The Sociology of Knowledge: a Micro-View

A simple tripartite system, circular-causal, easily modeled as your own way of being, phenomenally, in the world.

I have randomly numbered each of the three parts, but any one can come first, second or third, as they are always interacting with each other. I hope you cop an intellectual buzz from this simple system, which you may find "profound," to varying degrees, depending on who's reading/thinking about it:

1.) Externalization: Everyone is pouring forth themselves, their "being" into the world, whether physically, or with mental activity. I'm doing it right now as I write this. "Reality" becomes a human-produced byproduct of externalization, and we cannot help ourselves. We externalize. It is an anthropological necessity. Whether you're building a treehouse, gossiping at a cocktail party, or planning an invasion of Yemen, you are externalizing.

2.) Objectivation: There seems something - call it "omnipresent hypnosis"? although some sociologists and other thinkers would vigorously dispute using "hypnosis" here - that has us constantly attaining the products of other people's physical and mental activity. Other people's externalizations flow through us and confront us - and, it seems the producers of externalizations themselves - as somehow "facts" that are external to all of us, and, further, appear as if in the order of the natural world, although there seems some crucial differences between these human-made "products" and oceans, butterflies, microbes, and the West Wind.

3.) Internalization: We take in other peoples' objectivated "reality," let it work around in our own nervous system, try to make sense of it all. We therefore transform that objectivized "reality" into part of our own subjective world. "It" becomes part of our consciousness, and then...see #1 above.

And on and on and on and on it goes, seemingly to some sort of eschaton...
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The above heavily indebted to Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, but especially Berger. Both sociologists were heavily influenced by Alfred Schutz, yet another emigre from fascist Germany/Austria, who worked at The New School for Social Research in New York. Schutz was in turn heavily influenced by the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, and William James the great American pragmatist.

Husserl was very much influenced by Franz Brentano. Brentano influenced Sigmund Freud.

Freud seems to have been influenced by a plethora of the most interesting thinkers in Vienna and the entire European scene of the 1870s-80s, but also he seems to have chewed, swallowed and digested the entire Western canon, and then externalized himself with his books, his psychoanalysis, which in 2011 university life, seems to mostly be read by literary critics and teachers, historians, and other social scientists. Which seems ironic to me, because what he wanted was for his thought to be a "hard" physical science.

Say what you will about Sigmund Freud, but I applaud him for his heroic artistry as a cartographer of the human mind, an invisible landscape, and for pointing out the correct idea that most of what goes on in our nervous system is non-conscious, or at least not available to ourselves.

This simple/profound phenomenological model and daisy-chain brought to you by:

The Overweening Generalist, blogging since May 6. See the OG on most any Internet connexion!