Transactionalism is a pragmatic philosophical approach to questions such as: what is the nature of reality; how we know and are known; and how we motivate, maintain, and satisfy goals for health, money, career, relationships, and a multitude of conditions of life through mutually cooperative social exchange and ecologies.
To transact is learning to beat the odds or mitigate the common pitfalls involved with living a good and comfortable life by always factoring in the surrounding circumstances of people, places, things and the thinking behind any exchange from work to play.
Without cooperative exchange, we resist transacting to survive the unavoidable biological, societal, and environmental threats that can prevent us from comfort and ease in any of the multiple conditions of life we labor to maintain (cf.
A transaction is a reciprocal and co-constitutive cycle of moves (what to do) and phases (or implemented tactics) aimed at satisfying (or at learning to become fit) in the multiple and interlocking conditions of life including health, work, money, knowledge, education, career, ethics, and more.
[2] This philosophical approach has correlation to Hannah Arendt's notion of human being as "political animal" ("Zoon Politikon") that should attend to the "labor, work, and action" beyond merely articulating an aspiration or a goal.
It is shaped and affected by one's fitness in satisfying an ethical exchange of business or education in certain conditions of life, such as reputation, politics (small and large), and ethics—how we treat one another or regulate our behavior and feelings.
Human satisfaction is shaped first and foremost by our body's state of wellness or disease, which is inescapably linked to the ecology, shared and/or invented norms and values, and the fitness of our ability to understand the mechanics of trans-acting.
[15] In 1949, Dewey and Bentley offered that their sophisticated pragmatic approach starts from the perception of "man" as an organism that is always transacting within its environment; that it is sensible to think of our selves as an organism-environment seeking to fulfill multiple necessary conditions of life "together-at-once".
[1] Each of these approaches are aspects of problem-solving used by the transactionalist to examine the invention, construction of a narrative presentation, the objective work or activity that must happen, and the deconstruction of a transaction to fully observe and assess the consequences and outcomes of any transaction—from simply to complex—in the process of living a good and satisfying life.
"[17] Transactionalist analysis is a core paradigm advanced by social psychologist Eric Berne in his book Games People Play,[18] in which an analyst seeks to understand an individual as "embedded and integrated" in an ever-evolving world of situations, actors, and exchange.
[38][39][40] In a critique of structural functionalism, Barth offered a new interpretation of culture that did not portray an overly cohesive picture of society without attending to the "roles, relationships, decisions, and innovations of the individual.
[51] 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.
[56] 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 our personal knowledge so as to solve life's complex problems.
[63][64]What is real then, from a transactionist perspective, must be constantly reevaluated relative to man as organism-environment in a co-constitutive and reciprocal dynamic with people, personalities, situations, aims, and given the needs each party seeks to satisfy.
Whether the environment is natural or human-made, whether discussing biology, sociology, culture, linguistics, history and memory, or economics and physics, every organism-environment is reciprocal, constitutive, socially-conditioned and constantly in flux demanding our ethical attention to conditions and consequences as we live life.
[55] Both rejected the supposition that man had dominion over or governed behavior in his/her environment embracing a presupposition of transactionalism; we are reciprocal, co-constitutive, socially-conditioned, and motivated "together-at-once" as we seek solutions to living a good life.
"[66] Our behavior and acts in knowing, or transacting, must be considered "together" and "at-once" with its conditions and consequences for any ambitious movement or fulfillment to occur alone and among other people in any setting with objects and constructed inherited from others known and unknown over time.
In Dewey's final days, wrote Phillips, he emphasized the twin aspects of attending to both the means and the ends of any transaction: "It is…impossible to have an end-in-view or to anticipate the consequences of any proposed line of action."
"[10] Behavior, movement, and acts are not merely a function of the mind, of wishful or positive thinking or belief in external forces, nor can it be determined ethically from the philosophers of the past or knowledge written in a book.
[74] Philosophy and Women's Studies Professor Shannon Sullivan explores and applies "transactional knowing through embodied and relational lived experience"[77] as a feminist epistemology developed out of the pragmatist tradition.
[83] Transactionalists view politics as a cooperative, genuine interaction between all participating parties whether buyer-seller, student-teacher, or worker-boss; we are biological as well as social subjects[84] involved not merely in "transacting" for our own advantage or gain but connected to other entities.
"[S]ocial phenomena cannot be understood except as there is prior understanding of physical conditions and the laws of their [socio-biological] interactions," wrote John Dewey in Logic: The Theory of Inquiry.
Each situation and assumptions about it—and this transactionalists assert is radical way of thinking—must be tested, examined, and determined by a series of iterative moves and activity based on the capacity of that organism's ability to fulfill its desired intentions to eventually thrive (or not).
The political governing of thinking towards dualisms and bifurcation as well as the "false conception of the individual" (apart from their environment) is what Dewey argued actually limits man's free (meaning "liberal") thought and action.
Rather than applying a theory or approach that emphasizes the individual as a "free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will,"[96] subjects are invited to co-create functioning among all other organism-environments, including the specific conditions and consequences of any objects and personalities involved, in order to intelligently structure existence in and among it all.
Since our body and the physical environments and social ecologies in which it trans-acts are continually in flux across time and space, a singular or repetitive assumption carried over in an unthinking manner may not be valuable or satisfactory.
As the counter-culture challenged and reassessed society's "philosophical-psychological complex, its Weltanschauung,"[112][113] their political and social alienation sparked protests against the war and the draft as well as historic racial rebellions in various U.S. cities.
This current of alienation unfortunately veered away from a relevant understanding of the transactional whole taking into account the reciprocal and co-constitutive nature of man as an organism-environment fulfilling important conditions of life with others all the time.
A transactionalist 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 human-made environment.
We as human beings live in distinct sociological patterns with people, material and immaterial culture shaped by specific and ever-changing times and places further articulated by increasing migration and globalization.