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Thinking about Social Life

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Thinking about Social Life

Lloyd E. Sandelands

2003

University Press of America, Inc.

Lanham, MD
Contents

Preface v

Acknowledgements vii

Chapter 1 Introduction 1

In the Image of a Tree

A Philosophical Challenge
Further Preliminaries
A Look Ahead

Chapter 2 Love 15

Poetry
Puzzles
Love a Phase of Social Life
Love a Moment of Social Life

Chapter 3 Play 35

Innocence Lost
Puzzles
Play a Phase of Social Life
Play a Moment of Social Life

Chapter 4 Individuation 53

Images
Puzzles
Individuation a Phase of Social Life
Individuation a Moment of Social Life
 Chapter 5 A Concept of Social Life 67

Images
Lives and Feelings
Form Sometimes Felt
Form Before and Beyond Structure
Summary

Chapter 6 Individual and Society 95

The Individual and Society Problem

Unpacking the Problem
The Problem in New Light
Social Life in the Balance
A Final Note

Chapter 7 Mind and Body 111

The Mind and Body Problem

Unpacking the Problem
The Problem in New Light
Social Life in the Balance
A Final Note

Conclusion 127

Thinking about Social Life

Whither Individuals?
Art and Living Explanation
Living for the Future
In the Image of a Tree

Notes 141

Bibliography 155

About the Author 163

Index 165
Preface

A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods when one of them
falls to the ground. He doesn’t seem to be breathing. His eyes are
rolled back in his head.

The other guy whips out his cellphone and calls 911. He gasps to the
operator: “My friend is dead! What can I do?”

The operator, in a calm soothing voice, says: “Just take it easy. I can
help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.”

There is silence, then a shot is heard. The guy’s voice comes back on
the line. He says, “O.K., now what?”

This book is about the truth in jest—not the truth of a heavy

meaning conveyed lightly, but the surprising truth of human nature. In
the moment of a joke our living mind dissolves in a body-shaking
laugh. In the moment of a joke we are no more alone, but allied with
others in a greater life. The joke is a consoling unity against a divided
dividing life. The truth in jest is that modern ideas that separate mind
from body and separate self from society are just that, ideas. The truth
in jest is that these modern ideas are fundamentally mistaken. We are
one in ourselves and one among others. And we laugh.
This book is a work of philosophy. It is about how we should
think about social life. It is about the concepts needed to create a
coherent and scientifically verifiable understanding of social life. Like
a great many works of philosophy, the book is dominated by an image,
of which it is a growth and detailing. This image is just that of a tree.
The book finds that our human social life takes the form of a tree—it is
a growing branching development that culminates, at its farthest
reaches, in individual leaves. This form of a tree is no metaphor. It is
not a case of seeing social life as a tree. Social life is a tree. For this
reason, and with an obsession that may border on pathos, the book
begins with an image of a tree, ends with an image of a tree, and in
between returns constantly to an image of a tree.
This book is an argument addressed to social science. The book
says that social science thinks about social life the wrong way.
Whereas social science has been a study of social physics (a study of
material individuals that interact in time and space) it must become a
study of social life (a study of the vital forms and feelings of an
inherently social species). The argument is not new; it has been made
before, often passionately, but without lasting success. In hopes of
helping the argument “stick,” the book makes a philosophical case for a
concept of social life that can serve as a basis for scientific study. This
concept of social life is founded on an analysis of three fundamental
dynamics: namely; love, play, and individuation. This concept of
social life is substantiated empirically by the manifest forms and
universal principles of growth of social life. This concept of social life
is substantiated philosophically by its usefulness in coming to terms
with two longstanding conceptual problems of social science: the
problem of relating individual and society and the problem of relating
mind and body. Finally, this concept of social life is substantiated
pragmatically by its advice for how we should think about ourselves
and act with others to nurture and protect our social life.
Chapter 1

Introduction

Mankind, fleet of life, like tree leaves, weak

Creatures of clay, unsubstantial as shadows,
Wingless, ephemeral, wretched, mortal, and dream like.
---- Aristophanes, 414 BC.

What a puzzle Aristophanes opens for us when, looking around

him, he notices that the solid fact of “mankind” is made up of fleeting,
insubstantial, ephemeral creatures. Aristophanes, like poets for
centuries, captures in just a few lines a thorny and troubling aspect of
human life. We are a kind of creature, a universal sisterhood and
brotherhood of humankind, living out the similarities of human
existence all over the planet. We participate in the life of the stock,
revel in its long history and project forward its many futures. And yet,
at the same time we are each our own package of humanity—we live
lives of our own, create expressions of ourselves, vividly experience
our own mortality. Individually, we are our own life. Our actions
matter, and combined our actions give force to social movements and
societies of all kinds. We are Aristophanes’ tree leaves, each beautiful
and full of color and activity and life, and yet profoundly of the tree,
with only an ephemeral existence beyond its solid trunk and reaching
branches.
This book is a meditation on the leaves and the tree. It grows
from a concern that we are living in an age in which we have become
so fascinated with our own individual lives (with the leaves) that we do
not pay attention enough to the life of the species (with the tree). And,
as a result, we live diminished, unsustainable lives. Writing about our
age, many have noted its narcissism; its pervading selfish concerns for
personal affirmation, for self-aggrandizement, for self-fulfillment, for
amusement, for relief from boredom, for exemption from stifling rules,
for independence, and for sexual satisfaction without commitment.
More and more we live for the moment. We denigrate the past and
invest nothing in the future. And more and more, we live for ourselves
and not for others, not even for our children (Lasch, 1979).
Sociologists complain of lost community and flagging fellow feeling.
Naturalists worry about people’s selfish infringements on a natural
environment that belongs to all. And politicians, educators, and clergy
lament the demise of the family and the loss of its human values. Ours
is an increasingly selfish, rapacious, anti-natural, and intemperate age.
Enamored of the color and movement of our own individual leaves, we
forget that our lives rest on the health of the species tree.
This book implores social scientists to reconsider how they think
about human nature, on the grounds that they, no less than others in
society, are over-fascinated with the leaves and forget the tree. The
need is dire because we depend on intellectuals to keep our human
nature fully in view so that we can act wisely. And this our social
scientists are not doing. Modern economics and psychology, for
examples, make the individual their almost exclusive focus. They
describe and explain how individuals act, think, and feel in relation to
others. While they acknowledge society to a degree, and pay lip
service to effects of “context” on occasion, they do so from a solid seat
looking through a window of individualism. Individuals are said to act,
even if context guides them; individuals are said to think, even if others
influence them; and individuals are said to feel, even if the social world
makes feelings possible. Modern sociology studies the movements and
forms of society, but its methodologies stay tuned to individuals. The
problems and dialogues of current sociologists do not describe the life
of the group and how its forms create and sustain human feeling,
thought, and action. They describe how individual feelings, thoughts,
and actions comprise social movements, race and class conflicts, and a
pervading social ennui. Only anthropology, which today takes some of
its methods from literary studies and practice, comes close to
acknowledging the complexity of human life and feeling. Where it is
involved in revealing how people operate within larger groups such as
cultures, families, or religions, it comes closer to regarding people as
undivided from others and participating in the wholeness of group life.
But alas, even here, ethnography is predicated on the model of
individual psychology, which is to say it assumes willful social actors
motivated by rational self-interests (see O’Nell, 1996, p. 188).
Looking across the social sciences today, one can’t help but
wonder where the tree has gone. It has become passé, if not déclassé,
to speak of human kind or of human nature. There is little talk
anymore about how our species meets the problems nature puts before
it. Within the precincts of evolutionary biology, the idea of a species
life that grows, develops, and adapts itself to circumstances is
considered a folly. Everyone is supposed to know by now that nature
cares not for species but for selfish individuals or, better, selfish genes
(Sober & Wilson, 1998).i And there is little talk anymore about human
universals such as the division of the sexes, or the instinct to play, that
organize and animate human life. Nowadays it is heresy to speak of
universals and, even more, of essentials. Perish the thought that we are
less than master or mistress of our fates. There is no tree, but leaves
only.
We murder to dissect,” wrote the poet Wordsworth. It is just so in
social science today. A prominent biologist writes of maternal love as
a personal investment to revoke if disease or meager resources turn a
child from asset to liability (Hrdy, 1999). A prominent psychologist
writes of sexual love as a marketplace transaction between selfish male
and female reproductive interests (Buss, 1994). Such deliberately
sensational accounts insult common sense. The lucky among us may
remember a mother’s unconditional love, or may lose sight of the
selfish line that divides him/her from a mate. All of us meet groups
daily that act, for ill or good, as no individual would or could. A
newspaper reports a rampage of soccer hooligans in England or a late
night riot of basketball fans in the United States. A history book recalls
the valor of armies in battle. A community newsletter extends thanks
for the quiet kindness of a PTO group, or booster club, or scouting
troop, or a church ministry. Such glimpses of social life are belied by
scientific autopsies of individual lives and times.
Perhaps the surest affidavit that social science today misses the tree
for the leaves comes in temple, mosque, or church. If there is a single
indubitable fact in the variety of religious experiences, it is that of
human unity (literally, human-ity). Call it the brotherhood of man, or
Christ’s church, or Buddha nature, or the I-Thou relation, this oneness
is beyond a social science centered on the individual. For those of
religious sensibility, this oneness is the key to understanding human
life. A social science antagonistic to this certainty disqualifies itself
from the start. As James (1902) wisely observed, religious experience
may lie beyond science’s grasp, but it is too central and too important
to dismiss. Social science not only takes religious experience lightly, it
makes it a pathology. Marx famously dismissed religion as an opiate of
the masses. Freud (1961) derided religion as a neurotic symptom.
Few since have much dared to differ.
Still there is hope for a social science that now and again concedes
a social life older and more fundamental than the individual lives
celebrated today. Years ago, Levy-Bruhl (1926/1985) wrote of
Melanesian Islanders unable to think of persons as individuals apart
from the group. When Melanesians say they are “members” of the
tribe they are not using metaphor, they are speaking a literal truth. The
group is the life. Individuals are an unmanageable abstraction. Years
later, Redfield (1953) distinguished pre-civilized folk societies from
modern civilized societies by moral orders that do not distinguish
persons in the group as independent-minded individuals, and do not
distinguish the group from the realms of nature and spirit of which it is
part. Redfield found that these societies conceive a single natural and
spiritual order in which everything is connected. Even today, Rebhum
(1999) writes about small communities in Brazil in which most persons
go through life never spending time alone. Aloneness is a mark of
tragedy. Here is a society in which persons do not live a substantial
individual life divided from others. Echoing Redfield, Rebhum
documents the way economic changes, movement to cities, and
technology change people’s experiences of connection with others and
necessitate more individual lives. In view of these explorations of
other historical moments and cultures, it is high time we question
whether the individual belongs at the center of our thinking about social
life.

A Philosophical Challenge
Social science ought to be more of a natural science. Its
abstractions ought to be based more on lived experience. We human
beings live in two-faceted world---one physical, made of matter in
motion, and one mental, made of feeling and idea in behavior. The
scientific study of the one we call physics or chemistry or biology, the
scientific study of the other we call economics, sociology, or
psychology.
The physical and natural sciences began with practical concerns.
There were foods to gather, animals to hunt or ward off, clothing to
fashion, and shelters to build. Such concerns called for tools---a rock
shovel, a wood spear, a stone axe, a lever, a brace, a trap, a wheel.
With tools came insights into the workings of the physical world and
ideas about how to act effectively on it. Physics began with axes,
wheels, levers, and pulleys; chemistry with metals, alchemy, and
medicines; astronomy with superstitions about the zodiac, time
keeping, and celestial navigation.
 Though they did not, the social sciences should have begun the
same way, with practical concerns. Certainly, social life poses
problems. There have always been mating pairs to arrange, hunting
and war parties to form, construction crews to gather, divided labor to
plan, childcare arrangements to settle, families to negotiate, and Gods
to propitiate. Yet, though these and other problems called for practical
solutions, they did not lead in the same way to sciences. Instead, they
led to religion and folk-wisdom. The social sciences got their start in
the 19th century in an already scientific world. Psychology, sociology,
and anthropology began, not with practical problems, but with the
project to extend the insights of rational science to the realms of the
psyche and social life. They began by emulating physical science ideas
of matter and motion and by mimicking methods of reductive analysis.
This history of emulation, motivated by what a few wags have called
“physics envy,” may explain why the social sciences concentrate on
individuals and why they chart social life in individual actions and
interactions. This history of emulation, separated from practical
problems of social life, also may explain why the social sciences have
been a poor guide to practice.
Psychology is a case in point. With notable exceptions,
psychology began with ideas of people and behavior that could easily
have been lifted from the pages of a physics textbook.ii Human
behavior was identified with human beings who were in turn regarded
as physical objects in space. Psychology began as psychophysics. Its
first questions, posed by the likes of Weber, Fechner, and Helmholtz,
concerned elementary physical abilities, such as the ability to
distinguish weights, or the ability to discriminate visual or auditory
stimuli at varying levels of intensity, or the ability to perceive distances
in space. From an initial focus on individual physical abilities,
psychology moved to focus on individual perceptions and mental
abilities of memory and reason. Studies by “associationists” such as
Wundt, and later by “introspectionists” such as Titchener, centered on
the contents of individual minds—sensations, feelings, and images
mainly—and attempted to describe the structures and functions of these
contents. Later, and partly in reaction to this largely Continental
psychology of mind, came a distinctively American psychology of
behavior. Led by Watson, the “behaviorists” sought refuge from
ethereal “inside-the-head” experiences of sensation and idea in a
bunker of laws relating observable individual stimuli and observable
individual responses. Psychology again resembled physics—its laws
about stimulus and response took the place of laws about cause and
effect. By the time the sub-field of social psychology began in earnest
some years later, the die was cast. Social behavior was a department of
individual behavior. The “social field,” to borrow Lewin’s influential
phrase, consisted of individuals in interaction. Ideas, feelings, and
actions in society did not reach beyond the flesh envelopes of the
individuals in the social field. Mind and behavior were “social” only
insofar as individual feeling, thought, or action referred to others, or
insofar as they were shared with others.
With psychology, the social sciences share a need for a more
natural concept of social life based not on analogy to physics, but on
our own lived experience and on our own practical purposes. The need
is to go beyond the leaves to embrace the tree, to see how individual
lives express (literally, ex-press, press outward) the life of the species.
The need is philosophic rather than scientific. Philosophy is the study
of meanings. It is the primary discipline that delineates and integrates
ideas for purposes of explanation and understanding. Science is the
study of facts. It is a secondary discipline that objectifies ideas by
coordinating them with experiences that can be shared. Science works
with the ideas philosophy leaves it. Social science today needs an idea
of social life to complement and support its idea of the individual. This
is the main philosophical challenge facing social science and the main
focus of this book.
I have sought a concept of social life before, in two books I now
see as introductory to this one.iii In those books, I saw that social life
takes dynamic forms not centered upon the doings and makings of
individuals. Consider the dynamic forms traced by the sexes. Male
and female are indispensable parts played in a single species life. A
species is an exquisitely differentiated unity in which male character
and tendency answer female character and tendency at every turn.
From the play of the sexes—sometimes inaptly called the “battle of the
sexes”—come recognizable social forms, such as the mating pair,
mother-child bond, family, fraternity, and sorority. Such forms cannot
be reckoned in terms of the actions and interactions of individuals. To
be an individual is to have no sex—an individual can be male or
female. However, to be a male, or to be a female, is to take a certain
non-negotiable part in the life of the species. To be a male or a female
is to be a branch upon a single tree.
In those earlier books, I saw further that feeling is the key to
understanding the forms of social life. Social life is not the sort of
thing we can point to. It is the sort of thing we know intuitively, by its
feelings. In the anticipation of lovers, the focused intensity of a
military unit on alert, the communal feeling of a church assembly, the
steady purpose and resolve of a business, and the patriotism of a nation
in conflict, we know social life. Though commonplace, such feelings
are anathema in social science because they are intuitive and often
indescribable. As Langer (1942) showed, the formal possibilities of
natural language are not sufficient to reflect the fluid dynamism of
feelings. By the same token, the formal possibilities of language are
not sufficient to behold the fluid dynamism of social life. The feelings
and forms of social life are comprised of myriad forces, tensions, and
movements. Language, which unfurls term after term and proposition
after proposition, cannot represent such dynamic forms. Unable to talk
precisely about the feelings and forms of social life, social scientists
talk precisely about what they can—namely, interactions of individual
bodies in space and time. Physics envy is not the only thing to keep
social science from social life; so does language itself.
In view of the limitations of language, and taking Langer’s (1942;
1953; 1967) lead, I turned to symbols with different conceptual
possibilities. Art is a mode of perceptual abstraction expressly geared
to the feelings and forms of social life. The art objects and
performances that pervade social life (in dance, stadium chant,
costume, tavern song, religious ritual, family tradition, or corporate
culture) exemplify its inner workings and thereby present an image of
its feeling and form. These objects and performances are ideas about
the elements and dynamics of social life. To wit, I have described in
detail an American folk dance, called the “Virginia Reel,” that offers an
image of the sexual dynamics of social life (Sandelands, 1998; 2001).
This dance divides a single community into male and female groups
from which individual men and women occasionally leave to pair off in
allegorical dalliances. The dance is a complex interplay of these
figures that symbolizes the sexual life of the group. The dance is a
symbol of social life, the form of which we can see, talk about, and
understand.
However, even before the ink dried on the pages of those earlier
books it was clear that the real work had barely begun. It was one thing
to speak of the difficulties an individual-centered social science has in
explaining social life. It was one thing to find in the example of sex a
compelling social dynamic that cannot be told as a story about
individual persons. And it was one thing to point to art as a way to
communicate things about social life that words cannot say. But it was,
and is, another thing altogether to comprehend the meaning of all that
speaking, finding, and pointing. There is still the challenge of
constructing a cogent philosophy for the study of social life. What is
social life exactly? What is a form of social life? And how can we
know and talk about the forms of social life? With this book, I seek a
more substantial framework of ideas for thinking about social life.
With this book, I seek a more secure basis for social science than the
rational, self-interested individual that begins most social analysis
today. And with this book, I seek to reclaim Aristophanes’ full view of
humanity as leaves and tree together as one.

Further Preliminaries

It is often hardest to be clear about what is most familiar. We

speak of social life all the time—in admiration of the exciting social
lives we imagine for celebrities, in despair of the sadder social lives we
know as our own, and in thrall of the wonderfully familiar social lives
of dogs, or chimpanzees, or even bees. We intuit an essence—a
common form—across these instances, even though we are hard-
pressed to say what that essence is. The familiarity of social life
encourages us to believe it real. Our inarticulateness about it makes us
wonder. We should have mastered it long ago. Why haven’t we?
Social life is an ideal subject for philosophical analysis. It is a fact
about which we are sure. It is a fact about which we do not yet know
how to speak clearly.
Although we cannot yet give a full meaning to the idea of social
life, there are three points to make in preface to prepare the ground for
the conceptual development that follows. I put these points baldly and
obtusely here, but with the hope that their significance will become
clear as the book progresses.
First, social life is a form. ‘Form’ is commonly taken to mean “the
shape and structure of something as distinguished from its material”
(Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, 1979). Think of the forms into
which concrete is poured to make a sidewalk or batter is poured to
make a ring cake. Or think of the forms into which information is put
to file an income tax or to apply for a job. A social form is likewise a
shape or structure into which social activity is poured or put. But
unlike a cake mold or tax report, a social form is not a physical
structure. Rather, it is a dynamic structure or process. A social form is
more like a waterfall than a framework. It is made visible by material
that is temporary and constantly moving rather than enduring and fixed
in place. A waterfall is visible with a continuous movement of water.
It ceases to exist the moment its supply of water is cut off. Likewise, a
social form is visible with continuous activity. Like the waterfall, it
ceases to exist the moment its supply of activity is cut off.iv
However, unlike a waterfall, a social life is not a simple dynamic.
It is an organism. To the idea that social life is a shape or structure, we
must add a second idea of form that it is a “mode of existence, action,
or manifestation of a particular thing or substance” (Webster’s New
Collegiate Dictionary, 1979). The word “mode” is key, because it
connotes an existence that has its own integrity, its own inner logic. A
waterfall has neither integrity nor inner logic. Its visible appearance is
given by brute circumstances. It is a movement of water determined by
exogenous forces and constraints of gravity, wind, temperature, and
topography. A social form, by contrast, is an integral organism. Its
visible appearance is given not only by exogenous forces and
constraints, but also by inner forces that play among themselves. A
social form is an appearance that lives. It has familiar qualities of life,
such as birth, growth, metabolism, reproduction, and death.v And,
behind these, it has familiar dynamics of life, such as division, tension,
balance, coordination, rhythm, and harmony.
A second point, related to the first, is that social life cannot be
described with the analytic categories of whole and part. It is not that
social life is too complex to comprehend piecemeal, but that social life
does not have pieces. Social life is pure form (and form is, again, a
logical principle, of shape or structure apart from substance). The
distinction between whole and part applies to substance, not to form.
Whole and part are different ways that a substance can be seen. On one
way of seeing—that we might call “molecular” or “bottom-up”—we
see a thing in terms of its parts. With the focus on parts, we see the
whole as a composition. On the other way of seeing—that we might
call “molar” or “top-down”—we see a thing as a whole. With the focus
on the whole, we see parts as constituents. Taken together, these two
ways of seeing comprise reductive explanation—the parts explain the
whole and/or the whole explains the parts.vi
Whereas a substance has space and time and can be seen either as a
single mass or as a collection of masses, a social life has no space and
time and cannot be seen these two ways. There is nothing (literally
“no-thing”) to see as a whole or as parts. There is only the form or
shape of activity. Only by keeping this crucial difference in mind can
we comprehend social life. If we do not see social form apart from
substance, we do not see its life. If we see only material “wholes”,
such as a couple, group, tribe, nation, or corporation, and material
persons who are its “parts” (see Sandelands & St. Clair, 1993), we miss
the movement and activity that define life and define form.vii Again, to
emphasize, social forms are logically and empirically distinct from the
material parts and wholes of people and groups.
This second point that life—be it social life or any other life—
cannot be analyzed as a whole made of parts should be one of the
affecting lessons of modern philosophy. All attempts to conceive of
living beings as material wholes made of parts have failed—in some
instances because they included immaterial essences, such as Dreisch’s
‘entelechy’ or Bergson’s ‘elan vital’, in other instances because they
included ideas of process that could not themselves be analyzed.
Whitehead (1925, pp. 196-199) saw into the problem of conceiving life
by comparing it to non-life. Life, says Whitehead, has rhythm.
“Wherever there is some rhythm, there is some life. … The rhythm is
then the life, in the sense in which it can be said to be included within
nature.” “A life-bearing object is not a uniform object. …There is no
such thing as life ‘at one instant’; life is too obstinately concrete to be
located in an extensive element in an instantaneous space.” The
analytic problem is that rhythm is an irreducible form. “The essence of
rhythm,” writes Whitehead, “is the fusion of sameness and novelty; so
that the whole never loses the essential unity of the pattern. … A mere
recurrence kills rhythm as surely as does a mere confusion of
differences. A crystal lacks rhythm from excess of pattern, while a fog
is un-rhythmic in that it exhibits a pattern-less confusion of detail.”
Thus, “a rhythm is too concrete to be truly an object. It refuses to be
disengaged from the event in the form of a true object which would be
mere pattern.” viii Rhythm—the central dynamism and form of life—
cannot be analyzed as an object made of parts because it cannot be
isolated from the milieu in which it is born and maintained.
Langer (1967) extended Whitehead’s idea of rhythm as the
defining feature of life to argue that rhythm (and life) can be analyzed
into parts she called “acts”. According to Langer, an act is an
inviolable, fuse-able, and retrievable unit of activity. It consists of an
initial tension (stored energy) and subsequent modes of meting out that
tension. An act ends with resolution of tension. According to Langer,
rhythm is a dialectical patterning of acts, whereby consummation of
one act prepares the way for a succeeding act. Thus, in the rhythm of
respiration, an act of expanding the lungs induces its opponent act of
contracting the lungs that re-induces the act of expanding the lungs.
Life, according to Langer, is a patterning and play of acts. But what
does it mean to say social life is a pattern or play of acts? The words
‘pattern’ and ‘play’ name unspecified (and unspecifiable) syntheses.
The question is: How do acts comprise a pattern or a play? Langer’s
analysis founders because acts cannot be discriminated as she proposes.
What she calls “acts” are aspects of a single continuous rhythm. As
Dewey (1896) showed, a rhythm only looks like it is made of separate
acts because we cannot discern the common origin and continuities
between them. In his example of the simple reflex arc of physiology—
perhaps the simplest vital rhythm of all—he showed that what looks
like separable component acts of stimulus and response turns out, on
closer analysis, to be a single unbroken and unbreakable rhythm. Acts
cannot be discriminated because rhythms are not actually assembled
from them. Rhythm, again, is pure form. It is not a whole made of
parts.
There are further problems in applying an act-based analysis to
human social life. Even if social life could be parsed into constituent
acts (and it cannot), and even if acts could be assembled into social
forms (and they cannot), this sort of analysis cannot succeed because
people don’t act the way they’re supposed to. As conceived by Langer,
and by scientists who compare social life to computational models of
cybernetic control (e.g., Bateson, 1972; Powers, 1973) or complexity
(e.g., Axelrod, 1984; Yamori, 1998), an act is a unit of activity without
context or meaning. It is pure mechanics and/or pure information. Yet,
insofar as people act at all, they do so in view of the meanings of their
circumstances and with ideas about what they are doing and why.
People are not robots. They do not respond mechanically to others.
They take meaningful action. Meaning makes human action unique
and negates explanations based on mere information or material
causes.ix Here again, in a different way, the act is unsuited to the
analysis of social life.
The third and final point to make in preface, related to the first and
second, is that while social life cannot be analyzed as a whole made of
parts, it can and must be understood instead in terms of its phases and
in terms of its moments. A “phase” is an objective principle of
appearance. It is how a form looks under different objectively
describable conditions. For example, an electric circuit that includes a
tungsten filament housed in a glass bulb appears one way when
completed by a closed switch, and another way when broken by an
open switch. Light and heat are phases of a circuit carrying electric
current. We depend on these phases to light and warm our way in a
dark and cold world. Or for example, the chemical compound of two
parts hydrogen to one part oxygen appears one way at a temperature of
0 degrees Celsius, another way at 50 degrees Celsius, and still another
way at 100 degrees Celsius. One you can drive a car over, another a
boat upon, and the third a plane through. We call one ice, another
water, and the third steam to note that they look, feel, taste, and sound
differently. I will speak in this book of phases of social life to note that
its forms, too, look, feel, taste, and sound differently.
A “moment” is an objective principle of form. It is a condition of
tension, dynamism or motivation established by a play of forces,
tendencies, or evoking conditions. We might see a moment in a
striving or in a trajectory of movement, or in a particular historical or
logical development. We can discern moments in the different
appearances or phases of forms. To return to the example of H2O, its
principal moment is a dynamic tradeoff between two forces acting on
molecules—hydrogen bonding and kinetic movement. Solid ice is the
phase in which hydrogen bonding overwhelms kinetic movement.
Gaseous steam is the phase in which kinetic movement overwhelms
hydrogen bonding. And liquid water is the phase in which there is an
uneasy balance between the two. A moment is thus a configuration of
forces. A moment engenders activity and is expressed in acts, but it not
an activity and not again an act. A moment engenders change and
often growth, but it is not a change and not a growth. A moment is a
principle of potential, of development yet to happen. Finally, although
a moment may be manifest in phases of material activity, it has no
material existence of its own. Again, a moment is a principle of form.x
In the chapters ahead, I focus on the moments of social life to note
particular configurations of forces and action tendencies. Putting the
ideas of phase and moment together leads to a conception of social life
and to a theoretical vocabulary to study social life.

A Look Ahead

There is a lot to think about social life. Social life takes definite
forms. Social forms cohere (they remain intact despite constant
movement, despite constant interior flows of energy and material, and
despite constant external exchanges of nutrients and refuse). Social
forms are born, grow, metabolize, and die. And social forms relate
recognizably to activities and things outside them.
In these pages I seek a vocabulary to think and talk about social
life. In Chapters 2, 3, and 4, I describe three principal moments of
social life. I show how these moments appear as feeling—feeling
being the most important phase of social life in human experience. I
show also how these moments of social life are logically related in an
evolutionary hierarchy.
Chapter 2 deals with love. Love is the first moment of social life
and its first principle of form. Love is division in unity and unity in
division. Without love, no social form can be born, grow, flourish, or
die. To feel “love” is to feel life itself. Love is an excitement of birth
and growth, a gratitude of health and integrity, and a mellow
acceptance of inevitable death. Love is a condition of becoming and
being whole. Although we commonly think love is personal—
something that belongs to us—it is other and much more than that. To
love is to be of the species or group.
Chapter 3 deals with play. Play is the second moment of social
life. Play is fantasy in reality and reality in fantasy. Through play
social forms are created. As an example, play between and within the
sexes is a key dynamic of social life. Males stage contests in hopes of
being chosen by females to mate. Elsewhere, I suggest that sex is the
principal dynamic organizing social life (see Sandelands, 2001). Be
this as it may, play of the kind we see in sex is the dynamic by which
social forms grow and develop. Durkheim (1893/1933) described play
when he explained the division of labor in society in Darwin-like terms
as the “struggle for existence.”xi
And Chapter 4 deals with the uniquely human moment of
individuation. Rooted in play and love, individuation is self in society
and society in self. Individuation is that dynamic of mind whereby
persons become aware of the parts they and others play in social life.
With awareness of society and of the parts played in it comes formal
organization designed to meet local needs. This third moment of social
life explains the unprecedented adaptability of human societies to
circumstance—an adaptability that finds people prospering in
dramatically different environments the world over.
I turn in the center of the book, in Chapter 5, to the central
philosophical aim of defining a concept of social life that can be used
for scientific study. As noted at the outset, there is dire need for
concepts to describe social life as a feature of the species and not of
individuals. Social life is defined as form sometimes felt. This form is
given by the three principal moments of social life described in
Chapters 2-4. This form is found in 3 plainly observed kinds of groups,
that I describe as the ‘open group,’ ‘closed group,’ and the ‘formal
group.’ And this form suggests several principles of growth that I
describe as an initial theory of social life. I end the chapter with a
second look at the basic social science concepts of social structure and
individual to see how they appear in light of the proposed concept of
social life.
With a concept of social life in hand, Chapters 6 and 7 explore its
significance for social science. In particular, I ask how this concept
fares with two of the most fundamental and longstanding problems in
the philosophy of social science. In Chapter 6, I show how the concept
of social life leads us to think more constructively about the so-called
“individual and society” problem. In Chapter 7, I show how the
concept of social life leads us to think more constructively about the so-
called “mind and body” problem. I find that both problems are helped
by an approach to social life focused on form rather than on the
objective individual.
I close the book in Chapter 8 with a brief summary and with
conclusions about how social science can honor Aristophanes’ image of
human life as a tree. I suggest that the proposed concept of social life
compels us to think about social life in a more sound way, encourages
us to see ourselves in a more worthwhile way, and admonishes us to
live with others in a more beneficial way. With the proposed concept
of social life we come to see our profound identity with the tree.
Notes
i
Though a formal definition of species has been elusive for scientists of all
stripes, like the now-famous quote about pornography, we know one when we
see it. Species life means that we are creatures moved together by forces of the
stock. Though it breaks a grammatical rule to say (itself an example of deeply
social species life) it is clear that we are never not social. Species life means
also that there are certain problems of life, such as survival and reproduction,
that are not individual problems. Though many evolutionary theorists dislike a
focus on group-level phenomena, no human being reproduces as an individual
and no human being survives as an individual. A focus on species life indicates
that we are continually participating in the solutions to basic species problems
such as survival and reproduction, whether or not we see ourselves this way or
are conscious of our participation.
ii
Among the exceptions are the notoriously idiosyncratic psychologies of
James and Freud. These psychologies are founded upon the hard rock of
personal sensibility and observation. For this reason, together with the fact
their observations are acute, their theoretical insights remain fresh to this day.
iii
See Sandelands, 1998; 2001
iv
This point recalls the old graduate school exam question of whether or not an
organization continues to exist at the end of the day when its activity ceases and
its people go home? It is an illuminating but not decisive question. Its answer
depends on how one thinks about the interval between evening and morning.
Insofar as the distinctive activity of the organization picks up the next day
where it left off the day before, it can be reasonably asserted that the defining
continuity of the organization remains and that it is the self-same organization
from one day to the next. The case is roughly analogous to our own personality
when we retire for the evening to go to sleep.
v
The distinction between a simple physical dynamic and organism is not easily
sustained. It is not clear where we should draw the dividing line between them,
or indeed if we should draw a dividing line at all. Perhaps what looks like a
distinction is actually an unseen continuity. I offer this distinction only to draw
attention to similarities between social life and lives of other kinds.
vi
It is explanation of meager illumination. Whole and part are related by
definition, not by fact. One does not discover their relation in nature, one
imposes their relation on nature, by how one looks at its substance. Reductive
explanation is a form of superstition—literally, of putting an idea over facts.
To say either that parts “make” the whole, or that the whole “unifies” parts is to
advertise a synthetic (explanatory) relation when only an analytic (non-
explanatory) distinction is implied.
 vii
The novelist, Steinbeck , offers a good example of the distinction between
living form and material wholes and parts that we can apply to our study of
social life:
The Mexican Sierra has 17 plus 15 plus 9 spines in the dorsal fin. These
can be easily counted. But if the Sierra strikes hard on the line so that our
hands are burned, if the fish sounds and nearly escapes and finally comes
in over the rail, his colors pulsing and his tail beating the air, a whole new
relational externality has come into being—an entity which is more than
the sum of the fish plus the fisherman. The only way to count the spines
of the Sierra unaffected by this second relational reality is to sit in a
laboratory, open an evil-smelling jar, remove a stiff colorless fish from the
formalin solution, count the spines, and write the truth. … There you have
recorded a reality which cannot be assailed—probably the least important
reality concerning either the fish or yourself. (1941, pp. 2-3)
Likewise, to concretize and parse social life is to kill it.
viii
According to Whitehead: “The events which are associated by us with life
are also the situations of physical objects. But the physical object, though
essential, is not an adequate condition for its occurrence.” “Life is the rhythm
as such, whereas a physical object is an average of rhythms which build not
rhythm in their aggregation; and thus matter is in itself lifeless” … “In the
physical object we have in a sense lost the rhythms in the macroscopic
aggregate which is the final causal character. But life preserves its expression
of rhythm and its sensitiveness to rhythm.” (pp. 197-8). To this I would add
only that life preserves its rhythm because it is not an aggregation but an
original unity.
ix
See Weber (1949) and Searle (1984) for criticisms of mechanical models of
human psychology. See Sandelands, Larson & Glynn (1991) and Sandelands
(2001) for criticisms of cybernetic and agent-based complexity models of social
life.
x
The concept of moment used here is an analogue to Langer’s (1953) concept
of illusion in art. In her analysis of art, she speaks of the importance of
abstracting the form, of banning from it all irrelevancies that might obscure it
and divesting it of all usual meanings. The “meaning” of art—its significant
form—is the illusion of vitality created by the artist’s arrangement of sensuous
materials. This illusion is pure form, a pure moment of life.
xi
Although Durkheim used the phrase ‘struggle for existence’ rather than the
term ‘play’ to describe this organizing dynamic, his meaning is plain when he
distinguishes his struggle for existence from Darwin’s by noting its “mellow
denouement.” Instead of extinction, losers of his struggle for existence find a
new line of work (often as an employee of the victor) and new struggles. Years
later, Huizinga (1950) would define play in terms reminiscent of Durkheim as a
“cooperative antagonism.”

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