Human nature and the social order

by Charles Horton Cooley

In the literature of the feelings we often find that love and self are set over against each other, as by Tennyson when he says:

“Love took up the harp of life and smote on all the chords with might;

Smote the chord of self, that, trembling, passed in music out of sight.”

Let us consider for a moment whether, or in what sense, this antithesis is a just one.

As regards its relation to self we may, perhaps, distinguish two kinds of love, one of which is mingled with self-feeling and the other is not. The latter is a disinterested, contemplative joy, in feeling which the mind loses all sense of its private existence; while the former is active, purposeful, and appropriate, rejoicing in its object with a sense of being one with it as against the rest of the world.

In so far as one feels the disinterested love, that which has no designs with reference to its object, he has no sense of “I” at all, but simply exists in something to which he feels no bounds. Of this sort, for instance, seem to be the delight in natural beauty, in the landscape and the shining sea, the joy and rest of art—so long as we have no thought of production or criticism—and the admiration of persons regarding whom we have no intentions, either of influence or imitation. It appears to be the final perfection of this unspecialized joy that the Buddhist sages seek in Nirvana. Love of this sort obliterates that idea of separate personality whose life is always unsure and often painful. One who feels it leaves the precarious self; his boat glides out upon a wider stream; he forgets his own deformity, weakness, shame or failure, or if he thinks of them it is to feel free of them, released from their coil. No matter what you and I may be, if we can comprehend that which is fair and great we may still have it, may transcend ourselves and go out into it. It carries us beyond the sense of all individuality, either our own or others’, into the feeling of universal and joyous life. The “I,” the specialized self, and the passions involved with it, have a great and necessary part to play, but they afford no continuing city; they are so evidently transient and insecure that the idealizing mind cannot rest in them, and is glad to forget them at times and to go out into a life joyous and without bounds in which thought may be at peace.

But love that plans and strives is always in some degree self-love. That is, self-feeling is correlated with individualized, purposeful thought and action, and so begins to spring up as soon as love lingers upon something, forms intentions and begins to act. The love of a mother for her child is appropriative, as is apparent from the fact that it is capable of jealousy. Its characteristic is not selflessness, by any means, but the association of self-feeling with the idea of her child. It is no more selfless in its nature than the ambitions of a man, and may or may not be morally superior; the idea that it involves self-abnegation seems to spring from the crudely material notion of personality which assumes that other persons are external to the self. And so of all productive, specialized love. I shall say more of the self in the next chapter, but my belief is that it is impossible to cherish and strive for special purposes without having self-feeling about them; without becoming more or less capable of resentment, pride, and fear regarding them. The imaginative and sympathetic aims that are commonly spoken of as self-renunciation are more properly an enlargement of the self, and by no means destroy, though they may transform, the “I.” A wholly selfless love is mere contemplation, an escape from conscious speciality, and a dwelling in undifferentiated life. It sees all things as one and makes no effort.

These two sorts of love are properly complementary, one corresponding to production and giving each of us a specialized intensity and effectiveness, while in the other we find enlargement and relief. They are indeed closely bound together and each contributory to the other. The self and the special love that goes with it seem to grow by a sort of crystallization about them of elements from the wider life. The man first loves the woman as something transcendent, divine, or universal, which he dares not think of appropriating; but presently he begins to claim her as his in antithesis to the rest of the world, and to have hopes, fears, and resentments regarding her; the painter loves beauty contemplatively, and then tries to paint it; the poet delights in his visions, and then tries to tell them, and so on. It is necessary to our growth that we should be capable of delighting in that upon which we have no designs, because we draw our fresh materials from this region. The sort of self-love that is harmful is one that has hardened about a particular object and ceased to expand. On the other hand, it seems that the power to enter into universal life depends upon a healthy development of the special self. “Willst du in’s Unendliche schreiten,” said Goethe, “geh nur im Endlichen nach allen Seiten.” That which we have achieved by special, selfful endeavor becomes a basis of inference and sympathy, which gives a wider reach to our disinterested contemplation. While the artist is trying to paint he forfeits the pure joy of contemplation; he is strenuous, anxious, vain, or mortified; but when he ceases trying he will be capable, just because of this experience, of a fuller appreciation of beauty in general than he was before. And so of personal affection; the winning of wife, home, and children involves constant self-assertion, but it multiplies the power of sympathy. We cannot, then, exalt one of these over the other; what would seem desirable is that the self, without losing its special purpose and vigor, should keep expanding, so that it should tend to include more and more of what is largest and highest in the general life.

It appears, then, that sympathy, in the sense of mental sharing or communication, is by no means a simple matter, but that so much enters into it as to suggest that by the time we thoroughly understood one sympathetic experience we should be in a way to understand the social order itself. An act of communication is a particular aspect of the whole which we call society, and necessarily reflects that of which it is a characteristic part. To come into touch with a friend, a leader, an antagonist, or a book, is an act of sympathy; but it is precisely in the totality of such acts that society consists. Even the most complex and rigid institutions may be looked upon as consisting of innumerable personal influences or acts of sympathy, organized, in the case of institutions, into a definite and continuing whole by means of some system of permanent symbols, such as laws, constitutions, sacred writings, and the like, in which personal influences are preserved. And, turning the matter around, we may look upon every act of sympathy as a particular expression of the history, institutions, and tendencies of the society in which it takes place. Every influence which you or I can receive or impart will be characteristic of the race, the country, the epoch, in which our personalities have grown up.

The main thing here is to bring out the vital unity of every phase of personal life, from the simplest interchange of a friendly word to the polity of nations or of hierarchies. The common idea of the matter is crudely mechanical—that there are persons as there are bricks and societies as there are walls. A person, or some trait of personality or of intercourse, is held to be the element of society, and the latter is formed by the aggregation of these elements. Now there is no such thing as an element of society in the sense that a brick is the element of a wall; this is a mechanical conception quite inapplicable to vital phenomena. I should say that living wholes have aspects but not elements.