• kudos
    373
    Here is an idea that I was thinking about, this is not a full discursive analysis but just some loose thoughts. I was reading a small section of Hegel’s Encyclopedia Vol 1, the part of the text where the concept of ‘I’ comes about as a type of amalgamation of all universals is of particular interest. After thinking about this a little, it seems to be itself the point of departure between the sociological and individual perspectives of cultural theory.

    “When I say I, I mean to refer to myself as this individual, indeed as this determinate person. Actually, however, I do not thereby say anything specific about myself. Everybody else is I as well, and although in denoting myself as I, I mean myself, this individual being, I simultaneously utter something completely universal. 'I' is pure being-for-itself in which all that is particular has been negated and sublated; it is the ultimate, simple, and pure element of consciousness. We can say that I and thought are the same; or more specifically, I is the thinking as someone thinking. What I possess in my consciousness is for me. I is this void, the receptacle for anything and everything, that for which everything exists and which stores everything within itself. Every human being is an entire world of representations buried in the night of the I.”

    -Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline, Part 1, Science of Logic


    Regarding the two perspectives themselves, when we see something from the sociological perspective – a phenomena, an action, a movement– our aims are usually to describe it with respect to motivational factors of cultural values and beliefs represented within a social group, whether it be by geography, shared interest, or similarity. On the other hand, there is the concept of the individual perspective relating to the whole sphere of a person’s life as it would appear to them, allowing them to act and express meaning rather than act in themselves. These two perspectives the individual and sociological both seem connected with the divide of what Hegel is referring to by ‘I.’

    “I” in the usual day to day sense as in ‘I walk the dog,’ or ‘I’m feeling sad’ is a concept as close as I can fathom to the individual perspective. When we try to see the world through the individual’s eyes, we think of an individual behaving in this manner; it seems the best way we have for sharing understanding of experience. This is not the individual’s real existence or will but a representation of them, a structure of representations strung together beginning from experience and other concepts and formed into an idea.

    However, ‘I’ in the second sense, in the sense in which Rene Descartes used it, as the self thinking about the self universally, would closely follow the sociological perspective. Once the ‘I’ frees itself from the subjective usage, and begins to become universal and objective itself it forms what is called the sociological perspective. This is not the description of the sociological, which deals with the content or results of that thinking, but is simply the embodiment of the perspectives essential formula. When Descartes emptied his mind of everything and determined what was left, he established the all-inclusiveness of the ‘I’ in the cogito ‘I think, therefore I am.’ If ‘I’ is a thing that thinks, and not necessarily a particular person, then it would be the perspective most fit for making explicit how individual values can vary from person to person. If we were to try and use the individual representations for such a perspective, we would be explaining another’s experiences using the language of our own interests, which would be like trying to explain sense by referring to sense.

    For instance, trying to explain poverty by the thinking of “I can go out and get a job, there’s no reason why someone else couldn’t” tries to explain a concept that has been thought of in terms of social universals through the language of the individual. The individual’s interests as appearing to him or her are given a separate treatment since they are a different language or structure of thinking more closely tied in with particulars, experience, and intuition. Something could very well be completely true and complete to the individual, and also false in the other sense. Using a sociological perspective we might feel inclined to rebut, ‘factors influencing hiring in low income neighborhoods can be significantly affected by social status, race and ethnicity.’ If we were to explain the individual’s actual representations in this way, we would wind up in a similar conundrum but limiting their world only to a system of laws that operate on them, denying him/her their realness.

    There seems to be at least two easy to identify categories as instruments of these forces: a historical and narrative. Both of these are interpretations of reality and go farther than to describe, but are actually ways in which sociological factors exert themselves through determinations of cultural power.

    Sociological sentences sometimes sound like, ‘The work conveyed the sufferings of a man exiled by his nation during the height of the civil war.” To the individual themselves, this statement would sound like an exterior cause, something they’d had nothing at all to do with. Alternatively, we could say, ‘The people spoke up, representing two hundred years of anger and subjugation at the hands of their oppressors.’ And we can extrapolate that this is contrary to the concept of the act as it appears to either the oppressor or the individual acting, but rather represents universalization of the individual and their actions. This type of perspective is more or less a type of historical style.

    We could also think about life to a certain extent this way, as separate from the things that we think and feel in the moment of acting, and find some type of meaning in this that cannot be found elsewhere. This occurs in the form of a story or narrative, and sometimes this has influence on the individual’s actions themselves. Mostly talking in this way would sound descriptive of the individuals psychic causality. For example, "My life is about helping people affected by droughts," would be an example whereby the actions that went into producing this universal concept did not bear the meaning but there was a narrative to hold them together. In this narrative way, attitudes, values, and personal emotions are mixed between the individual and sociological concepts moving towards an ultimate directive.
  • ernestm
    1k
    I think you are really advocating the Jungian model of the self, which has three parts: individual consciousness, individual unconsciousness, and collective unconsciousness. Individuals can only choose part of their experience to represent themselves, and that part becomes the persona, or 'mask' which they prefer to 'wear.' The rest, which may or may not conflict with the self image chosen as persona, is pushed down into personal unconscious, or 'bag.' If there is a conflict between the personal unconscious and persona, the conflict must be pushed deeper into the bag to avoid emotional trauma. The deeper it is pushed, the more it becomes part of the universal unconscious shared by all people.

    One should note, if you are familiar with the Freudian model, that the Jungian model does not consider 'subconscious' as valid conceptually. The unconscious comprises not 'suppressed' thoughts, but thoughts which should rationally occur, but don't.

    The result, in the Jungian model, is that when many connected people adopt similar persona to each other, the resulting unconscious emotional trauma results in social conflicts with other groups that the individuals do not understand, or sometimes even recognize as happening, even though people outside the connected network of people with similar personae consider their behavior as obvious insanity.

    Anyway, sorry to hear you were recently made unemployed. What is now happening is that 30 million recently unemployed people are competing for a narrower number of job opportunities. The big companies used corona to divest themselves of corollary 'dead weight' they had accumulated during a long period of expansion, and now anticipate strong profits, so the stock market has already resurged to the level it was in October last year. They will need to start hiring more people again in more numbers, because gains realized from layoffs are short lived, but it's too soon to know how long it will be before reported employment numbers reach the record levels they were previously, if ever.
  • kudos
    373
    If there is a conflict between the personal unconscious and persona, the conflict must be pushed deeper into the bag to avoid emotional trauma. The deeper it is pushed, the more it becomes part of the universal unconscious shared by all people. One should note, if you are familiar with the Freudian model, that the Jungian model does not consider 'subconscious' as valid conceptually. The unconscious comprises not 'suppressed' thoughts, but thoughts which should rationally occur, but don't.
    Thanks for the response. I didn't quite understand what you meant by this, as I haven't really ever heard anything in Freud's work to suggest that subconscious thoughts were real comprehensible thoughts. Could you explain that point a little more?

    Your reference to Jung sounds essentially analogous to this case, supplanting a description of self knowledge for philosophical knowledge. I do not see modern psychology as in any manner replacing Hegel's point of view on conceptualization of the self. I assume that it was not meant in this way, but couldn't tell if it were a subtle point you were making.
  • ernestm
    1k
    In Freud's model, they are real thoughts, but not comprehensible. In Freud's view, the thoughts operate in the subconscious (increasingly in the id as people mature) to produce behaviors in the individual by themselves.

    In the jungian model, the thoughts should be rationally thought, but as soon as a stimulus would be expected to provoke them in the consciousness, the persona blocks the thought entirely.

    The thought does not occur in the individual at all, but the thought remains, in the Jungian model, in the imagined individual unconscious, and more or less part of the universal unconscious, depending on the amount of emotional conflict that the notion would cause if it were thought consciously.

    Then the unconscious provokes emotions in the individual that the individual cannot fully explain.
  • kudos
    373
    Certainly there is an element of losing one's self or losing identity in attempting to define an individual existence according to their place in a type of universal web of consciousness. It would be sort of like trying to seek perfection, or attempting to fully realize something beyond capability. I do not agree that they are selectively psychologically-driven processes (social and individual perspectives), though certainly they are well informed by psychology.

    Psychology is an empirical science, and thus can describe and analyze our behaviour, but it cannot fully be used to understand meaning. That's why I say that yes, the concept of the self or 'I' is maintained through deterministic processes, but what it is not is any type of explanation for our social phenomena. I think being a science, it is more useful for explaining anthropological forces. It is obviously essential for analyzing the motivations of the individual. Trying to integrate this method into collective society presents many difficulties based on the diversity of conditions. You could though, as physicists are prone to do attempt to create a theory to go with certain observations, but a theory is just that and not really a complete explanation.
  • ernestm
    1k
    well its a frequent mistake to think that science attempts to define truth. Science is the process of testing a model to determine its predictive success. there is no necessary connection between the elements of the model and the elements of reality. In many obvious cases, there is a direct correspondence, but when modeling the immaterial, or in scientific terms, 'abstractions,' then there need be no correspondence between the predictive model's elements and physical reality. As long as the model is successful in predicting events, it is a useful model. Most frequently models simplify descriptions of reality, such as modeling bulk matter without considering individual atoms in newtonian physics.

    When predicting people's experiences and behavior, the model is describing intrinsic events, and there need not be any physioligical structure or pattern of neurons firing that correspond with the abstractions of the model at all.

    It does not ultimately matter whether the physical world is an illusory manifestation of the mind, as per Descartes demon or not, as long as the model's predictions correspond with observed events.
  • kudos
    373
    I suppose we ought to differentiate a model that works on the basis of pure logic, and one that is built upon a narrative that tries to offer an explanation and is, as Hegel puts it, finite and determined. That’s more or less what I was defining to be the ‘narrative’ versus ‘historical’ of the sociological/individual. The idea that values can be expressed as pure determinations themselves or as a possible explanation, and both are either believed or desired to become reality.

    Take the issue of abortion. One might say, “60 million dollars were generated from the industry last year,” another might say, “what about X women who were forced into pregnancy.” Both carry respective cultural values though the content of the second tells a narrative of women who occupy such and such circumstances, and its variable of power is intertwined with already-established emotional structures in society. The first claims mostly to fact and logic, though it has discursive meaning in it’s context.
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