Abstract
The richness of Mead’s fundamental themes is so great that a thorough and systematic criticism of his entire range of thought would clearly transcend the limits of our present study. We restrict ourselves necessarily to a consideration of a few major doctrines and focus our discussion upon five central themes which characterize Mead’s position: the self, other selves, the act, temporality, and sociality. It might be well to indicate at the outset why these particular problems have been selected from the welter of issues in Mead’s work. First of all, it should be clear that any criticism of Mead’s general position cannot avoid dealing with the topics we have selected; they are key issues. A second consideration is that the five topics selected are either discussed or implied in all of Mead’s work: it is not possible to understand his theories of gesture, communication, language, consciousness, etc., without taking into consideration problems of the self and other selves, the act and its stages, questions of the temporal span of the act and its relation to the present, and, finally, the root issue of the ground of all these structures, sociality. A third factor in our selection of these themes is that they represent problems crucial to the basis and structure of the social sciences to the extent that the latter are fundamentally concerned with the nature of societal reality. In whatever form the themes are articulated, a true understanding of the foundations of the social sciences must involve such problems as the nature of the self, the group, and the situation incorporating both. For all these reasons, Mead’s insights not only are of value in themselves, but tend to direct our attention toward the foundational problems of the social sciences.
“Philosophy can take root only in radical reflexion upon the meaning and possibility of its own scheme.”— Edmund Husserl
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Notes
MSS, p. 136.
lbid., p. 140.
The following statement deserves special notice: “We can distinguish very definitely between the self and the body. The body can be there and can operate in a very intelligent fashion without there being a self involved in the experience. The self has the characteristic that it is an object to itself, and that characteristic distinguishes it from other objects and from the body. It is perfectly true that the eye can see the foot, but it does not see the body as a whole. We cannot see our backs; we can feel certain portions of them, if we are agile, but we cannot get an experience of our whole body. There are, of course, experiences which are somewhat vague and difficult of location, but the bodily experiences are for us organized about a self. The foot and hand belong to the self. We can see our feet, especially if we look at them from the wrong end of an opera glass, as strange things which we have difficulty in recognizing as our own. The parts of the body are quite distinguishable from the self. We can lose parts of the body without any serious invasion of the self. The mere ability to experience different parts of the body is not different from the experience of a table. The table presents a different feel from what the hand does when one hand feels another, but it is an experience of something with which we come definitely into contact. The body does not experience itself as a whole, in the sense in which the self in some way enters into the experience of the self.” (MSS, p. 136.)
MSS, footnote, p. 137.
MSS, p. 136.
See Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenolo-gischen Philosophie:Vol. II: Phänomenohgische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952; Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Être et le néant, Paris: Gallimard, 1943 and Cf. Maurice Natanson, A Critique of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Ontology, University of Nebraska Studies, New Series No. 6, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1951; Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception, Paris: Gallimard, 1945.
PA, p. 186.
The implications here, as Alfred Schütz has shown (“Scheler’s Theory of Inter-subjectivity and the General Thesis of the Alter Ego,” Philosophy and Phenome-nological Research, Vol. II, March 1942, p. 341 ff.), are far-reaching for any theory of the self and its relations to other selves. Implied in this position, for example, is the derivative notion that I can never grasp myself in the immediate present; it is, as Schütz says, the otherwho has the unique privilege of grasping my “I” in immediacy, but his report to me is necessarily that of a just-past content presented to my “me” in the present.
PA, p. 344 ff., p. 638; PP, p. 21 ff.
MSS, p. 332.
Especially pp. 73-76 and 656-59.
PA, p. 659.
MSS, p. 14.
L’Être et le néant, p. 315.
What Alfred Schütz has termed the “tuning-in relationship”; see his “Making Music Together: A Study in Social Relationship,” Social Research, Vol. 18, No. 1, March 1951, pp. 77–79.
See Alfred Schütz, “Common-Sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Affairs,” op. cit., p. 4 ff., p. 11 ff.
MSS, pp. 155–56.
Ibid.
PA, p. 66.
The following statement is significant enough to be quoted at length and will serve as a background for the present discussion: “There are two ways in which a unity may be in experience. It may be there as the actual process of the act and as the nature of the thing, or it may be there as an organization of the phases of the act and as the parts of the thing. Thus placing food in the mouth is an act which has a certain unity, and a tree is an object which has a unity. Both these unities are in experience. However, there is a difference in their structural unities in experience. We can break the tree into its parts, such as its roots, stem and branches, and its foliage, flowers, and fruit, and find in the recognized relations of these parts a statement of the unity of the tree. These parts also lie in experience; and, even if we carry our analysis into minuter parts, these still lie in imagination and in thought in the experience. They are parts that we are aware of as we may be aware of the tree. In the case of the physiological act of carrying food to the mouth, we may look at the act from the standpoint of an act of the self and as an act of the physiological organism. As an act of the self it has a unity, the statement of which can be made in the different stages of the purposive activity and in their relationships to one another. The act of the self may be analyzed into the different parts which also lie within the experience of the self together with the relations that connect them. But the organic unity of the physiological act which carries the food to the mouth cannot be so analyzed in terms of the experiences of the self, though the act and its unity are certainly there. Walking, writing, and talking are there as physiological processes as well as actions of the self. We realize this when for some reason the organism refuses to function. Something that was there has disappeared, but its structure is not to be come at by an analysis of the experiences of the self. It is true that we may make an analysis of the different elements of the physiological structure by anatomizing the organism and showing what the mechanism is that must work to enable the act to take place. This analysis, however, does not present parts of the act of the self. They are conditions of the action of the self, but they lie outside that experience.” (PA, pp. 449–450.)
PA, p. 450.
Ibid.
PA, p. 128.
PA, p. 261.
“In some sense the act must be present as completed. The act as completed implies a different object from the object that is there whose reality lies in its control over ongoing action. Its relation is not to the action by which one would reach or avoid the distant object but to the action that would take place if contact were already attained. We are already adjusting ourselves to the manipulation of the object. This object of manipulation is thus coextensive with the contact field of the percipient individual. We push this field out into the spatiotemporally distant world and capture it for the immediate present. It becomes contemporaneous. If we see the book as something to be taken up and opened, the mountain as something to be climbed, they are realities upon which this present tendency to act could be exercised. The spatial distance remains. The temporal distance has been cancelled, for the act within which the passage takes place is syncopated in the presence of the attitude which belongs to its completion, while all the steps in the act in the intervening landscape (also in contact terms as manipulatory objects) are there in spatial terms. They are there in some sense as the past of the completed act, and yet in so far as they are an extension of the immediate contact field of the individual they are contemporaneous.” (PA, pp. 263–64.)
Although we take this term from Husserl, we use it in a generalized sense and, of course, in a non-phenomenological framework.
PA, p. 115. 28FA, p. 221.
Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1893, p. 610.
PA, p. 220.
PA, p. 65.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
PA, p. 636.
Ibid.
Ibid.
PA, p. 637.
PA, p. 64. The distinction between the biological act and the selective or constitutive act suggests an analogue to Mead’s contrast between the “biologic individual” and the “socially self-conscious individual.” The conduct of the former does not involve conscious reasoning, whereas the conduct of the latter does. The “biologic individual” is the impulsive actor who responds directly to stimuli; the “socially self-conscious individual” responds mediately to his environment. The distinction between “biologic individual” and “socially self-conscious individual” involves, at its deepest level, a problem of temporality. Mead tells us that the “biologic individual lives in an undifferentiated now; the social reflective individual takes this up into a flow of experience within which stands a fixed past and a more or less uncertain future.” (MSS, p. 351.) The nowof the biologic individual is the set of impulses through which there is a continuous adjustment of the organism to the environment. What Mead terms “immediate experience” is the now in which the biologic individual is in direct rapport with his environment. “Immediate experience” turns out to be the world-taken-for-granted: This immediate experience which is reality, and which is the final test of the truth of all our ideas and suppositions, is the experience of what I have called the ‘biologic individual’ The term refers to the individual in an attitude and at a moment in which the impulses sustain an unfractured relation with the objects around him. The final registering of the pointer on a pair of scales, of the coincidence of the star with the hair line of a telescope, of the presence of an individual in a room, of the actual consummation of a business deal—these occurrences which may confirm any hypothesis or supposition are not themselves subject to analysis. What is sought is a coincidence of an anticipated result with the actual event. I have termed it ‘biologic’ because the term lays emphasis on the living reality which may be distinguished from reflection. A later reflection turns back upon it and endeavors to present the complete interrelationship between the world and the individual in terms of physical stimuli and biological mechanism; the actual experience did not take place in this form but in the form of unsophisticated reality. (MSS, pp. 352-53.) The biologic individual, in an “unfractured relation with the objects around him” lives, it would appear, in a nowuntouched by critical reflection or problematic situations. The biologic individual has membership only in the immediate now.This fact of unitary participation in an immediate nowleads us to wonder whether the concept of the biologic individual can be reconciled with the theory of the self presented in the “I”-“me” dialectic or the self in relation to the theory of perspectives.
PP, p. 49.
PP, p. 62.
PP, p. 70.
PP, p. 68.
PA, p. 90.
“The epistemologist starts … with the immediate experience of the individual and attempts by way of this cognitive reference to reach a world outside of the individual’s experience. The biologist and genetic psychologist, on the other hand, start with the world which the individual enters, and undertake to show how this world fashions the experience of the individual, and how he re-fashions it … For the scientist the problem of knowledge does not arise until the exception appears, or until the logical development of the structure of the world brings with it new objects that call for reconstruction.” (PP, p. 108); “A world cannot be constructed from scientific data that have been abstracted from the world within which the problem arises. It is also true that in testing the logical consistency of his theory the scientist carries his problem back, at least presumptively, into the structure of those perceptual objects that his problem does not affect, but if such objects lie outside the problem, any inconsistency militates against the theory, not against the reality of the objects. Now the import of this character of the scientist’s method is, as Professor Dewey has long since insisted, that the knowledge-process lies inside of experience, and that the so-called percepts that have not fallen under the doubt knowledge seeks to resolve are simply there, and are affected with no cognitive character. We are not aware of objects about us, except as we seek to reassure ourselves of their existence, their qualities and their meanings; though any object may fall under suspicion and so become an assured object of knowledge. We must be able, for logical and methodological purposes, to state things which are simply there in terms of what we do find in our cognitive adventures.” (PP, p. 115.) For the scientist, “the world is simply there, over against the problematic area, within which analysis and discovery take place, but the invasion of this world by the problematic area produces in him the attitude of readiness to look for this relatedness of things wherever the problem carries his investigation. But it must not be forgotten that, however wide a diameter the problematic area assumes, it is always surrounded by a universe that is simply there and therefore to be used for experimental testing of hypotheses.” ( tA, pp. 29-30. )
PP, p. 115.
See John Dewey, Essays in Expérimental Logic, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1916; Cf. Sidney Hook, “The Place of John Dewey in Modern Thought” in Philosophic Thought in France and the United States (edited by Marvin Färber), Buffalo: The University of Buffalo Publications in Philosophy, 1950, p. 486 ff.
Alfred Schuetz, “On Multiple Realities,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. V, No. 4, June, 1945, footnote, p. 538.
“Phenomenology has taught us the concept of phenomenological epoché, the suspension of our belief in the reality of the world as a device to overcome the natural attitude by radicalizing the Cartesian method of philosophical doubt. The suggestion may be ventured that man with the natural attitude also uses a specific epoché, of course quite another one, than the phenomenologist. He does not suspend belief in the outer world and its objects, but on the contrary: he suspends doubt in its existence. What he puts in brackets is the doubt that the world and its objects might be otherwise than it appears to him. We propose to call this epochéthe epoché of the natural attitude.” (Ibid., pp. 550-51.)
Husserl writes: “We emphasize a most important point once again in the sentences that follow: I find continually present and standing over against me the one spatio-temporal fact-world to which I myself belong, as do all other men found in it and related in the same way to it. This ‘fact-world,’ as the word already tells us, I find to be out there, and also take it just as it gives itself to me as something that exists out there.All doubting and rejecting of the data of the natural world leaves standing the general thesis of the natural standpoint. ‘The’ world is as factworld always there; at the most it is at odd points ‘other’ than I supposed, this or that under such names as ‘illusion,’ ‘hallucination,’ and the like, must be struck out of it, so to speak; but the ‘it’ remains ever, in the sense of the general thesis, a world that has its being out there. To know it more comprehensively, more trustworthily, more perfectly than the naive lore of experience is able to do, and to solve all the problems of scientific knowledge which offer themselves upon its ground, that is the goal of the sciencesof the natural standpoint.” ( Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (tr. by W. R. Boyce Gibson), London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1931, section 30); Cf. Aron Gurwitsch, “The Phenomenological and the Psychological Approach to Consciousness,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. XV, No. 3, March 1955, pp. 305–310. 51 PA, p. 32.
Cf. Harmon M. Chapman, “Realism and Phenomenology,” in The Return to Reason (edited by John Wild), Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1953.
George H. Mead, “Scientific Method and Individual Thinker,” in Creative Intelligence; Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude, New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1917.
Ibid.
MSS, p. 245.
MSS, p. 248.
“A Behavioristic Account of the Significant Symbol,” op. cit., pp. 157-58.
Ibid., p. 158.
PA, p. 107.
PA, p. 95.
PA, p. 94.
Ibid.
George H. Mead, “What Social Objects Must Psychology Presuppose?”, Journal of Philosophy, Vol. VII, 1910, p. 174.
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Natanson, M. (1973). Critical Examination of Major Themes in Mead’s Thought. In: The Social Dynamics of George H. Mead. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2408-2_3
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