Donald T Palmgren (lonewolf@utkux.utcc.utk.edu)
Wed, 8 Jul 1998 19:22:27 +0100
Sorry this is slow comming.
On Wed, 17 Jun 1998, Bodvar Skutvik wrote:
>
> DONNY.
> About the society "bug" that stop you from accepting the SOTAQI
> idea fully. You wrote:
>
> > The intellectual level comes after the social one, it's dependent on society, but society
> > is not dependent on it. But you do need to have S-O thinking (or
> > "consciousness" which really says the same -- I/This, me/not-me) in
> > order to have a society. Fish, ants and birds don't have societies (except in
> > a loose, basically metiphorical sense).
>
> The last time we discussed it I dropped the fish school, bird flock
> "society", but I simply fail to see the necessity of S-O
> consciousness for societies to function, and there is a slight
> contradiction in your statement. Correctly enough; social
> value patterns are NOT dependent on Intellectual ones, but to require
> S-O thinking ..in order to have societies... says the opposite (If
> you accept that S-O consciousness is Intellect!!!)
That's not my contradiction; that's the bug in your theory I was
indicating.
>
> > a societies ability to exist depends first and formost on the ability of it's
> > individual constituants to diferentiate between social entities and
> > non-social entities -- minded-beings and mindless-beings, or (perhaps
> > put best) people and (mere) things.
Let me put this at greater length.
1st, at the biological level, my cat can tell itself from a ball
that it plays w/. This is a primative I-This sense. The beginings of
natural consciousness. But my can't doesn't distinguished very well
between (knowing)subjects and (known)objects. If something small and
mouse-like moves (like that ping-pong ball) she pounces. As I've said
before, a grown person who serously talks to his stuffed teddy bear is
bound for the funny farm.
Now in every society the fundimentil qualifyer for "personhood"
(membership in that society) is the ability to tell the people from the
non-people... or, the count's from the no-count's. Up until recently black
people were no-count's in most societies (outside of their own). They were
non-people, or almost-people. Black skin was(is) what Erving Goffman calls
a "stigma." Women also have a long history of being not-quite-people --
of being stigmatized. Now Goffman is clear that it is not a simple
count/no-count division. Rather you have a continum of stigmas from a
prostetic leg to a criminal record to being mentaly incompetant. (He even
says that an un-stigmad person is probably an ideal, never a reality.)
Here we are seeing something considerably more developed than my
cat's I-This consciousness. This is what I think really deserves to be
called "S-O thinking" proper. A real subject is someone who has legal
rights, moral athority (knows what is proper and improper behavier), and
logical athority. He can make scientific, objective observations, for
instance; Billy the Basketcase can't. Billy's observations are always
suspect (because he claims to be Jesus Christ).
Your SOTAQI theory, Bo, still has a lot of psychological resadu --
in which we think of the mind or the ego as this internal, "purly mental"
entity. I think you need to de-psychologize. The best book I know for
dumping that Cartisan Mind specter is Goffman's *Frame Analysis*. I think
your thinking could benifet a lot from a careful reading of Goffman.
To repeat what I've said before: The mind is not a thing! Rather
it is a set of (moral/social) capacities; 1st and formost of which is
the capacity to recognize other minds.
And to quote Goffman: "The Self is not a biological thing, whose
fate is to be born, mature and die, but rather is a dramatic effect [drama
-- as in, the stage; actors assuming a role for an audience] arising
difusly from the social [moral] situation [ie. my self is not "in here"
it's in the relm of public interaction], and the centeral question of
which, the crucial concern, is whether it will be credited or discredited
[ie. be a count, a person, something you talk WITH, or be a no-count, a
mear thing, something you talk ABOUT]."
And what determins that? Morality, naturaly. Social values.
I think you have a shaky idea of what the intellectual value
patterns are. They're nothing like the Cartisan Mind or the Freudian ego.
TTFN (ta-ta for now)
Donny
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