencing one responds to stimulus of the other, by acquired
physiological adjustment.
Among the vertebrates, apart from the differentiation of the sexes
and the nurture and care of infant forms, there is little or no inherited
physiological differentiation to mediate the complexities of social
conduct. If we are to cooperate successfully with others, we must in
some manner get their ongoing acts into ourselves to make the common
act come off. As I have just indicated, there is a small range of social
activity in which this is not necessary. The suckling of an infant form,
or a dog fight, if this may be called a social activity, does not call
for more than inherited physiological adjustment. Perhaps the so-called
herding instinct should be added, but it hardly comes to more than the
tendency of the herd to stick together in their various activities.
The wooing and mating of forms, the care of the infant form, the bunching
of animals in migrations, and fighting, about exhaust vertebrate social
conduct, and beyond these seasonal processes vertebrate societies hardly
exist till we reach man. They exhaust the possibilities in vertebrate
structure of the mediation of social conduct, for (180)
the vertebrate organism has shown no such astonishing plasticity in
physiological differentiation as that which we can trace among the insects,
from isolated forms to members of the societies of the termites, the
ants, and the bees.
A social act may be defined as one in which the occasion or stimulus
which sets free an impulse is found in the character or conduct of a
living form that belongs to the proper environment of the living form
whose impulse it is. I wish, however, to restrict the social act to
the class of acts which involve the cooperation of more than one individual,
and whose object as defined by the act, in the sense of Bergson, is
a social object. I mean by a social object one that answers to all the
parts of the complex act, though these parts are found in the conduct
of different individuals. The objective of the act is then found in
the life-process of the group, not in those of the separate individuals
alone. The full social object would not exist in the environments of
the separate individuals of the societies of the Hymanoptera and termites,
nor in the restricted societies of the vertebrates whose basis is found
alone in physiological adjustment. A cow that licks the skin of a calf
stuffed with hay, until the skin is worn away, and then eats the hay,
or a woman who expends her parental impulse upon a poodle, cannot be
said to have the full social object involved in the entire act in their
environments. It would be necessary to piece together the environments
of the different individuals or superimpose them upon each other to
reach the environment and objects of the societies in question.
Where forms such as those of the Hymenoptera and the termites exhibit
great plasticity in development, social acts based on physiological
adjustment, and corresponding societies, have reached astonishing complexity.
But when the limit of that plasticity is reached, the limit of the social
(181) act and the society is reached also. Where,
as among the vertebrates, that physiological adjustment which mediates
a social act is limited and fixed, the societies of this type are correspondingly
insignificant. But another type of social act, and its corresponding
society and object, has been at least suggested by the description of
the social act based upon physiological adjustment. Such an act would
be one in which the different parts of the act which belong to different
individuals should appear in the act of each individual. This cannot
mean, however, that the single individual could carry out the entire
act, for then, even if it were possible, it would cease to be a social
act, nor could the stimulus which calls out his own part of the complex
act be that which calls out the other parts of the act in so far as
they appear in his conduct. If the social object is to appear in his
experience, it must be that the stimuli which set free the responses
of the others involved in the act should be present in his experience,
not as stimuli to his response, but as stimuli for the responses of
others; and this implies that the social situation which arises after
the completion of one phase of the act, which serves as the stimulus
for the next participant in the complex procedure, shall in some sense
be in the experience of the first actor, tending to call out, not his
own response, but that of the succeeding actor. Let us make the impossible
assumption that the wasp, in stinging a spider which it stores with
its egg, finds in the spider a social object in the sense which I have
specified. The spider would have to exist in the experience of the wasp
as live but quiescent food for the larva when it emerges from the egg.
In order that the paralyzed spider should so appear to the wasp, the
wasp would need to be subject to the same stimulus as that which sets
free the response of the larva; in other words, the wasp would need
to be able to respond in some degree as the (182)
larva. And of course the wasp would have to view the spider under the
time dimension, grafting a hypothetical future onto its passing present,
but the occasion for this would have to lie in the wasp's tending to
respond in rôle of larva to the appropriate food which it is placing
in storage. This, then, presents another possible principle of social
organization, as distinguished from that of physiological differentiation.
If the objects that answer to the complex social act can exist spatio-temporally
in the experience of the different members of the society, as stimuli
that set free not only their own responses, but also as stimuli to the
responses of those who share in the composite act, a principle of coordination
might be found which would not depend upon physiological differentiation.
Any one necessary psychological condition for this would be that the
individual should have in some fashion present in his organism the tendencies
to respond as the other participants in the act will respond. Much more
than this would be involved, but this at least would be a necessary
precondition. A social object answering to the responses of different
individuals in a society could be conceived of as existing in the experiences
of individuals in that society, if the different responses of these
individuals in the complex acts could be found in sufficient degree
in the natures of separate individuals to render them sensitive to the
different values of the object answering to the parts of the act.
The cortex of the vertebrate central nervous system provides at least
a part of the mechanism which might make this possible. The nervous
currents from the column and the stem of the brain to the cortex can
there bring the acts that go out from these lower centers into relation
with each other so that more complex processes and adjustments can arise.
The centers and paths of the cortex represent an indefinite number of
possible actions; particularly they (183) represent
acts which, being in competition with each other, inhibit each other,
and present the problem of organization and adjustment so that overt
conduct may proceed. In the currents and cross-currents in the gray
matter and its association fibers, there exist the tendencies to an
indefinite number of responses. Answering to these adjustments are the
objects organized into a field of action, not only spatially but temporally;
for the tendency to grasp the distant object, while already excited,
is so linked with the processes of approach that it does not get its
overt expression till the intervening stretch is passed. In this vertebrate
apparatus of conduct, then, the already excited predispositions to thousands
of acts, that far transcend the outward accomplishments, furnish the
inner attitudes implicating objects that are not immediate objectives
of the individual's act.
But the cortex is not simply a mechanism. It is an organ that exists
in fulfilling its function. If these tendencies to action which do not
get immediate expression appear and persist, it is because they belong
to the act that is going on. If, for example, property is a social object
in the experience of men, as distinguished from the nut which the squirrel
stores, it is because features of the food that one buys innervate the
whole complex of responses by which property is not only acquired, but
respected and protected, and this complex so innervated is an essential
part of the act by which the man buys and stores his food. The point
is not that buying food is a more complicated affair than picking it
up from the ground, but that exchange is an act in which a man excites
himself to give by making an offer. An offer is what it is because the
presentation is a stimulus to give. One cannot exchange otherwise than
by putting one's self in the attitude of the other party to the bargain.
property becomes a tangible object., because all essential phases of
property appear in the actions of all those involved (184)
in exchange, and appear as essential features of the individual's action.
The individual in such an act is a self. If the cortex has become an
organ of social conduct, and has made possible the appearance of social
objects, it is because the individual has become a self, that is, an
individual who organizes his own response by the tendencies on the part
of others to respond to his act. He can do this because the mechanism
of the vertebrate brain enables the individual to take these different
attitudes in the formation of the act. But selves have appeared late
in vertebrate evolution. The structure of the central nervous system
is too minute to enable us to show the corresponding structural changes
in the paths of the brain. It is only in the behavior of the human animal
that we can trace this evolution. It has been customary to mark this
stage in development by endowing man with a mind, or at least with a
certain sort of mind. As long as consciousness is regarded as a sort
of spiritual stuff out of which are fashioned sensations and affections
and images and ideas or significances, a mind as a locus of these entities
is an almost necessary assumption, but when these contents have been
returned to things, the necessity of quarters for this furniture has
disappeared also.
It lies beyond the bounds of this paper to follow out the implications
of this shift for logic and epistemology, but there is one phase of
all so-called mental processes which is central to this discussion,
and that is self-consciousness. If the suggestions which I have made
above should prove tenable, the self that is central to all so-called
mental experience has appeared only in the social conduct of human vertebrates.
It is just because the individual finds himself taking the attitudes
of the others who are involved in his conduct that he becomes an object
for himself. It is only by taking the rôles of others that we have been
able to
(185) come back to ourselves. We have seen above that
the social object can exist for the individual only if the various parts
of the whole social act carried out by other members of the society
are in some fashion present in the conduct of the individual. It is
further true that the self can exist for the individual only if he assumes
the rôles of the others. The presence in the conduct of the individual
of the tendencies to act as others act may be, then, responsible for
the appearance in the experience of the individual of a social object,
i.e., an object answering to complex reactions of a number of individuals,
and also for the appearance of the self. Indeed, these two appearances
are correlative. Property can appear as an object only in so far as
the individual stimulates himself to buy by a prospective offer to sell.
Buying and selling are involved in each other. Something that can be
exchanged can exist in the experience of the individual only in so far
as he has in his own make-up the tendency to sell when he has also the
tendency to buy. And he becomes a self in his experience only in so
far as one attitude on his own part calls out the corresponding attitude
in the social undertaking.
This is just what we imply in "self-consciousness." We appear
as selves in our conduct in so far as we ourselves take the attitude
that others take toward us, in these correlative activities. Perhaps
as good an illustration of this as can be found is in a "right."
Over against the protection of our lives or property, we assume the
attitude of assent of all members in the community. We take the rôle
of what may be called the "generalized other." And in doing
this we appear as social objects, as selves. It is interesting to note
that in the development of the individual child, there are two stages
which present the two essential steps in attaining self-consciousness.
The first stage is that of play, and the second that of the game, where
these two are (186) distinguished from each other.
In play in this sense, the child is continually acting as a parent,
a teacher, a preacher, a grocery man, a policeman, a pirate, or an Indian.
It is the period of childish existence which Wordsworth has described
as that of "endless imitation." It is the period of Froebel's
kindergarten plays. In it, as Froebel recognized, the child is acquiring
the rôles of those who belong to his society. This takes place because
the child is continually exciting in himself the responses to his own
social acts. In his infant dependence upon the responses of others to
his own social stimuli, he is peculiarly sensitive to this relation.
Having in his own nature the beginning of the parental response, he
calls it out by his own appeals. The doll is the universal type of this,
but before he plays with a doll, he responds in tone of voice and in
attitude as his parents respond to his own cries and chortles. This
has been denominated imitation, but the psychologist now recognizes
that one imitates only in so far as the so-called imitated act can be
called out in the individual by his appropriate stimulation. That is,
one calls or tends to call out in himself the same response that he
calls out in the other.
The play antedates the game. For in a game there is a regulated procedure,
and rules. The child must not only take the rôle of the other, as he
does in the play, but he must assume the various rôles of all the participants
in the game, and govern his action accordingly. If he plays first base,
it is as the one to whom the ball will be thrown from the field or from
the catcher. Their organized reactions to him he has imbedded in his
own playing of the different positions, and this organized reaction
becomes what I have called the "generalized other" that accompanies
and controls his conduct. And it is this generalized other in his experience
which provides him with a self. I can only refer to the bearing of this
childish play attitude upon so-called (187) sympathetic
magic. Primitive men call out in their own activity some simulacrum
of the response which they are seeking from the world about. They are
children crying in the night.
The mechanism of this implies that the individual who is stimulating
others to response is at the same time arousing in himself the tendencies
to the same reactions. Now, that in a complex social act, which serves
as the stimulus to another individual to his response is not as a rule
fitted to call out the tendency to the same response in the individual
himself. The hostile demeanor of one animal does not frighten the animal
himself, presumably. Especially in the complex social reactions of the
ants or termites or the bees, the part of the act of one form which
does call out the appropriate reaction of another can hardly be conceived
of as arousing a like reaction in the form in question, for here the
complex social act is dependent upon physiological differentiation,
such an unlikeness in structure exists that the same stimulus could
not call out like responses. For such a mechanism as has been suggested,
it is necessary to find first of all some stimulus in the social conduct
of the members of an authentic group that can call out in the individual
that is responsible for it, the same response that it calls out in the
other; and in the second place, the individuals in the group must be
of such like structure that the stimulus will have the same value for
one form that it has for the other. Such a type of social stimulus is
found in the vocal gesture in a human society. The term gesture I am
using to refer to that part of the act or attitude of one individual
engaged in a social act which serves as the stimulus to another individual
to carry out his part of the whole act. Illustrations of gestures, so
defined, may be found in the attitudes and movements of others to which
we respond in passing them in a crowd, in the turning of the head toward
(188) the glance of another's eye, in the hostile
attitude assumed over against a threatening gesture, in the thousand
and one different attitudes which we assume toward different modulations
of the human voice, or in the attitudes and suggestions of movements
in boxers or fencers, to which responses are so nicely adjusted. it
is to be noted that the attitudes to which I have referred are but stages
in the act as they appear to others, and include expressions of countenance,
positions of the body, changes in breathing rhythm, outward evidence
of circulatory changes, and vocal sounds. In general these so-called
gestures belong to the beginning of the overt act, for the adjustments
of others to the social process are best made early in the act. Gestures
are, then, the early stages in the overt social act to which other forms
involved in the same act respond. Our interest is in finding gestures
which can affect the individual that is responsible for them in the
same manner as that in which they affect other individuals. The vocal
gesture is at least one that assails our ears who make it in the same
physiological fashion as that in which it affects others. We hear our
own vocal gestures as others hear them. We may see or feel movements
of our hands as others see or feel them, and these sights and feels
have served in the place of the vocal gestures in the case of those
who are congenitally deaf or deaf and blind. But it has been the vocal
gesture that has preeminently provided the medium of social organization
in human society. It belongs historically to the beginning of the act,
for it arises out of the change in breathing rhythm that accompanies
the preparation for sudden action, those actions to which other forms
must be nicely adjusted.
If, then, a vocal gesture arouses in the individual who makes it a
tendency to the same response that it arouses in another, and this beginning
of an act of the other in himself enters into his experience, he will
find himself tending (189) to act toward himself as
the other acts toward him. In our self-conscious experience we understand
what he does or says. The possibility of this entering into his experience
we have found in the cortex of the human brain. There the coordinations
answering to an indefinite number of acts may be excited, and while
holding each other in check enter into the neural process of adjustment
which leads to the final overt conduct. If one pronounces and hears
himself pronounce the word "table," he has aroused in himself
the organized attitudes of his response to that object, in the same
fashion as that in which he has aroused it in another. We commonly call
such an aroused organized attitude an idea, and the ideas of what we
are saying accompany all of our significant speech. If we may trust
to the statement in one of St. Paul's epistles, some of the saints spoke
with tongues which had no significance to them. They made sounds which
called out no response in those that made them. The sounds were without
meaning. Where a vocal gesture uttered by one individual leads to a
certain response in another, we may call it a symbol of that act; where
it arouses in the man who makes it the tendency to the same response,
we may call it a significant symbol. These organized attitudes which
we arouse in ourselves when we talk to others are, then, the ideas which
we say are in our minds, and in so far as they arouse the same attitudes
in others, they are in their minds, in so far as they are self-conscious
in the sense in which I have used that term. But it is not necessary
that we should talk to another to have these ideas. We can talk to ourselves,
and this we do in the inner forum of what we call thought. We are in
possession of selves just in so far as we can and do take the attitudes
of others toward ourselves and respond to those attitudes. We approve
of ourselves and condemn ourselves. We pat ourselves upon the back and
in blind fury attack (190) ourselves. We assume the
generalized attitude of the group, in the censor that stands at the
door of our imagery and inner conversations, and in the affirmation
of the laws and axioms of the universe of discourse. Quod semper,
quod ubique. Our thinking is an inner conversation in which we
may be taking the rôles of specific acquaintances over against ourselves,
but usually it is with what I have termed the "generalized other"
that we converse, and so attain to the levels of abstract thinking,
and that impersonality, that so-called objectivity that we cherish.
In this fashion, I conceive, have selves arisen in human behavior and
with the selves their minds. It is an interesting study, that of the
manner in which the self and its mind arises in every child, and the
indications of the corresponding manner in which it arose in primitive
man. I cannot enter into a discussion of this. I do wish, however, to
refer to some of the implications of this conception of the self for
the theory of social control.
I wish to recur to the position, taken earlier in this paper, that,
if we recognize that experience is a process continually passing into
the future, objects exist in nature as the patterns of our actions.
If we reduce the world to a fictitious instantaneous present, all objects
fall to pieces. There is no reason to be found, except in an equally
fictitious mind, why any lines should be drawn about any group of physical
particles, constituting them objects. However, no such knife-edge present
exists. Even in the so-called specious present there is a passage, in
which there is succession, and both past and future are there, and the
present is only that section in which, from the standpoint of action,
both are involved. When we take this passage of nature seriously, we
see that the object of perception is the existent future of the act.
The food is what the animal will eat, and his refuge is the burrow where
he will escape from his (191) pursuer. Of course the
future is, as future, contingent. He may not escape, but in nature it
exists there as the counterpart of his act. So far as there are fixed
relations there, they are of the past, and the object involves both,
but the form that it has arises from the ongoing act. Evolutionary biology,
in so far as it is not mere physics and chemistry, proceeds perhaps
unwittingly upon this assumption, and so does social science in so far
as it is not static. Its objects are in terms of the habitat, the environment.
They are fashioned by reactions. I am merely affirming the existence
of these objects, affirming them as existent in a passing universe answering
to acts.
In so far as there are social acts, there are social objects, and I
take it that social control is bringing the act of the individual into
relation with this social object. With the control of the object over
the act, we are abundantly familiar. just because the object is the
form of the act, in this character it controls the expression of the
act. The vision of the distant object is not only the stimulus to movement
toward it. It is also, in its changing distance values, a continual
control of the act of approach. The contours of the object determine
the organization of the act in its seizure, but in this case the whole
act is in the individual and the object is in his field of experience.
Barring a breakdown in the structure or function, the very existence
of the object insures its control of the act. In the social act, however,
the act is distributed among a number of individuals. While there is
or may be an object answering to each part of the act, existing in the
experience of each individual, in the case of societies dependent upon
physiological differentiation the whole object does not exist in the
experience of any individual. The control may be exercised through the
survival of those physiological differentiations that still
carry out the life-process involved in the complex act. No complication
(192) of the act which did not mediate this could
survive. Or we may take refuge in a controlling factor in the act, as
does Bergson, but this is not the situation that interests us. The human
societies in which we are interested are societies of selves. The human
individual is a self only in so far as he takes the attitude of another
toward himself. In so far as this attitude is that of a number of others,
and in so far as he can assume the organized attitudes of a number that
are cooperating in a common activity, he takes the attitudes of the
group toward himself, and in taking this or these attitudes he is defining
the object of the group, that which defines and controls the response.
Social control, then, will depend upon the degree to which the individual
does assume the attitudes of those in the group who are involved with
him in his social activities. In the illustration already used, the
man who buys controls his purchase from the standpoint of a value in
the object that exists for him only in so far as he takes the attitude
of a seller as well as a buyer. Value exists as an object only for individuals
within whose acts in exchange are present those attitudes which belong
to the acts of the others who are essential to the exchange.
The act of exchange becomes very complicated; the degree to which all
the essential acts involved in it enter into the acts of all those engaged
therein varies enormously, and the control which the object, i.e., the
value, exercises over the acts varies proportionately. The Marxian theory
of state ownership of capital, i.e., of exclusive state production,
is a striking illustration of the breakdown of such control. The social
object, successful economic production, as presented in this theory,
fails to assume the attitudes of individual initiative which successful
economic production implies, Democratic government, on the theory of
action through universal interest in the issues of a campaign, breaks
(193) down as a control, and surrenders the government
largely to the political machine, whose object more nearly answers to
the attitudes of the voters and the non-voters.
Social control depends, then, upon the degree to which the individuals
in society are able to assume the attitudes of the others who are involved
with them in common endeavor. For the social object will always answer
to the act developing itself in self-consciousness. Besides property,
all of the institutions are such objects, and serve to control individuals
who find in them the organization of their own social responses.
The individual does not, of course, assume the attitudes of the numberless
others who are in one way or another implicated in his social conduct,
except in so far as the attitudes of others are uniform under like circumstances.
One assumes, as I have said, the attitudes of generalized others. But
even with this advantage of the universal over the multiplicity of its
numberless instances, the number of different responses that enter into
our social conduct seems to defy any capacity of any individual to assume
the rôles which would be essential to define our social objects. And
yet, though modern life has become indefinitely more complex than it
was in earlier periods of human history, it is far easier for the modern
man than for his predecessor to put himself in the place of those who
contribute to his necessities, who share with him the functions of government,
or join with him in determining prices. It is not the number of participants,
or even the number of different functions, that is of primary importance.
The important question is whether these various forms of activities
belong so naturally to the member of a human society that, in taking
the rôle of another, his activities are found to belong to one's own
nature. As long as the complexities of human society do not exceed those
of the central nervous system, the problem (194) of
an adequate social object, which is identical with that of an adequate
self-consciousness, is not that of becoming acquainted with the indefinite
number of acts that are involved in social behavior, but that of so
overcoming the distances in space and time, and the barriers of language
and convention and social status, that we can converse with ourselves
in the rôles of those who are involved with us in the common undertaking
of life. A journalism that is insatiably curious about the human attitudes
of all of us is the sign of the times. The other curiosities as to the
conditions under which other people live, and work, and fight each other,
and love each other, follow from the fundamental curiosity which is
the passion of self-consciousness. We must be others if we are to be
ourselves. The modern realistic novel has done more than technical education
in fashioning the social object that spells social control. If we can
bring people together so that they can enter into each other's lives,
they will inevitably have a common object, which will control their
common conduct.
The task, however, is enormous enough, for it involves not simply breaking
down passive barriers such as those of distance in space and time and
vernacular, but those fixed attitudes of custom and status in which
our selves are imbedded. Any self is a social self, but it is restricted
to the group whose rôles it assumes, and it will never abandon this
self until it finds itself entering into the larger society and maintaining
itself there. The whole history of warfare between societies and within
societies shows how much more readily and with how much greater emotional
thrill we realize our selves in opposition to common enemies than in
collaboration with them. All over Europe, and more specifically at Geneva,
we see nationals with great distrust and constant rebounds trying to
put themselves in each other's places and still preserve the selves
that have existed upon (195) enmities, that they may
reach the common ground where they may avoid the horror of war, and
meliorate unendurable economic conditions. A Dawes Plan is such a social
object, coming painfully into existence, that may control the conflicting
interests of hostile communities, but only if each can in some degree
put himself in the other's place in operating it. The World Court and
the League of Nations are other such social objects that sketch out
common plans of action if there are national selves that can realize
themselves in the collaborating attitudes of others.
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Gordon Ward and Robert
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The Mead Project, Department of Sociology, Brock University, St. Catharines,
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