Abstract
This discussion asks at which point in our lives we become social. The foundation for this study is Marcus’ conception that a common substance between humans and the rest of the universe indicates one living organism. Because this organism’s substance is pantheistic, it rationally orders the world. Marcus describes the universe as a single community due to the cooperative ordering that results between the things in it. I compare this singular universal community to Mead’s definition that a co-constitution between individual organisms and surrounding environment marks a singular social mechanism. I note how both Marcus’ and Mead’s conceptions incorporate human and nonhuman elements into a worldly collegiality. Despite this similarity, Marcus’ community involves a ladder of entities and social hierarchies based on relative degrees of rationality. Humans ultimately hold a greater socialized status and more collective responsibilities than other creatures and entities. In response, I consider whether a more unconditional sense of Marcus’ universal community is possible by incorporating Mead’s theory of a wholistic systemic plurality without hierarchies.
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Notes
- 1.
The insight that babies in the womb can hear, and discern differences between, sounds originating from outside the womb has been explored extensively in prenatal psychology and health scholarship. Ruth Fridman gives an account of such studies of hers since 1971 in “The Maternal Womb: The First Musical School for the Baby” (Fridman 2000). Likewise, in determining how babies in the womb shape the information that they receive from outside it, for Elinor Ochs and Bambi Schieffelin language development could commence before birth. In redefining at which stage a baby is a “language novice,” they argue that “the intertwining of language, society, and culture may begin in the womb” (Ochs and Schieffelin 2014, 8).
- 2.
Eleanor Maccoby (1992) provides a “historical overview” of interpretations of the role of parents in the socialization of children. In this research, Maccoby traces most early positions to two major schools; behaviorism, and psychoanalytic theory. Her work also recognizes the transition in more recent literature to “microanalytic” analyses of parent-child interaction.
- 3.
This reading of a universal sense of singularity and unification is not exclusive to the work of Marcus among Stoic thinkers. Plutarch reports in On Stoic Self-Contradictions that Chrysippus’ perspective involves “references to Zeus, fate [and] providence and stating that the cosmos is one and finite, being held together by a single power” (Plutarch, 1035b, in I&G, 9). Chrysippus attributes the capacity to appreciate this unity to scientific studies and one’s consequent acquisition of knowledge, holding that “none of this can be believed except by someone who is thoroughly immersed in physics” (1035b–c, in I&G, 9). The mechanics of this physics is too complex for the requirements of this chapter. It nevertheless relates to an impression of the continuity and unity of nature as Inwood explains, via the Stoic “claim that the forces which give each kind of entity its characteristic powers are all modifications of the same material principle, pneuma” (Inwood 1985, 21).
- 4.
Robin Hard’s translation describes this as how all “things are distinct and yet interfused and bound together by a common sympathy” (Marcus Aurelius 2011, 4.27).
- 5.
- 6.
It is not that Durkheim refuses the role of the body/corporeality in his sociology. In The Rules of Sociological Method he states that individual manifestations of collective conditions “depend to a large extent on the organopsychological constitution of the individual” (Durkheim 1938, 8; my emphasis). Further evidence of his awareness of this “organic dependence” is in Durkheim’s claim (albeit isolated) that there is no need to separate an ideal milieu from the body (Durkheim 1974 (1898), 28). These points possibly motivate commentaries such as Nick Crossley’s (2005) that there is not a mind|body dualism implicit to Durkheim’s sociology. Despite these qualifications, the organic bodily element of the individual is nevertheless largely absent from Durkheim’s structural sense of socialization.
- 7.
Mead’s Mind, Self and Society (1934) most extensively details his social behaviorist theory.
- 8.
The interpretation of “monistic” characteristics in this aspect of Mead’s work is not rare. One of the more interesting and recent examples of such a reading is Hans Johnsen’s assertion that in Mead we encounter a “particular blend of monism and social constructivism” (Johnsen 2014, 37). In exploring the notion of knowledge as a “natural resource,” Johnsen affirms that for Mead the social mind is not simply an aggregation of individual minds that a culture manufactures in subsequent ways. Mead’s sense of the social mind is rather of singular relation with individual minds.
- 9.
- 10.
Obbink (1999) also unpacks the two definitions of the Stoic city; one as a place of localized habitation, the other as the entire universe.
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Johncock, W. (2020). Is It Natural to Be Social? Marcus Aurelius and George Herbert Mead on Socialization. In: Stoic Philosophy and Social Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43153-2_11
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