The distinction between man and animal is in one sense only a difference in degree. But the extent of the degree makes all the difference. The Rubicon has been crossed. Alfred North Whitehead MODES OF THOUGHT Man's single-handed conflict with nature should be seen as a confrontation within nature; society is a crucial component of our vital constitution. 625 Man participates with vegetation against animals, with electricity against mechanical power, in a continuous modification of the environment; the principles which unite him to his allies and oppose him to his enemies are precisely those which unite or oppose physical, biological and chemical beings. The bond between man and nature is also a bond between nature and nature •.•The notion that nature is inhuman and man unnatural is totally invalid. No part of man is or ever was closer than any other to an ever-changing nature.(I) (1) Serge Moscovici SOCIETY AGAINST NATURE: THE EMERGENCE OF HUMAN SOCIETIES tr. Sacha Rabinovitch, Harvester Press, Hassocks, 1976 Introduction. From the individual cell and its metabolic processes, its synthesis of DNA and RNA, to man as the total organism, the biological rhythms are the controlling factor. They are integral to the nervous system and endocrine mechanisms; which regulate the internal state and ready the individual for attack or flight and maintain metabolic and sexual balance. These major patterns of response to external stimuli are the primary emotional states on which much more complex variants are elaborated.(l) (1) Eliot D. Chapple CULTURE AND BIOLOGICAL MAN Holt, Rinehart and Winston, N.Y., 1970, p.10. To put the matter otherwise, self-consciousness is only something definite, it only has real existence, so far as it alienates itself. By doing so, it puts itself in the position of something universal, and this its universality is its validity, establishes it, and is its actuality .•.The means, then, whereby an individual gets objective validity and concrete actuality here is the formative process of Culture.(2) (1) HEGEL'S PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT Ope cit. s264, p.163 (2) G.W.~Hegel THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND tr. J.B.Baillie (1931) Harper & Row, N.Y. 1967 p.514f. (3) JUrgen Habermas "Labour and Interaction: Remarks on Hegel's Jena PHILOSOPHY OF MIND" in THEORY AND PRACTICE (1971) tr. John Viertel, Heinemann, London, 1974, pp.142-169. 628 Various thinkers have developed different aspects of Hegel's characterization of human being. Some such as Helmuth Plessner have developed the idea that humans are both particular subjects and capable of transcending this particularity by taking an objective standpoint to themselves and the world. Others have explicated the various dialectical patterns by which humans form themselves. George Herbert Mead and the symbolic interactionists in U.S.A. have shown how the struggle for recognition gives rise to the development of moral relations. In France the structuralists have attempted to understand societies in terms of their symbolic systems. And Marx in his early writings and the humanist Marxists influenced by these have tried to understand the history of social relationships in terms of the mastering ofnat'ure through the labour process. Together these movements of thought constitute a major part of the corpus of works directed towards understanding the human order. However Hegel has been criticised for the pan-rationalism which follows from his idealist metãysics. This criticism has come from two directions: one concerned with the dynamics of society as a whole and one concerned with the lives of concrete individuals. The mature Marx is representative of those focussing on the dynamics of society as a whole. He argued that the dynamics of society and its interaction with. the world cannot be understood in terms of the telos of history. Since the dynamics of society are largely the product of the unintended consequences of people's actions it cannot be assumed that humanity is progressing in a rational way. (1) KIERKEGAARD'S CONCLUDING UNSCIENTIFIC POSTSCRIPT tr. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie, Princeton Uni. Press, Princeton. 1968, p.112 (2) loc.cit. The principle that the existing subjective thinker is constantly occupied in striving, does not mean that he has, in the finite sense, a goal toward which he strives, and that he would be fintshed when he had reached this goal. No, he strives infinitely, is constantly in the process of becoming. (2) (1) G.W.F. Hegel THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY tr. J.Sibree (1899) Dover, N.Y. 1956, p.457 (2) KIERKEGAARD'S CONCLUDING UNSCIENTIFIC POSTSCRIPT op.cit. p.84 (3) ibid.p.112 Ernst Cassirer takes the dialectic of representation and makes it the guiding principle of a Hegelianized Kant interpretation, which at the same time is the foundation of a philosophy of symbolic forms. Georg Lukacs interprets the movement of the intellectual development from Kant to Hegel along the guideline presented by the dialectic of labour, which at the same time guarantees the materialistic unity of subject and object in the world-historical formative process of the human species; finally, the neo-Hegelianism of a thinker such as Theodor Litt leads to a conception of the stepwise self-development of spirit which follows the pattern of the struggle for recognition.(1) The most important reason for the static view of structure is the premise that we look upon social life as a series of discrete, isolatable entities Durkheim's "things." Social life then is not a process of becoming but something that is. The basic units into which we divide social life for purposes of analysis are of a fixed nature, and it follows that the relationships of these units with other similarly conceived units will share the same rigidity. This situation is aggravated by the fact that our units are almost always far between bounded and more permanent in our analyses than in empirical reality. Functional analysis can thus come perilously close to replicating the mechanical systems so often used as analogies.(2) (1) JUgen Habermas (1974) op.ci~. p.157f. (2) Robert F. Murphy THE DI~ECTICS OF SOCIAL LIFE George Allen & Unwin, London, 1972, p.58f. 633 Also, since continuity and individuality are not mutually exclusive from the point of view of process philosophy, it becomes possible to form a more adequate conception of the relationship between individuals and their social context. Thus it becomes possible to reconcile those approaches to the understanding of society which emphasize subjectivity and intentional activity such as hermeneutics, existential phenomenology and symbolic ihteractiontsm, and those which emphasize the dynamics of society transcending the intentions of individuals. Finally by understanding the relationship between processes in terms of different temporalities or ~hythms, process philosophy points the way to the understanding of new dimensions of the human order. The interdependence of the various processes which make up the human order makes it difficult to describe. It cannot be grasped as a unified totality because it consists of a plurality of sub-processes with some autonomy from the totality, while to understand any particular process in society it is necessary to have some understanding of the multiplicity of other processes which make its existence possible. This is particularly difficult where the other processes are neither simply constituent subprocesses, nor supervening processes which provide the constitutive processes which neither transcend it nor are transcended by it. It has been shown how the higher animals must be understood as highly conscious deliberative subjects embodied in a dynamic world, capable of l~arning, mastering skills, of aesthetic appreciation and insight, and living in complex 634 communities with a proto-culture which can develop from generation to generation and which includes way of communicating specific types of information. Since it can be presupposed that at least this is true of humans and that any distinct~vely human processes must have emerged on this foundation, the analysis of any distinctively human process can presuppose such a context. But even presupposing this context, to deal with anyone distinctively human process in isolation from all others can only be regarded as an artificial and distorting abstraction. To overcome this problem I will begin my account of the human order with an explicitly abstract analysis of one of its dinstinguishing features. I will then show how this feature is the necessary condition of other uniquely human processes, and then how these processes make possible other processes. In this way I will gradually concretize the concepts in terms of which the human order is to be understood. Only in the conclusion in which I will return to the issues raised in Chapter I in which people will be seen as struggling to make sense of their lives in concrete situations will these ideas about the human order begin to become fully concrete. I will begin my account of the distinctive features of the human order by showing how the cognitive capacities of individuals develop beyond that which is achieved by any other type of animal. This presupposes that individuals are embodied subjects striving within a meaningful world, but abstracts from the problems that people are engaged in and the social and cultural contexts required for the development of such cognitive capacities. I will then show how the development of this .cognitive capacity enables individuals to decentre themselves from their immediate experience and how this makes possible the self-formative processes of culture described by Hegel. I will first show how the decentration from immediate experience leads to the development of a reciprocity of perspectives which leads to the emergence of the self, the struggle for recognition and the development of the moral order and then how this decentration and reciprocity of perspectives leads to the struggle for a common orientation to the world with an associated development of symbolic universes. Thirdly I will show how a decentred attitude leads to the development of technology in order to control the environement. Finally I will show how these processes are mutually constitutive of each other and always function interdependently. However this analysis will be seen to abstract from those dynamics of society in its relation to the rest of nature which are the unintended consequences of people's action. This will be the subject of the next chapter where, through a study and critique of Marx and the Marxists, the nature of such processes will be explicated. But it will also be shown in this chapter that the social order is an unfinished process of becoming and that the concepts developed to understand the formative processes of culture and the dynamics of processes which develop as the unintended consequences of people's actions do not fully come to grips with the lives -of the people who must struggle to come to terms with the contingencies of their concrete situations within the world. This will pave the way for the conclusion. In the concluding chapter the starting point of the thesis will be returned to. The asumptions about the nature As its name sugge~ts, existential philosophy consists of taking as one's theme not only knowledge or consciousness understood as an activity which autonomously posits immanent and transparent objects but also existence, i.e., an activity given to itself in a natural and historical situation and as incapable of abstracting itself from that situation as it is of reducing itself to it. Knowledge finds itself put back into the totality of human praxis, as it were, given ballast by it. The "subject" is no longer just the epistemological subject but is the human subject who, by means of a continual dialectic, thinks in terms of his situation, forms his categories in contact with his experience, and modifies this situation and this experienee by the meaning he discovers in them. In particular this subject is no longer alone, is no longer consciousness in general or pure being for itself. He is in the midst of other consciousnesses which likewise have a situation; he is for others, and because of this he undergoes an objectivation and becomes generic subject .•.Man no longer appears as a product of his environment or an absolute legislator but emerges as a productproducer, the locus where necessity can turn (1) Maurice Merleau-Ponty "Marxism and Philosophy" in PHENOMENOLOGY, LANGUAGE AND SOCIOLOGY: SELECTED ESSAYS OF MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY ed. John O'Neill, Heinemann, London, 1974 pp.174-18S, p.182f. (1) Maurice Merleau-Ponty "The Child's Relation with Others" in THE PRIMACY OF PERCEPTION ed. James M. Edie, N.W. UnL Press, Evanston, 1964, p.l00f. (2) Jean Piaget "Intellectual Evolution from Adolescence to Adulthood" in HmlAN DEVELOPf.lENT15, 1972, pp.1-12 (1) This criticism is made by Merleau-Ponty. See Robert J. Sardello in "A Phenomenological Approach to Development: The Contributions of Maurice Merleau-Ponty" in HUMAN DEVELOPMENT Vol.17, 1974, pp.401-423, esp.405 already in existence. The ordering principles underlying the human organism's early interactions with the world are very similar to those of the higher animals, while the higher types of ordering which develop transcend anything found in other animals, and can be seen to be essential if the other unique features of the human order are to be accounted for. Consequently it can be assumed that this developmental process is generic to the human speci~s, and by explicating it through the concepts of process philosophy, it should become possible to understand the continuity of the human order with the rest of nature and the basis of its uniqueness. As it was pointed out in the last chapter, the cognitive function can be understood as a differentiated organ for regulating exchanges with the environment. Cognition is thus always associated with action, and ail thought must be understood in relation to this. (1) Whatever is perceived or known by the organism is done so through a process of intergration or assimilation of the environment to an organisation or structures which pre-exist the particular knowing process so that the environment is constituted as a meaningful world to which the organism can act in an adaptive way~ Knowledge of the world involves transD@nming the experience of it so as to include it functionally in the transformation systems associated with action. This can be seen even in higher forms of intellectual activity. A physicist does not simply measure and describe the world, but by means of conceptualization, logic and mathematics, interprets the world so that it can be experienced as meaningful, predictable and controllable. Mathematics goes far beyond immediate reality, consisting not only of all actual trans- (I) Hans Furth I'The Nature of Representation and Interiorization" in Hans G. Furth PIAGET AND KNOWLEDGE: THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N:J.1969, p.74 (1) G.A. Miller, E.Galanter and K.H.Pibram PLANS AND THE STRUCTURE OF BEHAVIOUR, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, N.Y.,1960. (2) J.S. Bruner, R.R.Olver and P.M.Greenfield STUDIES IN COGNITIVE GROWTH, Wiley, N.Y. 1966 (3) This similarity between Piaget and Merleau-Ponty has been pointed out by Richard M. Zaner in "Piaget and MerleauPanty: A Study in Convergence" in REVIEW OF EXISTENTIAL PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHIATRY Vol.6 1966 pp.7-23 643 The organizing principles of an organism's eognition and action which can be transposed, generalized and differentiated from one situation to another are the organism's 'schemata'. The assimilation of the environment to the conceptual schemata of an organism is always associated with an accomodation by the organism to the environment by an adaption or modification of the organism's schemata to the particular environmental reality. The organism actively adjusts to the environment and adjusts the environment to itself rather than simply recording reality, and in this process the inner organization, the perceptual and action schemata, are developed to allow more effective interaction with the environment. In this way the higher forms of schemata are generated. The nature of this development has been described by Piaget in concepts very close to those of process philosophy. Piaget refers to schemata as structures and defines these as self-regulating systems of transformations in which the elements cannot be singled out or defined independently of their connections within the structures. These structures are understood to be active or functioning and also developing. He uses the term 'equilibration' to refer to the immanent causality by which these structures maintain themselves by compensating for internal and external imbalances and develop beyond themselves to more advanced structures. To describe the self-stabilizing path of development by which new structures emerge from preceding structures Piaget adopts the terminology of Waddington, writing: "...intellectual growth contains its own rhythm and its "chreods" .just as physical growth Thus, the synthesis of structuralism and geneticism towards which we are now moving is brought about by an internal evolution in ideas about biological causality a coordination between the two demands of conservation and transformation: conservation of structures as a whole, such as may be transformed without losing their identity because these transformations are reequilibrations and because transforming structures are capable (in theory and sometimes in .reality) of being integrated into transformed structures derived from them and adding to them.(2) (1) Jean Piaget (1971) op.cit. p.21 (2) ibid. p.136 of an indefinite number of levels. Understood in this way, cognitive development must be regarded as partially autonomous from the environments within which it develops, and it is for this reason that it can be ana lysed to some extent in abstraction from any particular social and cultural milieu. To avoid the limitations of Piaget's approach it is necessary to see the cognitive structures which develop not as isolated achievements but as an articulation of the child's original global and at the same time fragmentary experience of the world. The child's concepts can then be seen as part of a total world-design by which s/he lives as a functioning totality in his own her own right. This emphasis on the totality of experience then allows for the role of synthetic modes of cognition such as empathy or 'indwelling' which are ignored by Piaget but which I have argued are just as important in scientific understanding as the ability to deal with abstractions. And relating the synthetic and the analytic modes of cognition it is necessary to give a central place to the role of analogical thought which Piaget's formalistic views about science have led him to ignore despite the fact that his own ideas about cognitive development are based on the analogy of organic self-regulation and growth. Since both the cõcepts of science and the concepts of the world-designs of traditional societies can all be seen as the articulation of analogies, the ability to think analogically can be taken as generic to the human species. Thus if analogical thought is taken as the ultimate achievement of cognitive development rather than the ability to think in the abstract concepts of Newtonian physics, the ethnocentricism of Piaget can be avoided. However these provisos do not undermine Piaget's claim that cognitive development is a self-stabilizing path of development which goes through four basic stages: sensori-motor intelligence, pre-operational intelligence, concrete operational intelligence and formal operational intelligence, with each stage developing out of arnpresupposing the preceding stages. The central feature of this cognitive development is an increasing capacity of the subject to decentre him or herself from immediate experience. Since it is by this capacity that humans are able to transcend the achievements of other animals and are able to participate in the formative processes of culture, it is with the nature and development of this capacity that I will now be primarily concerned. I will try to show that decentring can be understood in terms of process philosophy as involving the development of different temporal orders with each stage of cognitive development being a temporal order which transcends in duration that which precedes it. Decentring will then be shown to be a temporal decentring whereby the subject is able to take a temporal standpoint which transcends the duration of his or her activities in the world. Consciousness will then be seen as a multilinear process of becoming, and it is this multilinearity which will be seen to account for its reflexivity. The first stage of cognitive development, sensorimotor intelligence lasts for about two years. This intelligence is entirely practical, and the form of knowledge is always tied to the content of specific sensory inputs and motor actions. This is the behaviour manifest in the coordinated movements of lower animals in their reaction to food or danger, or, at a more advanced level, where the seen branch of a tree serves for the monkey's grasping or avoiding it when jumping. Similarly a baby's seeing a thing carries with it the total organism's tendency to move it, to touch it etc. In all these cases we can understand that the biological function of knowing a thing in the environment is to react to the thing in an adaptive manner. In Piaget's terminology, the assimilation of a sensorimotor schema is always simultaneous with an accommodation to the external aspect of things. However this is also a period of rapid cognitive development in the child who from the beginning is a creature of curiosity. During this period the child develops from a state where slhe is capable only of a few reflex movements and where slhe experiences the world as a barely differentiated totality in which there is no discrimination made between him or herself and the world to a stage where slhe can experience him or herself as an embodied centre of action in a spatially ordered world of objects existing independently of him of herself. This involves a continuous process of development, differertiation and integration of schemata which leads to a gradual transition from a subjective un integrated body-centred activity to a practical separatiqn of means and ends to a final stage where we can infer a logic of action. only be a vague feeling of duration. Differentiating actions into means and ends implies a cognitive act which has a duration transcending the immediate experience of the environment and this provides the reference point from which the end can be seen as a future not yet realized. The perception of an object as enduring self-identically whether it is being observed or not implies the existence of a cognitive activity which endures beyond each particular appearance of the object, and this then forms the standpoint from which experiences can be seen as before and after. The pre-operational form of intelligence dominates from two years of age until about five or six. As far as we know this is the highest level of intelligence achieved by non-human animals. This period begins with the dissociation of schemata from particular content and is manifest in the ability of the child to keep in mind objects not involved in immediate activities. For instance Jacqueline was observed by Piaget to put an object behind her while engaged in some other task and then after five minutes to search for this object.(l) In this situation knowledge which knows by effective external action gives way to a knowledge which simply knows. The most important feature of this form of intelligence is the development of the symbolic function. The child at this stage is capable of representing the known object. Everything occurs as though the child believed that the object is alternately made and unmade ... When the child sees a part of the boject emerge from the screen and he assumes the existence of the totality of that object, he does not yet consider this totality as being formed "behind" the screen; he simply admits that it is in the proces of being formed at the moment of leaving the screen.(1) (1) J. Piaget THE CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY IN THE CHILD (1937) Basic Books, N.Y. 1954 p.31 (2) John H. Flavell THE DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY OF JEAN PIAGET D. Van Nostrand, N.Y. 1963 p.147 650 In this respect symbols contrast with signals associated with sensori-motor intelligence. The signal functions as a substitute for a stimulus and the organism simply reacts to it. Thus an animal reacts to smoke as it would to fire, the smoke functioning as a signal for the fire. In this there is a rigid relation between the signal and any particular event, whereas since the relationship between the symbol and the world is mediated by knowing, there is no such fixed relation, even when the symbol is highly specific. For instance in reading: "The roof is going to fallon you this very moment" it is unlikely that you will even look up. There are two aspects to symbols: their production and their comprehension. Piaget argues that deferred imitation, where imitative movements become separate from the context of the perceived original is the first manifestation of symbolic production. The schemata which enabled an accommodation to the original is required for such an imitation. A basic manifestation of symbolic behaviour is playas when two sticks at right angles are used as an aeroplane. Images are internalized forms of imition. This is exemplified in visual images where the overt movements of the eye that can be observed with the appropriate instruments become less large, less detailed during evocation of a visual image but are still directly related to the more easily observable movements of perceptual looking. Piaget uses the word 'image' to cover any sensory modality. The second aspect of symbols is their comprehension. The symbols are experienced as meaningful through being assimilated -to the same schema 651 of knowing by the which the known object or event which the symbol represents was constituted in the first place. In distinction from the construction of the known thing which stays internal to the knowing activity, the symbol is constructed by means of the schema of knowing in order to make present, to represent, the known thing in a field in which the knowing activity takes place. It can have the independent status of the external world as is the case with play, gestures, written words or ceremonies, or it can be internalized as an image, but in all cases the symbol is independent of the knowing activity. While being tied to the knowing schemata assures the active relation of knower and representation, it is by having an aspect external to the knowing activity that enables the symbol to fulfil its function of representation, of making something present in a new medium. In this way the organism orients itself to a world which is experienced as having significance beyond the immediately experienced situation. This symbolic function then makes possible the acquisition of language through which the child is able to extend his or her hor{zons through verbal communication. Despite this the child at the pre-operational level of intelligence has a vastly different world-design from that of an adult.(l) Though the symbolic function implies a process temporally decentred from the child's immediate involvement in the world which orders the representations or symbols, the child remains highly centred in this immediate involvement. This cent redness is manifest in the inability of the child to take the role of the other person and to see his or her own viewpoint on the world as one among others. S/he is incapable of looking at a visual display and then representing what the display would look like from a different position. It is also virtually impossible for the child to treat his or her own thought processes as an object of thought and s/he is unable to reconstruct a chain of reasoning which s/he has just passed through. A feature of this centredness is the tendency for a single striking aspect of a situation to be focussed on to the exclusion of all else. For instance after it is admitted by the child that two thin containers hold the same amount of water, s/he will deny the equivalence when onequantity is poured before his or her eyes into a broad container, since s/he fixes his or her attention soley on the width of the second container. Closely associated with this, the child only focusses on successive states of a display rather than upon its transformations. The child also has an inability to think in any other way than through isomorphic, step-by-step images of concrete objects. Thus when asked to take the same number of sticks from a pile as a group of six sticks which had been placed in a row, the pre-operational children could only solve the problem by placing sticks beneath the sample and matching the sticks one by one. They could not count the row of stocks and then count out six sticks from the pile because they could not travel along a cognitive route and then reverse directions to find an unchanged point of departure. That is, mental operations are irreversible. Another feature of pre-operational thought is the concrete and action ridden nature of the child's concepts and the absence of the concept of individuals which possess identity over time and in different contexts and the concept of classes of similar individuals. The child does not see an object such as a ball as identical in different contexts so that a ball-under-an-armchair is seen as different from a ball-somewhere-else. And identical objects tend to be seen as not members of a class but as different appearances of the same being. Comparison between objects can be made, but only one feature is considered, and things are seen to be either identical or totally different. This leads the child who has identified an object as similar to another to expect it to have all the characteristics or the original object. Reasoning is not deductive, but simply involves the associationaeements juxtaposed within a global all encompassing schema. Things are seen as simply going together. There is an inability to form the idea of superordinate classes, and the child who has acknowledged that all of a group of beads are wooden, some being brown and the majority being white, is unable to see that there are more wooden beads than white beads. The immediacy of the child's relation to his or her experience also prevents him or her from distinguishing play from non-play. Thus a child is upset when someone tramps on a stone which s/he has designated as a turtle. Play is seen as reality and reality is a game which the child is prepared to play without any distinction being drawn between the two. A new world-design is achieved through the development of structures which are increasingly dissociated from immediate content and reversible in operation. These structures enable the various compensating changes which result from a transformation to be composed into a single system in which an underlying invariance or constancy can be experienced through seeing one change as counterbalancing another. This enables the superficialities of immediate experience to be corrected for by means of successive, quick moving decentrings without producing the sort of disequilibrium whereby the original assimilatory organization is lost. When such a structure has been achieve, the child enters the phase of concrete operational intelligence. Operational intelligence begins to predominate from the age of six years onwards. This form of intelligence develops through the ordering of coordinating action schemata in such a way that forms of action can take place which do no involve interaction with the environment. Action is 'interiorized' as structures are dissociated from their immediate context. The objects of action are not obj~cts constituted in the world to which the organism then acts in an adaptive manner, but objects of knowledge which are acted on to transfD£m them from one reality state to another so as to lead to explicit knowledge of the state. For instance a perceived ball is transformed in thought so that it is seen as an instance of a portable object, thus allowing further inferences to be drawn. Such actions are called (1) H.G. Furth THINKING WITHOUT LANGUAGE: PSYCHOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS OF DEAFNESS Free Press, N.Y. 1966 (1) Bruno Snell "The Origin of Scientific Thought" in THE DISCOVERY OF THE MIND: THE GREEK ORIGINS OF EUROPEAN THOUGHT'tr. T.G. Rosenmeyer, Harper & Row N.Y. 1960, pp.227-245. centuries, it is unlikely that these concepts will be developed autonomously by young children. The acquisition of such concepts is far more likely to be a matter of cultural acquisition. Furthermore as suggested earlier, there is more to cognitive development than is suggested by Piaget's approach. Piaget does not consider the development of such synthetic modes of perception as 'indwelling' and the ability to make tacit inferences or judgements which tend to be associated with this and which were studied earlier by the Gestalt psychologists. Nevertheless the abilities which develop at the level of concrete operations are an important part of cognitive development, and if the details of this development are culturally specific, the general features are likely to be generic to the human species. They reveal the increasing ability of the human organism to decentre from experience through the development of new levels of ordering which unify into one duration a sequence of cognitive acts based on lower level structures. Sensori-motor schemata form the basis for the development of operational schemata and are implicit within them. For instance a ball known as an object carries with it an implicit functional potential as something that can be rolled, thrown, punched, kicked and so on. But by seeing a ball as an object is to constitute it from the point of view of a temporal order which transcends involvement with any particular functional potential. And reversible concrete operations unify into one duration a sequence of cognitive acts. The last stage of intelligence dealt with by Piaget is formal operations which begin to develop between the ages of eleven and fourteen or fifteen in rich cultural environments and later in other environments. Up to the age of eleven children are limited to general systems of groupings such as classification, seriation and numbering and thought is confined to objects considered to be real. With formal operations, operations are performed on.operations. This is exemplified by combinatory systems where the actual state of affairs is considered as one among other hypothetical possibilities. Such a form of intelligence makes possible the putting forward of hypotheses about the world and it is this which Piaget regards as the foundation for scientific thinking and criticism of the status quo. However, as it was pointed out in Chapter II, the development of science involves more than the formulation of hypotheses. It involves both the development of abstract systems of thought and a striving to 'indwell' in.the world as fully as possible. In this process analogy has a primary role, synthesising disparate realms of thought and facilitating the development of alternative conceptual schemes. Yet while the use of analogies is not examined by Piaget, this ability is likely to be closely associated with the formal operations he does consider since it involves thinking about the cognitive structures which are taken for granted in children who are only capable of concrete operations. Both analogical thinking and those types of formal operations considered by Piaget imply a new level of ordering, and associated with this,a new level of temporal decentring from immediate experience. The smooth slippage of closed events in a continuous progression along a time line is not adequate to the facts. Consciousness accumulates large patches of temporality into a variety of "nows" of many sizes. It synthesizes them in a great many way ..•and thereby generates the raw materials from which many abstract meanings for time can be derived: mathemetical, physical, perceptual etc. In short, the conveyor belt metaphor of temporal sequence does not accommodate to the multiple modes of arrest and synthesis by which consciousness establishes both its open-ended quasi-identity and the continuous summation of the world-in-relation-to-consciousness.(1) (1) Nathaniel Lawrence "The Illusion of Monoline8r Timell in PATTERNS OF THE LIFE WORLD. ed. James M. Ed~e, Francis H. Parker and Calvin O. Schrag, N.W.U.P., Evanston, 1,970 p.309.f. 660 THE EMERGENCE OF THE SELF, THE STRUGGLE FOR RECOGNITION AND As it has already been pointed out the child begins developing relations with others before s/he begins to develop the sort (1) Stephen Strasser THE IDEA OF A DIALOGAL PHENOMENOLOGY Duquesne Uni. Press, Pittsburgh, 1969, p.81. (2) ibid. p.77f. Above all, there is lacking the split between I and you that gives a characteristic tension to the experience of the adults. The 'I' and 'you' are still encompassed by the wholly *undivided unity of the 'we experience'. This is particularly true of the original form of contact with fellowman, namely, the relationship between mother and child.(1) (1) ibid. p.84 from Heinz Remplein DIE SEELISCHE ENTWICKLUNG DES MENSCHEN 1M KINDES UNO JUNGENDALTER, Munich, 14th ed. 1966, p.184 (2) M. Merleau-Ponty liTheChild's Relations with Others" in op.cit. (1964) p.124 (3) Strasser (1969) op.cit. p.85 The mother's behaviour arouses in the child in basic form many of the emotions known to us: love and hate, joy and anguish, triumph and despair, and their nature is more comprehensible when this is taken into account.(l) First, it is evident that emotions always appear in situations of an existential nature. For instance, an infant does not experience anger because s/he is hungry but because s/he feels that his or her existence is threatened. Dread arises when the child experiences him or herself being threatened by the unknown. Second, emotional behaviour is eruptive and expressive in nature and is thus immediately noticeable. Third, it is a primitive form of reaction to a situation in which the surrounding world is seen not by way of objectification, but immediately in the light of existential needs and dreads. Thus in later life when a person is overcome by emotion s/he loses the distance which characterizes the adult's relation to his or her physical and social world and which gives him or her the ability to take a detached attitude towards people, things and situatiõin this world. In the light of this it can be seen that the common form of dualism argued for and exemplified in the work of Piaget in which cognition is seen as having the function of interpreting the world while emotion provides the energy source for action must be rejected. Drives or needs might bring about emotions as for instance frustrated hunger, leads to anger, but they are not emotions. Nor do emotions imply motives, since motives are often independent of any emotion, while emotions do not impel one to any form of action. Rather emotions are a feature of the world for the organism is grasped, and this form of perception precedes and underlies the more abstract forms of cognition described by Piaget. Emotional perception is the condition of reason and the foundation on which objectification develops. Thus it is this primitive participation in a 'we' relationship involving an essentially emotional rel~tionship to the world that the individual develops, and the relationships between people should be understood as being ultimately grounded on and developing out of this form of involvement with the world. Since this immediate 'we' relationship between people must be taken as paradigmatic with other forms of relationships between people being explained as a development from the immediate state of unity with othe~, there can be no problem with overcoming solipsism and establishing the existence of other ~inds. The problem is to explain the separation of subjects from this immediate unity, not how subjects can become aware of other subjects. With the development of action and perceptual schemata through activity, the child begins to differentiate him or herself f:om the anonymous collectively experienced as 'we'. The originally fragmentary consciousness of one's body gradually becomes integrated to form a precise corporeal schema, and with this there develops a global consciousness of the body's position in the world. These two developments are indissociable as noted by Merleau-Ponty who pointed out that: "the perception of one's entry into the world (1) Merleau-Ponty "The Child's Relation with Others" (1964) op.cit. p.122 (2) ibid. p.121 (3) ibid. p.143 Iperspectives, it is impossible for him or her to switch (1) ibid. p.145 (2) ibid. p.147 Inevitably the child finally also assigns a place to his parents in his world that has become more realistic and more objective. The "you" becomes Mother and later Mother becomes a mother, that is, ~ mother is ~ mother like other mothers, like mothers of Johnny, Pete and Peggy. Here lies the beginning of the process of "becoming an other" •.•As a consequence of this process the "you", which was unique in the original dyad, becomes the other in reference to me through objectification, and finally one among many similar others.(I) (1) Strasser (1969) op.cit. p.95 (2) George Herbert Mead* MIND, SELF AND SOCIETY ed. Charles W. Morris, Uni. of Chicago Press,. Chicago, 1934, p.154ff. (1) As argued by R.D. Laing in THE DIVIDED SELF Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1966. In so far as the needs and goals of the individual are at the level of self-awareness, they are structured with reference to the kind of selfimage that is consonant with other basic orientations that prepare the self for action in a culturally constituted world.(l) (1) A.Irving Hallowell CULTURE AND EXPERIENCE Uni. of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1955, p.76 670 is the complex of ideals, moral notions, institutions, customs To internalize the viewpoint of the generalized other is to remain with one's own subjective, immediate stream of time consciousness and simultaneously to incorporate the intersubjective time dimension of society ...The unique self, then, emerges from society ••..at the point of intersection of multiple temporal systems in social experience.(1) (1) Mary Katherine Tillman "Temporality and Role-Taking in G.H.Mead" in SOCIAL RESEARCH Vol.37, 1970, p.544 (2) M.Merleau_Ponty (1962) op.cit. p.355 (3) Remplein as cited by Strasser (1969) op.cit. p.97 (4) Cited by Michael J. Chandler in "Relativism and the Problem of Epistemological Loneliness in HUMAN DEVELOPMENT 18, 1975, p.172 environment. This identity crisis leads to the dual struggle to re-orient oneself in the world and to re-substantiate onself as an objectively significant being. How people react in this situation will largely depend on the moral order in existence and its relation to other processes. If the moral order is coherent, justified by the prevailing world-view and part of a social order which is adequately coming to terms with the problems confronting society, then the individual will be able to think it through and reappropriate it and his or her identity crisis will be transient. Where it is incoherent and contradictory to the prevailing world-view and where society is heading for disaster individuals are most likely to be condemned to lives of quiet desperation in a continuous state of ontological insecurity. However the efforts of people to overcome this identity crisis leads to a constant struggle by individuals for intersubjectively valid or objective grounds to live by, and this is a constant impetus towards the recreation and development of the moral order towards greater rational coherence and universality. The increasing objectivity associated with this universalization of the moral order does not imply emotional detachment but an extension of emotional involvement into an ever broader community. ORIENTATION, COMMUNICATION AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF SYMBOLIC UNIVERSES with the cognitive development which takes place with activity, and this in turn leads to a differentiation (1) M.Merleau-Ponty "The Child's Relation with Others" (1964) op.cit. p.150 674 the child will use the world 'hand' in a way which makes no radical distinction between his or her own and the hand of others. With the pre-operational level of cognitive development the child comes to distinguish his or her own perspective from that of others, and at the same time to distinguish all perspectives from the external object. This makes the child's own viewpoint questionable from the viewpoint of the other and opens up the issue of the relationship between these viewpoints. To overcome this problem and to regain the sense of communality with the other the child is impelled to express him or herself to validate his or her own perspective in the eyes of the other and to question others to relate this perspective to theirs. By achieving such affirmation of the child's own viewpoint, his or her experience of the world takes on the aspect of common reality. But this reveals to the child that his or her surrounding world is only a small part of the world, and slhe is further impelled to question the other to see what his or her place is in this world. With further cognitive development enabling the individual to take the perspective of the generalized other, the world comes to be experienced as shared not only with those with whom one comes into face to face contact, but with all the anonymous contempories who make up and contribute to the functioning of society and with all predecessors and people not yet born. With this development the child is impelled to relate the immediacy of his or her surrounding world to ever larger contexts. That is, the child must develop a world-view or world design. That people require such a conception of the world within which they can define their position ••.all normal people are metaphysicians; all have some desire to locate themselves in a 'system', a 'universe', a 'process' transcending at least the immediate give-and-take between the individual and his environment; for all normal people the conscious lack or frustration of some such understanding will result in a kind of metaphysical anxiety.(l) (1) Erik Erikson YOUNG MAN LUTHER: A STUDY IN PSYCHOANALYSIS AND HISTORY Norton & Co. N.Y., 1962, p.110 communication. To participate in this order the individual must become a hermeneutical agent, interpreting the meanings of speech, actions and products of others, and be capable of expressing him or herself in a way that can be understood by these others. As a hermeneutical agent, the individual does not simply reduplicate the intentions of the communicator in his or her own mind, but actively tries to assimilate what is meant by the expressions of the others to his or her own developing world-view. But at the same time, the individual is impelled to express him or herself in terms of his or her understanding of the world so as to validate this understanding. By becoming an articulate member of the symbolic order in this way the individual circumscribes a variety of states of affairs into his or her perspective, and by doing so becomes comfortably situated in interpersonal space and time. It is by developing the ability to adjudicate any state of affairs that the individual is able to encompass the entire world within his or her purview and so attain a comprehensive worldview. Orientation through communication is not simply a matter of being informed about the state of the world. Communications are also performances by which people give orders, place themselves under obligations or ~efine relationships with each other. The multiple uses to which language can be put have been traced out by J.L. Austin. However the fact that language has such multiple uses does not mean that communication about the nature of the world is not an extremely important characteristic of dialogue. The pragmatic use of language to form new relationships between people, to redefine social status and to give directions is only possible where there is already a largely shared understanding about the nature of the world in general and the immediate situation in particular. Language is not the only medium through which people communicate and by means of which they orient themselves to each other. Communication takes place through body language, gestures, dress, ceremonies and facial expressions. Wearing a uniform, putting on a wedding ring, standing on a dais and building a house all involve communicating something. Economic exchanges are at the same time communicative exchanges, and the style with which one does things communicates something about one's social background. Even in the act of speaking itself, accent and tone of voice communicate something over and above the meaning of the words. The products of activity are also important communications. This includes not only works of art but also signals such as traffic lights, or less obviously such features as the layouts of buildings which indicate where different things should be done. The use of language is one form of communication among others, albeit the most refined form, and is generally associated with a great many other forms of expression including the activities which have gone into making the physical environment in which speaking takes place. With the development of the symbolic order, there is constituted the world of shared understanding, the common world. The common world as such is not an object of experience, but is the ultimãe unmoved basis presupposed (1) Ludwig Landgrebe "The World as a Phenomenological Problem" in PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH, Vol.l, 1940-41, p.49f (2) Maurice Merleau-Ponty PHENOMENOLOGY OF PERCEPTION tr. Colin Smith, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1962 p.347 (3) Maurice Natanson THE JOURNEYING SELF: A STUDY IN PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL ROLE, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, 1970, p.167 (1) Ferdinand de Saussure COURSE IN GENERAL LINGUISTICS (1916) tr. Wade Baskin, Fontana/Collins, 1974 Taken as a whole, speech is many-sided and heterogeneous; straddling several areas simultaneously physical, and psychological it belongs both to the individual and to society; we cannot put it into any category of human facts, for we cannot discover its unity. Language, on the contrary, is a self-contained whole and a principle of classification. As soon as we give language first place among the facts of speech, we introduce a natural order into a mass that lends itself to no other classification.(1) (1) (2) ( 3 ) (4) James J. Dagenais MODELS OF MAN: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL CRITICISM OF SOME PARADIGMS IN THE HUMAN SCIENCES, Martinus Nijhoff, 1972, p.123 ibid. p.9 ibid. p.91 loc.cit. *..first, by its being a totality, that is, whatever the "composing elements" in the system, they are subordinated to the laws which define the system as system. Second, a system is characterized by multiple transformations interdependent with each other and with the totality, that is, they are dependent upon the structure itself. This points to a third characteristic of structure, that it is self-regulating, tends towards the conservation and enhancement of the system itself, on the one hand, and closedness towards all other systems on the other.(l) ...all the various non-verbal dimensions of culture, such a3 styles in clothing, village lay-out, architecture, furniture, food, cooking, music, physical gestures, postural attitudes, and so on are organised in patterned sets so as to incorporate coded information in a manner analogous to the sounds and words of sentences of a natural language. I assume therefore it is just as meaningful to talk about the grammatical rules which govern the wearing of clothes as it is to talk about the grammatical rules which govern speech utterances.(3) (1) loc.cit. (2) Saussure (1916), op.cit. p.16. (3) Edmund Leach CULTURE AND COMMUNICATION C.U.P., Cambridge, 1976, p.10 (1) No. J.P. Sartre "Replies to Structuralism" 9. 1971, p.113 (1) Cited by George Steiner in EXTRATERRITORIAL: PAPERS ON LITERATURE AND THE LANGUAGE REVOLUTION (1971) Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1975, p.123 (2) Noam Chomsky ASPECTS OF THE THEORY OF SYNTAX M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1965, p.27 (3) Claude Levi-Strauss STRUCTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY tr. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1972, p.33 The customs of a community, taken as a whole, always have a particular style and are reducible to systems. I am of the opinion that the number of such systems is not unlimited and that in their games, dreams or wild imaginings human societies, like individuals, never create absolutely, but merely choose certain combinations from an ideal repertoire that it should be possible to define. By making an inventory of all recorded customs, of all those imagined in myths or suggested in children's games or adult games, or in the dreams of healthy or sick indivtduals or in psycho-pathological behaviour, one could arrive at a sort of table, like that of the chemicel elements, in which all actual or hypothetical customs would be grouped in families, so that one could see at a glance which customs a particular society had in fact adopted.(2) combination, while the syntagmatic aspect is the melody (1) Claude Levi-Strauss TOTEMISM (1967) to Rodney Needham, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1969, p.163 (2) Claude Levi-Strauss TRISTES TROPIQUES (1955) tr. John and Doreen Weightman, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth 1976, p.229 (3) Claude Levi-Strauss THE RAW AND THE COOKED: INTRODUCTION TO THE SCIENCE OF MYTHOLOGY Vol.~ (1964) tr. John & Doreen Weightman, Harper, N.Y. 1975 pp. 14-30 in which one note follows another. Paradigmatic association occurs when notes are played in different keys or where a sequence of notions is interpreted as a sequence of finger movements which then becomes a sequence of sound waves reaching the ear. This can be thought of as involving a series of metaphors where the same symbol is transposed into a different manifest form. The sequence of notes is a syntagmatic chain, and this can be the sequence of notations or the sequence of sounds. The elements of a syntagmatic chain are signs, and they are bound together through simple contiguity or metonymy. Communication involves both paradigmatic association and syntagmatic chains together. It is argued that since all kinds of human action: dancing, building, worshipping and so on serve to convey information each of these can be a paradigmatic transformation of the others. Structuralist analyses attempt to unravel the syntagmatic chains and paradigmatic relationships involved. Many actions can only be understood as very complex relations between the syntagmatic chains and the paradigmatic transformations which take place. This is exemplified by Edmund Leach's analysis of how it is that people come to believe in the efficacy of magic and sorcery.(l) However to illustrate the sorts of analyses made by structuralists I will consider syntagmatic chains and paradigmatic transformations separately. For there to be syntagmatic chains, there must be a number of elements which can be discriminated from each other. As Leach put it: The indicies in non-verbal communication systems, like the sound elements in spoken language, do not have meaning as isolates but only as members of sets. A sign or symbol only acquires meaning when it is discriminated from some other contrary sign or symbol. (1) 687 Simple examples of paradigmatic transformation are: Spontaneously, by systematically covering all the possible analogous parallels between Nature and Culture, thought constructs a gigantic mirror-effect, where the reciprocal image of man and the world is reflected ad infinitum, perpetually decomposing and recomposing in the prism of Nature-Culture relations. Using analogy to bring together all aspects and levels of Nature and Culture, thought in its spontaneous or primitive state is immediately and simultaneously analytic and synthetic and has the ability both to totalize all aspects of the real in mythical representatiõ and to pass from one 688 level of the real to another by the reciprocal transformations of its analogies. By analogy the whole world makes sense, everything is significant, everything can be explained within a symbolic order where all the positive known facts transposed into subject matter for myths, may take their place with all their rich abundance of detail.(1) One can already sense the symbolic productivity of the dualism. A difference of social groups (1) Maurice Godelier PERSPECTIVES IN MARXIST ANTHROPOLOGY (1973) tr. Robert Brain, Cambridge U.P., Cambridge 1977, p.213" (2) Marshall Sahlins CULTURE AND PRACTICAL REASON Uni. of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1976, p.24ff. corresponds to the distinction of land and sea on the geographical plane, itself an instapce of a general spatial differentiation of interior and peripheral, correlated with oppositions of indigenous and foreign, earlier and later, even animal and cultural; the same groups again are inferior and superior politically, ritual and secular functionally. As it were, the myth of origin is a temporal rendition of these basic distinctions, the setting of a binary logic of time, to reproduce it as narrative.(l) From a truly objective viewpoint, one that attempts to see language in a way completely apart from how it appears to an given individual at any given moment in time, language presents the picture of a ceaseless flow of becoming.(I) (1) V.N.Volosinov MARXISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE (1930) tr. Ladislav Matejka and I.R.Titunik, Seminar Press, N.Y., London, 1973 p.66 ...the constituent factor for the linguistic form, as for the sign, is not at all its selfidentity as signal but its specific variability; and the constitutent factor for understanding the linguistic form is not recognition of tithe same thing,tI but understanding in the proper sense of the word, i.e., orientation in the particular, given context and in the particular, given situation orientation in the dynamic process of becoming and not "orientationtl in some inert state. (1) rules and so on which transcends the temporal duration of their efforts. Language is not static since it develops with use, but such development is very slow relative to the duration of any dialogue. Understood in these terms, both language and speech presuppose each other. People can communicate because there is language,.~while language is sustained and develops because people are struggling to communicate with each other, and neither can be adequately understood in isolation from the other. The other form or reductionism originates in the concentration on the production of grammatical sentences or syntagmatic chains by individuals in abstraction from the social context in which such production takes place. It was seen that this led to the individual being ascribed an innate, biologically based generative structure to account for such performances. What is meant by Chomsky and Levi-Strauss in their references to brain physiology to account for the nature of sign systems is difficult to determine. Few would doubt that without the highly developed brains of humans there could be human language. But there seems to be more implied than this, namely that the capacity to speak grammatically is a single, unitary characteristic deriving from particular structure of the brain which exists prior to, and independently of the learning of language or any other sign system. Initial support for such a thesis would seem to be provided by the evidence for there being If we compare the early development of speech and of intellect which, as we have seen, develop along separate lines both in animals and in very young children with the development of inner speech and of verbal thought, we must conclude that the later stage is not a simple continuation of the earlier. The nature*of the development itself changes, from biological to socio-historical. Verbal thought is not an innate, natural form of behaviour but is determined by a historical-cultural process and has specific properties and laws that cannot be found in the natural forms of thought and speech.(3) (1) R.W.Sperry "Plasticity of Neural Maturation" in EMERGENCE OF ORDER IN DEVELOPING SYSTEMS ed.Michael Locke, Academic Press, N.Y. and London, 1968, p.320 (2) ibid. p.32S (3) L.S.Vygotsky THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE (1934) tr. E.Hanfmann and G.Vakar, M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1962 p.Sl 694 If linguistic structures are not innate, being somehow arises as to what is the relationship between them and brain processes. The implication of Chomsky's manner of conceiving depth structures is that there is some unitary and specific physiological property which is in some sense isomorphic with these structures. This manner of conceiving of the relationship between the the last chapter where it was argued that mental phenomena can only be understood in terms of the relationship between the organism and its environment, and that it is necessary to understand the central nervous system only as an essential constituent set of processes which enables such an organismenvironment relationship to take place. In the case of language structures, these must be seen as developing out of the relationship between people who are striving to communicate with each other, and the developments in the brains of should be understood in relation to this. That the growing child confronts people who already speak a language does not alter this analysis. As in the examination of Saussure1s ideas, it must be concluded that all linguistic phenomena must ultimately be understood in relationship to the struggle between people to communicate in particular social and physical contexts. analogies between nature and society. The emphasis on the form of communication leads to the structuralists to consider communication only in terms of what is 'good to think', that is, the binary oppositions which are supposed to be manifestations of.the structure of the human mind. But if the central feature of communication is the efforts of people to orient themselves and to communicate, then it is also necessary to consider what people are trying to communicate and why. It is necessary to consider the content of communication. The limitations of structuralism can be overcome simply by reverting to the normal way of thinking about the relationship between people and the sign sets which have been developed in the struggle to communicate. Rather than seeing people as the puppets of their sign sets, the sign sets would then be seen as means used by people to communicate with each other. On this basis the insights of the structuralists would retain their validity but would be put into perspe~tive. What binary oppositions there are should be seen not as reflecting the structure of the mind but as arising out of the necessity to differentcan take place. That things in the world which are used as signs then tend to be conceived of as part of a pattern of oppositions and that this has led many societies to conceive of the world in these terms is an important insight, but when seen in perspective it should not be surprising that some societies free themselves from this tendency. While paradigmatic transformations have been shown by the structuralists to by all pervasive in society, case of Western thought. However they are also revealed by Roy Willis's studies of'the role of animal symbolism The Nuer sense of distance from, and equality with the counterposed world of wild nature contrast markedly with the Lele sense of the dependence and moral inferiority of the village in relation to the forest, and again with the Fipa sense of the village's properly dominant role in relation to the surrounding bush. These cultural differences in the perceived structure of the universe correlated with differences in ideas of time of historical consciousness or lack of it, and in ideas of the self.(1) to understand the meaning of the elements of these sets, / s/he is able to become a participant in the symbolic (1) Willis (1975) op.cit. p.8 (2) ibid. p.128 698 in traditional societies has been to attempt to reinforce ...the Fipa universe is an open one in which the frontiers of the known expand constantly, and in theory, without limit ...Fipa are committed by their basic values to the active endeavour to extend the field of the known, or to incorporate more of the unknown within the compass of the known ...[T]he intellectual picture of the universe is always provisional ...Instead of maintenance and extension of social distinctions and cognitive categories, we find Fipa constantly seeking to subsume existing discriminations and categories within more inclusive and fundamental concepts.(l) 699 new material bases for communication. The most revolutionary 700 paintings should be seen as having given expression to the process view of nature along with Bergson's philosophical writings and David Bohm's writings in physics. The enduring nature of the material bases of the symbolic forms which have been developed by civilization and the rapid reproducibility of these forms .nd the increasing capacity to reach a large audience means that we now are all able to participate in a developing symbolic order which transcends all national boundaries and is world-wide in scope. It is in terms of this international symbolic order that the mature individual must orient him or herself if s/he is to overcome the contingency of his or her own perspective. 701 THE STRUGGLE FOR POWER AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF TECHNOLOGY In the immediacy of the Iwe' experience, the young child identifies with its mother's power over the environment. But with cognitive development which develops the child's own power over the world, this vicarious sense of power begins to be undermined. This two way tendency is intensified as the child's cognition develops beyond the abilities of the higher animals. The child develops the capacity to use instruments, but at the same time becomes more aware of the extent to which the world is beyond his or her control, and of the contingency of his or her own existence. Furthermore the child finds him or herself confronted by the will of others who not only limit his or her own power, but have the capacity to reduce him or her to an instrument of their will. It is only by participating in the common projects of the community, that is, in the general will, that the individual is able to transcend the powerlessness of his or her contingent existence. The combined capacity of people to enter into common projects and to develop the instruments of control has resulted in the development of technology. In this sect~on I will try to describe in more detail the uniqueness of human activity which makes possible this development and then briefly consider the nature of technological development. The bench, scissors, pieces of leather offer themselves to the subject as poles of action; through their combined values they delimit a certain situation, an open situation moreover, which calls for a certain mode of resolution, a certain kind of work. The body is no more than an element in a system of the subject and his world, and the task to be performed elicits the necessary movements from him by a sort of remote attraction ..•(l) 'I experience the movements of being as a result of the s~uation, of the sequence of events themselves; myself and my movements are, so to speak, merely a link in the whole process, and I am scarcely aware of any voluntary initiative •.. It all happens independently of me. '(2) (1) M.Merleau-Ponty PHENOMENOLOGY OF PERCEPTION (1945) tr. Colin Smith, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1962, p.106 (2) ibid. p.105 (1) ibid. p.104 (2) ibid. p.110 (3) William I. Thomas "The Definition of the Situation" in SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM 2nd ed. eds Jermome G. Manis and Bernard N. Melzer, Allyn and Bacon, Boston, 1972, p.331ff A nest is an object which has meaning only in relation to the possible behaviour of the organic individual; if a monkey picks a branch in order to reach a goal, it is because it is able to confer a functional value on an object of nature. But monkeys scarcely succeed at all in constructing instruments which would serve only for preparing others; ...having become a stick for the monkey, the tree branch is eliminated as such which is the equivalent of saying that it is never possessed as an instrument in the full sense of the word. Animal activity reveals its limits in the two cases: it loses itself in the real transformations which it accomplishes and cannot reiterate* them. For man, on the contrary, the tree branch which has become a stick will remain pr~cisely a tree-branch-which-has-become-a-stick, the same thing in two different functions and visible for him under a plurality of aspects.(l) . (1) Maurice Merleau-Ponty THE STRUCTURE OF BEHAVIOUR (1942) tr. Alden L. Fisher, Beacon Press, Boston, 1967, p.17S. to see the world from the perspective of others, humans are able to develop high levels of coope~ation. The recip- (1) Hegel JENENSER REALPHILOSOPHIE II, SAMrLICHE WERKE, Vol.20, p.199 ed. Lasson, Leipzig: 1923, cited by Jurgen Habermas (1974) op.cit. p.155 (1) Fred R. Dallmayr "Plessner's Philosophical Anthropology" . in INQUIRY Vol.I7, 1974, p.61 707 The most important action systemsof a society are those centred around the production of the means of life. These include the organizations for the distribution of what is produced as well as the organizations for the production of goods through interaction with the rest of nature. The whole organized process of interaction with the environment together with the distrib~tion of products is the production process of a society. The organized nature of this indicates that humans cannot be thought of as living on their environment. Rather the human community brings the environment under social control. The production process is society's metabolism. The biggest limiting factor to the power of individuals or groups over their environment has always been other people. In the face of scarcity, people have had to develop action systems and weapons to preserve their territories. However with the development of the means of production to a level at which workers can produce more than is necessary for their subsistence, this conflict with others is intensified. It is then possible for groups of people to enslave others and use them as instruments of production. This means that warfare is not simply a matter of preserving territories but of which party will be reduced to an instrument. The tec~nology of warfare has thus always closely followed the production process in importance. The subjugation of others has also required the development of a technology of social control. Apart from the action systems of the production process and warfare, action syst~ms are likely to be (1) S.Kirson Weinberg "Social Action Systems and Social Problems" in Arnold M. Rose ed. HUMAN BEHAVIOUR AND SOCIAL PROCESSES Houghton Mifflin, Boston 1962, p.407 Production not only provides the material to satisfy a need, but it also provides the need for the material ...The need felt for the object is induced by the perception of the object. An obet d'art creates a public that has artistic taste and is able to enjoy beauty and the same can be said of any other product.(1) ...Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature: He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature's productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By this acting on the external"world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway.(2) (1) Karl Marx A CONTRIBUTION TO THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1970, p.197 (2) Karl Marx CAPITAL: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF CAPITALIST PRODUCTION 3 Vols, Vol.1 (1887) tr. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, ed. Frederick Engles, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1974, p.173 710 THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THE DIFFERENT CULTURAL PROCESSES It was stated in the introduction to this chapter that the three formative processes of culture had some autonomy from each other, but that they were interdependent making their separate treatment artificial. This had given rise to attempts to reduce all three cultural processes to one of them. In this section I will consider the extent of the autonomy of the cultural processes and then try to show how closely related they are. The most common form of cultural reductionism is the attempt to explain all in terms of the technological order and the least common is the attempt to explain all in terms of the moral order and the struggle for recognition. The autonomy of the moral order is the least recognized, and its significance least acknowledged. It was pointed out in Chapter I that the moral order is closely associated with the world-view by which people orient themselves and it is frequently assumed by anthropologists that what counts as moral is simply what is thought as such by each society on the basis of their beliefs about themselves. Among most Marxists the moral order is that aspect of what is designated as the superstructure which is taken least seriously~ These ideas reflect a gross underestimation of the struggle for recognition and self-substantiation and the impetus it has given to the development of the moral order. In fact the struggle for a sense of one's own significance is frequently the major motive force not only of people who participate in the struggle for a better understanding of the world and those who struggle for power, but also in those who struggle to increase their consumption. The autonomy of the moral order is evident in the development of modern Western societies. Despite the undermining of the beliefs on which the moral order is based, there have been major developments in morality over the last three hundred years. The most important aspect of this has been the increasing universalization of the moral order so that. it can now be said that there exists a nascent world moral order. One has only to compare the moral order dominating the Roman world with the moral order of today to see what advances have been made. While the Roman society was based on continuous warfare to capture slaves who were then so ill treated that they did not reproduce themselves, the modern era has seen the abolition of slavery as such throughout the world, and a concern with international justice, human rights and the Plight of the poor nations of the world. Those who point to the crimes of the Nazis in the Second World War should remember that such worship of war and slaughter of innocents was commonplace in the Middle Ages, and that in those days there was no. world-wide revulsion against it. There is a tendency to be pessimistic about the world moral order because of the few people who take it seriously and the ease with which nations and multinational companies violate its principles. But creative processes frequently require a long duration to develop and this development is therefore 712 difficult to perceive, while destructive activities are of short duration and easy to perceive. To see that there is progress in the development of the world moral order one must consider a longer time span and consider the fact that three centuries ago there was no world moral order at all and that relations between nations' were based entirely on power politics. That the development of the moral order is simply a reflection or manifestation of the development of the technological order is undermined by the vastly different degrees of justice in societies such as Sweden, U.S.S.R., U.S.A. and South Africa, each with much the same technolog,ical development. Some attempts have been made to explain the ideas by which people orient themselves in terms of the struggle for recognition. In particular metaphysics is often dismissed as the attempt by people to deceive themselves to avoid facing up to the reality of their own insignificance; as though our potential for understanding, intimacy and creativity did not make us any different from lumps of inanimate matter. But far more commonly ideas are seen to be inseparable aspects of the technological order, either as ideologies to legitimate the social arrangements on which this order is based or as knowledge which enables us to control things. The implications of such a reduction are that it is impossible to criticise the technological order since criticisms must themselves be simply manifestions of the developing order. But like all forms of relativism, such reductionism undermines itself since if people believe it, they have no grounds for believing that their own beliefs are any superior to other peoples' opposing beliefs (1) J.n.Bernal THE EXTENSION OF MAN: A HISTORY OF PHYSICS BEFORE 1900, Paladin, Herts, 1972, p.16 (2) William James "Pragmatism's Conception of Truth" in PRAGMATISM: THE CLASSIC WRITINGS ed. H.Standish Thayer, Mentor Book, N.Y. 1970, esp.p.230 714 science and illustrating the distinction between science and technology was given in Chapter II. Here it was pointed out that Babylonian astronomy which was developed in order to establish a calander, fix the dates of festivals, and predict such heavenly events as eclipses which were regarded as omens, far surpassed the predictive ability and accuracy of observation of the Greeks, yet the Babylonians still referred to the heavenly bodies as gods and made no advance in understanding the nature of the cosmos. Another approach which attempts to reduce science has been the efforts of such thinkers as Borkenau, Lukacs, Simmel and von Martin to show how the scientific ideas which arose during the Renaissance were reflections of the new economic order. Thus the monetary economy ~n which everything was reduced to quantitative relationships was seen to have inspired the attempt to understand the world in such terms. However as Dijksterhuis pointed out, the beginnings of the developments of mathematical physics pre-dated the beginnings of capitalism.(l) What this suggests is that science cannot be seen as a manifest ion of the technological order but must be seen ?s part of the at least partially autonomous themselves in the world. While the development of science might be hindered or facilitated by particular types (1) G.W.F.Hegel THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND (tr.1931) op.cit. p.234ff. True knowledge is ignorant of values, but it has to be grounded on a value judgement, or rather on an axiomatic value. It is obvious that the positing of the principle of objectivity as the condition of true knowledge constitutes an ethical choice and not a judgement reached from knowledge, since, according to the postulte's own terms, there cannot have been any 'true' knowledge prior to this arbitrary choice.{l) (I) Jacques Monod CHANCE AND NECESSITY: AN ESSAY ON THE NATURAL PHILOSOPHY OF MODERN BIOLOGY tr. Austryn Wainhouse, Collins/Fount, Glasgow, 1977 p.163 The technology of information processing is now one of the main branches of technology. Finally, the technological order needs to be regulated by moral principles and requires high levels of communication to regulate people's behaviour and to enable them to coordinate their activities. Societies based on technological orders in which people are controlled as instruments rather than as moral agents, and in which people are disoriented and unable to believe in anything are unlikely to be able to deal with the technical problems confronting society for any length of time and are prone to disintegrate or to be destroyed by other societies. Being both mutually dependent and partially autonomous from each other means that there is frequently tension between the different formative processes of culture. There is no inherent reason why the dynamics of each process should lead to developments which are compatible with the other processes. This is clearly the case with developments in understanding during the Renaissance which undermined the conception of the universe which had supported the moral order of the previous epoch, and thedevelopments in the organization of productive relationships during the same period which conflicted directly with this moral order. Similarly in the present era rapid technological advances have changed society in ways which make it increasingly difficult for its participants to achieve any sense of their own significance. For such reasons advances in some processes have often been prevented or hindered so as to retain the unity of the total culture as in the past the proponents of the new science were persecuted in the Renaissance by people defending the old moral order, while today proponents of a new moral order are frequently attacked by those who want technological development to go on unhindered. In this chapter I have tried to show the distinctively human processes which have evolved to form the human order. I showed how cognition developed in humans beyond the levels achieved by any other animals so far understood and that this development was characterized ,by the ability of individuals to decentre themselves from immediate experience. The imbalance this produced in the growing child was then seen to impel him or her to struggle for recognition from others, to struggle for a common orientation to the world, and to a struggle for increased power over his or her destiny. These struggles were then shown to engender the developments of the moral order, the symbolic order and the technological order respectively. These formative processes of culture were seen to be both partially autonomous and mutually dependent. These cultural processes should not be hypostatized. and thought of as independent of the people struggling to make sense of their lives. Their dynamics and the relationships between them must be understood in terms of the efforts of individuals to achieve recognition and selfsubstantiation, to orient themselves and communicate with each other, to attain control over their lives and 719 so to form themselves by participating in these processes. Participating in these processes individuals must take into account different principles. They must interpret their projected actions within the context of the moral order to attain substantiation, in relation to sign sets if they are to know how their actions will be understood, and within the context of the social struggle to control the environment if they are to ensure their actions will be effective. In this way their activities are constrained by three distinct orders. Each of these requires the other: individuals must be able to orient themselves in order to act morally and coordinate their actions with others, there must be some morality underlying comm~nication and coordinated activities before people can trust what is communicated to them and enter into joint projects and people must have some power over their lives to preserve themselves, to express themselves and to act in ways which will substantiate themselves. The inadequacies of the different cultural processes and the contradictions between them are then experienced by individuals as an incoherence in their lives. But humans are not enmeshed in a life cycle as are animals. Having the ability to decentre themselves from immediate experience, mature humans can question ev~rything; their conceptions of themselves, the way the world is understood, their own interpretations of the situations in which they find themselves. Every belief and every projected action are open to question. Humans have to live their lives by making decisions and making commitments to a fragile web of intersubjective meanings, and where the struggles for recognition, orientation and power 720 over destiny are frustrated, these meanings will be questioned. Thus the various types of moral orders, symbolic systems and technological orders in which people participate and through which they attain the capacity for living authentic lives are continua,1:1~ybeing transcended. If this description of the cultural order were a complete description of the human order one would expect a continuous development towards societies which provide greater opportunities for their members to achieve a sense of their own significance, a deeper understanding of the world and the place of humanity within it, and greater power for individuals to control their own destinies and to participate in the creative processes by which these societies develop so as to provide their members with such conditions. This indicates the extent to which this analysis is an abstraction from the total human order. Apart from the contingencies of the natural environment, it is always open to individuals to react irrationally to their situations and destroy the achievements of culture rather than augment them. Thus in reaction to limited success in achieving recognition and power and the failure of the most advanced ideas about the nature of the world to orient people in life, people are likely to turn to irrationalist movements which appeal directly to th~ emotions and provide a short lived satisfaction of these ends. Thus the people of Nazi Germany turned to racial and cultural myths to orient themselves and achieved a sense of their own significance and of power through participating in the Nazi war machine and attempting to subjugate other groups of people. But even such irrational reactions to the frustrations of life do not account for the deviations from the path of continuous cultural progress. People's struggles give rise to dynamic processes which are the unintended consequences of their actions, and all purposive actions occur within environments which are largely the product of these. It is necessary to understand such processes before an adequate account of the nature of human being can be achieved. These processes will be the subject of the next chapter.