George
Herbert Mead
George Herbert Mead (1863–1931), American philosopher and social
theorist, is often classed with William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John
Dewey as one of the most significant figures in classical American pragmatism.
Dewey referred to Mead as “a seminal mind of the very first order” (Dewey,
1932, xl). Yet by the middle of the twentieth-century, Mead's prestige was
greatest outside of professional philosophical circles. He is considered by
many to be the father of the school of Symbolic Interactionism in sociology and
social psychology, although he did not use this nomenclature. Perhaps Mead's
principal influence in philosophical circles occurred as a result of his
friendship with John Dewey. There is little question that Mead and Dewey had an
enduring influence on each other, with Mead contributing an original theory of
the development of the self through communication. This theory has in recent
years played a central role in the work of Jürgen Habermas. While Mead is best
known for his work on the nature of the self and intersubjectivity, he also
developed a theory of action, and a metaphysics or philosophy of nature that
emphasizes emergence and temporality, in which the past and future are viewed
through the lens of the present. Although the extent of Mead's reach is
considerable, he never published a monograph. His most famous work, Mind, Self, and Society from the Standpoint of a
Social Behaviorist, was published after his death and is a compilation of student
notes and selections from unpublished manuscripts.
1. Life
and Influences
George Herbert Mead was born on February 27, 1863, in South
Hadley, Massachusetts. His father, Hiram Mead, a minister in the Congregational
Church, moved his family from Massachusetts to Ohio in 1869 in order to join
the faculty of The Oberlin Theological Seminary. At Oberlin he taught
homiletics and held the chair in Sacred Rhetoric and Pastoral Theology. Mead
would attend Oberlin College from 1879–1883, and matriculate at Harvard from
1887–1888. At Harvard he studied with Josiah Royce, a philosopher deeply
indebted to G.W.F. Hegel, who also left a lasting impression on Mead. (Mead met
William James at Harvard, although he did not study with him. Almost
immediately after graduation, Mead resided in William James's summer home
tutoring his son Harry.) Mead's mother, Elizabeth Storrs Billings, was a
devoutly religious woman, who taught at Oberlin for two years after the death
of her husband in 1881, and served as president of Mount Holyoke College from
1890–1900. After his college years, Mead became a committed naturalist and
non-believer, but he had struggled for years with the religious convictions
that he had inherited from his family and community. For a period of time after
college he even considered Christian Social Work as a career, but 1884 he
explained in a letter to his friend Henry Castle why this career path would be
problematic.
I
shall have to let persons understand that I have some belief in Christianity
and my praying be interpreted as a belief in God, whereas I have no doubt that
now the most reasonable system of the universe can be formed to myself without
a God. But notwithstanding all this I cannot go out with the world and not work
for men. The spirit of a minister is strong with me and I come fairly by it
(Shalin 1988, 920–921).
Mead did indeed move away from his earlier religious roots, but
the activist spirit remained with him. Mead marched in support of women's
suffrage, served as a treasurer for the Settlement House movement, immersed
himself in civic matters in Chicago, and generally supported progressive
causes. Jane Addams was a close friend. In terms of his transformation into a
naturalist, no doubt Darwin played a significant role. As a matter of fact, one
can understand much of Mead's work as an attempt to synthesize Darwin, Hegel, Dewey's
functionalist turn in psychology, and insights gleaned from James. Mead taught
with Dewey at the University of Michigan from 1891–1894, and when Dewey was
made chair at the University of Chicago in 1894, he requested that Mead receive
an appointment. Mead spent the rest of his career at Chicago. But before he
began teaching at Michigan, Mead was directly exposed to major currents of
European thought when he studied in Germany from 1888–1891, taking a course
from Wilhelm Dilthey and immersing himself in Wilhelm Wundt's research.
2. Language and Mind
Dewey and Mead were not only very close friends, they shared
similar intellectual trajectories. Both went through a period in which Hegel
was the most significant philosophical figure for them, and both democratized
and de-essentialized Hegelian ideas about the self and community. Nevertheless,
neo-hegelian organic metaphors and notions of negation and conflict,
reinterpreted as the problematic situation, remain central to their positions.
The teleological also remains important in their thought, but it is reduced in
scale from the world historical and localized in terms of anticipatory
experiences and goal oriented activities.
For Mead, the development of the self is intimately tied to the
development of language. To demonstrate this connection, Mead begins by
articulating what he learned about the gesture from Wundt. Gestures are to be
understood in terms of the behavioral responses of animals to stimuli from
other organisms. For example, a dog barks, and a second dog either barks back
or runs away. The “meaning” of the “barking gesture” is found in the response
of the second organism to the first. But dogs do not understand the “meaning”
of their gestures. They simply respond, that is, they use symbols without what
Mead refers to as “significance.” For a gesture to have significance, it must
call out in a second organism a response that is functionally identical to the
response that the first organism anticipates. In other words, for a gesture to
be significant it must “mean” the same thing to both organisms, and “meaning”
involves the capacity to consciously anticipate how other organisms will
respond to symbols or gestures. How does this capacity arise? It does so
through the vocal gesture.
A vocal gesture can be thought of as a word or phrase. When a
vocal gesture is used the individual making the gesture responds (implicitly)
in the same manner as the individual hearing it. If you are about to walk
across a busy street during rush hour, I might shout out, “Don't walk!” As I
shout, I hear my gesture the way in which you hear it, that is, I hear the same
words, and I might feel myself pulling back, stopping in my tracks because I
hear these words. But, of course, I don't hear them exactly as you do, because I
am aware of directing them to you. According to Mead, “Gestures become
significant symbols when they implicitly arouse in the individual making them
the same responses which the explicitly arouse, or are supposed to arouse, in
other individuals” (MSS, 47). He also tells us that, “the critical importance
of language in the development of human experience lies in this fact that the
stimulus is one that can react upon the speaking individual as it reacts upon
the other” (MSS, 69).
As noted, Mead was indebted to Hegel's work, and the notion of
reflexivity plays a fundamental role in Mead's theory of mind. Vocal
gestures—which depend on sufficiently sophisticated nervous systems to process
them—allow individuals to hear their own gestures in the way that others hear
them. If I shout “Boo” at you, I might not only scare you, I might scare
myself. Or, to put this in other terms, vocal gestures allow one to speak to
oneself when others are not present. I make certain vocal gestures and
anticipate how they would be responded to by others, even when they are not
present. The responses of others have been internalized and have become part of
an accessible repertoire. (Mead would agree with Ludwig Wittgenstein that there
are no private languages. Language is social all the way down.) According to
Mead, through the use of vocal gestures one can turn “experience” back on
itself through the loop of speaking and hearing at relatively the same instant.
And when one is part of a complex network of language users, Mead argues that
this reflexivity, the “turning back” of experience on itself, allows mind to
develop.
Mentality
on our approach simply comes in when the organism is able to point out meanings
to others and to himself. This is the point at which mind appears, or if you like,
emerges…. It is absurd to look at the mind simply from the standpoint of the
individual human organism; for, although it has its focus there, it is
essentially a social phenomenon; even its biological functions are primarily
social (MSS, 132–133).
It is
by means of reflexiveness—the turning back of the experience of the individual
upon himself—that the whole social process is thus brought into the experience
of the individuals involved in it; it is by such means, which enable the
individual to take the attitude of the other toward himself, that the
individual is able consciously to adjust himself to that process, and to modify
the resultant of that process in any given social act in terms of his
adjustment to it. Reflexiveness, then, is the essential condition, within the
social process, for the development of mind (MSS, 134).
Mind is developed not only through the use of vocal gestures,
but through the taking of roles, which will be addressed below. Here it is
worth noting that although we often employ our capacity for reflexivity to
engage in reflection or deliberation, both Dewey and Mead argue that habitual,
non-deliberative, experience constitutes the most common way that we engage the
world. The habitual involves a host of background beliefs and assumptions that
are not raised to the level of (self) conscious reflection unless problems
occur that warrant addressing. For Dewey, this background is described as
“funded experience.” For Mead, it is the world that this there and the “biologic individual.”
The
immediate experience which is reality, and which is the final test of the
reality of scientific hypotheses as well as the test of the truth of all our
ideas and suppositions, is the experience of what I have called the “biologic
individual.”…[This] term lays emphasis on the living reality which may be
distinguished from reflection…. Actual experience did not take place in this
form but in the form of unsophisticated reality (MSS, 352–353).
3. Roles, the Self, and the Generalized Other
One of the most noteworthy features of Mead's account of the
significant symbol is that it assumes that anticipatory experiences are
fundamental to the development of language. We have the ability place ourselves
in the positions of others—that is, to anticipate their responses—with regard
to our linguistic gestures. This ability is also crucial for the development of
the self and self-consciousness. For Mead, as for Hegel, the self is
fundamentally social and cognitive. It is to be distinguished from the
personality, which has non-cognitive dimensions. The self, then, is not
identical to the individual and is linked to self-consciousness. It begins to
develop when individuals interact with others and play roles. What are roles?
They are constellations of behaviors that are responses to sets of behaviors of
other human beings. The notions of role-taking and role playing are familiar
from sociological and social-psychological literature. For example, the child
plays at being a doctor by having another child play at being a patient. To
play at being a doctor, however, requires being able to anticipate what a
patient might say, and vice versa. Role playing involves taking the attitudes
or perspectives of others. It is worth noting in this context that while Mead
studied physiological psychology, his work on role-taking can be viewed as
combining features of the work of the Scottish sympathy theorists (which James
appealed to in The Principles of Psychology), with Hegel's dialectic of self and
other. As we will discover shortly, perspective-taking is associated not only
with roles, but with far more complex behaviors.
For Mead, if we were simply to take the roles of others, we
would never develop selves or self-consciousness. We would have a nascent form
of self-consciousness that parallels the sort of reflexive awareness that is
required for the use of significant symbols. A role-taking (self) consciousness
of this sort makes possible what might be called a proto-self, but not a self,
because it doesn't have the complexity necessary to give rise to a self. How
then does a self arise? Here Mead introduces his well-known neologism, the generalized other. When children or
adults take roles, they can be said to be playing these roles in dyads.
However, this sort of exchange is quite different from the more complex sets of
behaviors that are required to participate in games. In the latter, we are
required to learn not only the responses of specific others, but behaviors
associated with every position on the field. These can be internalized, and
when we succeed in doing so we come to “view” our own behaviors from the
perspective of the game as a whole, which is a system of organized actions.
The
organized community or social group which gives to the individual his unity of
self may be called “the generalized other.” The attitude of the generalized
other is the attitude of the whole community. Thus, for example, in the case of
such a social group as a ball team, the team is the generalized other in so far
as it enters—as an organized process or social activity—into the experience of
any one of the individual members of it (MSS, 154).
For Mead, although these communities can take different forms,
they should be thought of as systems; for example, a family can be thought of
systemically and can therefore give rise to a generalized other and a self that
corresponds to it. Generalized others can also be found in
concrete
social classes or subgroups, such as political parties, clubs, corporations,
which are all actually functional social units, in terms of which their
individual members are directly related to one another. The others are abstract
social classes or subgroups, such as the class of debtors and the class of
creditors, in terms of which their individual members are related to one
another only more or less indirectly (MSS, 157).
In his Principles of Psychology, a book Mead knew
well, William James discusses various types of empirical selves, namely, the
material, the social, and the spiritual. In addressing the social self, James
notes how it is possible to have multiple selves.
Properly
speaking, a man has as many social
selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their
mind. To wound any one of these his images is to wound him. But as the
individuals who carry the images fall naturally into classes, we may
practically say that he has as many different social selves as there are
distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he
cares. He generally shows a different side of himself to each of these
different groups (James 1890, 294).
From Mead's vantage point, James was on the right track.
However, the notion of audience is left undeveloped in James, as is the manner
in which language is utilized in the genesis of the self and
self-consciousness. For Mead, James's audiences should be thought of in terms
of systemically organized groups, such as we find in certain games, which give
rise to generalized others. Further, we need an account of how we come to view
ourselves from the perspective of these groups that goes beyond the concept of
“sympathetic attachments.” Such an account involves reflexivity, which
originates with the vocal gesture and is essential to taking roles and the
perspective of the generalized other. In addition, reflexivity helps make
possible the capacity to “see” ourselves from ever wider or more “universal”
communities. Mead relates the latter capacity to cosmopolitan political and
cultural orientations. It's worth noting that for Mead a full account of the
self should address the phylogenetic as well as the ontogenetic.
4. The “I” and the “Me”
One of Mead's most significant contributions to social
psychology is his distinction between the “I” and the “Me.” It's worth
emphasizing that while this distinction is utilized in sociological circles, it
is grounded philosophically for Mead. His target, in part, is no less than the
idea of the transcendental ego, especially in its Kantian incarnation. It is
also important to note that the “I” and “Me” are functional distinctions for
Mead, not metaphysical ones.
The self that arises in relationship to a specific generalized
other is referred to as the “Me.” The “Me” is a cognitive object, which is only
known retrospectively, that is, on reflection. When we act in habitual ways we
are not typically self-conscious. We are engaged in actions at a non-reflective
level. However, when we take the perspective of the generalized other, we are
both “watching” and forming a self in relationship to the system of behaviors
that constitute this generalized other. So, for example, if I am playing second
base, I may reflect on my position as a second baseman, but to do so I have to
be able to think of “myself” in relationship to the whole game, namely, the
other actors and the “rules” of the game. We might refer to this cognitive object
as my (second baseman) baseball self or “Me.” Perhaps a better example might be
to think of the self in relationship to one's family of origin. In this
situation, one views oneself from the perspective of the various sets of
behaviors that constitute the family system.
To return to the baseball example, one may have a self, a “Me,”
that corresponds to a particular position that one plays, which is nested
within the game as an organized totality. This self, however, doesn't tell us
how any particular play may be made. When a ball is grounded to a second
baseman, how he or she reacts is not predetermined. He reacts, and how he
reacts is always somewhat different from how he has reacted in the past. These
reactions or actions of the individual, whether in response to others or
self-initiated, fall within the “sphere” of the “I.” Every response that the
“I” makes is somewhat novel. Its responses may differ only in small ways from
previous responses, but they will never be absolutely the same. No catch in a
ball game is ever identical to a previous catch. Mead declares that, “The ‘I’
gives the sense of freedom, of initiative. The situation is there for us to act
in a self-conscious fashion. We are aware of ourselves, and of what the
situation is, but exactly how we will act never gets into experience until
after the action takes place” (MSS, 177–178). The “I” is a “source” of both
spontaneity and creativity. For Mead, however, the “I” is not a noumenal ego.
Nor is it a substance. It is a way of designating a locus of activity.
The responses of the “I” are non-reflective. How the “I” reacts
is known only on reflection, that is, after we retrospect.
If
you ask, then, where directly in your own experience the “I” comes in, the
answer is that it comes in as a historical figure. It is what you were a second
ago that is the “I” of the “me.” It is another “me” that has to take that rôle.
You cannot get the immediate response of the “I” in the process (MSS, 174).
In other words, once the actions of the “I” have become objectified
and known, by definition they have become a “Me.” The status of the “I” is
interesting in Mead. In trying to differentiate it from the empirical,
knowable, “Me,” he states, “The ‘I’ is the transcendental self of Kant, the
soul that James conceived behind the scene holding on to the skirts of an idea
to give it an added increment of emphasis” (MSC in SW, 141). However, this
statement should not to be interpreted as endorsing the notion of a
transcendental ego. Mead is seeking to emphasize that the “I” is not available
to us in our acts, that is, it is only knowable in its objectified form as a
“Me.” This point is clarified by a remark that directly follows the statement
just cited. “The self-conscious, actual self in social intercourse is the objective
‘me’ or ‘me's’ with the process of response continually going on and implying a
fictitious ‘I’ always out of sight of himself” (MSC in SW, 141). A
transcendental ego is not fictitious. But for Mead, since we are dealing with a
functional distinction here, it is quite acceptable to refer to the “I” as
fictitious in metaphysical sense.
Why, then, do we seem to experience what Mead refers to as a
“running current of awareness,” that is, an ego that appears to be aware of
itself as it acts and thinks, if the “I” is not immediately aware of itself (SS
in SW, 144)? William James sought to explain this phenomenon in terms of
proprioception and the relationship between “parts” of the stream of
consciousness. (James 1890, 296–307; James 1904, 169–183; James 1905, 184–194).
Mead developed a unique explanation based on the relationship of the “I” to the
“Me.” As we have seen, the “I” reacts and initiates action, but the actions
taken are comprehended, objectified, as a “Me.” However, the “Me” is not simply
confined to the objectifications of the immediate actions of the “I.” The “Me”
carries with it internalized responses that serve as a commentary on the “I's”
actions. Mead states, “The action with reference to the others calls out
responses in the individual himself—there is then another ‘me’ criticizing,
approving, and suggesting, and consciously planning, i.e., the reflective self”
(SS in SW, 145). The running current of awareness, then, is not due to the “I”
being immediately aware of itself. It is due to the running commentary of the
“Me” on the actions of the “I.” The “Me” follows the “I” so closely in time
that it appears as if the “I” is the source of the “running current of
awareness.”
Freud's super-ego could be conscious or unconscious. One might
think of the “Me” as similar to the conscious super-ego in the commentary that
it provides, but one would have to be careful not to carry this analogy too
far. For Mead, the “Me” arises in relationship to systems of behaviors,
generalized others, and, therefore, is by definition multiple, although the
behaviors of various “Me's” can overlap. Further, Freud's model assumes a
determinism that is not inherent in the relationship of the “I” to the “Me.”
Not only does the “I” initiate novel responses, its new behaviors can become
part of a “Me.” In other words, “Me's” are not static. They are systems that
often undergo transformation. This will become more apparent in the next
section when we discuss Mead's ideas regarding emergence. In this context it is
enough to suggest the following: when a ballplayer makes a catch in a manner
that has never been made before—that is, makes a play that is significantly
different from prior catches—the new play may become part of the repertoire of
the team's behaviors. In other words, the play may alter the existing
generalized other by modifying existing behavioral patterns. In so doing, it
gives rise to a modified or new self because the game as a whole has been
changed. Once again, this may be easier to see in terms of the transformations
that take place in families when new reactions occur as children and adults
interact over time. New selves are generated as family systems are transformed.
5. Sociality, Emergence, and The
Philosophy of the Present
We have seen that the “I” introduces novelty in actions and in
the interactions between human beings. For Mead, novelty is not a phenomenon
that can be accounted for in terms of human ignorance, as it can for a
determinist such as Spinoza. In the Spinozistic framework, even though
everything in nature is determined, as finite modes we must remain ignorant of
the totality of causes. In principle, however, an infinite Mind could predict
every event. Mead, following in the footsteps of Darwin, argues that novelty is
in fact an aspect of the natural world, and that there are events that are not
only unpredictable due to ignorance, but are in principle impossible to
predict. In the latter category, for example, we find mutations that help to
give rise to new species, as well as the creative responses of baseball
players, musicians, composers, dancers, scientists, etc.
In The Philosophy of the
Present—a compilation based on the Carus Lectures delivered in late
1930 in Berkeley—Mead outlines his thoughts on nature and time. Mead did not
have the opportunity to develop his ideas into a book. (He passed away early in
1931.) In spite of the fact that these lectures were hurriedly written due to
obligations that he had as chair of the University of Chicago's philosophy
department, they contain ideas that illuminate his earlier work and indicate
the direction of his thought. On the first page of the lectures we are told
that “reality exists in a present” and that we do not live in a Parmenidean
cosmos (PP, 1). “For a Parmenidean reality does not exist. Existence involves
non-existence: it does take place. The world is a world of events” (PP, 1). Our
world is one in which change is real and not merely a subjective, perceptual,
phenomenon.
It
seems to me that the extreme mathematization of recent science in which the
reality of motion is reduced to equations in which change disappears in an
identity, and in which space and time disappear in a four dimensional continuum
of indistinguishable events which is neither space nor time is a reflection of
the treatment of time as passage without becoming (PP, 19).
The universe doesn't just spin its wheels and offer motion
without real novelty. Part of the impetus behind The Philosophy of the Present was to argue against an interpretation of space-time, such as
Hermann Minkowski's, which eliminates the truly novel or the emergent.
Emergence involves not only biological organisms, but matter and energy, for
example, there is a sense in which water can be spoken of as emerging from the
combination of hydrogen and oxygen.[1] Nevertheless, biological examples
appear best suited to Mead's approach. It's worth noting at this juncture that
Mead had always been keenly interested in science and the scientific method.
However, as a pragmatist, the test of a scientific hypothesis for him is
whether it can illuminate the world that is there. He certainly was never a positivist.
As mentioned, Mead is a systemic thinker who speaks of taking
the perspectives of others and of generalized others. These perspectives are
not “subjective” for Mead. They are “objective” in the sense that they provide
frames of reference and shared patterns of behavior for members of communities.
(This is not to say that every human community has an equally viable account of
the natural world. This is in part why we have science for Mead.) However, it
is not only human perspectives that are objective for Mead. While it is true
that only human beings share perspectives in a manner that allows them to be
(self) conscious about the perspectives of others, there is an objective
reality to non-human perspectives. How can a non-human perspective be
objective? In order to answer this question, a few general remarks about Mead's
notion of “perspective” are in order. First, it is important to note that
perspectives are not primarily visual for Mead. They are ways of speaking about
how organisms act and interact in environments. In the words of David Miller,
According
to Mead, every perspective is a consequence of an active, selecting organism,
and no perspective can be built up out of visual experiences alone or out of
experiences of the so-called secondary qualities. A perspective arises out of a
relation of an active, selective, percipient event and its environment. It
determines the order of things in the environment that are selected, and it is
in nature….We make distinctions among objects in our environment, finally,
through, contact (Miller 1973, 213).
Mead has been referred to as a tactile philosopher, as opposed
to a visual one, because of the importance of contact experience in his
thought. Perspectives involve contact and interaction between organisms and
their environments. For example, a fish living in a certain pond can be thought
of as inhabiting an ecosystem. The way in which it navigates the pond, finds
food to eat, captures its food, etc., can be spoken of as the fish's
perspective on the pond, and it is objective, that is, its interactions are not
a matter of the subjective perceptions of the fish. Its interactions in its
environment shape and give form to its perspective, which is different from the
snail's perspective, although it lives in the same waters. In other words,
organisms stratify environments in different ways as they seek to meet their
needs (Miller 1973, 207–217). The pond, in fact, is not one system but many
systems in the sense that its inhabitants engage in different, interlaced
interactions, and therefore have different objective perspectives. The fish, of
course, does not comprehend its perspective or localized environment as a
system, but this doesn't make its perspective subjective. Human beings, given
our capacity to discuss systems in language, can describe the ecology of a pond
(or better, the ecologies of a pond depending on what organisms we are
studying). We can describe, with varying degrees of accuracy, what it is like
to be a fish living in a particular pond, as opposed to a snail. Through study
we learn about the perspectives of other creatures, although we cannot share
them as we can the perspectives of the language bearing members of our own
species.
For Mead, as noted, systems are not static. This is especially
evident in the biological world. New forms of life arise, and some of them are
due to the efforts of human beings, for example, the botanists who create
hybrids. Mead argues that if a new form of life emerges from another form, then
there is a time when the new organism has not fully developed, and therefore
has not yet modified its environmental niche. In this situation the older
order, the old environment, has not disappeared but neither has the new one
been born. Mead refers to this state of betwixt and between as sociality.
When
the new form has established its citizenship the botanist can exhibit the
mutual adjustments that have taken place. The world has become a different
world because of the advent, but to identify sociality with this result is to
identify it with system merely. It is rather the stage betwixt and between the
old system and the new one that I am referring to. If emergence is a feature of
reality this phase of adjustment, which comes between the ordered universe
before the emergent has arisen and that after it has come to terms with the
newcomer, must be a feature also of reality (PP, 47).
Sociality is a key idea for Mead and it has implications for his
sociology and social psychology. If we think of the “Me” as a system, then
there are times when the “I” initiates new responses that may or may not be
integrated into an existing “Me.” But if they come to be integrated, then there
is a time betwixt and between the old and new “Me” system. What makes this all
the more interesting is that at the level of human interactions we have a
capacity for reflection. We can become aware of changes that are taking place
and even anticipate new “Me's” that may come into being. We can even set up
conditions to promote changes that we believe may transform us in certain ways.
Or to put this in another light, new problems are bound to arise in the world,
and because of our capacity for sociality, we can get some purchase on the
courses of action available to us as we reflect on the novel problems
confronting us. Of course, because the problems are novel means that we do not
have ready solutions. However, the capacity to at times “stand” betwixt and
between old and (possible) new orders, as we do between old and new social
roles, provides us with some opportunity for anticipating alternatives and
integrating new responses. As a matter of fact, Mead links moral development
with our capacity for moving beyond old values, old selves, in order to
integrate new values into our personalities when new situations call for them.
To
leave the field to the values represented by the old self is exactly what we
term selfishness. The justification for the term is found in the habitual
character of conduct with reference to these values.…Where, however, the
problem is objectively considered, although the conflict is a social one, it
should not resolve itself into a struggle between selves, but into such
reconstruction of the situation that different and enlarged
and more adequate personalities may emerge (SS in SW, 148) (emphasis added).
It's worth noting here that Mead did not develop an ethics, at
least not one that was systematically presented. But his position bears a
kinship to theorists of moral sentiment, if we understand “the taking the
perspectives of others” as a more sophisticated statement of sympathetic
attachments. It is important to emphasize that for pragmatic reasons Mead does
not think that the idea of compassion is sufficient for grounding an ethics. He
argues for a notion of obligation that is tied to transforming social conditions
that generate pain and suffering.[2]
Returning to Mead's notion of sociality, we can see that he is
seeking to emphasize transitions and change between systems. This emphasis on
change has repercussions for his view of the present, which is not to be
understood as a knife-edge present. In human experience, the present arises
from a past and spreads into the future. In a manner reminiscent of James's
account of the stream of thought, Mead argues that the present entails duration
(James 1890, 237–283). It retains the receding past and anticipates the
imminent future. Yet because reality ultimately exists in the present, Mead
argues that the historical past, insofar as it is capable of being experienced,
is transformed by novel events. History is not written on an unchanging scroll.
Novelty gives lie to this way of seeing the past. By virtue of its originality,
the novel event can not be explained or understood in terms of prior interpretations
of the past. The past, which by definition can only exist in the present,
changes to “conform” to novel events.
It
is idle, at least for the purposes of experience, to have recourse to a “real”
past within which we are making constant discoveries; for that past must be set
over against a present within which the emergent appears, and the past, which
must then be looked at from the standpoint of the emergent, becomes a different
past. The emergent when it appears is always found to follow from the past, but
before it appears it does not, by definition, follow from the past (PP, 2).
6. Concluding Comments on Determinism and Freedom
Mead's account of the “Me” and the generalized other has often
led commentators to assume that he is a determinist. It is certainly the case
that if one were to emphasize Mead's concern with social systems and the social
development of the self, one might be led to conclude that Mead is a theorist
of the processes of socialization. And the latter, nested as they are within
social systems, are beyond the control of individuals. However, when one
considers the role of the “I” and novelty in his thinking, it becomes more
difficult to view him as a determinist. But his emphasis on novelty only seems
to counter determinism with spontaneity. This counter to determinism in itself
doesn't supply a notion of autonomy—self-governance and self-determination—that
is often viewed as the “essence” of the modern Western notion of the subject.
However, Mead was a firm booster of the scientific method, which he viewed as
an activity that was at its heart democratic. For him, science is tied to the
manner in which human beings have managed from pre-recorded times to solve
problems and transform their worlds. We have just learned to be more methodical
about the ways in which we solve problems in modern science. If one considers
his discussions of science and problem solving behavior, which entail
anticipatory experience, the reflexivity of consciousness, the sharing of
perspectives and their objective reality, and the creativity of the “I,” then
one begins to see how Mead thought that our biological endowments coupled with
our social skills could assist us in shaping our own futures, as well aid us in
making moral decisions. He did not work out the details of this process,
especially with regard to moral autonomy and the “I's” role in it.[3] There is, however, little doubt that
he thought autonomy possible, but the condition for its possibility depends on
the nature of the self's genesis and the type of society in which it develops.
