The Genesis of the Self and Social Control by George Herbert Mead
The Standpoint of Behavioristic Psychology in Social Science
The Shift from Psychical States to External Conduct: George Herbert Mead adopts the standpoint of behavioristic psychology, which he characterizes as the study of the objective conduct of the organism. This movement, originating from the study of non-human animals, shifts the psychological interest away from internal psychical states and toward external behavior.
The Act as a Process: Conduct is tracked through the central nervous system not to find a mental correlate (psychosis) for a nerve process (neurosis), but to complete the physical act, regardless of its distance in space or time. This approach aligns with pragmatism and recent realism, which locate the significance and sensa of things within the object itself rather than a subjective mind.
Escape from the "Epistemological Serpent": Prebehavioristic psychology suffered from a dualism, maintaining a presence in both consciousness and the world of physics/physiology. This duplication led to problems of solipsism and epistemological dilemmas dating back to Descartes.
Descartes' division between the "extended physical world" and the "unextended world of thought" required a deus ex machina to bridge the gap at the pineal gland.
Behaviorism, by ignoring the content of the object as a mental state, becomes a science cognate with physiology and dynamics, effectively bypassing these metaphysical buffer-state problems.
The Logic of Natural Science: Natural sciences function pragmatically by starting with a world that is already "there" and introducing hypothetical reconstructions only when a problem arises. Behavioristic psychology follows this by treating the individual's experience as an objective part of the natural world.
The Ambiguity and Redefinition of Consciousness
Two Senses of Consciousness:
Sense 1: Awareness or "Consciousness Of": This is often wrongly assumed to be coextensive with all experience and equated with cognition. In a pragmatic view, this sense of awareness disappears from immediate experience; the world simply exists for the organism through conduct.
Sense 2: Peculiar Content: This refers to the specific sense qualities (secondary qualities), bodily affections (pleasure/pain), and imagery of memory and imagination. These are "private" only in the sense of difference in access or perspective from different organisms.
The Canalization of the Environment: An organism becomes "conscious" in the first sense when it marks or "canalizes" its environment in terms of future conduct. Henri Bergson's theory of perception is utilized here: a percept is an object of possible action. The percept is relative to the active interests of the individual, not a state of their consciousness lodged in the cortex.
Emergence of Qualities: Following Alexander in Space Time and the Deity and Lloyd Morgan in Emergent Evolution, Mead argues that new qualities and meanings emerge in nature relative to the sensitivities and capacities of living forms. These characters exist in nature objectively, even if access is confined to a specific individual (e.g., imagery or internal physical pain).
Relativity, Consentient Sets, and Temporal Stratification
Whitehead's Influence: Mead references Alfred North Whitehead's The Principles of Natural Knowledge, The Concept of Nature, and The Principle of Relativity. He adopts the idea of "consentient sets"—sets of objects at rest relative to a percipient event.
Temporal Perspectives: Nature is stratified by the temporal perspectives of different individuals. Each individual "slices" the events of a common life from a unique angle. This stratification exists in nature, meaning psychology becomes the study of reality from the standpoint of ongoing processes.
The Elimination of Timeless Instincts: Spatial objects appear permanent and timeless only because we abstract time for the sake of conduct. In reality, objects are "plans of action." If we reduce the universe to a fictitious "instantaneous present," the individuality and behavior of objects are lost.
Comparative Social Organization: Invertebrates vs. Vertebrates
Invertebrate Societies (Hymenoptera and Termites): Social coordination is mediated by physiological differentiation. Individual acts (like those of ants or bees) are completed through others, but there is no evidence that these forms must "anticipate" the others' acts or use language. Their roles are embedded in their physical structures.
Vertebrate Societies: Apart from sex and infant care, vertebrates have little inherited physiological differentiation for complex social conduct. To cooperate, vertebrates—especially humans—must get the ongoing acts of others "into themselves."
The Social Object: A "social object" answers to all parts of a complex act distributed across different individuals. In insect societies, the full social object does not exist in the environment of any single individual. In human societies, the social object must appear in the experience of the individual participants.
The Genesis of the Self and the Significant Symbol
The Principle of Coordination: For a social object to exist for an individual, that individual must be sensitive to the stimuli that set free the responses of others. This requires having the "tendencies to respond as the other participants in the act will respond" within one's own organism.
The Role of the Cortex: The vertebrate central nervous system, specifically the cortex, allows currents and cross-currents that represent an indefinite number of possible, often competing, actions. This allows internal attitudes to implicate objects that are not the immediate objectives of the act.
The Vocal Gesture: In human society, the vocal gesture is the primary medium of organization. Unlike a hostile look (which a form may not see in itself), a vocal gesture is heard by the one making it in the same way it is heard by the one receiving it.
Significant Symbols: A vocal gesture becomes a "significant symbol" when it arouses in the speaker the same organized attitude (idea) that it arouses in the listener. Significant speech involves the speaker taking the attitude of the other toward their own stimulus.
The Mind and Self: Mind is not a "spiritual stuff" but a process of social conduct. The self arises when the individual becomes an object to themselves by taking the roles of others.
Developmental Stages: Play, the Game, and the Generalized Other
The Stage of Play: The child assumes various roles (parent, teacher, policeman) in a process of "endless imitation." The child excites in themselves the responses they expect from others. This is a discrete, one-to-one role-taking.
The Stage of the Game: The child must assume the roles of all participants simultaneously. In a game like baseball, the player's action is determined by their internal representation of the organized reactions of the entire team. This organized reaction is the "Generalized Other."
Thinking as Inner Conversation: Thought is a conversation with the Generalized Other. This allows for abstract thinking, objectivity, and the "censor" that regulates imagery and inner speech.
Social Control and the Functional Self
Control via the Social Object: Social control is the influence of the social object over the act of the individual. Because the individual can assume the attitudes of the group, they define the object that in turn controls their response.
Economic Examples:
Value: Value as a social object exists only when a buyer also takes the attitude of a seller, and vice versa.
Marxian Theory: Mead critiques the breakdown of control in State production if it fails to incorporate the attitudes of individual initiative.
Democratic Government: Control breaks down when the social object (the issues of a campaign) fails to truly answer to the attitudes of the voters, surrendering to the "political machine."
The Path to Universal Social Control: Modern complexity requires breaking down barriers of space, time, language, and status to allow individuals to "converse with themselves in the roles of those who are involved with us." Mead cites the realistic novel and inquisitive journalism as tools that help people enter others' lives.
Global Integration: Institutional structures like the League of Nations, the World Court, and the Dawes Plan are social objects that require national selves to realize themselves through the collaborating attitudes of other nations. He notes that while opposition to a common enemy simplifies self-realization, collaboration is the more difficult but necessary path for modern civilization.
Would you like a summary of the next segment of text?