The role of the self in biological and cultural systems: A response to Czikszentmihalyi and Massimini

Abstract

Once, while still a college freshman, I (the first author) saw a man clearing a path in the snow from his doorway to the street. Suddenly I began to think of the scene in different terms. I thought of the snow as crystallized forms of oxygen and hydrogen, precipitated in a given range of temperatures, responding to Newtonian laws of gravitation, settling on earth and creating impediments to human locomotion. I saw the man’s house as an insulating barrier creating a temperature differential between a micro-environment in which he dwelled and the larger ambient atmosphere, accompanied by a few thoughts on laws of thermodynamics and the principles of heat transmission through varying materials. And my attitude toward these reflections was one of ambivalence. Had I thought something useful or was this pretentious musing? I never could decide, and that is to some extent what we feel about the far more sophisticated thinking of Csikszentmihalyi and Massimini (1985). We can’t quite decide whether what they are saying is extremely interesting, or merely the commonplace raised to a high order of technical expression. The authors point out that earlier approaches to the study of human evolution have been unidirectional, with some theorists arguing that biology determines culture and others arguing that culture determines biology. However, the authors assert that neither position, nor even an interactionist position, gikes an adequate account of the process. They propose a third, autonomous factor, the role of self, which enters into circular causality with culture and biology. At the descriptive level, much of what the authors say appears true, but perhaps self-evidently so. Who can deny that “plans in the briefcase” constitute “exosomatically stored information”? Who can deny that when a man makes a decision to marry, this psychological choice has consequences both for the biological and cultural systems ? But the critical question is whether the authors’ perspective sheds new light on these matters, leads to an actual increment in knowledge, or is essentially a reformulation of what we already know. Certainly the terms of their argument are not especially new. For example, in the nineteenth century, Auguste Comte (1854), in seeking the basis of an