Personal Being

1. Personal Being Rom Harré 05.10.13 D.M.B.

2. The dust-cover to Harré’s book provides a succinct rationale for its relevance to this module:- In this book, Rom Harré explores the radical thesis that most of our personal being may be of social origin. Consciousness, agency, and autobiography are the three unities which make up our personal being. Their origin in childhood development and their differences in different cultures are explored. Nevertheless, despite the overwhelming influence of social environment on mental structure, individual identity is a central facet of Western culture. How is the formation of such identity possible? Rom Harré ends with the suggestion that personal identity derives from the complementary powers of human beings both to display themselves socially as unique and to create novel linguistic forms making individual thought and feeling possible.

3. In other words, Harré is a social constructivist, and of the psychologists that you are most likely to study in other parts of your course, his ideas are closest to those of Lev Vygotsky. What is unique about Harré’s theorising is that it attempts to address the nature of personal identity, and does so within a framework of moral thinking about social agency and social responsibility.

4. Harré divides our experience into two basic components which although related to one another are not of the same kind. His ‘Primary Structure’ is our material and social world in which embodied ‘persons’ act and communicate with one another. Each person is a unique embodiment existing in a specific space/time location, and in this place constitutes a unique source of agency, including communication, i.e., each person has an identity, a biography, and a capacity to act. His ‘Secondary Structure’ derives from this. It is the structure of language which confers on each speaker an implicit theory of reflective selfhood. In each society, a communal language impose a theory of what a self is, what it can do, and in particular, what it is responsible for.

5. One might summarise this theory in the following way:- Our lived experience is constructed from language, and our language is constructed from our forms of life. However, there are various ways in which one must be prepared to modify these apparently direct linkages. Although a mode of life may change, the common language may be slow to develop an appropriate discourse because of other constraints – perhaps a former vegetarian tribe now has to survive by meat-eating, but its religious and even legal structures remain built upon the assumption of universal vegetarianism for a long time because of the property laws that had previously been developed. Similarly, although new psychological understandings may indicate severe limits to the assumption of universal rationality, that society’s legal system may have developed around the assumption of absolute rationality and absolute moral responsibility, making any relaxation in the ideas of criminal culpability hard to tolerate.

6. Which is all to say that one must anticipate inertia and constraint operating between the three layers: reality, the language that represents it, and the modes of life that require and maintain the particular forms of language existing within a particular society. This state of affairs makes a study of isolation and solitude particularly intriguing. In the case of isolation one deals with a person who for one reason or another has become separated from normal modes of life. As a consequence, their common language begins to seem empty and meaningless. In the case of solitude the individual voluntarily absents themselves from normal modes of life in order to begin a new one that is usually simpler than before. By doing so they hope to formulate a modification of their common language - one that is ‘purer’, more ‘truthful’, etc.

7. So much for my overview, which you may use as a guide but should not quote in your assignment. What follows is a set of slides containing a selection of direct quotes and diagrams taken from Harre’s book which you can select from for your first assignment if you want to.

8. Harré starts by explaining his perspective on theoretical psychology, but remember, the book was published in 1984. In his view there are two ‘images’ of human psychology:- ‘men, women, and children are high-grade automata, the pattern of whose behaviour are thought to obey something very like natural laws. … It is assumed that there are programmes which control action and the task of psychology is to discover the ‘mechanisms’ by which they are implemented’ (p. 4). On the other hand, ‘Lay folk, clinical psychologists, lawyers, historians and all those who have to deal in a practical way with human beings tend to think of people as agents struggling to maintain some sort of reasoned order in their lives against a background flux of emotions, inadequate information, and the ever-present tides of social pressures’ (p. 4).

9. Re-statement of his perspective (from p. 8): ‘Contemporary psychology is made up of two antithetical strands. First, there is the thoroughgoing individualism of the cognitivists who conceive of human action as the product of individual mental processes.’ (He identifies, Freud, Piaget, and Dennett in this strand.) Secondly, there is the collectivism of the social constructivists, who conceive of human action as the joint intentional actions of minded creatures whose minds are structured and stocked from a social and interpersonal reality.’ (He identifies Wittgenstein, Vygotsky, and Mead.) Both of these present particular theoretical difficulties, and although we have decided to call Harré a social constructivist, he does claims that his theory manages to overcome most of these.

10. Harré offers these critiques:- ‘For individualists, the deepest problem is how intersubjectivity is possible and their great philosophical problem is that of our knowledge of other minds; for collectivists, the deepest problem is how individuality is created and sustained in so thoroughly social a world. For the former, individual being is given and social being constructed; while for the latter, collective being is given and personal being is an achievement’ (p. 8). On the Cartesian distinction between subjective and objective experience According to Harré, this involves running together two distinctions. To describe an experience as subjective may mean that it is recognised from a particular point of view (conceptual, moral, perceptual) currently entertained by a person, but it may also mean ‘within one consciousness’, i.e., a ‘self’. The latter cannot be shared, conceptually, but the former can. Disregarding these distinctions leads to statements to the effect that points of view are ‘embedded in individuals’ and therefore renders them beyond the understanding of others.

11. According to Harré, then, if Cartesianism is adopted psychology becomes both speculative and individualistic. Before the widespread adoption of information-processing models the subjectivity of individual experience in this muddled sense led either to phenomenological meditation or to behaviourism, but even when information-processing ideas were introduced the muddle remained. These computational ideas derive from automata studies and are simply assumed to apply to traditional subjective individualism (see Boden, M. (1996) Artificial Intelligence London: Academic Press). In Harré’s view, then, the default position should be instead that reference to modes of reasoning and systems of belief are retained unless a special reason can be given for the adoption of an approach that assumes people are automata.

12. So, Harré’s argument is that if there is to be a psychology in which we can still recognise and represent personal being, personal powers, and person-centred attributes, the transition from culturally specific common understandings to this new science of thought and feeling must preserve these aspects of being a person. In other words, if we feel the need for a special kind of explanation for the experiences of isolation or solitude, collapsing back onto untheorised notions of ‘brain-washing’ will not do. We either have to incorporate these experiences within our new science of thought, or else make a strong theoretical case for these experiences being such as to turn individuals into automata.

13. This leads Harré to identify three ‘personal unities’ that come from our common language and which must feature in his new science of psychology: consciousness, agency, and identity. He indicates that most psychological theories fail to conserve these three in their scientific discourses, and therefore describes them collectively as ‘subpersonal’ psychologies (is this true of Vygotsky, Piaget, or Freud?). This loss of common psychological understandings from theory is nothing new, and Harré gives three examples: Medieval morality plays, Freudian psychodynamics, and Cognitive psychology. The first turns psychological attributes, such as anger and envy, into ‘actors’ within a play competing for domination of Everyman’s actions; the second turns them into mental ‘forces’ battling for control of the ego; and the third turns them into mind modules which have a greater or lesser propensity to be switched on or off by certain environmental cues.

14. The Social Foundations of Mind ‘For me, a person is not a natural object, but a cultural artefact.’ Harré’s theory proposes: ‘A person is a being who has learned a theory, in terms of which his or her experience is ordered. I believe that persons are characterised neither by their having a characteristic kind of experience nor by some specific genetic endowment. They can be identified neither phenomenologically nor biologically, but only by the character of their beliefs. There are two primary realities in human life: the array of persons and the network of their symbiotic interactions, the most important of which is talk. I begin with the presumption that privatization and personalization of part of that network is thought. These realities are irreducible to one another, but each is the necessary condition for the possibility of the other. The network of symbiotic interactions appears to people in the form of two secondary realities; these are the social systems of material production, and of the creation and maintenance of honour and value, both of which are mediated by meanings and stabilized by ritual.’ (pp. 20-21).

15. Harré’s new psychology: the Social Foundations of Mind (pp. 20 - 24). ‘The fundamental human reality is a conversation, effectively without beginning or end, to which, from time to time, individuals may make contributions. All that is personal in our mental and emotional lives is individually appropriated from the conversation going on around us and perhaps idiosyncratically transformed. The structure of our thinking and feeling will reflect, in various ways, the form and content of this conversation. The main thesis of this work is that mind is no sort of entity, but a system of beliefs structured by a cluster of grammatical models. The science of psychology must be re-shaped accordingly.’ (p. 20). ‘I hope to show that not only are the acts we as individuals perform and the interpretations we create of the social and physical world prefigured in collective actions and social representations, but also that the very structure of our minds (and perhaps the fact that we have minds at all) is drawn from those social representations. At the centre of the argument will be a treatment of the three central aspects of human psychology, consciousness, agency and identity, and above all their reflexive forms, self-consciousness, self-mastery, and autobiography.’ (p. 20).

16. Harré believes that the ‘intimate structure of our personal being’ has its source in a ‘socially sustained and collectively imposed cluster of theories’ (both quotes, p. 21), and this leads him to make this comment on early child development. ‘It has been shown that from their earliest moments infants make demands upon their mothers and other caretakers that provoke the very talk and action from the mother that promotes the kind of development towards personal being implicit in the viewpoint here expounded. If my general thesis is right, each level of sophistication of public – collective activity in which a developing person joins is prepared for, not by a maturing natural endowment, but by the previous level of that interpersonal, public and collective activity. The infant’s apparently native contributions are already emerging from the personalization of the social structure within which it is being established. The outcome of contemporary studies of how development proceeds is a highly socialized theory of maturation, but in my view it is not yet socialized enough.’ (pp. 21-22)