G.H. Mead

A Reader

G. H. Mead, Filipe Carreira da Silva

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781135262235
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Psicología social

This book introduces social scientists to the ideas of George Herbert Mead (1863-1931) - one of the most original yet neglected thinkers of early twentieth century sociology.

Mead is an exceptional case amongst sociological classics in that, until now, there has been no comprehensive reader of his work. As the first one-volume, comprehensive edited collection of Mead's published and unpublished writing, this book fills this gap. It is the first to critically assess all of Mead's writings and draw out the aspects that are central to his system of thought. The book is divided into three parts (social psychology, science and epistemology, and democratic politics), comprising a total of 30 chapters - a third of which are published here for the first time.

G.H. Mead: A Reader provides a unique and timely contribution to the understanding of this key theorist. It is essential reading for both undergraduate and postgraduate students in the fields of sociology, social psychology, philosophy of social science, social and cultural anthropology, and social and political theory.

Part I

Mead on the human self

I. The early days

1

THE DEFINITION OF THE
PSYCHICAL (1903)^*

( … )This is the position taken by Dewey in the article on “The Reflex Arc Concept.” [1896]¹ He approaches the position from the discussion of the reflex-arc concept, but his quarrel with the psychologists he criticizes is in the end the same as that which I have endeavored to present as inevitable – the quarrel with the doctrine that sensation is an isolated content analyzed out through its correspondence to an outside element.

The result is that the reflex-arc idea leaves us with a disjointed psychology, ( … ) Failing to see the unity of activity, no matter how much it may prate of unity, it still leaves us with sensation or peripheral stimulus; idea or central process (the equivalent of attention); and motor response, or act, as three disconnected existences, having some how to be adjusted to each other, whether through the intervention of an extra-experimental soul, or by mechanical push and pull.²

And his proof of the futility of this psychology is that no such psychical elements answering to physical counterparts exist. Instead of a psychical state which is dependent upon a physical excitation, investigation shows in every case an activity which in advance must determine where attention is directed and give the psychical state the very content which is used in identifying it. In the simplest cases it is the direction of the sense-organs and their co-ordination in larger acts that is responsible for the actual contents of color, sound, odor, etc., which the psychologist treats as dependent only upon external physical conditions. To a reply that the psychologist assembles a complex co-ordinated nervous mechanism, with its inherited adaptations, over against which the outer physical stimulus is the only variable that needs to be taken into account, Dewey responds that either the physical mechanism must be taken as a bare system of motions, whose procedure is nothing but a shifting of stresses, in which case there is no such thing as stimulus and response at all, or else we must make our statement of the physiological system in terms of the same activity as those demanded for the psychological process. In the end what we see, hear, feel, taste, and smell depends upon what we are doing, and not the reverse. In our purposively organized life we inevitably come back upon previous conduct as the determining condition of what we sense at any one moment, and the so-called external stimulus is the occasion for this and not its cause. If we ask now for the results which such a disjointed psychology is actually able to present, the answer is that, just as the physical stimulus is reduced to nothing but a system of masses in motion in which the stimulus as such completely disappears, so the so-called psychical elements reduce to nothing but a series of sensations in which the character of response is as effectually destroyed as was that stimulus in the abstract physical world. We have sensations of motions as well as of colors, and nothing but sensations. Putting, then, the two parts of the argument together, in the first place, this disjointed psychology gives us nothing but sensations which cannot even be got into a sensory-motor arc, but are doomed to remain forever in their own abstract world of registration; and, in the second place, no such elements of sensations are found to exist, and what we have been pleased to call such leave in them the whole content of the act of which we were supposed to make them a part.

The author concludes that the distinction between stimulus, whether psychologically or physiologically investigated, and response is not one between pre-existent elements; that any phase of the act which could be obtained by analysis may be regarded as stimulus or response. The decision between the two predicates depends upon the direction in which the attention shifts. A type of analysis which follows in the wake of logical and physical sciences, gleaning that which they have dropped, harvests only unreal abstractions. Instead of attempting to identify elements, it is the duty of psychology to look upon these predicates as tools of interpretation. Which is another way of saying that sensation does not serve as a stimulus because of what it is as an independent content, but that it is a sensation because it serves as a stimulus. It is evident, then, that the definition must be made in terms of the act, not in terms of a content; and the following are the definitions given:

Generalized, the sensation as stimulus is always that phase of activity requiring to be defined in order that a co-ordination may be completed. What the sensation will be in particular at a given time, therefore, will depend entirely upon the way in which an activity is being used. It has no fixed quality of its own. The search for the stimulus is the search for the exact conditions of action; that is, for the state of things which decides how a beginning co-ordination should be completed. Similarly, motion, as response, has only functional value. It is whatever will serve to complete the disintegrating co-ordination. Just as the discovery of the sensation marks the establishing of the problem, so the constitution of the response marks the solution of this problem.³

And a little farther on:

The circle is a co-ordination, some of whose members have come into conflict with each other. It is the temporary disintegration and need of reconstitution which occasions, which affords the genesis of, the conscious distinction into sensory stimulus on the one side and motor respond on the other. The stimulus is that phase of the forming co-ordination which represents the conditions which have to be met in bringing it to a successful issue; the response is that phase of one and the same forming co-ordination which gives the key to meeting these conditions, which serves as an instrument in effecting the successful co-ordination. They are therefore, strictly correlative and contemporaneous. The stimulus is some thing to be discovered; to be made out; if the activity affords its own adequate stimulation, there is no stimulus save in the objective sense already referred to. As soon as it is adequately determined, then and then only is the response also complete. To attain either means that the co-ordination has completed itself.⁴

There are two situations suggested here – that in which the co-ordination is broken up by conflict between its members, and the other that in which the activity in its original form determines its own adequate stimulation. In the first case we have the presentation and solution of a problem, in terms of sensation and response. In the second instance, the author states that “there is no stimulus save in the objective sense.” These so-called stimuli are further defined “as minor acts serving by their respective positions to the maintenance of some organized co-ordination.”

Although the author has definitely postponed the application of this doctrine to the distinction between sensational and rational consciousness, and to the nature of the judgement, there seem to be some fairly evident conclusions that may be drawn. In the first place, there are presented here certain situations in which the psychical is the nature of consciousness, not because any analysis, or even introspection, produces or, catching our thought as it disappears, reveals a phase of which we were not conscious before, but because the inevitable conflicts of conduct deprive us of the stimuli which further action requires; in other words, deprive us of the objective character of some part of our world. If we compare this position with Wundt’s, the following distinction appears at once: Wundt assumes that the logical criticism arises when our anticipations are not satisfied and the interpretations of former experiences are contradicted. The result of this logical criticism, however, is simply to dislodge our objects from their objective position and relegate them to a subjective world, just as they are, deprived only of their validity. And their places are filled by the conceptual objects which a scientific imagination fashions out of figments light as air. That is, Wundt assumes that the criticised object may retain its organized content and yet lose its validity. He denies the mutual dependence of the validity and the form of the content. Dewey assumes that the object or stimulus loses its form in losing its validity.Furthermore, during this state the whole effort is toward a constitution of the object or stimulus again. The object loses its validity and organization as object at the same moment, and at the same moment it becomes psychical, but not as the shade of an object done to logical death, and doomed henceforth to haunt the shadows of a subjective Sheol. The illustration which is given in the article on the reflex arc is of the child of our modern psychology – not the child of the associational period, that meditative Bambino of the Milanese school with, the orange in his hand; but that some what ponderously curious child with the candle, who seems to be taken out of a Dutch interior. Of this child and his candle the author says: “The question whether to reach or abstain from reaching is the question: What sort of a bright light have we here? Is it one which means playing with one’s hands, eating milk, or burning one’s fingers? The stimulus must be constituted for the response to occur.”⁵ Now, if these questions are the stuff that the psychical is made of, we are dealing with states which do not have to be caught from behind, as they whisk around the corner, and studied in the faint aromas which they leave behind them. We are very frankly conscious of our problems and the hypotheses which they call forth, and the problems are not coy visitors that will not remain to be interrogated. We are not dealing with images that have to be cautiously dissected out of our objects, nor even with fancies that vanish as soon as we show an interest in their pedigree and visible means of support. Other theories of the psychical imply an analysis which preserves the content of the criticised object as subjective experience. But at once the difficulty arises of presenting this content. What the psychologist has actual recourse to is the abstraction of qualities from objects which have not been criticised. For example, in dealing with color as psychical we assume at first that, if we had not to distinguish the colored object as it appears to us from that object as our physical theory defines it, it might never have been possible to separate the color from the so-called real thing. But, in the second place, when we ask for the color which has been stripped off from the object, and which has in the process become psychical and subjective, what is offered to us is the logical abstraction of color from objects that remain objects for all the abstraction, under the assumption that it must be the same as that which this critical experience found on its hands when the object evanesced; while the reject itself would be most difficult to reproduce, and only the professional gymnastics of the trained introspectionist would be at all equal to the task, and he comes off with aromas and suggestions, fearfully avoiding the Jabberwock of the psychological fallacy. We deal with substitutes and correspondents in the place of the psychical material which is too subtle for our grasp. And this holds not only for the psychical derived from criticism of physical experience, but also for that which comes to us from the criticism of thought and imagination. Thought maintains its objectivity as proudly as does sense-perception and the analyst who tries to separate thought from the thing is apt to come off with all the object or nothing according to the school that he patronizes. But it is not difficult, of course, to abstract thought in logic, and it is easy to set up these abstractions as the psychical content, or, more correctly, the same thing as the psychical content which an epistemology has shown must be subjective purely.

The position taken by Dewey is that in this psychical situation the object is gone, and the psychical character of the situation consists in the disintegration and reconstruction. The question then arises: In what form do these contents appear when this disintegration and reconstitution takes place? It does not appear in the form of an object, for it is just this character that it has lost, and consciousness here certainly does not consist in the presentation of copies of objects that will not serve as stimuli, but in their analysis and reconstruction. An answer may be found in that classical description of psychical consciousness, James’s chapter on “The Stream of Thought.” Are there any of the characteristics of the stream which are not unmistakably present when we face any problem and really construct any hypothesis? The kaleidoscopic flash of suggestion, and intrusion of the inapt, the unceasing flow of odds and ends of possible objects that will not fit, together with the continuous collision with the hard,unshakable objective conditions of the problem, the transitive feelings of effort and anticipation when we feel that we are on the right track and substantive points of rest, as the idea becomes definite, the welcoming and rejecting, especially the identification of the meaning of the whole idea with the different steps in its coming to consciousness – there are none of these that are not almost oppressively present on the surface of consciousness during just the periods which Dewey describes as those of disintegration and reconstitution of the stimulus – the object. No person who bemoans insoluble difficulties in front of him that does not paint the same picture, though with no such brilliant brush. No scientist who describes the steps of a dawning and solidifying hypothesis who does not follow in the same channel, with the same swirl and eddy of current, and the same dissolving views upon the shores. If there is ever a psychical feeling of relation, it is when the related object has not yet risen from the underworld. It is under these circumstances that identities and differences come with thrills and shocks. Most of the persons who bore us with themselves, and the novelists who bore us with others, are but dilating upon the evident traits of such phases of our life, and they need lay no claim to professional skill of the trained intro spectionist to recognize these traits. Let me add also that James’s account of the hunt for the middle term in the reasoning process, and much that he writes of the concept, fit perfectly into this phase of experience, and that here as well the psychologist’s fallacy seems to have become perfectly innocuous. Consciousness here cannot help being psychical in its most evident form, and the recognition of it is unavoidable under whatever terminology, technical, or non-technical, we may cover it.

The real crux of the situation is to be found in the feelings of activity. Are they reduced to simple sensations of motion and effort, or may the activity appear directly, without representation? Can we psychically be consciously active, or is psychical consciousness confined to the results of activity? As long as the analysis is logical, i.e., as long as we simply abstract various characteristics of the objects and ascribe to the self assumed psychical elements corresponding to these, changes or motions will be inevitably translated into answering bodily changes or motions, and the only psychical elements that can be attained will be those presumed to accompany them. When psychology attempts to present these elements, it refers to certain feels, as we indicated above. We are now in a position to see where these contents come from. They cannot be the rejects, for reasons already adduced, but they may be the really psychical states forced into an integral act for purposes of interpretation. A successfully thrown ball means to us distance covered, weight of the ball, momentum attained, an entire objective situation. A mistake in the weight of the ball will give rise to a disorganized phase of consciousness, which will be subjective or psychical until it is readjusted. Here the efforts in their inhibition of each other provide us with states of feeling which we assume to be those which accompanied the co-ordinated process, though we could not detect them. This I take to be the real psychologist’s fallacy, the attempt to introject a psychical state into a process which is not psychical. We assume that the individual who did move had an unanalyzed consciousness which contained the motion and this feeling of effort, whereas the feeling of effort belongs to a state in which the individual is not able to move, or in which at least the effort and the motion are in inverse proportion to each other. It is not the individual who could build up a world of masses and momentums, of carrying distances and varying velocities, that has feelings of effort. He has a universe of life and motion instead. Force these elements however, into this universe by a reflective process, and the only statement you can make about them is that they are feelings of those motions. To generalize this statement: the psychical contents which belong to these phases of disintegration and reconstitution, if referred to physical or logical objects that belong to other phases of consciousness, can be only representative, can be only sensations of some thing. They inevitably lose their immediacy. To present a concrete instance: the man who hesitates before a ditch, which he is not sure that he can jump, is conscious of inhibited activity. If he were sure of his ability to jump it, in the place of that consciousness he would have an estimate of the width of the ditch and the spring as an objective motion. If now we say that the sense of effort which comes with the inhibition is the subjective side of that which is objectively expressed as motion, we introduce into the original process a complexity which was not there for our consciousness. We were consciously moving. But we are told that beside this conscious motion there was this feeling of effort which has been borrowed from the subjective phase. This is not the motion. At most it can be but a feeling of motion. We carry over as an element a content whose peculiar quality depends upon its functional value in one phase of consciousness into another, and insist that it exists there as the subjectivity of this second phase. Under these circumstances it is reduced to the position of standing for some thing, and this so-called subjective consciousness is made of nothing but sensations of registrations.

I should add that the experimental psychologist is apt to trouble himself comparatively little about this or any other content of subjectivity. He assumes its existence answering to the physical situation, and confines himself to determining these physical situations with reference to the conditions under which this subjectivity is supposed to appear.

If we do not confuse these two phases of consciousness, I see no more difficulty in the immediate consciousness of activity in the subjective situations than of the motion in the objective. It appears primarily in the shifting of attention in the adaptation of habitual tendencies to each other, when they have come into conflict within the co-ordination. They involve effort in the stresses and strains of these different activities over against each other. I cannot go into the discussion of the interpretation of attention in terms of the innervations of the muscles of the sense-organs and of the head and chest. I must confine myself to the demand that we leave different stages of conscious processes to themselves – to their immediacy – and to the assertion that, when we do this, no one phase can be made merely cognitive of another, whether we have reference to contents or activities. The conclusion was reached above that psychical consciousness could be immediate only in so far as it was functional. We may go a step farther and add that, in so far as the psychical state is functional, it cannot be a sensation of some thing else that is not in that state. Its functional character confines its reference to this function, which is that of reconstruction of the disintegrated co-ordination.

The discussion so far has considered the immediate characteristic of the psychical. The other element in the definition is its identification with the experience of the individual qua individual. The implication of the functional conception of the psychical is very interesting. If the psychical is functional and the consciousness of the individual at the same time, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this phase of our consciousness – or, in other words, the individual qua individual – is functional in the same sense. This individual cannot be the empirical “me” that exists in such profusion in the modern genetic and pathological psychologies; nor yet can it be the transcendental self that is nothing but the function of unity; nor the self whose realization is the goal of the ethics of Green and his ilk; nor the individual whose whole content is the other way of stating the knowable universe. For this individual cannot be an object; and yet it must have a content, but that content cannot be an ideal either of conduct or of knowledge. It cannot be an object, because, for many reasons, some of which will be developed later, it belongs to the subject end of the polarized ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• G.H.Mead
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Biographical summary
• Part I Mead on the human self
• Part II Mead On Science And Epistemology
• Part III Mead, a radical democrat
• G. H. MEAD WORKS
• Index