In Wallace Stevens’ phenomenological poetry, Nature and the human respons to Nature are inseparable components of a single experience of a “world.” is human feeling for the things of the world that makes them “things,” bi that feeling has its basis in what is already there. This fundamental phenom enological idea is expressed with particular vividness in one of Stevens’ la poems, entitled ‘An Old Man Asleep’:

The two worlds are asleep, are sleeping now. A dumb sense possesses them in a kind of solemnity. The self and the earth — your thoughts, your feelings, Your beliefs and disbeliefs, your whole peculiar plot; The redness of your reddish chestnut trees, The river motion, the drowsy motion of the river R.¹

Social interaction is obviously a very broad topic which can be approached from several directions. I shall below distinguish between two logically independent yet closely related “dimensions” and concentrate on them. First, we have the behavioral or overt point of view: that an agent’s (observable) actions are somehow related causally or generationally is taken as the basis of a characterization of interaction. Secondly, we have the covert or, perhaps better, explanatory (or, more widely, justificary) dimension. Here we characterize interaction in terms of the agents’ interdependent attitudes, such as intersubjective utilities (wants) and loop beliefs, which serve as their reasons for acting and which, accordingly, must be referred to in the (best) explanation (viz. social psychological explanation) of their actions. In Chapter 7 we characterized some aspects of this second dimension of social interaction and below we will discuss both of these dimensions starting with the first, or overt, dimension.

In the memory which is recall, inheritance is also appropriation which can be put to new use. In habit memory, inheritance comes as entrained repetition of a pattern. Recall memory belongs to our conscious experience, habit memory is part of the psycho-physiological substructure of our experience. I do not know how far down into nature habit memory, or some analogy with it, may go. If it can be extended, I suspect that the notion of a functioning organism would also need to be extended with it. To press this could lead to pan-psychism, which might be avoided if ‘memory’ is divested of any suggestion of conscious awareness, and used for a store of cumulated phylogenetic inheritance on which the individual draws in ontogeny.¹ This, it may be claimed, is shown by the way in which the embryo runs through a repertoire of evolutionary forms.