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George Herbert Mead: Philosophy and the Pragmatic Self

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

James Campbell
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Extract

George Herbert Mead was born at the height of America's bloody Civil War in 1863, the year of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address. He was born in New England, in the small town of South Hadley, Massachusetts; but when he was seven years old his family moved to Oberlin, Ohio, so that his father, Hiram Mead, a Protestant minister, could assume a chair in homiletics at the Oberlin Theological Seminary. After his father's death in 1881, Mead's mother, Elizabeth Storrs Billings Mead, briefly taught at Oberlin College. (She later served as the president of Mount Holyoke College from 1890 to 1900.) Mead grew to self-consciousness in this educational atmosphere, amidst the conflict between science and religion over the primacy of efficient or final explanations; and he offers us, in some autobiographical comments, a sense of the difficulties felt by one who saw values on either side: We wished to be free to follow our individual thinking and feeling into an intelligent and sympathetic world without having to bow before incomprehensible dogma or to anticipate the shipwreck of our individual ends and values. We wanted full intellectual freedom and yet the conservation of the values for which had stood Church, State, Science, and Art.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 19: American Philosophy , March 1985 , pp. 91 - 114
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1985

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References

1 ‘Josiah Royce—A Personal Impression’, International Journal of Ethics XXVII (1917), 168.Google Scholar

2 Additional biographical material on Mead and his family can be found in Miller, David L., George Herbert Mead: Self, Language, and the World (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1973; Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), xi–xxxviiiGoogle Scholar; Coughlan, Neil, Young John Dewey (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 113–150.Google Scholar

3 For a further discussion of Mead's work as a social reformer see Barry, Robert M., ‘A Man and a City: George Herbert Mead in Chicago’, in American Philosophy and the Future, Novak, Michael (ed.) (New York: Scribners, 1968), 173–192Google Scholar; Rucker, Darnell, The Chicago Pragmatists (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969), 20–22Google Scholar; Deegan, Mary Jo and Burger, John S., ‘George Herbert Mead and Social Reform: His Work and Writings’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences XIV (1978), 362–373.3.0.CO;2-I>CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 ‘The Work of George Mead’, The New Republic 26 07 1936, 329.Google Scholar

5 Selected Writings: George Herbert Mead [SW], Reck, Andrew J. (ed.) (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964; Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981)Google Scholar. A briefer selection of Mead's writings was published under the curious title: George Herbert Mead: Essays on His Social Philosophy, Petras, John W. (ed.) (New York: Teachers College Press, 1968)Google Scholar. The best available bibliography of the published works of Mead has been compiled by John A. Broyer and can be found in The Philosophy of George Herbert Mead, Corti, Walter R. (ed.) (Winterthur: Amriswiler, 1973), 243–260.Google Scholar

6 ‘The Work of George Mead’, 329.Google Scholar

7 ‘George Herbert Mead’, The Journal of Philosophy XXVIII (1931), 311.Google Scholar

8 The Philosophy of the Present [PP], Murphy, Arthur E. (ed.) (LaSalle: Open Court, 1932; Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Mind, Self, and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist [MSS], Morris, Charles W. (ed.) (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1934)Google Scholar; Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century [MT], Moore, Merritt H. (ed.) (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1936)Google Scholar; The Philosophy of the Act [PA], Morris, Charles W. et al. (eds) (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1938)Google Scholar; The Individual and the Social Self [ISS], Miller, David L. (ed.) (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1982)Google Scholar. The Mead Papers are housed in the Special Collections division of the Joseph Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago.

9 See Dewey, , How We Think, rev. edn (Boston: Heath, 1933), 107–118Google Scholar; Dewey, , Logic, The Theory of Inquiry (New York: Holt, 1938), 101–119.Google Scholar

10 See Dewey, , Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology (New York: Modern Library [1922], 1930).Google Scholar

11 See, for example, Mills, C. Wright, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 165–176.Google Scholar

12 Compare this comment with Dewey, 's: ‘Shared experience is the greatest of human goods’ (Experience and Nature, rev. edn (New York: Dover [1929], 1958), 202).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 See Peirce, Charles S., ‘The Fixation of Belief’, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Hartshorne, and Weiss, (eds), 6 vols (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931–1935), 5.358–5.387.Google Scholar

14 Liberalism and Social Action (New York: Capricorn [1935], 1963), 70.Google Scholar

15 For more on Mead's understanding of pragmatism, the pragmatic theory of meaning, the pragmatic theory of truth, etc., see MT 344–359; PA 360–364; SW 320–344.

16 The Philosophy of Dewey, John', International Journal of Ethics XLVI (1935), 64–81.Google Scholar

17 Mead is referring here to Frederick Jackson Turner (1861–1932). especially his The Frontier in American History (New York: Holt, 1920).Google Scholar

18 ‘The Philosophy of John Dewey’, 64.Google Scholar

19 Ibid., 67.

20 Ibid., 66.

21 Ibid., 72; cf. ‘Josiah Royce—A Personal Impression’, 168–170.Google Scholar

22 It must be recalled here that Mead is writing from the standpoint of Royce's impact on students in the late 1880s. (He himself studied with Royce in 1887–88.) Whether Mead's evaluation should be seen as adequate for an understanding of Royce's whole thought is doubtful, especially if we keep in mind Royce's later work and his 1915 self-evaluation: ‘my deepest motives and problems have centred about the Idea of the Community, although this idea has only come gradually to my clear consciousness’ (‘Words of Prof. Royce at the Walton Hotel at Philadelphia, December 29, 1915’, The Basic Writings of Josiah Royce, McDermott, John J. (ed.), 2 vols (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1969), Vol. I, 34).Google Scholar

23 ‘The Philosophy of John Dewey’, 72Google Scholar; cf. SW 390–391.

24 For more on Mead's understanding of the nature of the past, see SW 345–354; PP 1–31; PA 613–616; Miller, , George Herbert Mead, 172–187.Google Scholar

25 ‘The Philosophy of John Dewey’, 80.Google Scholar

26 Ibid.

27 ‘The Psychological Bases of Internationalism’, in George Herbert Mead, John W. Petras (ed.) 157; cf. MSS 207, 284–285.Google Scholar

28 ‘The Psychological Bases of Internationalism’, 151Google Scholar; cf. MSS 219–221; SW 235–236.