Reading: The Sacred Canopy (P. Berger): Ch. 1 Religion and World Construction (Day 3)

p18 Berger makes an argument against determinism: "The process of internalization must always be understood as but one moment of the larger dialectic process that also includes the moments of externalization and objectivation. If this is not done there emerges a picture of mechanistic determinism, in which the individual is produced by society as cause produces effect in nature"

p 18 Berger turns to an analysis of the individual: "The individual is not molded as a passive, inert thing. Rather, he is formed in the course of a protracted conversation (a dialectic, in the literal sense of the word) in which he is a participant. That is, the social world (with its appropriate institutions, roles, and identities) is not passively absorbed by the individual, but actively appropriated by him." Again, Berger's liminal point is madness: a refusal to appropriate the social world would make leave the individual in a solipsistic conversation with himself and thus no one. Having this conversation with oneself in this sense is absurd, and leeds to a senseless rendering of the individual. But I digress: this conception of the individual will be useful to compare against Maslow's, Marcuse's, Heidegger's, and Foucalt's conceptions of the individual. And back on p 15 Berger discusses the process of appropriation of the social world by the individual. He describes it as the process of socialization where the individual begins to take the available institutions, roles and identities as his own. This process is a psychological one. Socialization then is a key point on which berger's analysis of the individual rest. Any misunderstanding of socialization will open the argument up to criticism. He continues on: "No matter how small his power to change the social definitions of reality may be, he must at least continue to assent to those that form him as a person". Or risk the penalties: madness, isolation, and alienation. To risk a social revolution is then to risk not only death but death in madness. And what of this small power? Should the individual's agency hang only on the ability to assent? Berger does say that the individual must only assent to the social definitions that form him as a person, meaning other social definition not related to the individual's identity can be dissented against.