/tag/symbolic%20action%20system

4 quotes tagged 'symbolic action system'

How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves
Author: Paul John Eakin
Publisher: Cornell University Press (1999)
24

In contrast to the unmediated, direct perception of the ecological and interpersonal selves, the reflexiveness that distinguishes Neisser's extended, private, and conceptual selves is much like the 'consciousness of consciousness' that distinguishes Edelman's higher consciousness from primary consciousness. Following the acquisition of language and the entry into symbol-making activity that accompanies it, the child now engages in the 'self-representations' that these modes of selfhood predicate. Development of these selves is normally shaped and fostered in a concerted way at home and school by the adults of the child's immediate culture. These are the selves familiar to traditional autobiographers, who relate the story of the extended and private selves by drawing on their culture's store of conceptual selves.


Beginner's Guide to Revelation: A Jungian Interpretation
Author: Robin Robertson
Publisher: Nicholas-Hays Inc (1994)
215

Jung loved to repeat a story about a Chinese rainmaker which his friend Richard Wilhelm, the translator of the I Ching and The Secret of the Golden Flower, told him was a personal experience. Wilhelm was visiting a village devastated by a drought at a time when they sent for a rainmaker. When the rainmaker - who, as was normal in China at the time, was a Buddhist priest - arrived, he was asked what he would require. He asked only for a small hut to live in at the edge of the village. He then retired to that hut. \r\nAt the end of three days, he came out of the hut and it began to rain. While the people of the village scampered in delight, Wilhelm asked the priest how he had brought the rain. The priest said that when he came to the village, he could feel that it was 'out of Tao'; that is, emotionally disturbed. That made him feel 'out of Tao' as well. So he withdrew to the hut until he was once more 'in Tao'. When he did so, the rain came. \r\nThe goal is to experience life simultaneously as both a personal experience and a symbolic act. This is hard to describe, but it can become normal to look at every action in the day, every person we come into contact with, every event we hear about in the world as symbolic. Outer events seem to speak to our inner needs. Personal experience seems to speak to outer events. Out lives seem synchronous with those around us, for better or worse.


The Denial of Death
Author: Ernest Becker
Publisher: Free Press (1975)
22

When we appreciate how natural it is for man to strive to be a hero, how deeply it goes in his evolutionary and organismic constitution, how openly he shows it as a child, then it is all the more curious how ignorant most of us are, consciously, of what we really want and need. In our culture anyway, especially in modern times, the heroic seems too big for us, or we too small for it. Tell a young man that he is entitled to be a hero and he will blush. We disguise our struggle by piling up figures in a bank book to reflect privately our sense of heroic worth. Or by having only a little better home in the neighborhood, a bigger car, brighter children. But underneath throbs the ache of cosmic specialness, no matter how we mask it in concerns of smaller scope. Occasionally someone admits that he takes his heroism seriously, which gives most of us a chill, as did U.S. Congressman Mendel Rivers, who fed appropriations to the military machine and said he was the most powerful man since Julius Caesar. We may shudder at the crassness of earthly heroism, of both Caesar and his imitators, but the fault is not theirs, it is in the way society sets up its hero system and in the people it allows to fill its roles. The urge to heroism is natural, and to admit it honest. For everyone to admit it would probably release such pent-up force as to be devastating to societies as they now are. The fact is that this is what society is and always has been: a symbolic action system, a structure of statuses and roles, customs and rules for behavior, designed to serve as a vehicle for earthly heroism. Each script is somewhat unique, each culture has a different hero system. What the anthropologists call “cultural relativity” is thus really the relativity of hero-systems the world over. But each cultural system is a dramatization of earthly heroics; each system cuts out roles for performances of various degrees of heroism: from the “high” heroism of a Churchill, a Mao, or a Buddha, to the “low” heroism of the coal miner, the peasant, the simple priest; the plain, everyday, earthy heroism wrought by gnarled working hands guiding a family through hunger and disease. It doesn’t matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning. They earn this feeling by carving out a place in nature, by building an edifice that reflects human value: a temple, a cathedral, a totem pole, a sky-scraper, a family that spans three generations. The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count. When Norman O. Brown said that Western society since Newton, no matter how scientific or secular it claims to be, is still as “religious” as any other, this is what he meant: “civilized” society is a hopeful belief and protest that science, money and goods make man count for more than any other animal. In this sense everything that man does is religious and heroic, and yet in danger of being fictitious and fallible. The question that becomes then the most important one that man can put to himself is simply this: how conscious is he of what he is doing to earn his feeling of heroism?


22

When we appreciate how natural it is for man to strive to be a hero, how deeply it goes in his evolutionary and organismic constitution, how openly he shows it as a child, then it is all the more curious how ignorant most of us are, consciously, of what we really want and need. In our culture anyway, especially in modern times, the heroic seems too big for us, or we too small for it. Tell a young man that he is entitled to be a hero and he will blush. We disguise our struggle by piling up figures in a bank book to reflect privately our sense of heroic worth. Or by having only a little better home in the neighborhood, a bigger car, brighter children. But underneath throbs the ache of cosmic specialness, no matter how we mask it in concerns of smaller scope. Occasionally someone admits that he takes his heroism seriously, which gives most of us a chill, as did U.S. Congressman Mendel Rivers, who fed appropriations to the military machine and said he was the most powerful man since Julius Caesar. We may shudder at the crassness of earthly heroism, of both Caesar and his imitators, but the fault is not theirs, it is in the way society sets up its hero system and in the people it allows to fill its roles. The urge to heroism is natural, and to admit it honest. For everyone to admit it would probably release such pent-up force as to be devastating to societies as they now are. The fact is that this is what society is and always has been: a symbolic action system, a structure of statuses and roles, customs and rules for behavior, designed to serve as a vehicle for earthly heroism. Each script is somewhat unique, each culture has a different hero system. What the anthropologists call “cultural relativity” is thus really the relativity of hero-systems the world over. But each cultural system is a dramatization of earthly heroics; each system cuts out roles for performances of various degrees of heroism: from the “high” heroism of a Churchill, a Mao, or a Buddha, to the “low” heroism of the coal miner, the peasant, the simple priest; the plain, everyday, earthy heroism wrought by gnarled working hands guiding a family through hunger and disease.