Gemeinschaft, inner creation, and role-taking (empathy). 3. Charles Horton Cooley on "social" vs "spatial" (material) knowledge.

Abstract

This paper is the third of a series intended to relate Ferdinand Toennies' distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (and all comparable distinctions in social theory) to the difference between (1) intuitional and inferential role-taking (empathy), (2) Erlebnis and Erfahrung experience, and (3) Rorschachian inner creation (movement repsonses) and Rorschachian rationality (form responses). The paper interprets Charles Horton Cooley's concepts of “social” knowledge (or sympathy-as-communion) and “spatial” (“material”) knowledge as intuitional and inferential, respectively. It therefore clusters “social” knowledge with Gemeinschaft, Erlebnis, and inner creation; and “spatial” knowledge with Gesellschaft, Erfahrung, and rationality. The paper treats also of George Herbert Mead's concept of “attitude-taking.” It considers Mead to have confounded intuition and inference, with the result that contemporary Meadians may mean qualitatively different psychological processes when they speak of “role-taking” or “empathy.” For example, whereas it is clear that Cooley's “social” knowledge may be identified with James' “acquaintance with,” Buber's “I-Thou” or “inclusion,” Tillich's “existential attitude” and “existential knowledge,” Maritain's “knowledge through connaturality,” and Sorokin's “intuitional theory of cognition,” it is not at all clear in the case of Mead's “attitude-taking.” This is due, the paper suggests, to his concept's large, sometimes exclusive, inferential component. It is this inferential component, the paper suggests, that has been exploited by the psychometric approach of the past 20 years, beginning with Dymond's “empathy” test. These “empathy” tests, in other words, are tests of an interpersonal version of what Cooley meant by “spatial” knowledge (and hence left Cottrell dissatisfied, since he had been partial to the intuitional kind that for Cooley was “social” knowledge). A tool that the paper uses for suggesting all this is Gouldner's analysis of the role-taking of Epaminondas planning a battle and Plato plotting a dialogue. Gouldner's dialogist-as-dramatist illustrates Cooley's “social” knowledge, and his general, Cooley's “spatial” knowledge.