An Introduction to Social Psychology

Chapter 12: The Functional Organization of Consciousness —The Objects of Consciousness

Luther Lee Bernard

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CLASSIFICATION— Professor Cooley has spoken of three types of consciousness— self, social, and public. We shall use these same categories, with others, but vary the application somewhat, keeping in mind the fact that consciousness is always subjective, and that even social consciousness and public consciousness are the consciousness experienced by individuals with reference to others and to the public as a whole, and not consciousness experienced by a group or by a public. The objects of consciousness may be classified in outline as follows:

I. Self-consciousness.

    I. Of the organic and overt behavior selves.
    2. Of the inner (symbolical or attitudinal) self.

II. Physical Consciousness.

    I. Of self to physical objects— the sensory qualities of physical objects.
    2.Of physical objects to other physical objects— the data of the sciences of physics, chemistry, and perhaps biology.

III. Social Consciousness.

    I. Of the relation of self to others.
    2.Of the relation of others to others.

IV. Public Consciousness.

    I. The normative relation of self to others.
    2. The normative relation of others to others, or the objective problem of what our social organization should be.

V. Collective Consciousness.

    I. Non-normative collective attitudes, etc.
    2. Public opinion, or normative collective attitudes.

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THE FORMS OF THE CLASSIFICATION— The general analysis and classification of the environments have already been presented in a previous chapter. Also, the general analysis of personality begun in the discussion of behavior patterns will be continued in the following four chapters. These two fields of data are basic to all social science and in the subsequent divisions of this book we shall elaborate and apply those aspects which are foundational to social psychology. The significance of physical consciousness for social psychology is slight and mainly indirect, although it is greater for some of the other social sciences. The data of social psychology fall primarily within the field of social consciousness. Hence the expansion of this category into two main subsidiary classifications, public and collective consciousness. In most of the classifications of the objective types of consciousness one phase of the consciousness has been stated as that of the relationship of self to the external objects involved. The other form of consciousness is that of the relation of the objects, persons, groups, institutions, and other phenomena to one another.

This is because it is possible to approach the study of these more objective and abstract relationships only by means of first studying our perceptual and conceptual relations or responses to them. As was said above, self-consciousness and social consciousness develop out of the necessity we are under of distinguishing for control purposes our own organism from its environment. Likewise we find it necessary to separate our environments into various units and relationships, a process which we begin when we learn to distinguish self from various more or less separate units in our environment. The term "others" in this classification of course includes not only individuals but all types of organizations of individuals and extensions and elaborations of personalities. Although our physical and social relationships begin in very concrete forms they may become very abstract and those physical and social relationships which are wholly objective or external to us may become particularly abstract to our consciousness, especially when they are apprehended only through symbols.

The forms of public consciousness are merely the more normative aspects of general social consciousness. Collective

(174) consciousness is not, like the other aspects of social consciousness, the consciousness of one, but of many individuals, with reference to the same or related phenomena. It is what is sometimes called the social mind and an important phase of it is public opinion.

SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS is what the individual perceives or thinks regarding himself. It is his method of seeing himself as an object, of perceiving himself as a behavior unit reacting upon other similar units and groups of behavior units. In its lower and simpler forms it is primarily the consciousness arising from contact with parts of his own body as stimuli sources as distinguished from that which arises from the stimulation of external objects. Thus the child learns to outline himself in regard to form, size, and weight by getting different tactual and kinesthetic experiences when he manipulates his own body or parts or extensions of it from those he experiences when he manipulates objects— which are not attached to it.

The main sensory distinctions which enable the child to differentiate his organism from other objects in his immediate environment are the kinesthetic and those arising from pain, heat and cold, touch, and somewhat later from sight and hearing organs. He soon makes a distinction between the double sensations he gets from his own body and the single sensory experiences he receives from other objects. Also the associations which he makes between the consciousness of intention in performing an act and the response of parts of his body to that will or intention are of a different sort from the associations which arise when objects not a part of his body respond to his intentions. The latter response requires an intermediate action of some part of his own body, such as manipulation by the hands or feet, while the former is executed directly through the nervous system without the use of intermediate or supplementary overt behavior controls.

The child, of course, has no such understanding as this of the philosophy of the development of his consciousness of his organic and overt behavior self. Neither, for that matter, have most adults. But it is in some such way as this that the child comes in time to recognize the parts of his body as different from those objects which are not parts of his own organism.

( 175) The different parts of the organic self or organism are correlated in his consciousness through the association of simultaneous and coördinate responses of the different parts of the organism. Thus he comes to integrate as a single unit this correlated consciousness of self, and self-consciousness in the large appears.

The sensory and perceptual self-consciousness of the child is not, of course, equally vivid with respect to all parts of his organism. He is not at first aware of any of the internal mechanisms which enable him to live and to make adjustments to his environment. Ordinarily he learns of these, not through sensory experiences in connection with his own body, but through the descriptions of observations made on the bodies of other persons conveyed to him verbally or pictorially. This extension of the range of organic and overt behavior self-consciousness to include the inner parts of the organism also comes at a much later period than that involving the more external parts of the body which are perceived through direct sensory observation. Since the internal mechanisms and structures are apprehended by most of us indirectly through verbal and photographic media, rather than directly through the sensory mechanisms, this type of knowledge of self might perhaps better be called self-awareness than self-consciousness, strictly speaking. Even the external parts of the body are not all perceived with equal completeness and clearness of definition. Those parts which are most active in making the adjustment to environment, such as the hands and feet, and the face, in case the child is taught to make his toilet before a mirror, are most clearly defined in the sensory and perceptual self-consciousness. The rear parts of the body may be included consciously as a part of the self much later than the front parts, because they cannot easily be seen, even with the aid of a mirror. They can, of course, be felt. Consequently they are never wholly absent from the child's corporate feeling of self. The story is told of a boy who never could be taught to comb the back part of his head until he had been shown a reflection of it in a mirror. Until then it was not sufficiently a factor in his self-consciousness to secure attention along with other parts of his organism.

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EXTENSION OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS TO EXTERNAL OBJECTS— The consciousness or awareness of self on the sensory and perceptual plane very early extends beyond the consciousness of the bare body to include those objects which are closely associated with the body, although the child, like the adult, distinguishes between his body self and his accessory or possessions self, which might also be called his secondary organic self. Of all external objects, his clothes and other ornaments partake most intimately of his self-conscious sensory and perceptual self. He thinks of himself only in connection with his clothes and his playthings and the ornaments he wears. If these should be removed after he has become thoroughly adjusted or conditioned to them there would be so great a disturbance of the functioning of the consciousness of self that his adjustments to his environment would be greatly altered and, in some cases even, effectively disintegrated. This inclusion of dress and other intimate possessions in the consciousness of self is equally, possibly more, characteristic of older people than of children. It extends even beyond merely immediate possessions to other persons who have relatively permanent and important relationships with us, and to all sorts of contacts which we make with our environment. The phrase, "I am apart of all I have met," might well be transformed for our purposes into, "All things I have met are a part of me." Of course the more distant the external objects or the less frequent or intense our contacts with them, the less, other things being equal, they are a part of us. The very way in which we wear our clothes or ornaments, or the manner in which we care for our bodies or arrange our hair, even, enters into the composition of our perceptual self-consciousness.

ATTITUDINAL OR INNER SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS is that which develops in delayed adjustment situations. It is under such conditions of delayed response that we develop attitudes instead of acting immediately and overtly. These attitudes are conditioned closely to our language symbols or partial and substitute overt responses which, as we saw in Chapter Y, appear in delayed adjustment situations. The content of this attitudinal self-consciousness is very large and diverse in a complexly organized society, because it represents our striving for adjust-

(177) -ment to this environment. Consequently it consists of feelings, emotions, judgments, valuations of all sorts. These will be discussed in considerable detail in this and the following chapters in so far as they have significance for communication and social contacts. Even the various forms of social consciousness are made up largely of attitudinal self-consciousness. An important aspect of self-consciousness is the self we see reflected in the attitudes of others toward us, or, as Cooley calls it, the looking glass self.

SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS, we are told by Professor Cooley and others, grows up as the other pole of self-consciousness. Both self and social consciousness develop in social situations and they are merely complementary aspects of the same process by which the individual gains at the same time a functional definition of himself and makes an analysis and synthesis of his environment which enables him as a personality to adjust himself to it or to mold it to himself. Both self and social consciousness arise out of the process by which the organism finds its relationship to the rest of the world. Consciousness is an internal behavior process for defining objects, including self and others as well as things. It functions as an aid to the control of relationships and to the organization of these into larger projective wholes. It also helps to split up improperly functioning units of behavior into manageable elements and to rearrange them in more adequately functioning systems. Self and social consciousness arise together out of this process of definition and adjustment, and they differ primarily according to whether self or others and public relationships are the major objects of definition and conscious adjustment control. But even this distinction is not absolute.

TWO PHASES of SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS— Social consciousness, like self-consciousness, has two aspects. In the simpler and more concrete of these two forms, the consciousness is directed toward the relation of self to others or of others to self. In the more abstract form of social consciousness the attention is upon the relationship of others to others. It is this first form of social consciousness which has the closest relationships with self-consciousness, especially with the second type of self-consciousness. It is in fact not always easy

( 178) to distinguish social consciousness on this plane from self-consciousness with a definite adjustment reference. The chief basis of distinction, however, lies here as elsewhere in the determination of the direction or of the object of consciousness. If attention is focussed primarily upon the self in considering the relationship between others and self we may speak of the type of consciousness as self-consciousness, although social consciousness is involved. But if the attention is primarily upon the other person or persons or relationship we may usually consider our understanding or appreciation of the relationship to be social consciousness, although clearly self-consciousness as well as social consciousness is involved in such a case.

Social consciousness in the other sense, however, of our awareness of relationships between two or more people or groups, in which we do not directly participate, does not necessarily involve self-consciousness in any immediate sense at all. It is, indeed, true that we cannot become aware of these purely objective relationships in any but the most superficial sense except by a process of more or less consciously putting ourselves in the places of the other persons who are experiencing the relationship. We are able to interpret their words or gestures or other forms of behavior only in the degree to which we have engaged in the same or similar behavior and have developed definite forms or contents of self-consciousness in performing such behavior. We interpret the meaning of such objective forms of social conduct only by means of projecting our own behavior or experiences into the other persons who are now behaving more or less as we have done. When, for instance, one small boy observes two other small boys in certain characteristic relations with each other and declares they are fighting, or playing a game, perhaps himself becomes highly excited about their behavior and wishes to participate in their activities, he is able to get the meaning of their behavior and experience the emotional impulse to participate only because he has previously had the same experience or similar experiences. If he had 'not had( similar experiences their behavior would be no more significant to him emotionally or intellectually than the activities of two very complicated machines. In fact the thing which renders his con-

( 179) -sciousness of the behavior of the other boys' behavior social instead of merely physical is the fact that he can interpret their behavior in terms of his own previous behavior, overt and internal or emotional and intellectual.

UNDERSTANDING THE WORLD AT A DISTANCE— Since we cannot actually perceive through our senses more than a very small fraction of this second or objective type of social behavior, our fullest awareness of it depends primarily upon the use of language symbols, by which it is conveyed to us through newspapers, books, conversation, radio, and upon picture symbols, such as photographs, paintings, sculpture, movie films, etc., which present the objective forms of social behavior in less abstract forms directly to our eyes. The degree of our familiarity with such symbols for communicating objective behavior will determine in large measure the extent to which we are able to be in contact with the external social world. Such contacts, especially those which employ verbal language symbols, are decidedly abstract and could function only in a highly developed cultural civilization. We are able through the use of pictures and printed descriptions to come in contact with the most remote areas of social contacts and— in so far as we are able to assimilate their behavior to our own experiencesto become cognizant of the significance and meaning of these relationships even in the most dissimilar types of cultures. In this way we gradually acquire the power of viewing ever wider reaches of the world of social behavior. Early peoples were confined in their understanding of the social world very largely to those relationships which were typical of their own groups. They lacked a knowledge of other languages through which they could understand the cultures carried by those languages, and they had no books to describe alien practices. They lacked almost wholly the comparative outlook or viewpoint. But gradually, with the development of verbal symbols to condition their perceptions and aid in interpretation, we have pushed out the borders of our intellectual and social worlds beyond the merely political one,;: And even now the world as a whole is becoming, through our increased powers of understanding and interpretation, in large measure a social unity.

PUBLIC CONSCIOUSNESS is, of course, a phase of social con-

(180) -sciousness. It is to be distinguished from ordinary social consciousness in that it is the normative aspect of the latter, that is, the abstract evaluative phase of the consciousness of the relationship of individuals and groups in society. It may appear to some that it is superfluous to distinguish public consciousness from social consciousness. The only justification for doing so is that most social consciousness is descriptive rather than evaluative and normative. The larger part of our consciousness of our relations to others and of our awareness of the relations of others to others consists merely of perceptions or conceptualizations of the facts of such relationships. We view the social world largely as a passing show, not particularly concerning ourselves about whether it should be different or how it could be changed. If we develop some interest in the possibility and the desirability of a different social order as a whole— which is rarely the case with most people— or in the desirability of changing some particular situation which impinges particularly upon ourselves, this interest is in most cases quite superficial and fleeting. Most of our contacts with the social world are either routine occupational contacts or those of amusement seeking. We are ordinarily more receptive or passive in both of these than we are active with the intention of producing change, especially far-reaching public changes. The concern of most people in the public social order and in the public welfare is decidedly limited in comprehensiveness and in persistence, as well as in depth of understanding and analysis. Therefore, for the sake of emphasizing a phase of evaluative consciousness which should become more effective with the development of the social sciences and more persistent with the increasing habit of analysis of our social environments and institutions, it seems wise to segregate the normative aspect of social consciousness and to establish for it a new category as public consciousness.

TWO ASPECTS OF PUBLIC CONSCIOUSNESS— In public consciousness also we discover two phases. In one of these we find that self-consciousness plays a considerable part and in the other we have mainly a detached or objectified consciousness of social relationships. In other words, the two phases of public consciousness correspond to the two phases of social

(181) consciousness, and they include the relations of self to others and of others to others. The former type of public consciousness is involved when the concern is with reference to the obligations of self to society or to other individuals in a social situation, or of their obligations to us as a phase of the proper functioning of the social system. In this phase of public consciousness, self-consciousness looms large and is sometimes in the ascendancy over public consciousness itself. This is a much more concrete phase of public consciousness than the other, which deals with obligations of the members and organizations of society in the abstract. But it can never be as concrete as non-normative social consciousness of this same general phase, because even the most concrete and trivial aspects of our relations to each other, such as occur in connection with ephemeral pleasure functions, social entertainments, etc., are included in non-normative social consciousness of the first type, while in public consciousness of the first type there must always be an abstract aspect because of the fact that the question of what should be is always an issue. This question cannot be raised in any fundamental sense except on the basis of abstract values and value concepts.

Public consciousness of the second type involves the highest degree of abstractions. It calls for the abstract formulas of social sciences, and likewise of all the antecedent sciences, as a means to measuring the degrees and kinds of responsibilities and obligations of individuals and organizations in society. In its perfected form it makes the most extensive possible use of abstract storage symbols and of the experience of the race and the results of experiments and refined observations of a mathematico-statistical sort in order to establish norms of measurement of obligations and relationships.

ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE OPERATION OF SOME PHASES OF FUNCTIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS —  Self-consciousness— Illustrations of the first type of self-consciousness in literature are to be found in accounts of emotional experiences in viewing nature, or in undergoing hardships in travel or on other expeditions, or in accounts of one's adventures with wild animals, experiences with foods, housing conditions, accommodations in hotels, the organic contacts of friendship, love-making, fight-

(182) -ing, etc., when the narration is in the first person. Inevitably in such narratives there will be intermingled also the more abstract aspects of self-consciousness, as well as phases of social consciousness, and possibly of public or normative social consciousness also. Such a book as Robinson Crusoe contains much material of the character of the first aspect of self-consciousness, and also much of the second aspect.

Such autobiographies as those of Herbert Spencer or Charles Darwin, or The Education of Henry Adams, serve well to illustrate the second aspect of self-consciousness. Men of great intelligence and of wide philosophic interests who write their own lives are likely to devote a minimum of space to the sensory and perceptual aspects of self, particularly of the organic and overt behavior self, and are certain to give considerable attention to the abstract and conceptual relationships of self to the environment, including or emphasizing such relationships with others. They live ordinarily in a world of ideas more than in a world of things, and their contacts with others are primarily on the basis of abstract idea values rather than on the more concrete basis of things. Consequently their accounts of themselves are couched mainly in terms of the former rather than of the latter.

Examples of social consciousness in literature are numerous. All narratives in the first person, recording conversations and other behavior between the narrator and other persons, either in fiction or in factual writing, illustrate social consciousness of the first type, as well as self-consciousness. In most such writing the social consciousness is probably dominant over self-consciousness, although the latter is always in the background as a basis of interpretation. Examples of the second type of non-normative social consciousness are to be found in the great mass of fiction writing which records supposed conversations and other contacts between characters of the story. Much of the news of newspapers is of this type, although it frequently extends over into some degree and quality of public consciousness. Also travel books, histories, descriptions of primitive peoples, including most of the content of anthropology, and a large part of the subject matter of geography represent more serious, and possibly more accu-

( 183) -rately descriptive, phases of the second type of social consciousness. Sometimes this material in the descriptive social sciences becomes highly abstract, and not infrequently it is material for social consciousness rather than an account of social consciousness as such.

Public consciousness finds its best illustrations in the treatises on ethics and on political, economic, and social institutions and organizations, although it is also to be found in orations on public questions, in sermons, in newspaper editorials, in special articles and sometimes in the news itself. It also occurs in all types of serious magazines and periodicals, in public lectures, in the propaganda literature of public welfare organizations and agencies. Here also it is necessary to distinguish between public consciousness and material for public consciousness, because most of the content of such books and articles is stated impersonally rather than conversationally and is objectified into storage categories and symbolic meaning complexes. In such cases it is not only the objectified public consciousness of the author and of those who have read his book approvingly, but it is also material for the public consciousness of many more who may read it in the future. This is especially true of the content of text books in the social sciences dealing with the problems of public policy rather than with the descriptive facts of social organization and contacts.

PUBLIC OPINION AND COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS— Public opinion is sometimes confused with public consciousness. Such a confusion, however, is unjustifiable, although there is a strong functional relationship between the two. Public consciousness is always the consciousness of an individual with regard to public relationships, while public opinion is the normative aspect of collective consciousness, more or less clearly defined, with regard to any type of objects whatever. Consequently the consciousness content of public opinion may concern itself with the collective aspect of any of the several types of either self-consciousness, social consciousness, or public consciousness or it may even be a normative collective manifestation of consciousness directed toward non-personal and nonsocial objects. The essential characteristic of public opinion is that it shall be collective and normative, that is, that a num-

(184) -ber of individuals in the same group shall think or act as if they thought the same or closely similar or complementary things. It matters very little what they think as long as they think it together and with conviction. It is opinion, not merely non-normative consciousness. Collective consciousness itself refers merely to any consciousness whatever of the members of a group or public provided it possesses some degree of unity or organization. It may be normative (public opinion) or nonnormative. Its content may be either self, social, or public consciousness, or even physical consciousness (the consciousness of physical objects).

GRADES AND QUALITIES OF PUBLIC OPINION— There are of course grades and qualities in public opinion, and the highest type from the standpoint of its influence on public policy is that which is constituted primarily of public consciousness. Most writers on social psychology apparently have this type of consciousness content of public opinion in mind when they discuss the nature of public opinion, and this fact probably accounts for the frequent confusion of the two categories. A public opinion constituted of self-consciousness is the rarest form of collective consciousness, rarer even than a public opinion directed towards physical or other non-human objects, but it exists. Groups of very similar individuals of an egotistical bent may come together in a mutual admiration society, exchanging compliments and agreeing on mutual worth, where the primary purpose of each participant individual is to enhance his own self-feeling, even at the expense of exchanging felicitations with others. Groups engaged in mutual condolence and groups of worshipers intent upon saving their own souls may also come under this category. Many social gatherings, as well as art and discussion clubs, have much of this character, and perhaps almost all associations have something of this element in them. Collective consciousness of the nonnormative type, however, may have a considerable element of self-consciousness content in it. This fact may be illustrated by the everyday gossip of people which largely centers around the personalities of the gossipers' selves in relation to others. Non-normative social consciousness frequently enters into collective consciousness. Most of the daily news of the newspa-

( 185) -per fairly represents this type. But when social consciousness becomes public opinion in passing into the category of collective consciousness, it also becomes public consciousness. There can be no public opinion made up of social consciousness of the non-normative kind, because public opinion is the normative aspect of collective consciousness and the normative aspect of social consciousness is public consciousness. The term public opinion has a suggestion of the normative in it which does much to justify superficially the confusion which is so often to be found between public opinion and public consciousness.

It must not be supposed that the content of public opinion, as distinguished from collective consciousness in general, is limited wholly to public consciousness although it is predominantly of such character. Public opinion, as distinguished from less attitudinal and less normative collective consciousness, can exist with reference to other objects than the public. There can be convictions collectively held regarding a theory of light or of evolution, quite as well as toward a theory of the classification of races or the nature of the mentality of the members of any particular race, or regarding the proper policy of dealing with alien races or immigrant peoples, for example. The term collective consciousness is, as before said, inclusive of that of public opinion. The two are not mutually exclusive, but the latter bears much the same relation to the former as the term public consciousness bears to that of social consciousness. The application and organization of these categories will be discussed in subsequent chapters.

MATERIALS FOR SUPPLEMENTARY READING

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Notes

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