Cooley and the human consciousness

Abstract

This chapter focuses on two broad ways in which Cooley’s work is still intensely alive in the minds and work of researchers and philosophers today. First, in philosophy in the area of consciousness studies and in phenomenological studies in psychology, there has been a growing movement to the effect that accounts of “first person experience,” that is accounts of experience of the form “then I felt …” “I firmly believe …” (such accounts by themselves, without reductive arguments and without having to point to correlated phenomena in the neural—biological substrate) represent a completely scientific way of studying human consciousness. Cooley’s work is an early and extremely significant example of social science research that that amounts to using “first person experience” to studying consciousness this way. And second, Cooley’s “Principle of Sympathetic Introspection” and his whole approach to studying human life and experience has inspired my students and me in our “Essentialist Case Studies” and “Essentialist Portraits” of individuals since 1993, as illustrating that there can be a real understanding of subjective experience of higher values and ideals, and, more generally, of spiritual aspects involved in daily living and human life as a whole.