George Herbert Mead. Philosopher of the Social Individual 9780231882941

Table of contents :
Prefatory Notes
Contents
Introduction
1. Elements of the Act
2. The Act and Time
3. Perception
4. The Social Attitude
5. Reflection
6. The Self and Society
7. Summary
8. Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

GEORGE HERBERT MEAD

Philosopher of the Social Individual

GEORGE HERBERT MEAD PHILOSOPHER OF THE SOCIAL INDIVIDUAL

Bv• Grace Chin Lee

NEW

YORK.

:

MORNINGSIDE

HEIGHTS

KING'S CROWN PRESS 1945

Copyright 1945 G R A C E C H I N LEE Printed in the United States of America

King's Crown Press is a division 0} Columbia University Press organized for the purpose of making certain scholarly material available at minimum cost. Toward that end, the publishers have adopted every reasonable economy except such as would interfere with a legible format. The worl^ is presented substantially as submitted by the author, without the usual editorial attention of Columbia University Press.

THIS

IS A

WAR

TIME

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PREFATORY

NOTES

G

was one of the founders of the distinctively American philosophy of pragmatism. He pioneered tirelessly for its acceptance as the system most germane to modern American ways of living. A genuinely original and independent thinker, Mead nevertheless had little consciousness of his own genius. Rather, with his characteristic effort to introduce the scientific method into philosophy, he regarded himself as a co-worker of all other investigators. Thus, as an associate of John Dewey during the formative years of the Chicago school of pragmatism, he contributed much to the development of the ideas of his better-known colleague. Indeed, the latter has said: " I dislike to think what my own ideas might have been were it not for the seminal ideas which I derived from him." 1 EORGE H E R B E R T M E A D

Mead was born February 27, 1863 and died April 26, 1931. From 1893 to the time of his death, he was a member of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. He published no systematic works, and his writings for journals were predominantly in the fields of psychology, education, and sociology. Mead had a certain diffidence that kept him from giving his ideas the finality of printed form or the inflexibility of systematic organization. True to his theory that men do their significant thinking in the course of conversation, he found extemporaneous speaking his best medium. Consequently, students have available only a loose accumulation of his random remarks, lecture notes, fragmentary manuscripts, and tentative drafts of unprinted essays. These have been posthumously collected and edited. But this collection is an aggregation rather than an organization; its chief aim is completeness rather than arrangement or interpretation. Yet this heterogeneous body of thought has been signally praised by such great thinkers as Whitehead and Dewey. And a glance at it is sufficient to impress the reader with Mead's originality and penetration. Hence, there is manifest need that this chaotic miscellany be presented systematically and be given a concrete interpretation. What are Mead's basic ideas, and how do they fit together ? The purpose of this book is to answer these questions. 1

Journal of Philosophy, vol. xxviii, 1931, p. 311.

vi

PREFATORY

NOTES

The posthumous collection of Mead's unpublished writings consists of four volumes: The Philosophy of the Present (Chicago, 111., publ. 1932) Edited by Arthur E. Murphy. Mind, Self and Society (Chicago, 111., publ. 1934) Edited by Charles W . Morris. Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 111., publ. 1936) Edited by Merritt H . Moore. The Philosophy of the Act (Chicago, 111., publ. 1938) Edited by Charles W . Morris. The Philosophy of the Present contains the Paul Carus Foundation lectures delivered in 1930, the year before Mead's death. In these lectures, Mead presents a philosophy of history from the pragmatists' point of view. In addition to this, there are fruitful suggestions regarding the latest developments in Mead's thinking. The last two lectures, especially, on "The Present as Social" and "The Implications of the Self," indicate a trend of thought which interested and excited Mead just before his death. This trend of thought, the most original and at the same time the most difficult part of Mead's philosophy, represented his self-conscious effort to apply to nature in general the categories implied in the functioning of human nature. Mind, Self and Society is a collection of lectures delivered at the University of Chicago to Mead's classes in social psychology. Their contribution to the development of Mead's metaphysical ideas lies chiefly in his theory of communication and in his conception of the relation between the I and the me. The lectures have further significance in the field of ethics and politics, in which Mead held the naturalistic view that human conduct in its normal functioning contains the elements required for ethical action and political progress. Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century is a collection of lectures delivered to Mead's classes in the history of philosophy. These lectures are interesting because they indicate Mead's affiliations in the traditional schools of thought. Besides being readable and non-technical, they show that Mead, unlike the average American teacher of philosophy of his day, urged his students to relate the ideas of the great philosophers to the periods in which they lived and the social problems which they faced. References to these volumes, The Philosophy of the Present; Mind, Self

PREFATORY

NOTES

pii

and Society; and Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century; will be indicated by the initials PP, MS, and MT, respectively. The Philosophy of the Act is made up of essays and miscellaneous fragments, which are technical and repetitious, obscure and difficult. Of all Mead's writings, these were evidently least intended for publication in the form in which they appear. However, their extensiveness has made them invaluable for the reconstruction of Mead's ideas. In the following pages, references to this volume will be indicated simply by page numbers. I wish to acknowledge my sincere appreciation of the stimulation and guidance which I have received both during and after my five years of graduate study at Bryn Mawr College from Professor Paul Weiss of the Department of Philosophy. I am grateful to Professor Charles W. Morris of the University of Chicago for placing at my disposal Mead's unpublished manuscripts. To my friends, Doris Carland, H. M. D. and M. A., I am indebted for their constant encouragement during the period in which I was preparing this volume for publication. To my family, I am grateful for indispensable financial aid. I also wish to thank the following for permission to quote from their publications: University of Chicago Press, publishers of Mead's works; Harvard University Press, publishers of the Collected Worlds of Charles Sanders Peirce; The Macmillan Co., publishers of A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality and I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. K. Smith; Longmans Green & Co., Inc., publishers of William James, A Pluralistic Universe; E. P. Dutton & Co, Inc., publishers of William James, Selected Papers on Philosophy; Henry Holt & Co, publishers of Essays in Honor of John Deu/ey and Creative Intelligence; and University of California Publications in Philosophy.

CONTENTS Introduction

/

1. Elements of the Act

12

2. The Act and Time

18

3. Perception

26

The Social Attitude

35

5. Reflection

54

6. The Self and Society

65

7. Summary

77

8. Conclusion

82

Bibliography

9J

Index

99

INTRODUCTION

G

has been characterized as a "seminal mind." 1 This description seems to imply that his writings do not constitute a system of philosophy. However, a system of philosophy need not have the external form of a system. Were such formal organization necessary, it would be impossible, for example, to characterize Plato's and Aristotle's philosophies as philosophic systems. On the surface, they are lectures, dialogues, random remarks. But the impetus behind these philosophies has been an internal systematic form. We can detect behind the external appearance of casualness in their diverse writings the same basic ideas and principles which integrate and interrelate the concepts into a meaningful whole. A philosophy is systematic when there is a solution offered to a fundamental philosophical problem, and all other problems are developed in terms of that solution. On the basis of this criterion, Mead's writings form a system of philosophy. A fundamental problem of all men and therefore of all philosophy is the relation of the individual to the whole of things. It is to the solution of this problem that Mead devotes his earnest attention. As he says: EORGE M E A D

Stating it in as broad a form as I can, this is the philosophical problem that faces the community at the present time. How are we to get the universality involved, the general statement which must go with any interpretation of the world and still make use of the differences which belong to the individual as an individual ? (MT417) If, however, we demand a system that its ideas have an absolute, unchanging and final validity, Mead has no system. In fact, he would be the last one to wish his philosophical theories to have this rigid character. 1 See The Philosophy of the Present, Prefatory Remarks by John Dewey, xl. Also A. N. Whitehead, whose comment upon the publication of The Philosophy oj the Act is quoted on the jacket of that volume: "I regard the publication of the volumes containing the late Professor George Herbert Mead's researches as of the highest importance for Philosophy. I entirely agree with Professor John Dewey's estimate: 'A seminal mind of the very first order.' "

INTRODUCTION

2

Fundamental to Mead's way of regarding the universe is a belief in the emergence of novel experiences, requiring different systematic constructions to explain them. One system of thought is supplanted by a more comprehensive one as new experiences and hence new problems arise. T h e values of the old system are incorporated within the new. 2 Only by bearing in mind Mead's belief in the tentativeness and relativity of any system can we say that Mead's work constitutes a system. A n d even then, we must remember that Mead was so engrossed in building a system —and so aware of the limitations of any system—that he never published one. Moreover, the richness of the internal development of Mead's thought prevented him from concentrating on its external structure. W h a t is salient in Mead's works, as they come to us, is the penetrating nature of his insight. What is lacking is an external organization of his inherently systematic body of thought. T h e obscurity of Mead's written presentation of his ideas is generally acknowledged. Kenneth Burke, in reviewing the collected works, expresses this well when he describes Mead as writing in paragraphs rather than sentences.3 Each of Mead's sentences, especially in The Philosophy

of the

Act, seems like an attempt to present, analyze and solve a fundamental problem. A sentence is rarely introduced for the sole and deliberate purpose of clarifying a preceding one. For Mead, it was "the realization of the problem and its solution that is the whole zest of living" (511). A s a result, his method is ad hoc and inductive rather than closely-knit and deductive. Still another cause of the obscurity of Mead's language has its source in a situation with which all innovators are faced. In a sense they are starting again at the beginning. They cannot accept the traditional modes of thinking, although the language they must use to convey their meaning is an outgrowth of these modes. A s Dewey expressed it, A great deal of the seeming obscurity of Mr. Mead's expression was due to the fact that he saw something as a problem which had not presented itself at all to the other minds. There was no common language because there was no common object of reference (PPxxxvii). Nevertheless, with the passage of time, the ideas Mead laboriously set forth have become part of our intellectual environment. Largely through 2 " W e never simply throw away values that have been there. They are allotted to their proper spheres within which they give rise to appropriate responses."—"A Pragmatic Theory of Truth," University of California Publications in Philosophy, II (1929). p. 72. » The New Republic, X C V I I (1939), p. 293.

INTRODUCTION

3

his efforts and those of his students, American thought has been encouraged to employ biological and social categories in the consideration of philosophic and psychological problems. Throughout Mead's work he professes an antipathy for the metaphysics which he had inherited from his philosophical predecessors. This metaphysics had resulted in a doubly bifurcated universe, a universe divided into mind and matter, and into appearance and reality. The result was the domination of philosophy by the problem: "How can we get beyond that which we experience to that which we believe to be the ultimate reality?" Philosophy became the attempt to bridge a gap between the experienced and inexperienceable. The mechanism of the period in which philosophy was dominated by the success of science had identified metaphysics either with physics or with meta-experience. In the one case, there had been a certain degradation of metaphysics; in the other, there had been an attempt to elevate it. In either case, metaphysics could be shown to be futile, on the basis that its function was more adequately fulfilled by science, or that its function could not be fulfilled at all. So far as metaphysics implies meta-experience, that is, an ultimate reality outside experience, Mead denies that the metaphysical problem has any meaning. For Mead, "the experience within which human beings arc involved is a constituent part of the reality which they judge." But so far as metaphysics suggests meta-physics, conceiving physics as a study of abstract motion, Mead finds the problem highly meaningful. His effort was to build a metaphysical system in which physics, recognized in its proper place as a product of social reflection, can be used for purposes of control and prediction. Mead believes in metaphysics as the study of reality which comes to us in the form of experience. But experience, for Mead, does not have the limited meaning of conscious experience, a meaning which it has come to have in many accepted views. Our experience includes more than that of which we are aware.4 Experience in its most general sense, says Mead, is * Mead points out the importance of Freud in the recognition of unconscious experience by modern thinkers: "It has become a commonplace of the psychologists that there is a structure in our experience which runs out beyond what we ordinarily term our consciousness; that this structure of ideas determines to a degree not generally recognized the very manner of our perception as well as that of our thinking, and yet that the structure itself is not generally in the focus of our attention and passes unnoticed in our thought and perceiving. . . . It is one of the valuable byproducts of the Freudian psychology that it has brought many people to recognize that we do not only our thinking but also our perceiving

4

INTRODUCTION

"that portion of the life-process of any form which includes the actions of the form as a whole with reference to an environment" (405). That is, experience is the activity of a living individual in his environment, when what he does is an expression of his whole being. According to Mead, the life-process confers a character upon the environment, which did not antedate the appearance of the process. And this environment, in its turn, conserves the process which made it possible. Only where there is experience, that is, living process, does an environment exist in the strict sense of the word. Inanimate things cannot confer a character upon their surroundings. They do not therefore have an environment, but only a background. An inanimate thing is part of the world of motion in which it exists; a living thing is distinguishable from its environment, although dependent upon it for its continued existence. The conception of experience as life-process is fundamental to Mead's philosophy. It leads to a concept of the act as teleological, and is closely akin to the Aristotelian concept of actuality, since the latter is similarly based on a concept of organic action. The emphasis on experience, moreover, leads to a philosophy in which the present is regarded as the field within which all values and all meanings aiise; ii is the starting point and the goal of all thinking. Mead's philosophy, like Aristotle's, is a philosophy in which doing is more fundamental than making. Doing is the end for which making is the means. Yet making has so occupied the attention of modern man that it has obscured the end for which it was originally intended. The scientific rationalism of the period since Galileo has been concerned principally with making, that is, with concepts which express an experimental control over nature, concepts which satisfy "man's instrumental mind" (470). Science has made man at home in the world, in the sense that man is able to control his environment by explanation and prediction, by construction and reconstruction. Man's success in controlling the world had its rational culmination in the Kantian First Critique in which the objectivity of the world was conceived as man-made. However, the extreme importance of making has caused man to conceive reality on the experimental model; in terms only of that which is invariant and determined. This view has resulted in a philosophy of deterwith minds that have already an organized itructuie which determines in no smill degree what the world of our immediate and UDreflective experience shall be." "Scientific Method and the Moral Sciences,' International lournul of Ethics, XXXJII 11923), p. 229.

INTRODUCTION

5

minism, that is, of the determination of the individual by the environment and of the part by the whole. It is a curious paradox of history that ideas conceived to give man power over the universe were developed into or accompanied by a philosophy which denied the ultimacy of the individual men. A comparable situation exists in the temperament of a contemporary scientist, a combination of pride because of what he knows and humility because of what he thinks. His knowledge gives him power, but when he stops to philosophize, he conceives that his knowledge includes himself, that his actions obey the laws which he has discovered, and therefore, that he is merely a part determined by the environment in which he lives. At the height of the development of this point of view, man was believed to be a mere congeries of physical particles, a whole only in the sense that he was an aggregation of parts. The essential fallacy of mechanism, however, is not its reduction of the units of reality to material particles. These have been replaced by energy. The fault lies rather in the misunderstanding of the nature of the scientific method and in the consequent denial of the reality of emergence. T h e scientific procedure evidently involves a search for that which is invariant and necessary. But the starting point of that search is the present, a reality which is different from the past. The present, or the field of immediate experience, presents itself as problematic, indeterminate, vague, and without any immediately apparent relation to the past from which it has emerged. The enterprise of science is the explanation of that present in terms of a past so that the future may be anticipated. It seeks the necessary conditions of the present, reconstructs the past in terms of that present. The experience within which the problem arose requires a different historical setting from that which had previously been assumed to be an adequate explanation. The recognition of the primacy of doing over making is thus paralleled by a recognition of the primacy of doing over knowing. Science or knowledge is a development of control for the purposes of conduct, the explanation of the present in terms of the past for the sake of future action. What is known or made by an individual as a scientist is for the sake of what will be done by him or others, as living individuals. Knowing, or the understanding of the past, is for the sake of action, or doing which moves into the future. It begins in doing and has doing as its goal. What is known must be true in the sense that it conforms to the structure of our experience. For the ongoing experience is prior to reflection and is the verification

6

INTRODUCTION

of the reflective analysis. But what is known must also be useful in the sense that it promotes our doing. Doing is chronologically, teleologically, and normatively prior to knowing and making. It is the ultimate fact and the ultimate end. In asserting that knowing and making are for the sake of doing, Mead does not deny the importance of knowing and making. And because the latter necessitates mechanism as its hypothesis, i.e., a belief in invariant laws, Mead admits that mechanics has a practical importance. It is for the sake of doing or action which moves toward an end. This doing, on the other hand, implies a teleological theory of nature. Thus Mead maintains two attitudes at once, i. e., mechanism and teleology. For example, in the conception of the nature of life, he appreciates the importance of the attempt to explain its reality in terms of physico-chemical relations, but refuses to reduce it to such a relation of energies. The reality of living is an experience which is an undeniable and immediately present whole, a fact in the sense of an ultimate doing, not in the sense of something made or constructed from constituent elements. Once life has emerged, the attempt to explain it in physical terms is not only legitimate but also desirable, so long as it is not denied that the explanation is dependent upon the existence of life as an actual, ongoing process. It should be noted here that the use of life as an illustration is not arbitrary. Mead says that he knows of no process that is not that of a living form (344). The living process is a unique phenomenon from the observation of which Mead has derived his ultimate principles. Its employment as the basis of his philosophy is justified by the fact that it is that which we realize most intimately, although its very intimacy limits our capacity for reflective knowledge concerning it. As philosophers, however, we should not restrict ourselves to reflective knowledge or to that which is relatively complete. For reflection implies an abstraction from what is individual and unique in order to construct that which is universal and common. And philosophy includes both the abstraction, i.e., the reflective construction, and that from which it is abstracted, i. e., the individual experience or the life process. T h e attempt to integrate the conative or immediate with the cognitive or mediate elements in human conduct has been the goal of all philosophers. Traditionally, the effort to integrate the two has been made either through a subordination of the conative to the cognitive, e.g., by asserting that the irrational elements arc unreal, or by their simple juxtaposition,

INTRODUCTION

7

e. g , by a parallelism of mind and matter. Through Mead's attempt to achieve a means for the exercise of man's will to power through an understanding of nature (626), he has focussed upon a new method for integrating the two elements. His distinctive contribution has been the presentation of these elements in a functional rather than in a structural relation, i. e., the conception of knowledge as a means to action. Mead's thought is a healthy as well as inescapable reaction from the philosophies which have prevailed since the time of Descartes and which culminated in the absolute idealism and the naive materialism of the nineteenth century. Both these isms, growing out of the Cartesian rationalism, exclude the non-rationalizable element involved in the individual person as a concrete and inimitable unit. It is only natural that this minimizing of the individual, which had infected philosophic and scientific thought for over two hundred years, should have become fixed in the popular mind. For Mead, the unity which is the life-process of the individual is the ultimate fact. An individual is not merely the sum of its analyzable parts, nor is it a part which is merely a representation of a wider whole. Mechanistic materialism and objective idealism are equally guilty of a denial of the individual's unique reality as experienced in the present. In the one case, mechanism, the present is conceived as completely conditioned by the past, or that which has happened. In the other case, objective idealism, the present is conceived as completely conditioned by the future, or that which will happen. That is, the universe is defined or limited by its beginning or by its end. This limitation implies a closed or completed universe, a whole which antedates its parts and thus determines whatever occurs or will occur as eternally present. According to Mead, however, both these conceptions, of the past as a whole, and of the future as a whole, are cognitive structures or reflective constructs which begin with the present. Each is a temporal extension of that present into a whole which is irrelevant to passage or emergence. The result is a rigidifying of the present's history and its prophecy, a timeless representation which must abstract from the fact that new presents are continually emerging which require a new systematization. One of the significant achievements of Mead's philosophy of experience is that it restores the present to its place as the locus of reality, at the same time looking to the past, or what may be systematized, as a basis for control. The philosophy of experience, in other words, denies the rigidity of the

8

INTRODUCTION

structures which are the result of the theoretical enterprise. Thus Mead denies the ultimate significance of the presuppositions characteristic of mechanistic materialism and objective idealism, namely, that reality is an aggregation of abstract parts or a simple all-inclusive whole. In an emphasis on experience as prior to reflection, and on doing as prior to making, Mead is able to avoid the situation in which the individual is a resultant. It is this emphasis which makes it possible for Mead to restore dignity and a place to the individual. For Mead, the universe or objective whole is an organization of individual perspectives or unique presents. The reality of the universe is derived from the reality of the individuals which constitute it. This involves the rejection of the theory that the individual is a partial representation of a supervening or underlying absolute reality, but it is not the denial of an objective world constituted by individuals. Nor is the possibility of getting beyond individual experience ignored. What occurs in the experience of one individual can be related to what occurs in the experience of another. Every individual, by virtue of his belonging to a community, recognizes the reality of other individuals in that community and assumes their attitudes, i. e , regards himself from their perspectives and sees his behavior from their points of view. These perspectives are generalized by the individuals into a common perspective which is the perspective of the community. But this common perspective is not an absolute perspective which denies the reality of the individuals which constitute it. A basic principle in the organization is the fact of translation or transformation from one perspective to another. The meaning of the organized perspective, in other words, is not only its universality, i. e., its abstraction from the peculiarity of the perspectives, but also its inclusion of the fact of reference. The whole is a product of communal activity within which there is a place for the individual activities from which it was derived. The integration of the principles of the primacy of experience and the objectivity of perspectives constitutes Mead's system as a metaphysical pluralism and a social idealism. The individual is ultimate; he becomes a part of a whole through a wider process. His reality is not complete in its isolate being, but must be achieved in part through his relation to a whole which is wider than himself. Every self, as we shall see, is both an 1 and a me, active and reactive with both an inside and an outside. No individual is completely determined by his relations to others, but makes a difference in the development of these relations. On the odier hand, there is a certain

INTRODUCTION

9

structure of relations to which the individual must conform. If we define sociality as the presence of a reality in two systems, we see that the individual is social. He belongs to a system which determines him in part, and at the same time to a system which he determines. Mead's concept of the community perspective is a reflection of his lifelong interest in social psychology to which he made significant contributions. The American social psychology of Mead's day was a reaction both from the abstract individualism of the traditional English psychology with its atomistic and physiological approach to social phenomena, and the social realism of European psychology with its monistic approach to individuals in society. According to English psychology, the individual was basically impulsive and egoistic and could become socially conscious or altruistic only by a kind of irrational mysticism or Christian charity. Quite different from this "lord of the manor" approach to social consciousness was both the German and French social psychology. Developed under the influence of Hegelian thought, with its historical conception of the cultural phenomena of society, the Germans (Wundt, Lazarus and Simmel, to mention only a few), and the French (Tardé, Durkheim, Lévy-Bruhl and Le Bon), created social psychologies around their studies of anthropology, philology, and criminology. The result was a stress on the social milieu in time and place as responsible for the social reactions of the individual. Both English and Continental social psychology implied social statics rather than social dynamics, insofar as the one emphasized the fixed biological heredity of individual instincts and the other the fixed cultural heredity of social rules and regulations. The American social psychologists favor the European social psychologists over the English individualists insofar as American social psychology is social behaviorism, or a study of behavior under social conditions rather than physiological conditions. It takes for granted certain ongoing social processes in which all individuals are necessarily involved. However, American social psychology is tinged with a characteristic optimism and faith in social progress, in sharp contrast to the social fatalism of many of the Europeans. Therefore, the social psychologists in America attempted to modify the complete social determination of the individual, implied in the latter theory, to permit of influences on society by the individual. In this they were assisted by the genetic approach suggested in Darwin's work. Supplanting the earlier child psychology in which the child's mind was measured by the adults, the Americans found in such early social experi-

IO

INTRODUCTION

ences as play and games an outlet for the expressive tendencies of the individual in a social environment. From a study of these processes is derived an emphasis on developing attitudes which represent not only an adaptation to society but also the acquisition of a definite self or personality. Mead's distinctive contribution to American social psychology was his emphasis on symbolic behavior, or communication through language, as the chief mechanism for both social control and social progress. In communication through language, the individual must, to some extent at least, adopt the attitude of the others of his group in order to be heeded. H e must understand in order to be understood. Language, therefore, gives society a method of control over the individual. Education, which is a professionalized form of communication, is the most patent illustration of such control. At the same time, communication diffuses the knowledge which has been made available by science, and is thus the true medium of social technology and social progress. Language is thus the great universalizer of experiences—both of the collective experiences in the individual and of the individual experience in society. T h e ancient philosophers, according to Mead, were impressed by the universality of the significant symbols with which they conversed, but transferred these symbols to an eternal realm because they were "frankly unable to find solutions for their social problems either in politics or in morals. They could devise neither an order of society nor a manner of life for the common man which within immediate experience could meet the social problems that confronted him. Social justice, and the union of social solidarity with individual initiative and responsibility remained practically unattainable and therefore as fixed conditions of the social problem were idealized as existences transcending immediate experience. The same transcendent existence was logically assigned to other universal characters of things which were arrived at by the same process of analysis and indication" (387). Therefore, only the intellectual élite could attain the knowledge of universals which enabled them to participate in the highest society. Wisdom was the exclusive prerogative of the leisure class. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution and the development of modern science, however, the possibilities of control over the environment have been so enhanced that universals can be brought down from the heights where they served only as objects of contemplation and put to use as competent techniques for the solution of social problems. N o longer

INTRODUCTION

ii

need man idealize his abstract ideas. He can now employ them to make himself at home in his environment. No longer need knowledge bow before faith. Knowledge has become power. Released from the tyranny of a supernatural realm of ideals, man has been freed for the mundane task of making abstract relations into concrete aspects of his world. For Mead, therefore, the basic problem of the relation of the part to the whole, both in theory and practice, has been solved, not by abstract logic but by the logic of events beginning with the Industrial Revolution. Theory can now be regarded as comprising the universals or functional ideas which lead to successful practice. These ideas are sometimes simply imparted by society to individuals who accept them as information, and sometimes developed by individuals who attempt to use them for reformation. In the one case, we have the mechanism for social control; in the other for social progress. In either event, these theories should be regarded as originating in the problems of individual experiences and as verified in the successful continuation of the social process.

Chapter

ELEMENTS

One

OF THE

ACT

HE ultimate unit of existence is, for Mead, what he calls an act (65). We may define an act as the ongoing behavior of an individual, initiated by a want and directed to the end of satisfying that want through the use of suitable elements in the environment. In any act, the end is that which determines the direction of the activity, and which is present in the beginning as a control, defining the want and regulating its expression. This constitutes the act as a teleological activity. An act is the behavior of an individual whose "reasons for movement lie within itself," rather than in another (417). Acts are self-caused. It is this which distinguishes them from motions which are conditioned by other motions. Causation of the action by the individual may be interpreted in either of two ways: (1) Acts as self-caused may imply a relation between an inside and an outside (160) or between an inner core of being and its overt form. (2) On the other hand, self-causation may mean causation by the elements of the act itself. We may describe this as the act causing itself rather than as the act being caused by a self. The first interpretation of self-causation is unacceptable to Mead insofar as it implies that time-honored conception of a private inward being spatially distinguished from its outside. For such spatial distinctions Mead substitutes temporal ones; in other words, defining the act in terms of process rather than structure. A process, because it is incomplete and has part of its being in the future, has a certain inaccessibility. It cannot be made an object of scientific knowledge, but belongs to the continuous and as yet incomplete experience of the individual. Its inaccessibility, however, denotes not a spatial privacy which would be uncovered by dissection but a temporal one which uncovers itself as the act proceeds. Once temporal distinctions within the act have been substituted for spatial ones within the actor, we arrive at the interpretation of the act as causing itself. The living process is a "process in which the later events in the experience control the acts which express that process" (343). The act is an ongoing event in which there is active direction by the end toward which it moves. The end of the act is present in the beginning as a want. A want is an

ELEMENTS

OF THE ACT

jj

inner deficiency developed within the process itself, beginning one process and ending another. The circularity of this process can be illustrated by an example from the internal economy of an organism which has both nutritive and non-nutritive cells. The nutritive cells in this economy specialize in the ingestion and assimilation of food and "only expend energy which is essential to their own activity" (303). The non-nutritive cells, on the other hand, specialize in the expenditure of energy, employing the nourishment supplied by the nutritive cells, and ingesting and assimilating only what is essential to their own activity. The non-nutritive cells in this process both supply the want and create it. Their motile and other functions involve the expenditure of energy which is obtained from the activity of the nutritive cells directly, but which they (the non-nutritive cells) originally obtained from the environment. The non-nutritive cells are "exciting the nutritive cells to activity by their demands upon them, while the ingested food will excite these cells by the presence of the nourishment. It is this excitement of the nutritive tract by the non-nutritive cells that gives rise to the stimulus to the non-nutritive cells which continues until the food provides the stimulus to the proper exercise of the nutritive tract" (304). A want is thus self-sustaining and self-stimulating. It is both a deficiency which arises through the expenditure of energy and the effort to replenish that deficiency. The exhaustion of the supply does not involve the destruction of the life process, because, in the very exhaustion, there is a replenishment of the materials needed. The constant reinforcement of the want keeps the life process, therefore, in continuous, if rather monotonous, operation. This conception of want as self-sustaining appears to be pertinent primar ily to the processes of sub-human forms and to the purely organic activities in human forms. In peculiarly human activities, on the other hand, where there is a consciousness of ends to be attained, the conception of wants as relative to an ideal completion, or end in the sense of terminus, appears more appropriate. Nevertheless, while Mead occasionally refers to selfrealization in this ideal sense, he tends to regard even human behavior as moral only if the wants are maintained and reinforced. Wants or "impulses will be good to the degree that they reinforce themselves and expand and give expression to other impulses as well" (MS385). Thus, not only in biology but also in ethics, Mead exemplifies the emphasis on the desirability of ongoing and uninterrupted process which is typical of the pragmatic

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1

approach. Insofar as the pragmatist emphasizes continuous biological activities exclusively, he is led to a position which permits of no distinction between ends and means. On the other hand, philosophers who emphasize self-conscious processes and self-realization exclusively are unable to conceive that ends are also means. T h e teleological or functional nature of the act implies its division into various stages, logically and temporally related. A purposive activity implies a qualitative change of state as the activity proceeds, e.g., from a hungry to a satiated being. Each state has a value in terms of the function as a whole, according to the extent to which the end is realized in it. A function begins in want, or a feeling of incompletion and ends in satisfaction, or a feeling of completion. In between these two feelings is another feeling, that of interest. An interest is a feeling of potential satisfaction relative to a specific object which serves as a means to the end. Where there is an enormous gap between wants and satisfaction, as in human society with its highly developed specialization of labor, there is an increased emphasis on the interest phase of the act. Want, interest, and satisfaction may be considered the affective or subjective counterparts of the act which expresses itself effectively in the environment. Actually, the affective series is an abstraction, for an act is a doing rather than a feeling. As doing, the act falls into three stages: impulse, stimulus, and response—corresponding to want, interest, and partial satisfaction. 2 A n impulse is the want as going out and bringing the needs of the 1

James is the most extreme of the pragmatists in his emphasis on continuous and uninterrupted activity. According to Mead (631, MT396), James did not bring out the inhibitions that exist in experience. That is, in James's stress on the unity of the ongoing experience, there is a failure to recognize that problems fracture experience and require analysis and reconstruction of the situation. An illustration of this is the story which Mead tells (MT507) of James and Royce "out sight-seeing in a city. Royce had information of where they were going and told James what car they would take so that in the end they would get to such and such a place. H e y got to a Junction where they had to change cars. James got on the wrong car. Royce corrected him, telling him . . . that the car he was on went to another point "Yes," said James, "that is where I wanted to go." 1 The end of the act or complete satisfaction, does not have a counterpart in conduct in relation to and within the environment, because the attainment of the censummatory stage implies ( 1 ) that the things toward which acdons have been directed have become part of the acting individual and (2) that the individual is no longer interested in the environment. "The satisfaction takes place within the organism" (306}. Also see Whitehead, Process and Reality, New York, 1929, p. 233: "In the conception of the actual entity in its phase of satisfaction, the entity has attained its separation from other things; it has absorbed the datum, and it has not yet lost itself in the swing back tu the "decision" whereby its appetition becomes an element in the data of other entities superseding it. Time his stood sfJl—if only it could."

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' 5

organism into the environment. An impulse relates the organism to the environment in two ways, actively and passively, or selectively and respdnsively. When we speak of the impulse as seeking expression, we refer to its active aspect. We mean that it expresses a "gestalt of sensitivity" ( M S 129) and will selectively determine its environment. When we speak of the impulse as requiring a release, we refer to its passive aspect, regarding it as "a congenital tendency to react in a specific manner to a certain sort of stimulation under certain organic conditions" (MS337). An emphasis on the passive aspect of an impulse tends to obscure the difference between an impulse and an instinct. Instincts are specific capacities requiring release by specific stimuli. They are so firmly and specifically organized that "a check at any point frustrates the whole undertaking" (MS337). Impulses, on the other hand, are general tendencies subject to modification in their expression according to the selective capacity of the organism. The impulse is the tendency or attitude of the organism not only ready to express itself without, in the presence of the appropriate environment, but also seeking an occasion which will permit the act to proceed. A stimulus is an object of interest because it answers the quest of the impulse (MS328). It is a particular which exemplifies the general character which the impulse defined as necessary for its release. The objective of the impulse is usually of a general character, e. g., for food rather than for a particular kind of meat. The stimulus is a concrete particular which is interesting because it falls into the category defined by the impulse. T h e more complex the structure of the organism, the more definite the stimulus must be.3 By considering the stimulus an answer to the impulse, we avoid the "stimulus-response fallacy" according to which the stimulus is the first cause. This fallacy involves the supposition that the behavior of the organism is entirely determined by its environment.4 In contrast to this view 3 In more complicated activities, where the organism has distance experience of stimuli, and locomotive organs to enable it to get beyond its immediate environment, the initial stimulus is not always a simple exemplification of the generically defined object of the impulse, but may be merely a means to such an objcct. However, it is still functionally a member of the class defined by the impulse. See Dewey, Logic, New York, H. Holt & Co., 1938, p. 3 1 . 4 "The older statement which put the stimulus first, made it the condition, the cause of the response, had, so to speak, put the cart before the horse. You cannot deal with psychological data adequately if you insist on the causal associational statement in regard to them. We are at any moment surrounded by an indefinite number of possible sensations. Which of these will be picked out is decided in terms of the response that is already being made. There you have the future, the conclusion of the act, implied in what is now going on but which is not yet achieved, coming in to set up the conditions in terms of which stimuli shall arise. This mechanism selects certain responses; it selects the stimuli which shall be effective" ( M T 3 1 8 ) .

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is Mead's conception that the environment is a selection which is dependent upon the processes of the living form. The stimulus is an opportunity or occasion for the act and not a compulsion or mandate. Insofar as the environment exists for the act, it exists only as means. Moreover, the objects in the environment take on meaning only insofar as they function as means (MT89). This dependence of the environment upon the lifeprocess of the living form is what Mead calls the logical determination of the environment by the form. It is to be contrasted with the causal determination of the form by the environment which is emphasized in the mechanist's view of the universe. According to the concept of logical determination, "the environment is defined in terms of objects which are foods and in their spatio-temporal and physiological accessibility to the form" (116). According to the concept of causal determination, "food and hunger, life and death, disappear as entities in nature and become physical and chemical processes, which in themselves and in their on-going carry none of these characters" (202). The response is at the subjective pole of the subject-object relation or perspective in which the stimulus is at the objective pole. It is the verification of interest in the stimulus by an adjustment to it. The response is thus the reply to the stimulus, but it is evident that a response can so reply only if there was an original impulse which selected the stimulus. Therefore, a response presupposes an impulse as well as a stimulus and is a means to the completion of the former in its reply to the latter, i. e., it is a response to the state of the organism as well as to the environment. The impulse represents the act as an initial outgoing tendency. The stimulus represents the environment of the object. In the response the organism has been externalized in action; the object has been internalized. The externalization and internalization may take place in different degrees. For example, the externalization may be merely a glance at the stimulating object, or it may be an actual step toward it. The stimulating object may be merely touched, or it may be actually consumed. Just as the impulse functions as a universal for which the stimuli are particular occasions, the response functions as a universal in remaining identical despite a variety of stimuli (MS125). "In the experience of individuals they [the identical responses] are the criteria by which we identify the universal character in things. Whatever one tends to sit down in is a chair" (371). Moreover, the response has a persistent unity even though the stimuli change in specific content as the act is being carried out. For exam-

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pic, if I want to get to a certain place along a complicated blazed trail, I continue to walk even though the landmarks, or stimuli, change as I approach the goal of my trip. In terms of this persistent unity of the response, I call the conglomeration of stimuli a road. It is thus the response which gives to the environment the structural meaning which it has for the organism. Before the stage of response, the environment existed merely as the objective of the impulse, i. e , as a possible means to satisfaction and as the locus of the stimuli or concrete particulars. In the response are integrated the generality of the impulse and the particularity of the stimuli. The logical essence of the teleological act is that it proceeds from the universal to the particular, and finally to the synthesis of the two in the response, which determines the environment as made up of objects. "So far as environments exist for the form itself, they exist in this selected character and as constructed in terms of possible responses" (MS247).

Chapter Two

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HE ACT has a temporal charactcr which defines the temporal organization of its environment: ( i ) its duration or its continuity, (2) its direction or its successiveness, and (3) its uniqueness or perspectivity. A n act "stretches beyond the stimulus to the response" (65). Its occurrence is therefore over a period of time. Since the act is the unit of existence, it defines a world which cannot be confined within the instant. Thus, any existent requires a temporal continuity or temporal span in order to be what it is. " T h e real is qualitative and you cannot get quality at an instant. It occurs over a period whether it be color, melody, or the ionization of an atom" ( M T 3 1 6 ) . For the purposes of measurement science has reduced the world to an instant, or a "knife-edged present" (225-6). This methodological fiction implies the addition of instantaneous presents to each other in order to obtain a duration. But if the world were defined by the moment, it would disappear with the moment. T h e world at each moment would be a new world, not necessarily different qualitatively, but other than its predecessor numerically. There would be no temporal stretches, no continuity but only conjunctivity, since a continuum can never be made up of points. Moreover, the conception of knife-edged presents renders causality meaningless, as Hume made patently clear. For a series of non-extended events could never influence each other. The paradox of causality arose from the attempt to make it transeunt, a relation between non-extended points. On the other hand, the conception of causality within a continuous process implies immanent causality, the "pressing through a period" (650) by an act which limits and sets conditions for its own completion (649). It is the enduring character of the experience that contains in it the continuity of nature, that contains in it just that connection which Hume denied. There is something that continues. If there is something that continues, that which is there at the present time is responsible for what is going to be there in the future (647).

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i9

A process is conditioned by the past, takes place in the present, and is controlled by the future (351). The concept of the past as conditioning the present is readily acceptable to modern thought which has been nurtured on pis a tergo theories. For it has been the goal of the physical scientist to describe only that aggregation or sequence of events which precedes a certain set of other events. In making this abstraction, the scientist has left out of consideration the end by which the act is controlled and concerned himself only with the conditions. Only the conditions have been regarded as necessary; the end has been regarded as contingent (318-19). Therefore, the concept of the future as a control is rarely acknowledged except insofar as it is applied to conscious human activity. That such control does exist even in sub-human activity is, however, crucial to Mead's theory of the teleological act. The distinctive nature of this act is that it contains within its present the end to which it is directed. " A t the future end of experience there is content which reaches out ready to accept the control of that which is taking place, in still maintaining itself" (344). T h e act tends toward the future, advancing toward it because the future is present in the act. "This content in the individual appears as tendencies, i. e., a series of events which not only advance to a certain set of events but show a certain direction in the relation of the events to one another" (343). T h e existence within the present of both the past as condition and the future as control is what gives duration to the present. Their different functional significance within that present confers direction on that duration. Thus a process is not a monotonous continuity such as is given in spatial extension (344). The duration of an act is one in which there are distinct phases which nevertheless belong to a single whole. "Reality is always in a present" (PP28), since it is the ongoing process which is the unit of existence. The present, however, "is not a piece cut out anywhere from the temporal dimension of uniformly passing reality" (PP23). A present becomes and disappears. In its becoming it sets itself off from previous presents as qualitatively different from them, being, therefore, what Mead describes as an emergent event. In its disappearance, it permits future presents to emerge as novel. As an emergent event, the present has a unique structure, enabling us to recognize it as present and to distinguish it from other events which are past or future. Thus, concrete time, as defined by the act, has continuity, direction, and uniqueness. What Mead calls abstract time, on the other hand, is a series of discrete moments in which past, present, and future moments are so uni-

20

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form as to be indistinguishable except insofar as we impose the logical order of irreversibility upon the series. T i m e which is indeterminate succession at the future edge of the duration or specious present (what Bergson calls 'living time') is to be distinguished from what Bergson calls 'spatialized time,' that is, a time that has been returned to an extension from which it has been abstracted but returned as a still abstracted character (344). Mead describes at length how the conception of abstract time arises, showing how the very difficulties in discovering temporal organization in abstract time are a consequence of its abstraction from concrete time.

Abstract Time Every organism has the relation of externality to every other organism, defining externality as a relation which involves "awayness, distance, and a separation" (326). This externality between the organism and the stimuli which can release its impulses must be overcome by activity in time. Hence the relation of externality between organisms is not simply spatial but spatio-temporal. T h e field of ongoing action is space-time. In any particular act for which the stimulus is a spatio-temporally distant object and in which the act proceeds immediately to its conclusion, the awayness or spatio-temporal distance of the object evidently becomes less as the act proceeds. "In the immediacy of action, all dimensions, spatial or temporal, vary with passage" (262). When, however, the act does not proceed immediately to its conclusion, but is interrupted or stopped, by conflicting tendencies to its conclusion, there is a relatively stable spatiotemporal relation between the organism and the stimulus. In such a situation, it becomes possible to cancel out the temporal distance and represent it in terms of the spatial distance, achieving thereby "contemporaneity" of the organism and the stimulus. Contemporaneity is a relation of the organism with the stimulus in which the stimulus appears co-existent with the organism, i. e., temporally present but spatially distant (263). T h e temporal distance is cancelled out in the sense that the attitudes belonging to the completion of the act already exist in the organism, enabling it to regard the act as completed. By such representational completion, "the temporal distance is squeezed out of action." T h e spatial distance remains in the sense that the intervening landscape between the organism and the stimulus must still be traversed. Take, for example, the individual

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who sees a book at the other end of the room as something to be opened up and read. Insofar as the attitude of opening up and reading the book already exists in him, the temporal distance has been cancelled. The spatial distance remains as the effort of walking across the room to get the book. When only the spatial distance is recognized and we assume that the temporal distance has been cancelled, the velocity of the motion is evidently regarded as infinite. (Velocity =

Space = oo, where Time = o). A cornTime parable abstraction exists in the measurement of spatial distance by means of laying a board or a ruler between the organism and the distant object. In such a situation we disregard the time factor because we already have an attitude toward the object at the far end (568). T h e world of action in which lower forms live "provides no contemporaneity, for contemporaneity is an affair of a world in which the fixity of certain environmental relations renders possible the appearance of identity in the passage of events, that is, gives the conditions of the date of an event" (267). It is only the human individual who has the conception of contemporaneity. "This individual in the presence of various objects which invite to various responses, not only through the conflict of these tendencies inhibits the response, but also through the extension of the contact field by imagery and the judgment of perception introduces the contemporaneous physical object" (265). After contemporaneity has been achieved in the fashion described above, the percipient individual arrives at a conception of abstract time, or time that passes without affecting the activities within it. The element of passage is introduced into the stable relationship between the organism and the stimulus by matching with it a regular movement like that of a clock (262). Thus, we experience the elapsing of a state which is comparatively at rest in one-to-one correspondence to a regular movement, and get time as passing over against something which lasts. "Lasting things in a passing time is the situation arising from the return of passage to the condition of conduct from which passage has been abstracted" (345). The experience of abstract time in the sense defined above is a very common one. When I ^m waiting for a train and anticipate its arrival, I speak of time as passing and measure its passage by the movement of the clock. I have completed the act of getting on the train representationally and I rest while time passes. Its passage is marked off by a motion which involves the successive occupation of positions by the hands on the clock.

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Abstract time differs from the concrete time which is actually involved in action in two ways: ( i ) T h e percipient individual has substituted a determinate temporal distance for a temporal distance which is actually indeterminate. When the act is actually carried out, the distant object may no longer be at the position at which we located it when we measured it spatially. "The moving object is in a series of constantly changing succession and in the environment of the individual, it involves constantly changing attitudes in the individual" (346). Moreover, we may not carry out that particular act at all if another stimulus is presented as more suited to the satisfactory completion of the act. "The organization of these attitudes may give rise to other opportunities, that is, a new whole of action may arise which is qualitatively different from what has been" (637). The actual future and the hypothetically determined future are not always compatible. (2) The concrete time of the act involves a causal distinction between the present and the future. The stimulus or distant object with which contemporaneity is representationally achieved has its value for the act as a control and will realize its promise only in the future when the act is actually completed (216, 264). In spatializing time, there has been an abstraction from the function of the distant object.

Permanent Space and Motion Every entity is moving with respect to another because every entity is carrying out an act which involves some changes in it. No entity is actually at rest with reference to another. Nevertheless, action requires a certain stability in regard to some things which must endure as the background of the action (582). This endurance does not imply complete lack of action but rather equilibrium or balance of the actions of entities with respect to one another. Equilibrium of action and reaction gives the individual orientation in an environment. This orientation is the condition for a "consentient set." " A consentient set is such a structure of the field that enables the organism to carry out its next reaction, and whatever (changing or not) lies in that field will be regarded as simultaneous with the individual" (583). A consentient set is thus determined by the persistent relation of here and there with reference to an individual. T h e consentient set which an individual determines defines a timeless space or a permanent space to which time or passage is irrelevant because the variations in both spatial and temporal co-ordinates of the entities in the field will be identical. Objects which do not maintain a persistent relation of

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here and there with respect to the individual are said to be in motion (322). Within a consentient set, the individual selects the object which will complete its own action and moves toward it. In this motion it establishes successive simultaneity with different objects within the intervening space. In this way certain spatially intervening objects in the permanent space are given a place in the temporal perspective of the act and are thus successively related to each other. It is only where there is a selection by the individual of one object toward which it moves that successive relations are established for other objects. The movement which is the expression of a selection conditioned by the process (348) "is responsible for an actual succession of events in nature which would not obtain if no selection were made or if another selection were made" (349). Thus, through the analysis of the act and its involvement of temporal dimension, we arrive at a conception of relativity analogous in its minimum outline to that of the modern physicist. Since the selection of any consentient set is dependent upon a percipient individual, what is contemporaneous or successive for one percipient individual is not for another. What is at rest in the perspective of one is in motion in the perspective of another. If we abstract from all percipient individuals or from all perspectives, we have no determinate temporal direction or succession but merely a totality of abstract events—a Minkowski world. One of the great contributions of relativity has been that it has accustomed us to the recognition that the determining relation of the individual or percipient event to the consentient set is a fact in nature If there were one absolute and temporal order of the world, the different worlds of different individuals would seem to be experiences which should be located within the individuals; but in a universe which is stratified by the selection of a time order by a percipient event, these stratifications are in nature and not in the individual (325). Perspectives in Nature The perspectives or percipient events as a totality constitute nature. Each of them is both persistent and discrete. Discreteness is ordinarily a characteristic of entities which are spatially located while persistence is ordinarily a characteristic of entities which are temporally located. Thus Descartes' souls, conceived under the form of space, had discreteness but

24

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no persistence; while Plato's objects in the world of becoming, conceived under the form of time, had persistence but no discreteness. In order to obtain persistence for his spatially conceived units, Descartes had to introduce a God who continually recreated his souls.1 In order to give discreteness to his world of becoming, Plato had to introduce ideas or forms. 2 Descartes, before he introduced his God, had a pattern for his world but no guarantee that the pattern would exist in the future. Plato, before he introduced his forms, had a continuity of becoming but no pattern within it. A spatially oriented philosophy gives us exclusiveness but no persistence of entities. A temporally oriented philosophy gives us persistence but no exclusiveness. 3 In order to stratify reality in terms of perspectives which are both persistent and discrete, Mead conceives of each perspective as a spatio-temporal process. Each perspective as an individual act has an original discreteness or identity. T o retain this identity, however, it must carry on a changing relationship to the rest of nature. "If no change were involved in its maintenance, it would disappear in a more extensive structure and lose its identity as an individual" (318). "Change is as ultimate as endurance and they mutually implicate each other" ( 1 1 9 ) . T h e existence of a perspective depends upon the "patience" of the other perspectives which constitute the rest of nature. It is not completely isolated from nor indifferent to its environment but implies the latter as a condition for its maintenance. Because the rest of nature is in a process of continuous change, every perspective must change and adapt itself in accordance with changes in its environment. Such changes are the price of its continued existence as a unique perspective. Physical objects are rarely considered as individuals because the pattern of their existence is static and unchanging. They have disappeared into the background because they do not function as acts determining themselves and proximate objects in their environment. A stone, for example, is not considered to define an individual perspective because its maintenance of position does not ordinarily require change. Its nature is rather that of being defined by its relationships to other more active objects existing in the 1 Meditations, in, trans, by Haldane and Ross, Cambridge University Press, 1931, v. i, pp. 168-9. 2 Titnaeus, 37ft. 8 In con temporary philosophy, these extremes are represented by Russell and Bergson. Note Russell's definition of a "thing," Our Knowledge of the External World, W. W. Norton & Co., 1929, p. 1 1 7 . Also see Bergson's criticism of Descartes, Creative Evolution. New York, 1 9 1 1 , pp. 34jff.

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same system. Manifestly organic processes, on the other hand, do not have a monotonous continuity of existence but must continually determine or select their environment, i.e., struggle for existence. When this struggle for existence results in failure rather than success, the organic becomes inorganic or dies, i.e., disappears as an individual. While the struggle for existence succeeds, the organism is continually creating and adapting itself to its environment. In making the persistence of individuality dependent upon changing relationships with other entities through a spatio-temporal process, Mead distinguishes himself from the traditional philosophical positions which stem from Descartes and Plato. Both of these philosophers found it necessary to introduce super-natural principles in order to confer upon the entities in nature the discreteness and persistence which are necessary to individuality. As a result, their units were isolated from each other and made dependent upon eternal principles from whom they borrowed an eternal existence. Mead, by making his units interdependent as the means for their self-preservation, is able to maintain a thorough-going naturalism, in which no individual is eternally guaranteed his existence but must cooperate with others in order to maintain it. As we shall see, this theory of Mead's is not only applicable to nature in general but also to human nature.

Chapter Three PERCEPTION HE ACT is a very practical affair. Under favorable circumstances, it proceeds directly to its conclusion without stopping for a glance at the world or for questions as to the nature or existence of objects. "Favorable circumstances" may be defined as the presence of an appropriate stimulus to answer the impulse and to release a specific and univocal response. Evidently, such favorable circumstances are not uniformly present. Crises, of greater or less significance, arise in the experience of the organism. The appropriate stimulus may be absent; several alternative and conflicting responses may be aroused. Under such critical conditions, the practical act is inhibited until a specific stimulus can be integrated with a specific response. It is out of such situations that the theoretical act of perception develops. Perception is a mediate or interrupted rather than an immediate and ongoing experience. The field between the impulse and the consummation becomes the focus of attention. This field, according to our analysis of the elements of the act, contains the stimulus and the response. The organization and integration of the values of these two elements results in a perceptual object or what we ordinarily call a thing.

Distance and Contact Experience The inhibition of the act of the organism implies not only that there is a spatio-temporally distant stimulus but also that there are spatio-temporally present tendencies to response. The perceptual object therefore combines "distance values" with "now values" or what Mead calls "contact values" (i44)A distance experience is necessary to the experience of an object because an object must have a spatial relatedness which locates its boundaries or its outsides and thus gives it a status as one among many. Distance experience gives us a multiplicity of externally related boundaries because it locates characters in a visual space. But insofar as experience is merely distance experience, i.e., direct inspection on the analogy of vision, we have only an outside for our objects. No analysis or dissection of these outsides will

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ever produce more than a new outside (212, 327, 428). "The inner nature of the physical thing we never reach by subdividing its visual boundaries" "What we mean by an inside . . . . is action as it is going on" (144). In other words, objects, if they are to be units of existence, must be acts in their own right with ends of their own. They become perceptual objects in the experience of another when they subserve or assist the ends of this other. But even in this experience they must manifest their own activity through resistance as well as assistance. An object must also object. The objection of the object is primarily manifested in the contact experience when the organism, e. g., in grasping or pulling, must make an effort to combat the resistance of the thing. The harder the object, the greater the effort which must be exerted. The organism stimulates itself to effort only to the extent that the object resists it; and the object resists only to the extent that the organism arouses itself to effort. Effort and resistance are thus the concave and convex aspects of one experience, namely, the contact experience, viewed on the one hand from the stand taken by the organism, and on the other from the stand taken by the object. From such an experience arises the physical statement of the equality of action and reaction, and the concept of the effective occupation of space as essential to objects. However, the contact experience is not purely contactual but is also visual, combining therefore distance with contact values. This situation exists pre-eminently in the case of manipulation which is a capacity distinctively possessed by man. Manipulation is a specialized form of contact experience and is the most significant in the development of the experience of things because it allows an experience, short of consummation, which implies mediate completion. "The contact experiences of most of the vertebrate forms lower than man represent the completion of their acts" (MS362). The dog takes his food between his teeth and begins immediately to masticate it with the same organ. Man's manual contacts, on the other hand, define a field of mediate things lying between his impulses and their consummation. The object held in the hand is also in a sense held off while alternative responses compete for the completion of the act. Held in this way it can be seen as well as felt. Both the seeing and the feeling pass into the make-up of the perceptual object, but it is the feeling which dominates the seeing, because the feeling is more intimately associated with the way in which the object may be used. The sight of an object arouses certain responses or promises regard-

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ing the possible uses of the object. For example, a stone may be used to drive a nail, to build a fire, to fill in a hole. One use is dominant and the other inhibited. The inhibited tendencies to response, while unrealized, do not simply disappear but react upop the dominating response. These inhibited responses within the experience make up the whatness of the stone, constituting "the object as it will be or at least may be for the organism" (PP129). T h e perceptual object is thus an organization of responses. It will be noted that Mead places his emphasis almost exclusively upon the response in analyzing the composition of an object. The stimulus is considered merely as a stimulus, as a catalyst, so to speak, whose presence is necessary for the response, but which has little or no importance in the development of the responses into a perceptual object. This emphasis arises from Mead's concern with the motor rather than the sensory side of the act. As a result, the acting individual is conceived as responsible for its own environment. "Organic processes or responses in a sense constitute the objects to which they are responses; that is to say, any given biological organism is in a way responsible for the existence (in the sense of the meanings they have for it) of the objects to which it physiologically and chemically responds. There would, for example, be no food—no edible objects— if there were no organisms which could digest it" (MS77). By emphasizing the response Mead is able to confer upon the perceptual object a richer content than is involved in the simple integration of distance and contact values. A thing has a meaning which is more than its physical structure ( M S 1 3 1 ) . For example, a bed is more than its color, and other distance values, plus the resistance or effective occupation of space, realized in contact. It is a focus of many possible activities; it may be dismantled, made up, sat on, slept on, etc. These are all responses which may be stimulated simply by its presence at a distance, responses usually acquired by past experience. By conceiving the object as an organization of such responses, Mead is attempting to make the "individual more and more intimately a part of the world about him" (PP70). That is, he is trying to show how the individual's experiences determine the character of his environment. "Our world is definitely mapped out for us by the responses that are going to take place," says Mead (MS129). It is evident that such an emphasis on the responses tends to restrict the individual to an experience and knowledge only of his conscious or inner states. Indeed, as Mead says, "life becomes conscious at those points at

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which the organism's own responses enter as part of the objective field to which it reacts" (PP72). The consciousness of the object is an experience of our "own repressed responses" (PP71). "It is the resistance in what is not done that is the matter of the object to which we respond" (PP128). For example, if the sight of the book calls out a direct response of movement toward it, there is in this response nothing but the excitement of the organism to that act. If, however, all other responses the book may be responsible for, are aroused, they can enter into the act only insofar as they are inhibited or coordinated. They are in opposition to the preponent response of moving toward the book until the integration of the act organizes them in their spatial and temporal relations with the inhibitions of their immediate expression. It is this opposition which I have referred to as resistance (PP129). Mead sidesteps the suggestion of subjectivism involved in this reduction of the object's resistance to the opposition between responses by insisting (PP132) that, in making this analysis of the object, he is only giving the organic phase or the neural organization which anticipates the contact reality which has not yet been realized but which will be realized when the preponent response of approach has been completed. What he is retaining thus in the preponent response or the approaching movement is the significance of the distant stimulus and therefore the otherness which is the denial of subjectivism. The resistance of the responses to each other in the conflict of attitudes is only a substitute in the area of the organism for the contact reality not yet realized. This resistance is thus only the resistance involved in distance experience and not the resistance involved in contact experience. It is only insofar as the distance experience is abstracted from the future contact experience that we have no inside for the object other than our inner conflicting responses. The conveyance of alternative uses in contact by the distant stimulus implies that the future is there as a control of the act. But if only the future attitudes were present, the perceptual object would be only a construct or a hypothesis. What gives us the assurance of the reality of the perceptual object is its conveyance of a past successful reaction. We could not perceive an utterly novel object. A thing derives part of its objectivity in the perceptual relation from the fact that it fits in with our ideas of the world in general.

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30

Mead's conccption of past successful behavior as contributing to the objectivity of a perceptual object is a de-intellectualized version of the Kantian conception of causality as necessary to objectivity.1 Behavioristically speaking, the causal relation of a stimulus to a response is explained only if it had its place in a previously completed act. And only when this relation has been congealed in memory, does the present stimulus with its response constitute an object. T h e novel has no causal significance, i. e., cannot be explained because there is no act functioning as the referent for the explanation. Explanation is the substitution of a successful act for an act as yet incomplete. Perceptual objects exist as such because they have been explained. The assurance of their objectivity is one based on past experience. I know the stone as an object because I can explain it; and I can explain it because I have acted toward it in the past. What has in the past proved itself resides in the present as an object whose behavior can be relied upon. The perceptual object is therefore partly a memory object. T h e perceptual object, however, is only partly a memory object because "the mere appearance of imagery from past experience would not give us a now*' (146). T h e imagery from the past has a spatial and temporal distance comparable to that of the future. "It comes with the character of the past, not of the present" (162). It is then rather than now. In order to be now, the perceptual object must combine its promise of the future, as conveyed in the alternative attitudes or tendencies to response, with its assurance from the past, as conveyed by the memory image. The presentness of the perceptual object depends on its inclusion of these two references to a then, the one past and the other future. Without the reference to the past, it would not have the objectivity characteristic of a perceptual object. Without the reference to the future, it would not have the necessary pertinence to the needs of the individual. " A perception has in it, therefore, all the elements of the act—the stimulation, the response represented by the attitude, and the ultimate experience which follows upon the reaction represented by the imagery arising out of past reactions" (3). Perceptual reality is not something which exists in 1

"Experience itself—in other words, empirical knowledge of sppearances is thus possible only insofar as we subject the succession of appearances and therefore all alteration to the law of causality, and as likewise follows, the appearances, as objects of experience are themselves possible only in conformity with the law."—Critique of Pure Reason, trans, by N. K. Smith, London, 1933, p. 219.

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the world at an instant but is realized in the perceptual act as a process taking place in time. The perceptual object is not something which an image or an idea could copy or correspond to, since its reality is achieved only within the perceptual act. In the beginning the reality is ahead in time as well as in space.

Sense-Data Inhibition is an experience of organisms with complex impulses resulting in a variety of incomplete responses or attitudes to a distant stimulus (MS363). Since the stimulus is not uniquely determinative of a specific response, the stimulus may be freed or abstracted from the variety of responses which it arouses. This abstraction removes the stimulus from its place in the act and makes a sense-datum of it. A sense-datum is thus a stimulus which is viewed merely as content and not in its functional relation to a response (21). Sense-data, e. g. colors and sounds, have been considered subjective because of this abstraction from their place in the act. The reality of the sensedatum as stimulus lies in the future accomplishment of the act. Because the act is not yet complete, the reality of the sense-datum is not yet attained. "Taken as existing now, it is a subjective substitute for an objective reality that lies ahead of us" (122). "If we say that the colours and sounds are present actualities, we affirm them of individual experience, not of the objects" (261). Thus, "the price of seeing the future as present is the substitution of the seeing for the seen. It is only the seeing that is contemporaneous with contact reality. That which is seen is contemporaneous with a reality that is not yet" (122). When this consciousness of the distance character or sense-datum is interpreted in the light of the theory of the world at an instant, there is no alternative to the attribution of subjectivity to the sense-datum (227). T h e objective reality of the sense-datum is in the future. If it is cut oil from that future, and that future, moreover, is denied, then its only habitat is the mind. "Abstracted from their objects in the perceptual world and taken simply in their relation to the individual who initiates the act, they are called psychical" (227). T h e subjective or psychical is that which is there as experience but not yet there as perceptual fact, the anticipated reality from which it is divorced. The attribution of subjectivity, however, loses its invidious significance when we realize that the sense-datum is func-

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tionally a stimulus which can be integrated with a response. By "mental" or "subjective" data, then, we mean, not a kind of substance or a location, but elements in an incompleted act (71). It is the temporal aspect of things which is responsible for their psychological character. It is in so far as the reality of the things is affected either with the future or with the past that we are able to isolate elements which are referred to the experience of the individual, which are abstracted as psychological contents. Things are what they are in the relationship between the individual and his environment, and this relationship is that of conduct. The stimuli from distant objects invite reactions leading up to contact experiences. The stimulus belongs to the inception of the act, while the contact belongs to the completion. As an object in so-called perception, it is simply there with no temporal characters. T h e question whether it will be what it is, or whether it was what it is, splits the object into the content that is immediately functional and that which awaits the completion of the act or that which was the completion of a former act. The content that is immediately functional belongs to that part of the situation in which the act is proceeding, i. e. to the individual, while that which awaits the completion of the act lies in the environment (218).2

In the uncritical and popular scientific view of the world, the distance qualities are considered to be subjective or psychical (secondary qualities), whereas the contact qualities are considered objective or physical (primary qualities). This view appears tenable because the contact experience has certain characteristics which give it cognitive precedence over the distance experience. For example, the contact experience is closer to the final response, and the alternative responses aroused by the stimulus have been narrowed down. Moreover, the contact qualities have a relative permanence and endurance because they are experienced in an area in which spatial and temporal distance has been reduced to a minimum. In this area the thing is congruent with itself in the sense that it would express itself in much the same way in contact with every thing. However, the greater cognitive significance of the contact experience does not imply a metaphysical relation between the contact and distance 2 Mead says: " I find myself in agreement with Professor Bode in identifying the future with consciousness, although I have reached the conclusion by a somewhat different path" (348a). See B. H. Bode, "Consciousness and Psychology" in Creative Intelligence, New York, 1 0 1 7 . pp. 228-81, esp. 242f.

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3s

experience (in the sense of a relation between noumena and phenomena or between substance and attribute). "The reason for the distinction between the two types of sensuous qualities is to be found in the relation of contents to each other, a relation which arises out of the form and structure of the act" (297). In perception, the two experiences are supplementary and not reducible to each other. Therefore, it should not be assumed that the contact contents can be substituted for the distance contents. Even in the scientific enterprise, distance experience is implied since the particles, constructed from contact contents, are located in a space which is constructed on the analogy of visual space. The scientist must construct such a space in order to relate the outsides of particles to each other (283). "The actual vision cannot be carried even in imagination beyond the range of the mechanism of vision." There always remains "an abstract conception of some distance perception with the like relation to a contact experience." Therefore, even "in his most abstract analysis, the mathematical physicist is still operating in a field where he has objects which in their essential structure are objects of an experience that logically fits into that of our immediate experience" (273). Mead's conception of the supplementary nature of distance and contact values and their mutual indispensability for perceptual experience distinguishes his theory of knowledge from that of his contemporaries who attributed an exclusive significance to one or the other of these aspects of perceptual experience. Thus, the emphasis of a theory which conceives knowing as pure activity, is on distance perception by means of vision. The actualization of the knowing process is outside the percipient in the object. On the other hand, the emphasis in a theory of knowledge which conceives of knowing as activity and passivity, is on contact perception by means of touch. The actualization of the knowing process is mediated by an interaction and a transcendence of distance achieved at the place of the percipient. The naive realist conceives of the mind as a searchlight, throwing its rays outward so that they fall on objects and illuminate them. The illumination constitutes the knowing process, and the illumined is the object of knowledge. The terminus of the knowledge, or the known, is thus without. What we know is there rather than here. But what is there is predominantly visual in content, and vision in itself gives us merely characters or qualities (280). The critical realist, recognizing a passive role for the percipient in the

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knowing process, conceivcs of an interaction between the object and the percipient, actualized in the latter. Because the contact is achieved at the place of the knower, only that which can be transmitted is known. The critical realist calls this transmitted thing a quality, although, strictly speaking, what is transmitted is a physical thing, e. g., a wave length or a physical particle. H e is thus faced immediately with the problem of translating these physical things into qualities or mental essences. The naive realist has difficulty in giving body to his object, e. g., is reduced to a conception of neutral stuff, because the distance object is essentially unsubstantial except insofar as we gratuitously confer contact qualities upon it. T h e critical realist, on the other hand, is baffled by the problem of translating physical things into mental or unsubstantial qualities, because the contact object is essentially a resistant one, and therefore is material, according to the usual conception. Mead precludes the difficulties involved in each of these extreme ways of regarding the knowing process by insisting that only by combining both phases of the act, the distant stimulation and its achievement in contact, do we get a perceptual object with the necessary characteristics, i. e., substantiality and quality. H e describes perception by saying that it "endows the distance experience with contact values in the sense of giving solidity and contact extension to what is seen and heard" (299). "The felt object is not colored as felt" (283). The contact experience alone does not give us the quality. It is as a perceptual object that the felt object is colored, i. e., the object has the distance values in addition to the contact values. Similarly, the colored object is hard or soft only in the sense that it conveys the result in contact experience. " I sec the object as I may later respond to it" ( 1 3 1 ) . The perceptual object is the reference of both the distance and the contact experience, and is an object in the one only insofar as the values of the other are conveyed.

Chapter Four THE

SOCIAL

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I

N THE conception of acts as the units of existence, Mead has a universe of discrete and individual forms. In the conception of the social process, Mead develops at length a principle of their interrelationship and organization. All living organisms are bound up in a general social environment or situation, in a complex of social interrelationship and interaction upon which their continued existence depends. The experience and behavior of the individual organisms are always components of a larger social whole or process of experience and behavior in which the individual organism—by virtue of the social character of the fundamental physiological impulses and needs which motivate and are expressed in its experience and behavior—is necessarily implicated, even at the lowest evolutionary levels (MS228). The organization of this social situation is predicated upon a differentiation of function among the participating organisms. Differentiation of function among the lower evolutionary forms, e. g., the insect community, arises from physiological differentiations comparable to those among the cells in the tissues of a multicellular form. In human society, on the other hand, "all of the individuals have essentially the same physiological structures, and the process of organization among such forms has to be an entirely different process from that found among the insects" (MS231). Physiological differentiation of function, although existing in human society, primarily in the sexual and reproductive relations, is overshadowed by a new distinctively human principle of organization, namely, the social attitude. That which creates the duties, rights, the customs, the laws and the various institutions in human society, as distinguished from the physiological relationships of an ant nest or beehive, is the capacity of the human individual to assume the organized attitude of the community toward himself as well as toward others (625).

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In order that the individual may assume the attitude of the community certain social processes must be taking place in which he is a participant and which make him a functioning member of the group. The most universal social processes in human society, according to Mead, are the religious and the economic. The religious process is fundamentally that of "kindliness, helpfulness and assistance" (MS258). The economic process is that of exchange in which individuals participate in the "attitude of need, each putting himself in the attitude of the other in the recognition of the mutual value which the exchange has for both" {ibid.)} From these universal social processes arise communities and institutions in which the individual enters into special sets of social relations with various other classes of individuals. These special sets of social relations are of two kinds. First, there are the 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. Second, there 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 or another only more or less indirectly . . . The given individual's membership in several of these abstract social classes or subgroups makes possible his entrance into definite social relations (however indirect) with an almost infinite number of other individuals who also belong to or are included within one or another of these abstract social classes or subgroups cutting across functional lines of demarcation which divide different human social communities from another (MS157). Thus, because all individuals participate in functional groups which are either concrete, i. e., actually organized, or abstract, i. e., unorganized, the basis exists for their development of a social attitude. A social attitude is 1

Of these two universal processes, according to Mead, the economic has been more universalizing, carrying "with it a process of social development in the way of production, of transportation, and of all the media involved in the economic process." "TTic economic process is one which has continually brought people into closer relationship with each other and had tended to identify individuals with each other. The outstanding example of this is the international character of labor, and the development within the local community of a labor organization as such" (MS295). On the other hand, the religious attitude tends to "identify itself with the immediate history and life of the community and is more conservative than almost any institution in the community" (MS296).

THE

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3

j

one involving the recognition by the individual that he is not alone in the world but exists among other individuals. It arises through the assumption of the attitude of one or another, or a group of these others in making one's own response. By the assumption of the attitude of another, Mead means that one identifies himself in a sense with another individual or group of individuals. In so doing, one's own actions are carried out through and with the understanding that the others are also acting. In its most general significance, therefore, the social attitude implies a recognition and appreciation of the ends of other individuals as pertinent to one's own ends. For Mead, the recognition of ends is conceived in behavioristic terms, viz., as the "individual's exciting himself to react as the other acts toward him by his own response" (427). Such a type of behavior, according to Mead, exists most saliently in the act of communication. T h e importance to Mead's philosophy of communication as a mechanism of the social attitude cannot be over-estimated. In stressing the act of communication as the means of developing such an attitude, Mead demonstrates his general tendency to emphasize process rather than structure, dynamic behavior rather than static consciousness. A s a result, he arrives at an interpretation of mind in behavioristic terms. This interpretation involves the conception of mind ( 1 ) as an organization of responses, i. e., as functional rather than substantive, and (2) as an expression of intelligence rather than wisdom, i. e., as an instrument of action rather than of contemplation. Moreover, Mead's theory of communication is rich in ontological and ethical implications. For all these reasons, it may justly be asserted that communication is the clue to the nature of Mead's philosophy.

The Development of

Communication

In discussing the act as the unit of existence, it has been shown that the act includes the end to which it is directed, i. e., the result of the act is present in its beginning, the future in the present. In the act of communication, there is a triadic relationship between the phases of the semiotic act comparable to that in the biologic act (MS76-80). There is a gesture on the part of one organism, i. e., a stimulus, a reaction on the part of another, i. e., a response, and a resultant social act, i. e., an end. A gesture is a stimulus to another individual who responds to it. It evokes behavior on the part of another (MS53). However, the response on the part of the other is not simply to the gesture as a physical event. T h e response is also to the gesture insofar as it indicates a future act on the part of the

3$

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originating form. For example, a dog growls at another, and the latter responds either by attack or flight in anticipation of the act which the first form will pursue. Thus "the gesture in some sense stands for the act as far as it affects the other form. . . . It carries with it the import of the act itself" (MS53). Insofar as a "gesture does so indicate to another organism the subsequent (or resultant) behavior of the given organism, then it has meaning" (MS76). For Mead, therefore, meaning exists on the subhuman level. It is conceived in terms of behavior between individual forms where the behavior of one stimulates another to a response which is anticipatory of the subsequent behavior of the first. What is the basis for such a response on the part of the second form to a gesture on the part of the first ? Mead speaks of the response as proper or appropriate (MS56) and as adjustive (MS80). The implication is that there is a certain automatism or instinctive adaptation on the part of the second form to the gesture on the part of the first. Mead dismisses any explanation of this adaptation in terms of imitation as a "perfectly impossible assumption" (MS58). According to him, such a theory would mean that we have a tendency to do the same thing that other people arc doing, and also that these tendencies are not only in our nature, but also that they are attached to certain stimuli which mean what the other people are doing. The sight of one person doing something would be a stimulus to another person to do the same thing. We should have to assume that what the person is doing is already a reaction that is in the nature of the imitating individual. It would mean that we have in our nature already all of these various activities, and that they are called out by the sight of other people doing the same thing (MS58). Mead's repudiation of the theory of imitation is justified insofar as imitation implies a direct reproduction of the stimulus by the response. Evidently, "there is no evidence that the gesture generally tends to call out the same gesture in the other organism" (MS60). Moreover, the introduction of a primitive impulse of imitation is unsatisfactory if another explanation can be found. As a substitute for imitation, Mead suggests that we should "recognize in the organism a set of acts which carry out the processes which are essential to the form" (MS60). "They are acts which go beyond the organism taken by itself, but they belong 10 cooperative processes in which groups of

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39

animals act together, and they are the fulfillment of the processes which are essential to the life of the forms" {ibid.). T h e difference between this theory and the theory of imitation is that it allows for the fact that the response of the second form may be different from that of the first. Moreover, it locates the gestures and responses of the participating individuals in a wider social act in which the behavior of each individual acquires meaning or import. Meaning arises and lies within the field of the relation between the gesture of a given human organism and the subsequent behavior of this organism as indicated to another human organism by that gesture. If that gesture does so indicate to another organism the subsequent (or resultant) behavior of the given organism, then it has meaning. In other words, the relationship between a given stimulus—as a gesture—and the later phases of the social act of which it is an early (if not the initial) phase constitutes the field within which meaning originates and exists. Meaning is thus a development of something objectively there as a relation between certain phases of the social act; it is not a psychical addition to that act and it is not an "idea" as traditionally conceived. A gesture by one organism, the resultant of the social act in which the gesture is an early phase, and the response of another organism to the gesture, are the relata in a triple or threefold relationship of gesture to first organism, of gesture to second organism, and of gesture to subsequent phases of the given social act; and this threefold relationship constitutes the matrix within which meaning arises, or which develops into the field of meaning. The gesture stands for a certain resultant of the social act, a resultant to which there is a definite response on the part of the individuals involved therein; so that meaning is given or stated in terms of response. Meaning is implicit—if not always explicit—in the relationship among the various phases of the social act to which it refers, and out of which it develops For example, the chick's response to the cluck of the mother hen is a response to the meaning of the cluck; the cluck refers to danger or to food, as the case may be, and has this meaning or connotation for the chick (MS75-77). Meaning is dius present wherever a wider social act determines an appropriate response to a gesture. But that a gesture and its appropriate response have meaning within a wider social act does not necessarily imply that the gestures are significant to the individuals involved. T o acquire such signifi-

40

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cance, the gestures made by the individual must be understood by him. Behavioristically speaking, such understanding exists when the individual who makes the gesture responds to it in the same way that the other responds. When such behavior is not evidenced, we have simply a conversation of non-significant gestures. Thus, there is communication without significance where the gesture of the individual calls out the response in the other without calling out or tending to call out the same response in the individual himself It does not become significant to the individuals who are involved in the act unless the tendency to the act is aroused within the individual who makes it (MS8in). Significant gestures, then, arouse identical responses in both the initiating and the responding individuals. It is because of this behavioral characteristic of significant gestures that vocal gestures have been so important in their development. When a vocal gesture is made, it is also heard by the individual who makes it. It therefore enables self-stimulation to take place in addition to other-stimulation. The vocal gesture has a function in the development of social objects similar to that which manipulation has in the development of perceptual objects. In manipulation and in the vocal gesture, there is a happy intersection of two senses. The importance, then, of the vocal stimulus lies in the fact that the individual can hear what he says and in hearing what he says is tending to respond as the other person responds Take the illustration of asking someone to do something and then doing it one's self. Perhaps the person addressed does not hear you or acts slowly, and then you carry out the action yourself. You find in yourself, in this way, the same tendency which you are asking the other individual to carry out. Your request stirred up in you that same response which you stirred up in the other individual (MS69-70). Why is it that significant gestures arouse the same response in the initiating individual as in the responding individual? One of the physiological bases for this phenomenon, as we have seen, is that certain gestures, namely, the vocal ones, are heard by both individuals. Even more important, however, is the fact that certain individuals, namely, human beings, have the capacity to list or indicate to themselves a whole series of possible responses

THE SOCIAL

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41

by means of language symbols. Thus, when a gesture is made, they can easily pick out the appropriate response. "Language is a process of indicating certain stimuli" (MS97) in relation to the responses which they elicit (MS92-93). It is a focussing upon the meanings which are involved in the relationships of organisms to each other by identifying these meanings with symbols (MS80). Language arises because the individual has a capacity to "indicate to himself what the other person is going to do and then to take his attitude on the basis of that indication" (MS244). "A symbol is nothing but the stimulus whose response is given in advance" (MSI-8I). The future actual or possible conduct is represented by symbols and their answering attitudes which appear in the immediate experience of the individuals. They bring into the experience of the individual the surrogates of the objects which would complete the acts which the individual initiates (223). We have discovered that identity of response is necessary before we can say that an individual understands the meaning of his gesture. However, such a similarity of response can exist in situations where there is no reason to attribute understanding to the participants. For example, two dogs may respond similarly to a growl made by one of them. Thus, identity of response is necessary but not sufficient evidence of understanding. There must be a further type of behavior in the situation before we are sure that there is significance to the individuals involved. This type of behavior may be termed reflexiveness, i.e., the fact that the response which the originating form makes is in turn a stimulus to him to control his action (MS73). One's own response becomes a stimulus to oneself (MS74). The individual who speaks in significant symbols is a self-conditioning individual. This self-conditioning can take place only insofar as the symbol or gesture has crystallized within it a temporal organization of responses which constitutes the attitude of the community or the generalized other. That is, it is possible for a response to become a stimulus controlling one's actions only insofar as the various values or possible consequences of an action have a certain organization or reliable connection with each other. Thus, for understanding to exist, the individual must not only take the attitude of a particular other but must crystallize "all these particular attitudes into a single attitude or viewpoint which may be called that of the 'generalized

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other'" (MS90). When the other has been generalized, "every gesture comes within a given social group or community to stand for a particular act or response, namely, the act or response which it calls forth explicitly in the individual to whom it is addressed and implicitly in the individual who makes it" (MS47). Responses are then both indicated and organized, and we have a universe of discourse or a system of common meanings. T o sum up, the distinctive features of significant communication or communication on the human level are the following: (/) understanding of meaning as evidenced in responding to one's own gestures. A person who makes use of significant speech to another . . . . knows and understands what he is asking the other person to do, and in some sense is inviting in himself the response to carry out the process. The process of addressing another person is a process of addressing himself as well, and of calling out the response he calls out in another That, in behavioristic terms, is what we mean by the person being conscious of something (MS108-9). The conversation of gestures is not significant below the human level, because it is not conscious, that is, not jW/-conscious (though it is conscious in the sense of involving feelings or sensations) (MS81). (2) focussing on or indicating meanings through language symbols. Animals of a type lower than man respond to certain characters with a nicety that is beyond human capacity, such as odor in the case of a dog. But it would be beyond the capacity of a dog to indicate to another dog what the odor was. Another dog could not be sent out by the first dog to pick out this odor. A man may tell how to identify another man. He can indicate what the characters are that will bring about a certain response. That ability absolutely distinguishes the intelligence of such a reflective being as man from that of the lower animals, however intelligent they may be. We generally say that man is a rational animal and lower animals are not. What I wanted to show, at least in terms of behavioristic psychology, is that what we have in mind in this distinction is the indication of those characters which lead to the sort of response which we give to an object. Pointing out the characters which lead to the response is precisely that which distinguishes a detective office that sends out a man, fiom a bloodhound which runs down a man (MS92-93).

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43

(j) organizing anticipated responses into a system of common meanings reletant to a generalized other. H e significant gesture or symbol always presupposes for its significance the social process of experience and behavior in which it arises; or, as the logicians say, a universe of discourse is always implied as the context in tarns of which, or as the field within which, significant gestures or symbols do in fact have significance. This universe of discourse is constituted by a group of individuals carrying on and participating in a common sociil process of experience and behavior, within which these gestures or synbols have the same or common meanings for all members of that group, whether they make them or address them to other individuals, or whether they overtly respond to them as made or addressed to them by other individuals (MS89). Tie organization of the different individual attitudes and interactions in a given social act, with reference to their interrelations as realized by th: individuals themselves, is what we mean by a universal (MSi46n). (4) using implicit responses to condition further responses. When we speak of the meaning of what we are doing we are making the response itself that we are on the point of carrying out a stimulus to our action. It becomes a stimulus to a later stage of action which is to take place from the point of view of this particular response. In the case of the boxer the blow that he is starting to direct toward his opponent is to call out a certain "response which will open up the guard of his opponent so that he can strike. The meaning is a stimulus for the preparation of the real blow he expects to deliver. The response which he calls out in himself (the guarding reaction) is the stimulus to him to strike where an opening is given. This action which he has initiated already in himself thus becomes a stimulus for his later response Such is the difference between intelligent conduct on the part of animals and what we call a reflective individual. We say the animal does not think. He does not put himself in a position for which he is responsible; he does not put himself in the place of the other person and say, in effect, "He will act in such a way, and I will act in this way." If the individual can act in this way, and the attitude which he calls out in himself can become a stimulus to him for another act, we have meaningful conduct (MS72-

73)-

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Having discovered and emphasized these distinctive features of communication on the human level, Mead is able to conclude that they are identical with those which characterize mind. Mind, therefore, arises through communication by significant symbols, and has a development comparable to that of communication by significant symbols. Thus, first, there is an actual process of living together on the part of all members of the community which takes place by means of gestures. The gestures are certain stages in the cooperative activities which mediate the whole process Given such a social process, there is the possibility of human intelligence when this social process, in terms of the conversation of gestures, is taken over into the conduct of the individual The mind is simply the interplay of such gestures in the form of significant symbols It is such significant symbols, in the sense of a sub-set of social stimuli initiating a cooperative response, that do in a certain sense constitute our mind, provided that not only the symbol but also the responses are in our own nature. What the human being has succeeded in doing is in organizing the response to a certain symbol which is a part of the social act, so that he takes the attitude of the other person who cooperates with him. It is that which gives him a mind (MS188-190). The most persistent of the traditional theories of mind is the belief that consciousness of ideas is its outstanding and irreducible characteristic. For such a theory, Mead substitutes a behavioristic conception of mind as the control of responses, arising through and most evident in the phenomenon of communication. While Mead does not deny the presence of conscious ideation in the process of communication and therefore in mental processes, he manages to give a dynamic interpretation to this factor through his identification of consciousness with self-stimulation. Words are used to denote and provoke activities. Used in this manner they constitute ideas. Such ideas are conscious when there is a "definite recognition of the relation between the stimulus to act and the experience that follows upon the completion of the act." And it is when one responds to one's own stimulus that one gives evidence of having recognized this relationship. Thus, mind is not simply consciousness, nor is language "arbitrary in the sense of denoting a bare state of consciousness by a word" (MS75). Both mind and language are processes of behavior in which individuals interact and control their interactions.

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Consciousness as a Social Attitude The word "consciousness," as Mead notes, is a very ambiguous one (MS27). It is used to denote awareness in general or accessibility to certain contents (MS30). And it is used in an invidious sense to stand for certain contents which are peculiar to an individual's experience. Its most legitimate use, according to Mead, is that involved in describing the awareness of the physiological organism in relation to physical objects (428). In this awareness, both the organism and the physical object appear as things. According to Mead, the individual in such an experience must take the attitude of the physical object. It must do so ( 1 ) in order to anticipate the resistance of the object and thus exert an adequate effort to meet it; and (2) in order to view itself as having the distance values necessary to any object. In this way, the object acquires an inside and the organism acquires an outside. All objects must have both insides and outsides. We know our insides by direct experience but we do not know ourselves as having outsides. We know the outsides of objects by direct experience in vision but have no way of getting to their insides. Only by taking their attitude do we confer an inside upon them and an outside upon ourselves. The organism cannot become an object in experience until we have "some phase of the act which is located outside the organism, from which position the organism could be a perceptual object." Therefore, the organism as a physical object does not arise except over against other physical objects, and is on the same level of reality as they. Thus, we refute the critical realist who attributes a preferential reality to the nervous system and the body in deciding that the physical world cannot be known because its knowledge is mediated by the physical organism and its sense organs. Moreover, if the central nervous system is an object like other physical objects, we cannot attribute to it the qualities which we have abstracted from the physical objects in the environment, i. e., the secondary qualities. Since consciousness, as the awareness of the physiological organism in relation to physical objects, requires the taking of the position of the physical object, it is a social experience. However, it is a limited social experience because we do not carry on the verbal intercourse with these objects which implies a thought process on their part, and therefore, their consciousness of us. Children, savages, and poets, according to Mead, take a complete social attitude toward physical objects, and such an attitude is genetically

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prior to the more sophisticated distinction between the social world and the physical world, remaining in our superstitions. Moreover, were it not for the fact that "the mechanism for the individual's acting toward himself as an object" (427) has already been set up in social conduct, we would not be able to experience perceptual objects. Consciousness is therefore a derivative social attitude. Ontological Consequences of Mead's Theory of

Communication

I. The fact that language arises out of the indication of a gesture which functions as stimulus demonstrates that the imperative mood is the primitive mood of all language. The stimulation by the gesture of alternative responses hypothetically related to each other introduces the subjunctive mood. When the alternative responses are organized by a preponent response as in perception, they can be considered to constitute a thing, and the indicative or referential mood arises. In terms of the modern theory of signs, these three moods may be characterized as the pragmatic, syntactic and semantic dimensions in which the pragmatic dimension has gcnetic precedence. The first function of a symbol is its stimulation to action. Secondly, it connotes and finally it denotes. In the logic of modern science or the experimental method, this means that language arises out of ongoing activity which has been inhibited and presents a problem. The scientist then proceeds to hypotheses or the construction of an organized system of relations. The conclusion that "the object is there" may or may not be made when the hypothesis is tested and found to be adequate. What is important is that the hypothesis enables action to proceed once again. Such a conception of language and method reverses the procedure of the Aristotelian logic which starts with the indicative mood because it is built up on the theory of the thing . . . . as something there from time immemorial Our science is of an evolutionary nature not only in regard to cats, dogs and men, but also with rcferencc to stellar bodies and even with reference to the so-called elements. We try to show how things appear, arise (80). Thus, according to the theory that mind arises through communication, the theoretical act exists only as a means to the successful completion of the practical act. The metaphysical conclusion which may or may not be drawn from this subordination of the theoretical act is that objects, or the world made up of things, do not have an independent existence, but arise only

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within the practical act, disappearing with its successful completion. Mead seems to draw this conclusion at times,2 mitigating its devastating effects by the theory that the socialization of the human animal results in an enormous distance between the inception of the practical act and its consummation, thus permitting theoretical acts to extend over a large part of his life and contributing a relative endurance to the world of things which he knows (137). Nevertheless, Mead believes in a world that is there, a world which is reconstructed rather than created by the act (417) • But this is not a world which is independent of any individual, since the universe is made up of perspectives (165). The world that is there is the world of immediate experience. Experiences are the actions of forms with reference to an environment, defining a world which is an ongoing concern, within which individuals live and move and have their being (58). This world may be said to be without structure in the sense that it is not the object of analysis or critical inquiry (31). On the other hand, this world that is there involves a certain uniformity and systematic nature, according to which it appears authoritative and reliable as we live within it (29). It thus contains "matters of common and undisputed validity" (59). To understand the relation between these apparently conflicting characterizations of the world that is there, it is essential to realize that Mead gives a functional interpretation to the world that is there. The world that is there exists as the limit of the problematic. It is the matrix within which problems arise and into which they are resolved (64). It is, moreover, the world by which hypotheses are verified (30). This means that the boundaries of the world that is there are never constant; that what is within this world in immediate experience may be precipitated out of it as a problem; that what has been precipitated out may be resolved back as a confirmed hypothesis. There is no part of the world that is there which may not conceivably be the field of a scientific problem. On the other hand, "the world that is there has taken up into itself all the order, definition and necessity of earlier scientific advance" (49). For Mead, the essence of the world that is there is its function as a reliable referent for conduct (532). It includes everything unproblematic, everything assumed as a fact in conduct. We may say that the world that is there 2 "There is no absolute world of things. In the experience which I have suggested of animals without minds and physical objects, there would be no things, no permanence, no sameness" (33i).

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is known, insofar as it is not unknown (64); but we may not say that it is known insofar as wc mean by knowledge the process of "discovery of the unknown" (43) or reflective analysis of a problem. Thus, in epistemology, or the problem of how to achieve certain knowledge, Mead's approach is characterized by a renunciation of static facts and a belief in the gradual transformation of the problematic into the accepted. Distinctions between objective facts and subjective experiences arise because the individual has always lived in a social environment. As a result of this social orientation, the individual early acquires through communication or the imparting of information what is generally considered to be a world of facts. Because these facts have not been discovered by the individual to whom they are told, he forgets that they have been laboriously acquired through the experiences of others. Because so many facts are independent of his experience, he comes to believe that facts in general are those which are independent of any experience; and therefore to conceive and believe in a world which has an independent existence (50-51). Out of such distinctions arise the theory of correspondence or copy as the criterion of knowledge. Knowledge is conceived to be that which conforms to a World which antedated the experience of all individuals. According to Mead, however, there is no world of objects which antedated the experiences of any individual. All perceptual objects, as we have seen, are integrations of contact and distance experience, achieved through a process which began as practical or organic and became theoretical when the practical act was inhibited. All reflective objects, as we shall see, are arrived at by a social process of abstracting from individual perspectives to obtain a common perspective. Experience becomes structuralized into objects because individual and social behavior demands a modicum of stability. But that which is stable or objective now may become problematic or subjective later. And, similarly, that which is problematic or subjective now may become objective. T o overgeneralize the sphere of the objective is to divorce oneself from the experiences out of which it was derived and to create an absolute. T o overgeneralize the sphere of the problematic is to become lost in professional epistemological problems. II. Men can speak to each other only if they have interests or activities in common. They can exist together in a universe of discourse only if there is an underlying social process in which they arc already associated. Their

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discursive interactions create new social situations, but these situations presuppose already existing cooperative activities. T h e universe of discourse "is not a process that, so to speak, runs by itself" (MS260). "The mechanism of meaning is . . . . present in the social act before the emergence of consciousness or awareness of meaning occurs" (MS77). Men create a universe of discourse in which they can live together more intelligently and cooperatively, once they achieve the capacity of communication by significant gestures. Their togetherness in this universe of discourse or on a conscious social level is the result of their conversational intercourse. Since Mead believes that physical interactions are social experiences in a more abstract form, we may infer that he regards togetherness in the universe in general or on an unconscious level as a consequence of unconscious intercourse or interactions of entities with each other.3 For example, whether or not I am conversing with my friend, there is a sense in which we are acting with respect to one another. There is some part of my activity which is having an influence on him just as there is some part of his activity which is having an influence upon me. There is a sense in which one might speak of our communication with each other, although this communication does not take place through overtly distinguishable gestures. And it is due to this subconscious communication or the intercourse of mutual yet imperceptible influences that we can speak of our togetherness or coexistence. Thus, imperceptible physical communications create a universe of coexistence just as communication on a conscious conversational level creates a universe of discourse. The identity of rational, content, or the universe of discourse created in communication by significant gestures, is a focal illustration of the logical space or the universe of coexistence which is crcatcd by the interconnecting experience of all things. Togetherness is then something which is arrived at by the intersection of activities or perspectives of distinct individuals. It is not a purely spatial concept, but involves both space and time insofar as it is a consequence of activity. It is not something which antedates these activities, but is achieved in them just as the universe of discourse is achieved in the common social process on the intelligible level. T h e theory of togetherness, just outlined, involves an acute insight on 3 "Conscious communication develops out of unconscious communication within the social process; conversation in terms of significant gestures out of conversation in terms of nonsignificant gestures" (MSi2