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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2022
Life, said William James, is a series of flights and perchings. Action is the process of life, and when its natural tempo or freedom is blocked or thwarted, the costs are those of life. Action is the goal-seeking behavior of the organism. All organisms have “goals”; without them they perish. Goals function as satisfiers of needs; without such satisfaction there is no life. Goal-directed action makes claims upon the organism's environments, and the levies are the stuff of life. Action is commerce with a milieu; “drives”—or any other motivational terms—only suggest the intensity and the form of that exchange; “death” is its cessation. The whole organism is involved, and the involvement is insistent, recurring, cyclical: it is the whole body which acts.
1 For a further elaboration of the act cycle see the present writer's “The Dialectic of the Situation, Some Notes on Situational Psychology,” Philisophy and Phenomenological Research, V (March, 1945), 354ff.
2 This is hardly a novel interpretation: see The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud (New York, 1938), Book I: “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life“; or K. Horney, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (New York, 1937).
3 See Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action (New York, 1937).
4 The sources of this interpretation are indicated in the present writer's studies of social movements: “Sequence in Revolution,” American Sociological Review, XXV (May–June, 1941); “The Situational Dialectic of Revolution,” Social Forces, XX (March, 1942); “Behavioral Bases of Social Movements,” Sociology and Social Research, XXVIII (November–December, 1943); “Movements of Social Withdrawal,” Sociology and Social Research, XXIX (September–October, 1944).
5 See H. S. Sullivan, “Psychiatric Aspects of Morale,” American Journal of Sociology, XLVII (November, 1941).
6 See T. D. Eliot, “The Possibilities of a Cultural Hygiene,” Psychiatry, VI (February, 1943).