WHY SOCIOLOGY IS DIFFICULT:
EMERGENCE, STRUCTURE, AND THE PECULIAR LOCATION
OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS IN NATURE*

1982

Abstract

Three unique qualities of the sociological perspective--emergence, structure, and self- consciousness--make this perspective difficult to grasp. Here these dialectical qualities are utilized reflexively to analyze the implicit epistemological dimensions of sociology itself. The radically transcendent quality of self-consciousness, upon which sociology is especially dependent, is located within the emergent structure of a "biology of knowledge." Understanding this peculiar location of human self-consciousness helps explain why the sociological perspective is so difficult to come by and to maintain, and why social consciousness is thus ultimately a moral undertaking.

There are good reasons why students and lay people have difficulty grasping the distinctive perspective that enables, shapes, and characterizes sociological thinking. Sociology does indeed slice into the phenomena of human behavior at an unusual angle, one that is not readily understood by the novitiate.  Even professionals in the discipline themselves occasionally have difficulty in maintaining this distinct approach.

Here I would like to identify and elaborate upon three features that make the sociological perspective difficult for most people to  comprehend easily. These features are what I call (1) emergence, (2) structure, and (3) self-consciousness. They characterize the level of analysis and understanding that is unique to sociology. The first two features are derived from the classical tradition, while the third refers to the actual process whereby the sociologist proceeds, the peculiar way in which the sociologist is able to stand aside and look back upon human nature. The unique, reflective quality of sociology is made possible by the human capacity for self-consciousness which itself can, in turn, best be apprehended through an understanding of emergence and structure.

EMERGENCE AND STRUCTURE
It is difficult to know just exactly how to begin discussing such a basic and formidable idea as that of emergence. One might go back as far as the Greek philosopher Zeno and his famous paradoxes, which argue against the logical possibility of change.¹ A more recent and perhaps more appropriate place to start is with the 19th Century German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel and his concept of the dialectic, a new kind of "logic" explicitly at odds with the traditional Aristotelian logic which was founded on the "law of the excluded middle" (everything must be classifiable as one thing or another) and the "law of contradiction" (a thing cannot be both one thing and another). Thus Aristotelian logic, the kind we are most at home with and which seems intuitively obvious, stipulates that something cannot both be itself and not be itself at the same time. The Cartesian dichotomy is founded on these laws of Aristotelian logic. Rene Descartes, a French philosopher of the 17th Century, concluded that the world was divided into two totally disparate and distinctive realms: that of the objective and inanimate, and that of the subjective and thinking. This distinction is historically considered by many to be the cornerstone of modern science. To many who are deeply imbued in and committed to the processes of Western rational thought and reason, these laws constitute what mathematician Douglas Gasking calls "incorrigible propositions"²--propositions for which any attempted contradiction would only be used to provide further evidence of their truth.³

At first glance, all this seems to make immediate sense. Most of us, for example, would have little difficulty with the idea that something cannot be both real and not real at the same time, or both present and not present simultaneously. But things get a bit more troublesome if we say that an aging person is not both living and dying, or that, while a fetus may not be fully human, neither is it fully not human. Or that while males and females are different and distinguishable, each sex does not share a significant number of characteristics with the other.

Hegel's dialectic offers a way out of these difficulties that result from a strict Aristotelian, Cartesian position. In place of dichotomous and mutually exclusive opposites (which we might think of as discrete variables), dialectical thinking offers a continuum in which so-called opposites are simultaneously and mutually co-present. The significance of the dialectic here is two-fold: First, it embodies the idea of becoming, the continuous movement or flow between or across otherwise discrete (i.e., totally separated) variables. Second, it fosters the root idea of emergence, the idea that one thing may be implied in and develop out of something else, something which originally it is not. As a specific process of emergence, Hegel argues that qualitative differences emerge out of quantitative changes. A dialectical logic thus enables us to deal with the perplexing paradoxical differences of degree and kind. For example, might increases in degree result in differences in kind; how does the one precipitate the other; how can we decide that we have crossed over from one kind of thing to another--how do we, in fact, draw lines.

The second fundamental feature of sociological thinking, contained in the idea of structure, is equally important. What I mean by structure actually becomes more comprehensible through the application of dialectical logic. Individual instances of behavior exemplified, for example, by a number of persons acting in regulated, regularized, predictable, or simply probable ways, together cumulate into something more than their simple sum. Something that may not be apparent or is simply not present in any one of the individual behaviors emerges as a result of all of them when they occur together. To comprehend this feature is central to perceiving the world from a sociological perspective. The German philosopher-sociologist Georg Simmel, writing around the turn of the century, provides a classic illustration of this emergence of qualitative, structural differences that result from quantitative, incremental changes when he elaborated on the distinction between the dyad and the triad, between two people and three. Simmel cited the well-known effect, and provided a comprehensive explanation for the fact, that changing the number of parts of a whole altered both the relationships of these parts and their subsequent overall arrangement. Out of the resulting different configurations emerge new structural wholes with new and distinctive qualities.⁴

We implicitly recognize that three people together make something more or something different than a pair of people plus just one more. We acknowledge this in our commonsense wisdom when we say "Two's company, three's a crowd." That is, while we have simply increased the number of people from two to three, we have also produced some kind of a qualitative difference in the gathering itself. For example, there are some things that most of us would not do if there were more than one other person present; conversely there are some things that are much more likely to happen in the presence of a third party. People are more likely to express intimacy or to even have intimate feelings in company with only one other person (probably the most common meaning of "two's company, three's a crowd"); on the other hand, they may be more enabled to resolve differences when there is a third person present.

In presenting the ideas of emergence and structure, the approach that follows serves both to illustrate these ideas and to identify why they may be so difficult to grasp. In this process of explanation we encounter that peculiar reflexive quality of sociology as we use the sociological perspective to enlighten itself (and ourselves in the process). It is in the context of this very discussion that the location and significance of the third feature of sociological thinking--that of self-consciousness--becomes evident.

The table below (adapted from an article by P. W. Anderson in the journal, Science) presents a display of different levels of scientific analysis in terms of disciplinary knowledge.⁵ This hierarchical sequence is assembled according to the principle that "elementary entities of science X obey the laws of (corresponding) science Y."⁶ For example, reading across the row from left to right, we see that the elementary entities of molecular biology (molecules) obey the laws of chemistry, while the elementary entities of sociology (individuals) obey the laws of psychology. Arranging the levels of analysis in this way enables us to make several important observations regarding the features of emergence, structure, and self-consciousness.

Disciplinary Levels of Analysis and Knowledge
X                                                                                                Y
Entities (Subsidiary)                                                                 Laws (Focal)
                                                  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  ethnomethodology
ethnomethodology  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .   .  .cultural anthropology
cultural anthropology.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  sociology
sociology .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .   .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . psychology
psychology** .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .   .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .zoology
zoology .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  physiology
physiology .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .   .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . cell biology
cell biology.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .molecular biology
molecular biology.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .chemistry
chemistry.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . many body physics
many body physics .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . elementary particle physics
 elementary particle physics.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .                                             

** Denotes that level at which conscious thought and self-conscious reflectivity may be said to occur fully.

The first observation is that as we move upward through each successive level (in either column) we are confronted with increasingly more complex phenomena. For instance, an atom is first encountered at the level of many-body physics. Only when some seventy trillion (7 X 10¹⁴) atoms are combined in a structurally distinctive way does a living cell emerge, occurring in the table at the level of cell biology (i.e., the next level up). And we do not encounter the human organism as an entity in itself until the level of zoology, where we have a unique combination of approximately ten trillion (1 X 10¹³) cells or some seven octillion (7 X 10²⁷) atoms.⁷

These successively emergent phenomena cannot be understood in terms of their component entities alone. The noted physicist and philosopher Michael Polanyi, in making a distinction between what he called subsidiary and focal knowledge (and incorporated into Table 1), identified levels of knowledge in a hierarchy similar to that presented here.⁸ Of this arrangement, Polanyi observed that the upper level "relies for its operations on the laws governing the elements of the lower one in themselves, but these operations (of the higher level entities) are not explicable by the laws of the lower level."⁹ To continue with our example, while sociological knowledge relies on the laws governing psychological phenomena, sociological phenomena are not explained by these psychological laws. Reading across the columns from right to left we see that subsidiary knowledge--knowledge of the comprehensive entity that emerges out of the inter-relations of focal elements--becomes the next higher level of analysis, the level at which newly emergent phenomena become available for study. More specifically, sociology--the science that emerges out of the knowledge of psychological interactions--becomes the next higher level of analysis.

A second observation is that the emergent phenomena cannot be fully comprehended without identifying and including additional and qualitatively different processes. Polanyi is again instructive: "You cannot derive a vocabulary from phonetics; you cannot derive the grammar of a language from its vocabulary; a correct use of grammar does not account for a good style; and a good style does not provide the content of a piece of prose."¹⁰ Related back to our example, this means that you cannot decode the workings of society from an understanding of individual psychology. It is important to note in relation to Polanyi's comment his use of such valuational terms as "correct," "good," and even "content," this last term implying aesthetic, possibly even moral judgment, in the sense of meaningfulness.

In the sequence of emergent levels presented in the table, we move from the material, through the organic, into the realm of the human, a sequence which moves from the reactive through the adaptive to the transcendent.¹¹ As we move through this sequence, the additional processes required for explication become increasingly valuational. Once more, Polanyi makes this point well:

The series of increasingly comprehensive operations which lead up to the emergence of man is accompanied at every step by an additional liability to miscarry. The capacity for growth, by which living things acquire their typical shapes, may produce malformations; physiological functions are subject to disabling and eventually mortal diseases; perception, drive satisfaction, and learning bring with them new failings by falling into error; and finally, man is found not only liable to a far greater range of errors than animals are, but, by virtue of his moral sense, becomes capable also of evil... Since all life is defined by its capacity for success and failure, all biology is necessarily critical. Observation, strictly free from valuation, is possible only in the sciences of inanimate nature.¹²

SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS
The third and crucial observation is that there is an especially remarkable aspect of this hierarchical arrangement that I have just described. With the appearance of human life, the process of emergence results in a unique structural phenomenon: It is at this point in the natural order that self-consciousness finds its fullest expression, and it is this capacity that enables us to "discover" (in much the same way I have used the word "discover" earlier in talking about society) both ourselves and our place in the world. Psychologist- anthropologist-sociologist Ernest Becker was speaking clearly to this awesome development when he wrote:

When man emerged into self-consciousness he could no longer, like other animals, take creation for granted... He would now have to bear the awareness of the miraculous instead of merely bovinely pulsing in time with the rest of nature.¹³

In a peculiar way, self-consciousness appears to stand outside the "natural order" of things. There is a profoundly disquieting anomalousness to human self-consciousness; this quality is especially revealed in the way it shoves the human animal into what Becker calls a terrifying dilemma:

The human animal is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever... The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it.¹⁴

This self-consciousness is truly amazing; it makes possible the organization of knowledge as we know it, it produces the table of levels of analysis just discussed, it locates itself in this table, and it results in this discussion we are just now having (as you read what I have written) in which these ideas regarding its occurrence are now being presented.

Given its radically transcendent character, self-consciousness might "logically" somehow be expected to occur at the pinnacle of the hierarchy shown in Table 1. But self-consciousness does not appear there; rather it occurs at a point along the way. Perhaps a spatial analogy can better illustrate this. As we locate the position of self-consciousness in the table, we see that there are many levels of analysis below it; i.e., we might say that we look down at these levels from above. From this particular vantage point, we "surmount" these entities; i.e., they comprise our constituent parts and processes. But there are levels of analysis that occur above the level of self-consciousness; we must look up, so to speak, at these from below. From our human vantage point (indeed, the only vantage point there is), we are ourselves surmounted; it is ourselves, tiny points of self-consciousness in the universe, who are the constituent parts and processes of some much larger and more inclusive whole. Since self-consciousness occurs at the level of the individual human psyche, and not elsewhere, an understanding of higher level, emergent phenomena presents unique difficulties.¹⁵

We are thus confronted with a momentous problem. Because of the peculiar "interior location" of self-consciousness in relation to the phenomena studied by the fully social sciences, we have no vantage point exterior to these phenomena from which we can see them whole and without bias, i.e, without the bias of our own partiality. One might say that it would inherently difficult if not impossible to see the forest for the trees especially if one is a tree.

To bring the point closer to home, it may be inherently difficult to accept the group as real when the awareness of the group exists only at the level of the individual. Here we encounter the all too common argument that the group is merely a fiction or an abstraction. Ironically, the emergent activity of self-consciousness seems to manifest itself more readily in a reductionist direction than in a "constuctionist" (or emergent) direction.¹⁶ That is, it seems much more difficult to consciously understand those emergent phenomena within which that consciousness is itself embedded. Thus in attempting to understand the subject matter of sociology, anthropology, and ethnomethodology in particular, we have to work against what we might think of as a "natural resistance" within ourselves as the understanding organism. Social structures, cognitive-evaluative symbol systems, and meta-normative orders (key elements of the content of sociology, anthropology, and ethnomethodology, respectively) are liable to appear to be less convincing, less potent, less real than our own immediate, directly-sensed, individual experience and self-awareness.¹⁷ We might recall here the famous quotation from the sociologist Charles H. Cooley, in which he describes both the individual and the group as "abstractions unknown to experience." In actuality, the individual appears as an abstraction known to experience. That self-consciousness and experience occur at the level of the individual seems to reinforce both the sense and the belief that it is the individual that embodies reality.

It is because of this whole process that I am inclined to think that there is a "biology of knowledge" that stands parallel to the already well-established sociology of knowledge. As such, it should be understood as equally cautionary. How, and what, and with what ease or difficulty we perceive and understand may be affected as much by the location in the natural order of this capacity for knowing as by the more clearly understood social constraints of knowledge. Such a limitation was ruefully noted, perhaps in the extreme, by the physicist Percy Bridgman, who observed at mid-century that

...it is impossible to transcend the human reference point...the structure of nature may eventually be such that our processes of thought do not correspond to it sufficiently to permit us to think about it at all....We are now approaching a bound beyond which we are forever estopped from pushing our inquires, not by the construction of the world, but by the construction of ourselves.

What I have described above in regard to the features of emergence, structure, and the unique occurrence of self-consciousness may serve to help unlock the mystery of why it is so difficult to grasp and hold firmly to the sociological perspective, to recognize and understand the powerful phenomena that occur at the upper levels of our hierarchy of analysis and knowledge. It may also help to account for the resistance we so often experience when trying to give to social structures and symbol systems their due weight in explaining human events;¹⁸ why it is always seems easier to think in terms of individual problems and solutions; and why the sociological imagination, which C. Wright Mills called the "most fruitful form of self-consciousness" is so hard to achieve and so difficult to maintain. Finally, it may help to explain why sustaining an ever-increasing social consciousness is a necessary, demanding, and ultimately moral undertaking.

Increasingly, we are seeing in the social sciences an enlightened and vigorous examination of the professional obligation to follow in the direction toward which our conclusions lead, an obligation perhaps only dimly perceived by many of us and certainly not agreed to by all. This obligation has nowhere been more profoundly summarized than by Ernest Becker in Beyond Alienation. Hidden in the middle of this little-known book is this resounding passage:

In a short twenty-five hundred years since the beginning of Western civilization with the Greeks, man had discovered his own peculiar nature. He was the animal who created and dramatized his own meanings....No matter what history does with our discovery--or rather, no matter what man now does with himself--the incredible has been achieved. In the evolution of the cosmos, on the planet Earth, the form of life called Man arrived at self-understanding, saw "through itself" and its motives. At least at one point in the universe, life had stopped its blind scurrying: it lay exposed, pulsating, anxious, wondering whether and in what way it would again spurt on to a different development. If we were immodest, we could say that man's reason had finally given him the possibility of full possession of himself, to do with as he may. But it would be truer to say that evolution had brought life to the point of its greatest potential liberation. Or perhaps it would be most true to speak mythically in the face of this awesome and ill-understood achievement, and to say man had finally become a potentially fully open vehicle for the design of God.¹⁹

NOTES

* Revised version of a paper originally presented at the meetings of the Western Social Science Association, Denver, CO, April 1978.

¹ Zeno's examples regarding the arrow, and Archilles and the tortoise argue against the possibility of change.  In essence, his paradoxes force the choice between contradictory opposites, disallowing any resolution between mutually exclusive alternatives and creating a further contradiction between logic and common sense.

² Douglas Gasking, "Mathematics and the World," in Logic and Language, edited by Anthony Flew,  Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, Anchor Books, 1955, p. 432.

³ Contradictions hold only against fixed assumptions.  If the assumption is by definition (i.e., by general, concerted agreement) a characteristic of a reality, then any disagreement with that assumption must be explained away or otherwise accounted for.  These explanations or accounts thus serve to reaffirm the validity of the assumption.

⁴ Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, edited by Kurt H. Wolff. New York: The Free Press, 1950, pp. 122-169.

⁵ This table is developed out of discussions by Anderson,  and Mehan and Wood, but it has been expanded by the present author. See P. W. Anderson, "More is Different," Science, Vol. 177, No. 4047 (August 4, 1972), pp. 393-396, and Hugh Mehan and Houston Wood, The Reality of Ethnomethodology, New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1975.

⁶ Anderson, op. cit., p. 393.

⁷ Theodoosius Dobzhanxky, Genetics of the Evolutionary Process, New York: Columbia University Press, 1970, p. 1.

⁸ See Michael Polanyi, the Study of Man, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1959, p. 30, and The Tacit Dimension, Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, Anchor Books, 1967, p. 34-47.

⁹ Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, p. 34.  This is Anderson's rule stated vertically rather than horizontally.

¹⁰ Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, p. 35.

¹¹ See David Matza, Becoming Deviant, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969, pp. 92-93.

¹² Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, pp. 50-51; my emphasis.

¹³ Ernest Becker, The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man, Second Edition, New York: The Free Press, 1971, p. 143.

¹⁴ Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death, New York: The Free Press, 1973, p. 26.

¹⁵ Miller argues that it is equally difficult to understand phenomena such as the internal working of the human body which occur, in effect, below the level of human consciousness (in terms of our spatial analogy). While conceptually this may be true, it is still possible to facilitate the conceptualization with various kinds of dissection along descending levels of analysis, the whole of the object of study existing below the level of the student him (or her) self.  This is never the case with higher level emergent phenomena.  See Jonathan Miller, The Body in Question, New York: Random House, 1979.  Thus Rene Daumal, in Mount Analog, writes:

You cannot stay on the summit forever;
you have to come down again.
So why bother in the first place?
Just this: What is above knows what is below
but what is below does not know what is above.
One climbs, one sees, one descends;
one sees no longer, but one has seen.

Quoted in Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy, Los Angeles: J. P. Tarcher, Inc., 1980.

¹⁶ Anderson identifies the constructionist view as one which operates in the same direction as that of emergence (as presented here) but which has no way of accounting for or managing qualitative differences.  See Anderson, op. cit., p. 393.

¹⁷ It is true that humans understand supra-human, human, and sub-human levels of phenomena through conceptualization. While in one sense all concepts are equally abstract, in another sense we proceed with them metaphorically, so they do eventually come to rest upon our own personal experience.  See Scott Greer, The Logic of Social Inquiry, Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1969, p. 90-94.

¹⁸ Such resistance, for example, exists among social scientists themselves in response to the school of ethnomethodology, a form of explanation that is willing to include itself as one of the phenomena that it needs to explain.  See Mehan and Wood, op. cit., p. 14. Given the sizable controversy over ethnomethodology among sociologists and the admitted difficulty so many of them claim to have in understanding even its basic and rather simple tenets, it would seem that social scientists within their disciplinary orientations are themselves not immune to resistance and reluctance.

¹⁹ Ernest Becker, Beyond Alienation: A Philosophy of Education for the Crisis of Democracy, New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1967, pp. 148-149.