Human nature and the social orderCooley, Charles Horton
Science
Human nature and the social order
Cooley, Charles Horton
Individualism; Social psychology; Sociology
As regards one’s self in relation to other people, I shall have more to
say in a later chapter; but I may say here that there is no view of the
self, that will bear examination, which makes it altogether distinct, in
our minds, from other persons. If it includes the whole mind, then, of
course, it includes all the persons we think of, all the society which
lives in our thoughts. If we confine it to a certain part of our thought
with which we connect a distinctive emotion or sentiment called
self-feeling, as I prefer to do, it still includes the persons with whom
we feel most identified. _Self and other do not exist as mutually
exclusive social facts_, and phraseology which implies that they do,
like the antithesis egoism _versus_ altruism, is open to the objection
of vagueness, if not of falsity.[27] It seems to me that the
classification of impulses as altruistic and egoistic, with or without a
third class called, perhaps, ego-altruistic, is empty; and I do not see
how any other conclusion can result from a concrete study of the matter.
There is no class of altruistic impulses specifically different from
other impulses: all our higher, socially developed sentiments are
indeterminately personal, and may be associated with self-feeling, or
with whatever personal symbol may happen to arouse them. Those feelings
which are merely sensual and have not been refined into sentiments by
communication and imagination are not so much egoistic as merely animal:
they do not pertain to social persons, either first or second, but
belong in a lower stratum of thought. Sensuality is not to be confused
with the social self. As I shall try to show later we do not think “I”
except with reference to a complementary thought of other persons; it is
an idea developed by association and communication.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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