Glenda B. Claborne
Soc 500b
Mead, G.H. (1934). Mind, Self, & Society (pp. 137-139). Chicago, Ill: The University of Chicago Press.
Mead's Assumptions About Human Cognitive Functioning
Mead asks, "How can an individual get outside himself (experientially) in such a way as to become an object to himself?" Mead's answer is an ambitious effort to span the gap between what he considers "the essential psychological problem of selfhood or of self-consciousness" and his burning moral agenda of a cooperative society, all within an evolutionary, behavioristic framework.
When Mead says an individual has to get out of himself in order to become an object to himself, he is not referring to an out-of-body experience in which a "soul" or a "spirit" leaves the physical body and somehow looks down on the latter. To Mead, the self that one must get out of is not the physical body per se but a self that is closely tied to immediate impulses or needs that are, nevertheless, closely tied to the body or physiological functions of the person. And, according to Mead, one can get out of this impulse-driven self only through the process of social conduct in which those impulses can be given meaning and be controlled in relation to the larger goal of maintaining and advancing the human community. Mead takes the end goal of a cooperative society to define physiological impulses as basically social in nature. They are social because they are beginnings of social acts, which will ultimately lead to a cooperative society.
One arrives at this cooperative society through taking in the attitudes of others into one's conduct and then forming these particular attitudes into one single attitude, which Mead calls the "generalized other." The "generalized other" is the universal conceptualization of certain characters which can be recognized in indefinite number of objects, organisms and events. It is therefore impersonal in the sense that it does not answer to immediate sensory or affective experiences of certain individuals but to an abstracted concept common to the experiences of many, if not all, individuals. Rationality then takes on an impersonal and universal character. This kind of rationality or mind is the tool with which an individual is able to separate himself from his immediate, subjective needs and feelings and therefore be able to make himself an object just as others are objects within his field of experience. By making one's self as an object unto one's self, Mead is not saying that one regards one's self like an inanimate object. Rather, one becomes an object when one can think of one's self as necessarily a social self, a self that arises from social interaction and will always be involved in social interaction.
At this point, one tends to see Mead as starting to build his grand bridge between the psychological and the communal by chopping off the purely psychical but ending up having to also chop off the purely emotional, private or subjective in order that his theory of mind, self and society can work. We can infer that his notion of human cognition, if he had used that term, would refer to reasoning or intellectual functioning that must necessarily be separate from any immediate affective components. It is not clear whether Mead regards emotions as necessarily part of the attitudes of others that one must take into one's conduct in the formation of a mind and self. The question arises whether Mead believed that emotions, affections and aesthetic sensibilities can be impersonal and universal. It is clear, however, that Mead assumes that human reasoning or cognition naturally evolves from earlier forms of human communication in the form of gestures and that this reasoning will eventually create a just moral order in society.
It is in the mixing of the moral and social components of human life with the physiological, as if the former evolves from the latter, that Mead's theory of the mind, self and society cannot work. By trying to fit a social and moral agenda into the framework of biological evolution, Mead is forced into a parallelism between forms of communication and social evolution that cannot be accounted for without linking it to the central nervous system. In effect, Mead's expanded behaviorism may be said to be worse than Watson's mechanistic version. Furthermore, Mead was not able to apply Darwin's theory of natural selection very well but instead fell into a Lamarckian trajectory of evolution in which both the whole form and its functions naturally advance to higher forms and functions, forward in time and space.
Mead would have done better if he dispensed of his pretensions to purely scientific reasoning that eschews the mystical and the psychical and acknowledged the Christian foundations of his theory. I suspect that Mead imported the Christian doctrine of the communication between the triune God into his notion of the triadic structure of the social act. From there, he felt secure to dispense of the mystical and the psychical. He cannot avoid weaving in his Christian beliefs, however, into his discussion of society. But, like language that is disconnected from its origins in an a priori knowledge in the brain, Christianity that is disconnected from an a priori communication between the triune God is not what it is.