Cooley’s

1. Cooley’s Human Nature & The Social Order Part I Presented by Tina Quicoli

2. Introduction • Cooley’s theory is both one on human nature and social order. • For him, human nature does not have content and meaning superior to the social order. • Human nature mirrors in each person the social order in which they act out their lives. • The imaginations that people have of one another are the solid facts of society. • Language supplies society with a self-understanding. Social communication is fundamental to selfhood. • Language allows us to see ourselves as others see us, so that we can address ourselves as others address us. • The locus of society emerges through our experiences in meaningful communication. • Without an imagery of self or a common consciousness society would doubt that it exists. • Society is mental for Cooley. That is, it exists in the minds as the contact and reciprocal influence of certain ideas called I.

3. The self has three principal elements: 1. The imagination of our appearance to others. 2. The imagination of judgment of our appearance by the other person. 3. Some sort of self feeling such as pride or mortification. • Cooley believes that society is an affair of consciousness. • He describes three types of consciousness: self consciousness, social consciousness, and public consciousness. • One’s self-consciousness allows them to reflect on the ideas about their self that are attributed to the other. • We exist in our imagination of them. It is only in the imaginations that others have of us that we are able to affect them.

4. Society and the Individual • When our lives begin two elements of history are drawn upon, the heredity and social. These elements merge together to create a new whole that ceases to exist as separate forces. • Society and the individual are not separate phenomena, but are collective and distributive aspects of the same thing. • When we speak about society we think about the general view of the people, and when we speak of the individual we disregard aspects and think about them as if they were separate. • The human mind is social, society is mental, and society and the mind are aspects of the same thing. • The imagination is the naïve expression of a socialization of the mind that underlies all later thinking. • The mind lives is a perpetual conversation. The impulse to communicate is an inseparable part of thought. • “The mind is not a hermit’s cell but a place of hospitality.”

5. To imagine is to be come real in a social sense. A person is real only though imagining an inner life that exists in us. That is, all real persons are imaginary. • The personality can be described as a group or system of thought associated with the symbols that stand for them. • Society may then be said to be a relation among personal ideas. • The individual and society must therefore be studied in the imagination. • The imaginations that individuals have of each other are the solid facts of society. • Thus, the object of study is an imaginative idea or group of ideas in the mind.. • A social person is a fact in the mind, which may be observed there.

6. Freedom • The individual has organic freedom, which is worked out by cooperating with others. The individual cannot simply do things independent of society, they must function in their own way, but they have to play the game as life brings it. • Freedom may be defined as the contrast between what man is and what he might be as out experiences of life enable us to imagine. • Freedom may be thought of as the individual aspect of progress; the individual and the social order. • Freedom can exist only in and through a social order. • The notion of freedom is in accord with a general or vague sentiment. It is the notion of fair play, of giving everyone a chance. Nothing upsets us more than the belief that someone or some class does not have a fair chance. • Therefore, in our view of freedom we believe that we have a right to.

7. Defining the I • The word self refers to the first person. It can be expressed through words such as I, me, my, mine, and myself. • The I is a fact like other facts. The I means feeling or its expression • The feeling of the self may be regarded as instinctive. • We are born with the need to assert ourselves, but whether we do our not or not depends on the opportunities offered to us in the social process. • The meaning of the I is learned just as other words of emotion and sentiment are learned. • This feeling of the self undergoes differentiation and refinement just as any other sort of innate feeling. • In common speech, I usually refers to opinions purpose, desires, and claims. • It should be noted that my and mine are more the names of the self. However, the I refers more to Miscellaneous possessions.

8. A Social Self • The social self is any idea, or systems of ideas that are drawn from the communicative life, which the mind takes to be its own. • The I of common speech has meaning that includes some sort of reference to other people. • It is doubtful if it is even possible to use language without thinking of someone else. • It may then be concluded that what we call me, mine, or myself, is not something separate from general life, but rather it is both general and individual. • We care for it because it is the part of the mind that is living and strives to impress itself upon the minds of the others. • The intense self-consciousness regarding it is combined with instinct or experiences that connects it with the thoughts of others. • We bring the I into the social world and we put our self-consciousness into it.

9. Discussion Questions 1) Consider the agency structure debate or Alexander’s distinction between individualistic and collectivistic theories… Where does Cooley’s theory fall? 2) Do you believe we have the self-feeling that Cooley describes? Is this self-self feeling an important notion? What do you think Cooley means when he says that the self-feeling is in part an instinct? 3) Does Cooley’s theory of the self rely on a nonrational element or faith?