Abstract
We have attempted to trace the processes of imaginative participation. We have outlined the concepts and constructs of this phenomenon as operative in various contexts and their connotations, and in different fields of scientific inquiry. Our examination was conducted on a relatively high level of abstraction, but its consequences are obviously of a great practical importance.
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References
In: K.H. Wolff, ed., Essays on Sociology and Philosophy. New York 1960, pp. 325–340.
M. Weber, Economy and Society. Totowa, N.J. 1968, pp. 1111 ff.
If one looks for a parallel in the field of dramatic creation, G.B. Shaw’s charming Saint Joan (1923) is a brilliant artistic account of the interference of a charisma with the traditional exercise of authority and power. At the same time, Shaw’s play contributes to illustrate the fact that there always is a difference between what the leader says, and what the people think and feel the leader says. Perception, H.S. Sullivan (Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry,New York 1953) reminded us, is an interpolated act.
Even if Mead is sometimes inclined to subscribe to the “oversocialized” conception of man, P. Pfuetze misinterprets Mead’s conclusions in stating that “man has to be made in the image of society, he becomes its function, the instrument of impersonal ends”, etc., and equating Mead in this respect with Marx (Self, Society, Existence, New York 1961). Pfuetze’s is a double mistake: neither is Mead’s conception of man basically an oversocialized one nor is that of Marx, especially if we take his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, a contribution of a markedly humanistic orientation, into full consideration.
E. Faris, The Nature of Human Nature and Other Essays in Social Psychology. New York 1969, pp. 7, 8, 9, 18.
The Philosopher G. Ryle put it correctly when stating: “A person’s knowledge about himself and others may be distributed between many roughly distinguishable grades yielding correspondingly numerous roughly distinguishable senses of ‘knowledge’… There are respects in which it is easier for me to get such knowledge about myself than to get it about someone else; there are often respects in which it is harder. But these differences of facility do not derive from, or lead to, a difference in kind between a person’s knowledge about himself and his knowledge about other people. No metaphysical Iron Curtain exists compelling us to be forever absolute strangers to one another, though ordinary circumstances, together with some deliberate management, serve to maintain a reasonable aloofness Similarly no metaphysical looking glass exists compelling us to be forever completely disclosed and explained to ourselves, though from the everyday conduct of our sociable and unsociable lives we learn to be reasonably conversant with ourselves” (G. Ryle, op. cit. chapter VI. In H. Morick, ed., op. cit., pp. 230, 231)
The present author prefers the generic term “cognitive theorists” to the less adequate “social nominalists” (in philosophical terms), and “social idealists” (in ideological terms) currently used in radical criticism.
J. Horton, “The Fetishism of Sociology”. In J.D. Colfax and J. L. Roach, eds., Radical Sociology. New York 1971.
Ibid.
R. Lichtman, “Social Reality and Consciousness”. In J.D. Colfax and J. L. Roach eds, op. cit.
P. Pfuetze, op. cit.
J. Ortega y Gasset, op. cit., p. 169.
Anna Freud’s (Defense Mechanism and the Ego, New York 1966) contribution to the elaboration of “ego psychology” (H. Hartmann, E. Kris), with more explicitly formulated relations between the ego and the external, mainly social, world, is undeniable.
K. Homey, Self-Analysis. New York 1942, passim.
A.S. Clayton, Emergent Mind and Education. New York 1943.
T.H. Grafton, “Religious Origins and Sociological Theory, in: Amer. Sociol. Rev. 1941/10. Grafton, following Dewey, Cooley and Mead, sees the ”supernatural“ as the ”other“, which man creates to respond to it.
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© 1975 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Baumann, B. (1975). Conclusion. In: Imaginative Participation. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-4871-1_10
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