Transactionalism

Transactionalism is a philosophical method of social exchange shared by scholars in education, psychology, political science, and social anthropology. It is a sophisticated, yet pragmatic approach to modern human existence designed to correct the "fragmentation of experience" often found in the isolated views of Subjectivism, Constructivism, Objectivism, and Skepticism.^[1] Rather, transactionalism requires a journey through each to create a reciprocal and co-constitutive whole. Referenced primarily in the work of John Dewey,^[1] political scientists Karl W. Deutsch^[2] and Ben Rosamond,^[3] as well as social anthropologist Fredrik Barth,^[4] in this philosophy attention is paid to organizing acts within, and as, a social exchange whether in buying and selling, teaching and learning, or in a marital relationship. Principally based on the work John Dewey and Arthur Bentley's book Knowing and the Known, the antecedents of transactionalism date back to Polybius and Galileo.

Definition

Stemming from the Latin transigere ("˜to drive through", "to accomplish"), the root word "transaction" is not restricted to the economic sense of buying and selling. A much larger field of discourse is considered. It not only examines exchanges, or "transactions," between borrower and lender, but encompasses any transaction involving people and objects whether it involves "borrowing-lending, buying-selling, writing-reading, parent-child, and husband-wife."^[5] A transaction, then is "a creative act, engaged in by one who, by virtue of his participation in the act – of which he is always an aspect, never an entity – together with the other participants, be they human or otherwise environmental, becomes in the process modified."^[6]

Historical antecedents

Trevor J. Phillips (1927–2016), a professor emeritus of educational foundations and inquiry^[7] at Bowling Green State University (1963-1996) studied and crafted a comprehensive review of the historical, philosophical, psychological, and educational development of the mode of thought and interpretation of action in his dissertation published in 1966. While standard views of philosophy have yet to acknowledge transactionalism, Phillips traced its roots to Greek historian Polybius, Greek historian Plato, and French philosopher Descartes. Phillips also outlined the philosophy's more recent developments found in the works of philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, sociologist George Herbert Mead, pragmatist William James, educational philosopher John Dewey,^[8] and political scientist Arthur Bentley.

Several sources credit anthropologist Fredrik Barth as the scholar first to apply the term in 1959.^[9][10][11] "Barth was critical of earlier functionalist models that portrayed an overly cohesive and collective picture of society without paying due attention to the roles, relationships, decisions and innovations of the individual."^[9] Using the examples of the Swat Pathan people in Pakistan and, later, in 1966, organization among Norwegian fishermen, Barth set out to demonstrate that social forms like kinship groups, economic institutions, and political alliances are generated by the actions and strategies of the individuals who deploy organized acts against a context of social constraints. "By observing how people interact with each other [through experience], an insight could be gained into the nature of the competition, values and principles that govern individuals' choices."^[9] This approach to life bears a resemblance to the later development of a "sociological imagination" of C. Wright Mills (1959).

Some scholars argue transactionalism is a theory rather than philosophical approach.^[12] Barth's contribution was initially criticized for paying insufficient attention to cultural constraints on individualism though it influenced the qualitative method known as symbolic interactionism used in the social sciences.^[13]

Modern architects of the philosophy are promulgated by John Patterson and Kirkland Tibbels, co-founders of Influence Ecology, who acquired, edited, and published, Phillips' dissertation (as is) in 2013. With a foreword written by Tibbels, a hardback and Kindle version is available under the title Transactionalism: An Historical and Interpretive Study (2013).^[14] The monograph is an account of how human phenomena came to be viewed less as the behavior of static and/or mutually isolated entities, and more as aspects of events in the process of becoming and solving a unavoidable problems in the human condition.

Philosophy

Metaphysics: transactional (vs. self-action or interaction)

The transactional view of metaphysics—studying the nature of reality or what is real—deals with the inseparability of what is known and how humans inquire into what is known--knowing and the known.^[15] Since the age of Aristotle, humans have shifted from one paradigm or system of "logic" to another before a transactional metaphysics evolved with a focus that examines and inquires into solving problems first and foremost based on the relationship of man as a biological organism (with a brain and a body) shaped by its environment. In the book Transactionalism (2015), the nature of reality is traced historically from self-action to interaction to transactional competence each as its own age of knowing or episteme.

The pre-Galilean age of knowing is defined by self-action "where things are viewed as acting on their own powers."^[16] In Knowing and the Known, Dewey and Bentley wrote, "The epistemologies, logics, psychologies and sociologies [of our day] are still largely on a self-actional basis."^[1]

The result of Newtonian physics, interaction marks the second age of knowing; a system marked especially by the "third 'law of motion'—that action and reaction are equal and opposite".^[1]

The third episteme is transactional competence.^[15][17] With origins in the contributions of Darwin, "man's understandings are finite as opposed to infinite. In the same way, his views, goals, commitments, and beliefs have relative status as opposed to absolute."^[18] John Dewey and Arthur Bentley asserted this competence as "the right to see together, extensionally and durationally, much that is talked about conventionally as if it were composed of irreconcilable separates."^[1] We tend to avoid considering our actions, whether mundane or complex—from an invitation, request, and offer to the complex management of a program or company) within a comprehensive, reciprocal, and co-constitutive—in other words, transactional—whole.^[19] A whole that includes the organized acts of ideas, narratives, people, things, settings, and personalities over time. With this competence, that which acts and is acted upon become united for a moment in a mutual or ethical exchange, where both are reciprocally transformed^[19] contradicting "any absolute separation or isolation"^[20] often found in the dualistic thinking and categorization of Western thought.

Dualistic thinking and categorization often leads to over-simplification of the transactional whole found in resorting to "exclusive classifications." Often such classifications exclude and reify man as if he has dominion over his nature or environment rather than being "in nature and of nature." Dualistic thinking prevents man from thinking about "continuity for discontinuity, change and interdependence for separateness."^[21] In problem solving, whenever we "insert a name instead of a problem," when words like "soul," "mind," "need," "I.Q." or "trait" are expressed as if real, they have the power to block and distort free inquiry into what is known in fact or as fact.^[22]

In the nature of change and being, "that which acts and that which is acted upon" always undergo a reciprocal relationship that is affected by the presence and influence of the other.^[20] We as human beings, as part of nature as an organism "integral to (as opposed to separate from, above or outside of) any investigation and inquiry may use a transactionalist approach, to expand a person's knowledge so as to solve life's complex problems.^[23] The purpose of transactionalism is not to discover what is already there, but for a person to seek and interpret senses, objects, places, positions, or any aspect of transactions between one's Self and one's environment (including objects, other people, and their symbolic interactions) in terms of the aims and desires each one needs and wants to fulfill. It is essential that one simultaneously take into account the needs and desires of others in one's environment or ecology. While other philosophies may discuss similar ethical concerns, this co-constitutive and reciprocal element of problem-solving is a central to transactionalism.

"To experience is to transact; in point of fact, experience is a transaction of organism-environment."^[21] In other words, what is "known" by the knower (or organism) is always filtered and shaped by both internal and external moods and narratives, mirrored in and through our relationships to the physical affordances and constraints in our environment or in specific ecologies.

This is characterized in the pragmatic writing of William James who insists that the "single barreled terms," terms like "thought" and "thing," actually stop or block inquiries into what is known and how we know it. Instead a transactional orientation of ‘double-barreledness’ or the "interdependence of aspects of experience" must always be considered.^[24] James offers readers insight into the "double-barreledness" of experience:

Is the preciousness of a diamond a quality of the gem [the thing] or is it a feeling in our mind [the thought]? Practically we treat it as both or as either, according to the temporary direction of our thought. The ‘experienced’ and the ‘experiencing,’ the ‘seen’ and the ‘seeing,’ are, in actuality, only names for a single fact.^[25][26]

Epistemology: truth from inquiry

Tranactionalists are firmly intolerant of "anything resembling an 'ultimate' truth -- or 'absolute' knowledge."^[27] Due the evolution of psychology about the nature of man, transactionalists reject the notion of a mind-body split or anything resembling the bifurcation of what they perceive as the circuitry in which our biological stimulus-response exists. The self-acting notions of Aristotle who posited the notion that "the soul -- the psyche -- realized itself in and through the body, and matter and form were two aspects involved in all existence." The claims of French philosopher Rene Descartes, recognized as the father of modern Western philosophy, later posited the interactional notion suggesting the stimulus-response where the mind controls the body and the body may influence the rational mind out of the passion of our emotions.

"Cartesian dualism breaks man up into two complete substances, joined to another no one knows how: one the one hand, the body which is only geometric extension; on the other, the soul which is only thought—an angel inhabiting a machine and directing it by means of the pineal gland" ^[28][29]

This, too, tranactionalists reject. Descartes distinguished this movement in different directions away from a common point or, better yet, a transactional whole uniting not only the mind and body, but man as organism always transacting with his environment, which includes but is not limited to his body as an entity. Man has a propensity to treat the mind and thought or the mind and body as abstractions and this tendency to deny the interrelatedness or coordinated continuity results in misconceptions in learning to move and thrive in his/her ecology. This learning begins and is constantly developed through action resulting from thought as a repetitive circuit of experience. This is discussed in Phillips as the organizing of perception: "we fail to realize that we can know nothing about things [or ourselves] beyond their significance to us" otherwise we distort our "reality" and treat things we perceive within it, including our bodies or mind as if concrete thereby "denying the interconnectedness of realities." ^[30] Transactionalists suggest that accurate (or inaccurate) thinking is not even considered as a consequence of this propensity for abstractions.

When an individual transacts through intelligent or consequential actions within the constraints and conditions of his environment in a reflexive and repetitive arc with through and experience, there is a "transaction between means and ends." This transactional approach features twin aspects of a larger event rather than merely manipulating the means to an end in our circumstances and situations. For instance, a goal can never be produced by abstraction by simply thinking about or declaring a a promise to produce a result. Nor can it be anticipated or foreseen (an abstraction at best) without a significant "pattern of inquiry," as John Dewey later defined it, into the constraints and conditions that happen and are happening given the interdependence of all the people and objects involved in any transaction. The nature of our environment affects all these entities which reveals the limiting and reductive notion of manipulating a psychology around stimulus and response. Instead, the transaction between the "means and ends" or the "transactional distinctions between the how, the way (or subject-matter), and the why (of what for)" constitutes a reciprocal connection and reflexive arc.^[31] "Consequences have to be determined on the grounds of what is selected and handled as means in example the same sense in which the converse holds and demands constant attention if activities are to be intelligently conducted."^[32] Only from this does one derive any value from a transaction and begin to fulfill on the kinds of exchange needed to live a good life.

Ethics: reciprocal and co-constitutive

Transactionalism offers a set of ethics based on a reciprocal, co-constitutive socially-conditioned, and motivated human being. Transationalist psychologists and educational philosophers assert that the highly valued norm of competitive individualism, individual choice, and and "the advancing conformity and coercive competition so characteristic of our times" demands reassessment.^[33] A new "philosophical-psychological complex" is needed to confront the "ever increasing growth of bureaucratic rule and the intendant rise of a complacent citizenry"^[33] and the intensification of key dynamics of globalization. An ethical and transactional approach to a good life should emphasize "human dignity and uniqueness" despite "a matrix of anxiety and despair [and] feelings of alienation" that persons pursue to cull a "semblance of personal worth, freedom, and responsibility."^[33] Transactionalist psychologists replace the once sought-after remedy of Existentialism with a different orientation to the act of living itself. Rather than applying a "philosophical theory or approach that emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will,"^[34] a good life involves a subject who acts as an agent "in the creation of an environment [a setting, organization, or transaction, for instance], and thereby in the structuring of existence itself. It is this very participation in creation which, say the transactionalists, gives to each person his unique status and dignity."^[33]

Cultural significance

The importance of the study of transactionalism arose in the late 1960s in response to an "alienation syndrome,"^[35] among youth of that generation. As the counter-culture challenged and reassessed society's "philosophical-psychological complex, its Weltanschauung," ^[35][36] their political and social alienation sparked protests against the war and the draft as well as historic racial rebellions in various U.S. cities. The Long hot summer of 1967 and the counterculture movement named the Summer of Love also in 1967 reflected the antipathy of young people who questioned everything. American society's norms and values were perceived as denying dignity to all. Riots of the period were studied in a report by the U.S. Kerner Commission and scholars began to study the patterns of alienation expressed by youth in the sixties.^{[37][38][39][40][41]} Youth sought a kind of existentialism expressed by a need to be "true to oneself" but alienation also seemed to lead away from understanding the transactional whole (of taking into account a reciprocal and co-constitutive whole involving all parties). Transactionalism presented an alternative to this limitation.^[35]

This philosophy, as Dewey and Bentley, articulated it was designed to account for all aspects of experience—subjective and objective –to consider slowing down and assessing all the facts involved in how, when, where, and why we move to transact with others and to always consider how it is beneficial to all involved. Transactionalism emphasized interdependence of thought and action. The transactionalism must account for one's biology and cognition (metaphysics); the ways knowing reality (epistemology); the reciprocal, co-constitutive, relationship (or ethics) between our social self and the interactions constrained by both our natural and man-made environment. We as human beings live in distinct sociological patterns of material and non-material culture in specific and ever-changing times and places particularly given increasing migration and globalization. In transating, one must also give attention to the political distribution of goods and services along with the ways its value has and is exchanged among people and groups (politics) and how persons are socialized to understand what it means to live a good life as well as fulfill those conditions over time (aesthetics).

Transactionalism offers more than existentialism offered with its aim of being "true to oneself." The alienation that results from its orientation to the self at the expense of societal norms and values, even in small groups, often leads to naiveté, despair, frustration, agitation, and even indifference, at the expense of consciously organizing one's acts to fulfill one's own necessary interests in living a good life. Consider the example of the pop-culture mentality of authenticity in the digital age. The naive confuse free speech as permitting a "do as I see fit" mentality irregardless of others's needs and concerns, which inevitably leads to negative consequences over time. Transactionalism depends "upon the integration of man and his surroundings."^[35] Phillips' dissertation was an account of the increased interest in what he termed a "transactional approach" that emerged in the late 1960s; an approach that rests on the fact that we are biological, linguistic, and transactional beings.

Various podcasts are available that exemplify the application of a transactional approach to individual practice and improvement.^[42]

References