The Philosophy of the Present
Introduction
Table of Contents | Next | Previous
The title Mr. Mead selected for these lectures -- "The Philosophy of the Present" -- contains an instructive ambiguity. The term "present" does not here refer directly to the contemporary situation in philosophy, but rather to the status of any object when it occurs and while it is occurring. If anything that exists is in some genuine sense temporal, as so many philosophers seem now to agree, then its foothold in reality is to be found in that present within which it not merely was or will be but effectively is, in the full and categorical sense. In a temporalist philosophy the tenses of the verb "to be" must be taken seriously, and Mr. Mead's theory is, above all things else, a philosophy of nature in the present tense. It seeks to understand the world as centered in a present, and to locate past and future, meanings and possibilities, in their function with respect to it. To see the past as past, for example, is to see it when it is past, in relation to the present whose past it is. What it, or anything else that claims existence, may be independent of its temporal reference, it is not empirically possible, and if Mr. Mead is right, it is not necessary, to inquire.
Yet the philosophy of being present is also, in a perfectly real sense, the philosophy of our contemporaries. "Process," "development" and "emergence" are catchwords of recent thought, and while the current is perhaps less strong to-day than it was ten or even five years ago it still represents a dominant theme among us. Mr. Mead's account will hardly take its place among the most popular manifestations of the "time spirit," but it does provide an unusually searching and independent analysis of its basic tendencies. Here is a temporalist philosophy that accepts its intellectual
(xii) responsibilities. Those who "take time seriously" will find in it a thoroughly serious and consistently temporal standpoint from which to determine what "the philosophy of the present" in the present philosophical situation can contribute to a constructive and consistent theory of reality.
I
There are in this theory three related tendencies, each of which has its distinctive part in the total view. The setting of the problem and many of its characteristic developments are determined by a pragmatic theory of knowledge which Mr. Mead defended in his earlier works and which here, after brief restatement (pages 4-5), is accepted as a basis for what follows. Its influence is apparent (1) in the statement of the philosophic alternatives between which a choice must be made and (2) in the place given to "experience" as the ultimate referent of all knowledge claims.
(1) There are, for Mr. Mead, a whole set of traditional theories, all grounded in a false epistemology, which so interpret the objects to which knowledge refers as to place them "outside experience," not merely in the trivial sense that they are held to be other than the "immediate data of consciousness," but in the "metaphysical" sense of excluding from their permanent and self-contained reality the essential features of that world of common experience within which experiment and verification occur. When such objects are made the unique objectives of knowledge, experience, falling short of such reality, becomes "mere appearance," and the experimental validation that our ideas can in fact receive becomes irrelevant to the transcendent validity they are supposed to claim. In opposition to all such theories, pragmatists have held that knowledge is concerned not with any "antecedent" or "ulterior" reality, but
(xiii) rather with the direction of activity in shared experience, and with objects in so far as they organize such activity around meaningful objectives of cooperative action. The reader will find, for example, in Mr. Mead's criticism of space-time as a "metaphysical" reality, that he has carried this familiar issue into the philosophy of science without essential modification of the basic dichotomy.
(2) Mr. Mead maintains that a view of this second type must defend its own ultimacy by holding that experience itself, as simply "there ... .. had" or possessed, has no ulterior reference-that there is no significant philosophical problem about the status of experience as such. And since consciousness, with its use of ideas and meanings, does involve such problematic reference, he further holds that consciousness is a development within experience, and not the final or inclusive form of our relation to it. This wider experience, the world which is "there" and with respect to which the problem of an external or transcendent reference does not arise, is foundational to Mr. Mead's view, and is assumed throughout.
Pragmatism as a philosophy has tended to encourage the activities of its protagonists in two directions. In many cases the polemical interest has been paramount, and here the sins and "pseudo-problems" of the epistemologist have come in for much attention. It seems not unjust to observe that while this criticism has played an important part in some earlier controversies it remains in itself too exclusively occupied with the very problems whose legitimacy it denies to offer great promise for the future. But when pragmatists have followed their enthusiasm for experience to the fact itself, and have called attention to the detailed structure of some objects of knowledge, their contributions have been outstanding. It was with this constructive pragmatism that Mr. Mead was primarily concerned. His approach
(xiv) to special problems of social psychology and of the history of scientific ideas was not at all that of a philosopher seeking ammunition for a special thesis; it was that of the painstaking, first-hand investigator, viewing the subject in its concrete detail and allowing it to tell its own story.
This second tendency in his thought is particularly manifest in his devotion to "research science" and to the objects and methods it presupposes. His insistence, against phenomenalism and relativism, that the material objects employed in physical experiment are neither to be reduced to sense-data nor dismissed as mere appearances is so emphatic as to call for defense against the suspicion that he is "hankering after the fleshpots of materialism." (page 148) It is not materialism but common sense, together with a healthy respect for the detailed process of physical discovery as opposed to sweeping generalizations, that governs his discussion of scientific objects in the third Supplementary Essay. And his own work in social psychology has its unique value as a contribution to the social sciences quite independently of any particular philosophic interpretation that may be placed upon it.
The third and perhaps the dominant strain in these lectures, however, is derived neither from pragmatism nor from research science, but forms part of that philosophy of nature which will no doubt be regarded as the characteristic contribution of the 1920's in Anglo-American philosophy. Alexander's Space, Time and Deity was the pioneer work in this transition from problems of knowledge-of "realism," "pragmatism" and "subjectivism"-to speculations about space and time and finally to metaphysics and the categories. The development of Whitehead's philosophy, from its early preoccupation with "sense data" and logical constructions, through the Concept of Nature with its 41 objects" and "events," to the daring speculations of Proc
xv) -ess and Reality sums up in striking fashion the tendency of the period. And the principles of this development are natural enough. The various theories of knowledge that were phases of the "revolt against dualism" all sought to objectify those features of experience which a dualistic philosophy had regarded as merely subjective. This meant that what had previously been allocated to "mind" must now find its place in "nature" and that nature must be reconstructed accordingly. And finally, in the extension of relativity to the objective world, a criticism was required of the notions of "perspective," "time-system," "sociality" and the like, in order to show how these notions, purified of their merely subjective connotations, could take their place in a system of categories as the pervasive characters of reality. The Philosophy of the Present is an important contribution to this great undertaking.
To show that "social and psychological process is but an instance of what takes place in nature, if nature is an evolution" (pages 173-4) is the expressed intent of this later phase of Mr. Mead's philosophy. The principles of pragmatism are by no means abandoned, but they are generalized to include the whole process of evolution, and within this more general development distinctively human or conscious phases of "sociality" and relativity are to be understood as special cases of a process that takes all nature for its province.
Older problems recur here, but with a difference. The superficial reader may find in Chapter One only a revival of a too familiar controversy about our knowledge of the past. But in fact the theory is grounded not in special requirements of knowledge or verification but in what it means to be past and on the status of emergence and novelty in natural processes. The most original feature of these lectures is the daring extension of "the social" into what Is at least a philosophy of nature, and, if the name did not
(xvi) offend a pragmatist, might also be called a metaphysic. The pity is that Mr. Mead
did not live to carry through the project which Chapters Three and Four serve at best to
outline. Whether it could have been carried through consistently within the limits of a
pragmatic theory of knowledge is a further question. My own view is that
"sociality," like Whitehead's "feeling" is too essentially subjective
a category for this metaphysic of process with which they were both concerned. But Mead,
like Whitehead and Alexander , ventured as a pioneer into that territory of change and
relativity which contemporary philosophy must certainly explore, and his chart of the
country, incomplete as it necessarily is, may well prove of permanent value to those of us
who follow, though less adventurously, the routes that have been opened for us.
II
The subject-matter of the lectures may be divided as follows. There is a theory about the nature of time and emergence, a theory about relativity and its social implications, and a synthesis of these in a theory of emergence as social and of sociality as a character of emergent evolution. In this section and the two following these topics are considered in this order.
The present is to be taken as the locus of reality. This means, I take it, that to consider anything as real is to consider it as existing in, or in relation to, a present. Now what, in relation to any present, is the status of its past? This is not to ask what it was when it was present, for then it was not past and did not stand in that relation by virtue of which it acquires the status of pastness. The past of an event is not just an antecedent present. This is Mr. Mead's main thesis throughout, but it does not often get as clearly
(xvii) expressed as in the following statement. "When one recalls his boyhood days he cannot get into them as he then was, without their relationship to what he has become; and if he could, that is, if he could reproduce the experience as it then took place, he could not use it, for this would involve his not being in the present within which that use must take place. A string of presents conceivably existing as presents would not constitute a past." (page 30)
The distinctive character of the past in its relation to the present is manifestly that of irrevocability. As conditioning the present, as making its occurrence possible, the past must have been of a determinate character. It expresses the settled condition to which the present must conform and without which it could not have been what it is. And this means not merely antecedent occurrence, it means causal determination or, as Mr. Mead tends to put it, the "carrying on of relations." The past is that out of which the present has arisen and irreversibility-the appeal might here have been made to Kant-- has its critical value in terms of such conditioning.
Yet this carrying on of identical relations is never the whole story. The doctrine of emergence asks us to believe that the present is always in some sense novel, abrupt, something which is not completely determined by the past out of which it arose. A present, if it is really new at all, will have in it an element of temporal and causal discontinuity. Recent quantum physics has taught us to believe that such indetermination is quite consistent with rigorous physical analysis. (page 17) But how is it possible to reconcile this novelty with scientific determinism?
The answer to this question supplies the basic principles of the theory. Before the emergent has occurred, and at the moment of its occurrence, it does not follow from the past. That past relative to which it was novel cannot be
(xviii) made to contain it. But after it has occurred we endeavor to reconstruct experience in terms of it, we alter our interpretation and try to conceive a past from which the recalcitrant element does follow and thus to eliminate the discontinuous aspect of its present status. Its abruptness is then removed by a new standpoint, a new set of laws, from which the conditions of our new present can be understood. These laws could not have been a part of any previous past, for in the presents with relation to which those pasts existed there was no such emergent element. To assume a single determinate past to which every present must wholly conform is to deny emergence altogether. But at the same time, to treat the emergent as a permanently alien and irrational element is to leave it a sheer mystery. It can be rationalized after the fact, in a new present, and in the past of that present it follows from antecedent conditions, where previously it did not follow at all. As the condition of the present, the past, then, will vary as the present varies, and new pasts will "arise behind us" in the course of evolution as each present "marks out and in a sense selects what has made its own peculiarity possible." (page 23)
Is there any contradiction between this novelty of the past and its essential irrevocability? None at all, for the two apply in different senses. The irrevocable past is the past of any given present, that which accounts for its occurrence. Its determining conditions will be ideally if not actually fully determinable in the present to which it is relative. But when a new present has arisen, with emergent facts which were really not contained in the former present, its determining conditions, hence its past, will of necessity be different. The determinism then holds of the past implied in any present, the emergence in the relation of one such present, with its past, to another.
This hypothesis, in Mr. Mead's opinion, has two main
(xix) advantages. In the first place it accounts for the attitude of the research scientist toward the data he is describing, an attitude otherwise highly paradoxical. The laws of any science do in a sense reconstruct the past out of which its given elements have arisen. So much is assumed in the establishment of determinate laws, and for the scientist to suppose that the present did not follow from the past in terms of the laws he had established would be to deny their adequacy to the data they interpret. So far as it goes in any field science tends to be deterministic. Yet this "following of present from past is wholly relative to the data on which the interpretation is based, and the scientist looks forward with equanimity to a new interpretation, and hence a new past, relative to the emergent data which the future will supply. And this combination of relative determinism and future reconstruction which holds for the research scientist, holds also, on this theory, for the nature he is describing.
Secondly, this view is in harmony with the emergence of novelty in experience, and the reorganization of experience in terms of it. This is the theme of the first Supplementary Essay. Even those who "bifurcate" nature most relentlessly must admit that in experience data may appear as intrusive elements in a world which has, in its present constitution, no place for them. They stand in contradiction to that world as currently interpreted and set a problem for reconstruction. To interpret the world exclusively in terms of the conditioning objects which a given period has isolated as the permanent background of becoming is to relegate novelty to a merely subjective experience. But in the case of data relevant to his own problems a scientist makes no such bifurcation. Rather does he treat the data as provisionally isolated in a world that does not now account for them, but as candidates for admission to a reconstituted world which
(xx) may make the facts previously rejected the very center of its interpretation. So it was, for example, in the status of the Michelson-Morley experiment, first in its relation to classical mechanics, then in the theory of relativity. Within experience new objects are continually arising and a new present reorients the settled conditions of an older era in the light of its discoveries. And if the past is this orientation of settled conditions with respect to present data, the past does empirically change as evolution proceeds. This empirical description has been a part of Mr. Mead's philosophy for many years. The novelty of the present account arises from its correlation with the structure of temporal reality as such, in the relation of a determining past to an emergent present.
At this point the reader will be all too likely to object that it is clearly only our viewpoint or interpretation of the past that has altered here. The past in itself has surely not been changed by the new way in which we have come to look at it. This however is just the distinction that Mr. Mead's whole analysis attempts to supersede. For a temporalist philosophy the past "in itself" is not a past at all-its relation to the present is the ground of its pastness. And this relation is empirically a causal one. If becoming is real that causal relation is never such as to exclude emergence. When emergence occurs a new perspective of the past, a new relatedness, will ensue -- a relatedness which is a natural fact about the new situation, though it could never have occurred in the old. And what is here new is precisely the way in which what, in the older present, was merely novel and abrupt has become a part of the world of causal objects, hence a part of the past through which they are supposed to operate. The relatedness is real, and the perspective past it generates, the past of the new present, is the real past of that present, and only for a present can the past be real at all.
(xxi) Mr. Mead's most objective version of his thesis occurs in Chapter Two, in the contrast between the past as relative to a present and the past as absolute. He holds, especially in criticizing Alexander, that the past which physics requires is simply the expression of identical relations in nature, not an antecedent environment, existing in itself and giving rise, in its isolated being, to all subsequent reality. Space-Time in Alexander's metaphysic seems to be a mathematical structure taken out of relation to the physical data it interprets and transformed, in all its abstract independence, into a metaphysical matrix from which all the complexities of nature are somehow to be derived. This, on Mead's view, is just what the past "in itself" would be, a conditioning phase of natural process turned into a metaphysical substance. The search for such a substance is not ruled out for those whom it may concern. But the research scientist cares for none of these things.
We seem, then, to have discovered in temporal transition itself a unique sort of relativity, and a set of what we are now to describe as "temporal perspectives" or "systems." Each such system is distinguished by the temporal center from which its relation to past events is organized, and they differ primarily in this, that what is external, contingent, hence "emergent" for one such standpoint will "follow from" and hence be reflected in the past of another. How are such perspectives related, and how does the transition from one to another take place? The answer can be given only when we have inquired into the nature of relativity, and into its social implications.
III
The problem of relativity appears in its most crucial form, for Mead, in the theory of
physical relativity. The
(xxii) "Minkowski space-time" as even the most casual reader may gather, is his major preoccupation. The form of the problem is characteristic, and, whatever one may hold as to its solution , clearly raises an issue that philosophers who deal with this subject must face. What the theory of relativity has apparently done is to undermine the ultimacy, in scientific investigation, of the world of material objects in terms of which experimental physics has been accustomed to verify its theories. That world, as Mr. Mead argues in the first Supplementary Essay, is by no means a world of sense data or of private impressions. It is the world of solid macroscopic objects that can be measured and handled in common, objects whose permanent and relatively isolable characters can be identified under varying conditions, and mainly by the appeal from sight to touch, from distant to contact values, in what Mead calls the "manipulatory area." Lovejoy's devotion to the properties an object possesses "within its own spatio-temporal limits" furnishes eloquent testimony to the importance attached to such entities by common sense and its epistemological prophets. These are ultimate, standard properties in the sense that they provide the unquestioned criteria by which the dubious parts of experience can be tested. Of course, an epistemology that makes all experience a problem will find these factors as dubious as any, but the research scientist has not been much troubled by such considerations. His "materialism" has not been a godless metaphysics but rather an experimental reliance on contact values in measurement. If these, too, are "merely relative" and if they are valid only in reference to something else never in itself thus experimentally attainable, we seem to have placed our physical standard of validity clear outside the material world. A pragmatist can hardly fail to take account of such a crisis.
Now it seems to Mead that this is exactly what the
(xxiii) doctrine of space-time, taken in a simple and realistic sense, has done. It undermines the authority of the material object and its place in scientific experiment, without putting anything tangible in its place. This is evidenced in three ways. (a) The distinction between space and time is broken down. And for ordinary material objects this distinction is essential. "But from the standpoint of relativity no physical object can be isolated from what is happening to it." (page 144) There is no permanent character in it independent of its changes. Again (b) the values that attach to the newer physical object are not those which a material object can possess in itself, but are relative essentially. "Energy, like space-time, is a transformation value." (page 146) This means that the properties in terms of which we have previously identified our validating objects are variable, not constant, and "the metaphysical question is, can a thing with changing spatio-temporal and energy dimensions be the same thing with different dimensions, when we have seemingly only these dimensions by which to define the thing." (page 79) Now physics has often enough in the past relegated seemingly intrinsic characters to a merely relative status, but here the alteration is fundamental. For (c) it is no longer possible to interpret distance values in terms of possible contact experience or to regard the properties which a thing has where it is as uniquely characterizing it. The space and time values which an object has from a distance under conditions of relative motion will not be identical, even ideally, with those which a measurement of it in its own local space and time units would reveal. Nor can we simply correct the distance values, those given in terms of signals, by those which an observer at rest on the body itself would discover. For his calculations only come out even, when he imputes to us measured values which again would be falsified by experience in our manipulatory
(xxiv) area, that is, with our local time and space standards. Thus, in the theory of relativity, distance experience, in terms of light signals, comes to have an autonomous value not reducible to contact or local values. This has been commented on with enthusiasm by Brunschvicg and with suspicion by Bergson, who reaches the conclusion that imputed times, those determined at a distance, do not really belong to their objects at all.
Mr. Mead reaches no such negative conclusion. He is content to follow the theory whither it leads and to accept space-time for whatever the scientist-as contrasted with the metaphysician-may find in it. Does this mean that we are to treat the measured values of physical objects as "subjective" and to set up-outside the experience in which we measure and manipulate-a new object standing in the same relation to primary qualities as that in which the primary have traditionally stood to the secondary? Spacetime would then be a sort of attenuated material object without material properties. The alternative would be to reexamine that whole relation of experience to its "real" or standard objects of which the problem about space-time is but an instance. Such reexamination is Mr. Mead's contribution to the much argued subject of relativity. Its character can best be illustrated by examples drawn first from the familiar type of social interaction which is to serve as a model for the whole account, next from the physical field in which a scientific verification has normally operated and finally from the theory of relativity itself. In each case it is to be shown that the correction and organization of relative experiences in terms of the "real" objects to which they refer involves not a non-empirical reality to which they must somehow correspond, but rather a way of acting which relates past and future to the present from the standpoint or perspective of its widest social meaning.
(xxv)
There is a vast difference in ordinary social experience between what a man has and what he owns. Possession may be nine-tenths of the law but it is never the whole of it. Yet this further fact, additional to mere possession, cannot be embodied in a purely self-centered experience; it involves a reference to such claims as would be recognized in a court of law. The rights of property are objects of present experience in so far as any individual surveys his situation as an owner, in relation to the claims of others, and of the law, and reacts accordingly. To understand the implications of his conduct from this standpoint he must see them as others see them and must, in consequence, have come to take a socially objective attitude toward his own behavior. The meanings that this relationship confers upon experience are real and important facts about it. But they arise only for an individual who, as Mead would say, can react to his own reactions in the rôle of his fellows, and can take the standpoint thus achieved as authoritative for the direction of his own activity.
Thus to "take the rôle of the other" is to see all experience in a new context, in terms of what it means or portends relatively to the objects-or objectives-which this standpoint defines as central. The more of the past and future such a standpoint commands, the more will it transform experience into the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen and the more, above all, will it enlighten action by giving a present relevance and value to occurrences not literally given in immediate experience. The ordinary function of standard objects is to mediate action by bringing within the range of conscious selection alternatives that only this wider standpoint can encompass. The process of adjustment by which a child learns to play various parts in a social situation and finally to judge himself as a responsible person in the light of the value others would
(xxvi) place upon his conduct, and which his own conscience, acting in their person, now accepts as authoritative, is outlined in the final Essay. It is the key to much that is most difficult, and most original, in the earlier Essays.
The second Essay attempts to extend this account of objectivity as "taking the rôle of the other" to our knowledge of physical objects. The requirements of the situation-if the analogy is to hold good-- will be the following: (1) The meaning to be explained must be such as an individual experience could not possess in itself or in its immediacy; it must arise out of its interaction with external agencies. (2) It must nevertheless be possible for the individual to distinguish in experience between what is merely his own contribution and what on the other hand can be identified with the action of the other party to the transaction. If he is to react in the rôle of the other he must be able to identify some activity of his own through which and in terms of which he can act in its person. (3) The standpoint which he thus achieves must become so authoritative within experience that the meanings data take on in relation to it will be the index of their objective value. Finally (4) experience, as mediated by such meanings, will include the past and future, thus introducing into the present the conditions and consequences of the alternative reactions between which an individual must choose. To bring the conditions of action into the range of conscious deliberation in such fashion that we can direct conduct in the light of them is the goal of this whole development.
In our knowledge of physical things we can trace each of these factors. (1) The distinctive nature of the physical thing, its "having an inside," as Mead puts it, is not a character which our own experience, taken in its individual aspect, can reveal. We do not, for example, first discover an inside to our own bodies and then interpret others on
(xxvii) this analogy. The body is known as a physical thing only in its relation to other physical things. "Genetically the infant advances from the periphery toward his body." (page 119) (2) It is the experience of resistance that provides the necessary external reference. In pushing and resisting things the organism can regard its own activity as identical in kind with that of the thing upon it. Action and reaction are equal and opposite. Thus in resisting the thing we are behaving towards it as it is behaving towards us. The "inside" of the physical thing, what it is for itself and in its own person, is thus what we find in contact experience, in the "manipulatory area." In the case of color, sound and the like there is no such persistent tendency to equate the thinghood of the thing with its effects in experience. (3) If we now assume that what experience would be from the standpoint of such a contact experience-what it is in its own spatio-temporal limits-is its real or standard nature we can judge its more immediate aspects accordingly. It is in leading up to the object as it exists where it is that distance experience becomes significant. We have here a standpoint, a relational focus of meanings, which, if we act in the rôle of the physical thing, becomes authoritative as against other perspectives or standpoints. "Real" shape and size, for example, are determined more correctly in the "manipulatory area" than they could be at a distance. There is some equivocation, I think, in Mr. Mead's use of the term "resistance" both for the deliverance of contact experience itself and also for the authority which such contact values come to have in directing or inhibiting our reactions to the thing. But his main view is clear. There are many contexts in which our experience is involved. The one we accept as a standard will determine the direction of activity and its meanings. It is by seeing the world as it would be for the fully realized values of thinghood that this standard
(xxviii) is in fact applied. (4) The power of the human animal to discover such meanings transforms present experience into a world of objects whose potentialities are the possibilities of action. The scope of such action explains and justifies that transcendence of immediacy which epistemologists have so frequently emphasized and so rarely understood.
The application of all this to the theory of relativity is now comparatively easy, and the reader will follow it in Chapter Four and, in a less complicated statement, in Essay Four in fairly straightforward fashion. Again we have relative values, which, if Mead is right, are essentially social in the sense that they involve a reference, for their meaning, to that which exists outside the "time-system" within which they are reckoned. Again there is a search for something identical that will enable the individual to "take the rôle of the other" and to interpret experience not only from his own standpoint but from that, say, of the man on Mars. But here the range of the generalization has taken us clear beyond the physical object and its value of resistance. We are in the realm of a "generalized other," of an attitude which enables us to pass from any physical perspective to any other, occupying each -- or any-in passage, and identifying in each only that which is in fact identical, the formula that justifies the transition from one to another. We have, then, in space-time, not a curious and unattainable new sort of object, but a generalization of that social objectivity which extends the generous capacity of seeing ourselves as others see us to include the views of our stellar neighbors. In this context of meaning the world of space0time has its locus and function. Nor does its importance discredit the physical object when the latter is viewed within its own proper limits. The conclusions of scientific research must not discredit the objects with which it operates and
(xxix) through which its conclusions are tested. But if space-time is understood not as
the metaphysical superior of the physical object-the "reality" of which its
relative being is but a "shadow" -- but rather as a further development of that
"community of interpretation" of which the physical object itself is a limited
but highly valuable expression the two are perfectly compatible. We are then able to
accept the theory of relativity as a phase-not necessarily final, of course-in that
process by which man achieves social objectivity through the organization of relative
perspectives.
IV
We are now ready for the most daring development in this theory. Can sociality-so far considered in its specifically human aspect-be so generalized as to characterize the whole course of natural development? We found relativity occurring in nature in the perspectives that emergence implies. And some sort of organization of such perspectives seemed to be required. If this readjustment should turn out-on all levels of development-to be a form of sociality, we should have succeeded in linking up sociality with the whole time process and putting mind back into nature with a vengeance. Thus "to present mind as an evolution in nature, in which culminates that sociality which is the principle and form of emergence" (page 85) is the final goal of the Carus Lectures. This culminating hypothesis took shape, if I can judge from my conversations with Mr. Mead, only while the lectures were being written. It remains the most suggestive and, as it stands, the most difficult part of his philosophy.
The sociality of emergence, and the evolution, through emergence, of sociality into higher and more complex objective expression are the parallel themes of this hypothesis.
(xxx) (a) In what sense is emergence social? In emergence, as in the theory of relativity there is a plurality of "systems," that is to say of distinct standpoints, and we have the consequence that the "same" object must be in different systems at once. The system of physical relations is one thing, with its own organization of experience; the system of vital relations includes, as essential, elements which, from the merely physical standpoint, are external and contingent. And neither of these can be reduced to the other, since the vital really is emergent and hence additional to the merely physical while the physical is, in its scientific standpoint, determined exclusively by relations in which uniquely organic features of the world have no place. And yet the living animal belongs to both orders of relation and is in both "systems" at once. Consciousness is additional and irreducible to mere organic behavior, yet a sensation is at once an organic event and also implicated in that system of meanings which, in objectifying the possible future activity of the organism, is the distinctively conscious aspect of experience.
Sociality is "the situation in which the novel event is in both the old order and the new which its advent heralds. Sociality is the capacity for being several things at once." (page 49) But in its dynamic aspect it is more than this. The novel event must not merely be in two systems; it must adjust this plurality of systematic relations in such fashion that "its presence in the later system changes its character in the earlier system or systems to which it belongs" (page 69) while its older relations are reflected in the new system it has entered. It carries over the old relations, yet in its emergent novelty it reflects back upon the older world the uniqueness of its new situation. "So Rousseau had to find the sovereign and the subject in the citizen and Kant had to find both the giver of the moral law and the subject
(xxxi) of the law in the rational being." (52) And so, to complete the picture, the monarchical system from which Rousseau's citizen and Kant's rational being emerged could never be quite the same again after their advent. The readjustment of the new social order to the old, of that which was carried over to that which emerged, is "sociality" in its most general sense. That it fits in neatly with the "reconstruction" of experience on the intrusion of novel elements as described in Section II will be evident.
The theory of relativity has been found consistent with "sociality" in its narrower sense. In Chapter Three Mr. Mead attempts to bring it under the more general formula he has now achieved. The "emergent" here will be that which appears only for some special perspective or "time-system" and is additional to that identical "carrying on of relations" expressed in the space-time structure common to the whole set of such perspectives. Motion is relative to the time-system selected, and the increase in mass which follows from increased velocity will occur only where the requisite motion occurs. And this "emergent" motion changes a physical character of the object-its mass-in that time-system within which it occurs. The analogy seems to Mr. Mead so obvious that he interprets more orthodox instances of "emergence" in terms of this one. "Emergent life changes the character of the world just as emergent velocities change the characters of masses." (page 65)
Now the body that moves in one time-system is as truly at rest in an alternative system-it is as much in the one as in the other. And its character in either is only adequately grasped when we understand its status in the other as well. Thus the relativist can explain the Fitzgerald contraction and its physical consequences only by assuming that the physically valid results reached in alternative time-systems will not in general coincide, and that each is to be seen
(xxxii) therefore as relative, as requiring the recognition, as equally legitimate, of its alternatives. In this sense, that the physicist must be able to place himself in either perspective, the theory does indeed approximate the pervasive form of sociality as already outlined, and it is possible to refer to an increase in mass as "an extreme example of sociality." (page 52) To understand this increase as relative, as dependent on a special time-system and "emergent" for space-time as such, we must see the event in question both in the system in which the increase occurs and in that in which it does not and regard the event as genuinely a member of each.
When Mr. Mead goes beyond this to argue that the actual measurement of an increase in mass in one system requires the use, in this system, of space and time values derived from an alternative system (page 52 ff.) and hence that the two systems "cease to be alternatives" (page 54) the discussion becomes very involved and, if I have not misunderstood it, would seem to me mistaken. He could hardly, I think, have intended to retain it in its present form. But the main thesis is not necessarily compromised by the inadequacy of its detailed application. And the main thesis is this: The abruptness of emergent process is reflected in a plurality of relational systems irreducibly distinct yet so mutally (sic) implicated in "passage" that an object, belonging to two such "systems" at once will import into each a character with which its presence in the other has endowed it. The process of readjustment in which the object maintains itself in each system, through being also in the other, is sociality.
(b) How does sociality evolve? Since Mr. Mead holds that "the appearance of mind is only the culmination of that sociality which is found throughout the universe" (page 86) he naturally distinguishes between the common prin-
(xxxiii) -ciple of this form of emergence and the special distinction it achieves in what is, so far as we know, its highest expression. With the common principle of sociality we are now familiar. The distinctive character of mind or consciousness is best seen in its contrast with the merely organic behavior from which it has emerged. "Primarily living forms react to external stimulation in such fashion as to preserve the living process. The peculiar method that distinguishes their reactions from the motions of inanimate objects is that of selection. This selection is the sensitivity of the living form. . . . The conscious animal carries selection into the field of its own responses.... Life becomes conscious at those points at which the organism's own responses enter into the objective field to which it reacts." (pages 71-3)
What it means to respond to one's own responses we have already seen. The relations in which the environment stands to our reactions are its meanings. To respond to such meanings, to treat them, rather than mere immediate data as the stimuli for behavior, is to have imported into the world as experienced the promise of the future and the lesson of the past. Meanings are now the very essence of what an object really is and in seeing it in terms of its meanings, in reacting to what it can do to us under crucial or standard conditions, we are bringing organic sensations into a new and emergent context. The human individual is alive and also conscious. His conscious behavior organizes his sensations-in themselves mere organic reactions-into qualities and meanings of things. This new place in a system of meanings alters the import of the sensation. Yet such behavior is dependent on the vital interactions from which it has emerged and the dependence of the thought on sensation carries over into the conscious system the reflection of its organic conditions. In reacting to the meaning of his sensations the individual is in both systems at once.
(xxxiv)
The highest level of conscious experience is, of course, that in which the individual can apprehend meanings in their fullest generality, and can thus command so wide a variety of standpoints toward his world as to isolate that which is common to all and would hence be valid for any rational individual. This is the rôle of the "generalized other," and the meanings which the sciences find in the world are those which so impersonal a standpoint will reveal. And yet it is just in this impersonality of standpoint that the individual becomes a "person" -- a real member of the community of rational beings. To participate in the life of the community he must see himself as a participant and must respond to its claims and responsibilities as his own. In its person he can survey the "perspectives" which individual attitudes engender and can relate them all to the demands of the common purpose in which they are equally involved.
There is, clearly, a notable difference between that general "sociality" in terms of which an animal, by simply being both material and alive is "several things at once," with the resulting consequences of such systematic plurality, quite independently of any consciousness of the situation, and the more special situation in which an individual, by "taking the rôle of the other" can see himself from different standpoints and can make the correlation of these standpoints a part of the meaning of his world. If Mr. Mead has succeeded in portraying the latter situation as a natural "emergent" development from the former his major task is accomplished.
The argument returns at the end, as it should, to its point of departure. It is in a present that emergent sociality occurs. And we can now see that such a present is no mere moment of time, arbitrarily cut out from an otherwise uniform "passage of nature." A present is a unit of natural becoming; it is the period within which something temporally
(xxxv) real can happen. What has been and what may be have their focus and actualization in a present standpoint and it is from such a standpoint that creative intelligence, transforming the novelty of emergence and the fatality of mere repetition into a measure at least of meaningful development, brings to articulate and self-conscious expression the pervasive form of natural process. It is as the scene of such process that the present is the locus of reality.
So original a hypothesis will naturally raise doubts and generate formidable problems. This, however, is not the place to consider them. The theory must speak first of all in its own person. In this introduction I have tried simply to "take the rôle of the other" and, interpreting the theory from its own standpoint, to bring together some of its main ideas, in such an order and relation as Mr. Mead might himself have adopted had he lived to complete the important work he had undertaken.
ARTHUR E. MURPHY.
