The social structure of language and consciousness in George Herbert Mead

Self, I, Me

Let us more specifically come to the issue of the Self, which Mead analyses in a very important writing, “The social self”, published in 1913 and already quoted above. The Self is here distinguished from the physical organism in that it can be an object to itself.

The English word self brings us back to the reflexive which indicates at the same time a subjective and an objective form. Just insofar as the Self can be an object to itself, it qualifies itself as a social and collective experience, and not as a personal and inward one. The Self is not “a more or less isolate and independent element... When we reach a self we reach a certain sort of conduct, a certain type of social process which involves the interaction of different individuals” (MSS 1645). That is to say, the Self is constituted by an entirely public stuff, by the material distributed by the lives of the others or, more exactly, of the material of the life in common with others. This appears all the more true if we stick to the pioneering investigations of the Austrian psychologist Rene Spitz. He was the first to describe the behaviors of those kids who, for some reason, were kept apart - for a long time or forever- from the person who used to take care of them, without managing to find a valid replacement. The physician visited many orphanages, where these kids were looked after very satisfactorily from a physical point of view, still without caring the relational and affective aspect. Many of these children inexplicably deteriorated, in some cases to the point of death. They displayed behaviors like bemoaning and calls (first month of separation), crying and weight lost (second month), rejection of physical contact, delay in motor development, tendency to get diseases, absence of expressiveness, procumbent position (third month), cessation of the crying and rare screams, lethargic state (after the third month). If within the fifth/sixth month of separation the child had the chance to find his attachment figure or someone who could replace it, these symptoms used to disappear; otherwise a coma could occur, or even death Spitz, R.A. The first year of life: a psychoanalytic study of normal and deviant development of object relations. New York, 1965.. These investigations confirm Mead's intuition: the structuring of the Self - even from the point of view of physical survival - is a process by all means social and relational. My own Self is, literally, into the hands and the gazes of the others.

This does not mean that one speaks only through the voice of the community. Mead was always mindful at preserving the space of liberty and individual responsibility. In the distinction to which he comes in the third chapter of Mind, Self and Society, by distinguishing between Self, I and Me, the author in fact manages to successfully reach a further articulation of his own psycho-social analysis. A similar distinction had already been put forward by James, and resonated in Peirce James speaks expressly about this in the tenth chapter of Principles of Psychology. Peirce had hinted at the issue in Immortality in the Light of Synechism, written and posthumously published in the collection Essential Peirce (Bloominton and Indianapolis, Vol. II).. But Mead, no doubt, works more deeply on it, and lays it out with sharper clarity. The Self is to be conceived of as split into the `I' and the `Me'. The `Me' represents the organized set of attitudes inherited by the community: it is the conventional, institutional aspect of subjectivity, which I tacitly share with others. The I is instead the excess, the atypical emergence, the irreducible singularity which stands against the Me; it is the unforeseeable discard, the idiosyncratic break whose nature we cannot define beforehand. The individual is not only a member of the community, but reacts to that community and, in the reaction itself, he modifies it: his answer to the “organized attitude” provokes the change, at times radical, of the latter, in ways that conduce to the steady reset of the collective environment and of the public forms of life. The `I' causes the `Me' to arise and, all the same, responds to it. Both contain in nuce different cores of the Self. The Self is, in the ultimate analysis, nothing solid and structured around a rigid centre, it is not sub-stance, but always predicate. It is, so to speak, “an eddy in the social current and so still a part of the current. It is a process in which the individual is continually adjusting himself in advance to the situation he belongs to, and reacting back on it” (MSS 182) The Self, to sum it up, is the correlation between different communicative signs, understood as a “dynamic process” of the experience. It does not have the nature as unicum and fundamentum. Rather, it has the nature of the double: it is `I' and `Me', `I' and `Other', `I' and `Other Generalized', subjective and objective pole of conduct.

In all these cases, as Mead sharply notes, I cannot still split myself with such a rapidity that I can fully capture my own self in my `originality'. At the time in which I see and represent myself, I am already far from the “I” and re-conquered by the “Me”. The `I' is therefore “a historical figure”, an effect of memory and recognition; what I was a second ago is the `I' of the `Me'. “The I is in certain sense that with which we do identify ourselves. The getting of it into experience constitutes one of the problems of most of our conscious experience; it is not directly given to experience” (MSS 174-5). The normal situation is one which involves a reaction of the individual which is socially determined, but to which he brings his own responses as an I. Yet, we cannot exhibit the response while responding.

The `I' emerges then within the folds of the Self; by the time it gets recognized it is already a “Me”; “The `I' of this moment is the `me' of the next moment” (MSS 174) “The I of introspection is the self which enters into social relations with other selves”. And again: “The mechanism of introspection is therefore given in the social attitude which man necessarily assumes towards himself, and the mechanism of thought, in so far as thought uses symbols which are used in social intercourse, is but an inner conversation” (Mead, G.H. “The Social Self”).. And `Me' is the organized, habitual, conventional set of the common attitudes (the various individual “Me”), just as they get deposited thanks to the system of language and symbols. The “I” names to the contrary the emerging of novelty, the competence in singular execution, the modifications, throughout individual answers, of the community asset. The 'I' is responsible for the conduct “in the first person”, the one which escapes and will always escape the “social control” which is expression of the `Me'. Something similar was thought by De Saussure when he used to distinguish between langue and parole.

Within the “I” we find the “Me”, or, even, within the “Me” we find the “I”, on which the `Me' never succeeds in keeping hold. The `I' is the break from the `Me' and of the `Me' from the `Self' (because it is, nevertheless, always the chorus of the `Me' which brings to the solo of the `I'). And again: it is the Self, structured in the rebound of the community, which generates the `Me' and the `I'. The Self as it-self. As a third person who lives within the first.

I would like to conclude by quoting an extremely beautiful sentence from a fragment added in note to the edition of Mind, Self and Society (MSS 223n.25). Mead refers to his own theory speaking of “a social theory of mind”: if the mind structures itself in a social way, he writes, “the field or locus of any given individual mind must extend as far as the social activity or apparatus of social relations which constitutes it extends; and hence that field cannot be bounded by the skin of the individual organism to which it belongs”. What resonates here is the ancient saying by Heraclitus: “You will not find out the limits of the soul when you go, travelling on every road, so deep a logos does it have” (B45). Heraclitus speaks about profoundness, but the reference to the road leads us to think of the horizontal extension of consciousness, rather than of the vertical profoundness. It leads us to think of an extended and distributed mind, just as the one of which many bright cognitivist thinkers I can here recall primarily Clark, A. Supersizing the mind. Oxford; New York, 2008. In the latest years, we have several interesting articles on the relation between Mead and the Theory of Extended (or Embedded, or Enactive) Mind: see Madzia, R. “Chicago Pragmatism and the Extended Mind Theory: Mead and Dewey on the Nature of Cognition”, European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, 2013, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 193-211; Baggio, G. “Sympathy and Empathy: G.H. Mead and the Pragmatist Basis of (Neuro)economics”, Pragmatism and Embodied Cognitive Science: From Bodily Interaction to Symbolic Articulation. Berlin; Boston, 2016, pp. 185-213. In the light of the new researches of the neurosciences, see also: Solymosi, T.

& Shook, J. “Neuropragmatism: a neurophilosophical Manifesto”, European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, 2013, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 212-234; Fabbrichesi, R., “Peirce, Mead, and the Theory of Extended Mind”, The Commens Encyclopedia. The Digital Encyclopedia of Peirce Studies [http://www.commens.org/encyclopedia/article/fabbrichesi-rossella-peirce-mead- and-theory-extended-mind, accessed on 29.11.2017]. maintain today, who from Mead, as I believe, would have much to learn.

References

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Baggio, G. “Sympathy and Empathy: G. H. Mead and the Pragmatist Basis of (Neuro) economics”, Pragmatism and Embodied Cognitive Science: From Bodily Interaction to Symbolic Articulation, ed. by R. Madzia and M. Jung. Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2016, pp. 185-210.

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Социальная структура языка и сознания в учении Джорджа Герберта Мида

Роселла Фаббрикези

Профессор отделения теоретической философии Миланского университета, председатель общества Чарльза Пирса (Charles S. Peirce Society). Universita degli Studi di Milano. Italia

В центре внимания автора настоящей статьи книга Джорджа Мида «Разум, Я и общество» (1934). В этом новаторском сочинении Мид создает дисциплину социальной психологии в ее отличии от чистого бихевиоризма. Как и бихевиористы, Мид исследует наблюдаемую деятельность, жест, поступок, однако он не отрицает внутреннего опыта индивида, тем самым обозначая свою дистанцию от бихевиоризма. Более того, рост значения внутреннего опыта в рамках целостного процесса составляет для него предмет первоочередного интереса. Процесс формирования сознания развивается извне и вовнутрь. Сознание надлежит объяснять, а не просто удостоверять его наличие; в объяснении нуждается его развитие, его функции и полезная роль. Мид, как и его современник Л.С. Выготский, полагал, что истоки сознания коренятся в обществе; вместе с Дарвином он придерживался той точки зрения, что сознание представляет собой исход процесса коммуникации, а не его начало. Этот процесс начинается с «беседы жестов», продолжается в виде того, что Мид называет «взятием на себя роли другого», и находит свое завершение в создании социальной архитектуры значимых символов. «Я» впервые возникает как «общественное Я», как «обобщенный другой», что становится возможно в первую очередь благодаря такой особой форме жеста, какой является голосовой жест. В качестве особенно значимой автор выделяет особую форму «генеалогии сознания», намеченную Мидом; ее новаторский характер раскрывается в соотнесении с метафизической и психологической традициями. Глядящий внутрь себя интроверт, по-видимому, лишается возможности увидеть свое «Я», ибо истина этого «Я» лежит в направленных вовне динамичных отношениях с другими.

Ключевые слова: Мид, Выготский, сознание, жест, символы, язык, коммуникация

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