George Herbert Mead

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Biography

George Herbert Mead was born in 1863 in South Hadley, Massachusetts. His father was the Reverend Hiram Mead, a Congregational Minister. Seven years later the Meads moved to Oberlin, Ohio, where the Rev. Hiram Mead became professor of homiletics at the Oberlin Theological Seminary. As a child, George was described as a “cautious, mild-mannered, kind-hearted, rather quiet boy” (Miller in Schellenberg, 1978, p. 38). As a student at Oberlin College, he experienced a sense of liberation from his early theological training. However, this was a relatively mild rebellion, and it created no stormy scenes with his parents. His father died in 1881, and his mother then took up teaching and later became president at Mt. Holyoke College. “There were no strained relations between the proud and dignified mother and her quiet son, though they avoided sensitive philosophical issues. George once said that he spent his second twenty years unlearning what he had been taught in his first twenty.” (Schellenberg, 1978, p. 38-39)

After failing as a grade school teacher ( at which he lasted four months) and working on a railroad surveying crew, Mead went to Harvard, where he met William James and took classes from Josiah Royce. The latter exposed him to Hegelian idealism, which influenced Mead. As one of the founders of American pragmatism, William James’ work also bears a strong relationship to Mead’s.

After a year at Harvard, Mead went to Germany. He studied physiological psychology in Berlin, and was married in Leipzig in 1891. Shortly thereafter, he accepted an offer to teach in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Michigan.

Mead underwent two important influences at Michigan: John Dewey, the Chairman of the Department, and Charles Horton Cooley, a young Ph.D. candidate. Dewey was one of the founders of Pragmatism. Cooley would become, along with Mead, one of the co-founders of the social psychological perspective later called Symbolic Interactionism.

Mead resolved to base his “philosophy upon scientific foundations that would not take basic entities - such as soul or mind - for granted.” (Schellenberg, 1978, p. 41).

Three years later, in 1894, Dewey was appointed chair of the Philosophy Department at the newly created University of Chicago, and he brought Mead with him to that department. Mead was thirty-one years old at that time, and he stayed at the University of Chicago until his death in 1931.

While Mead never joined the Sociology Department at the University of Chicago, his legacy is perhaps more prominent in that field than it is in Philosophy. As will become clear in the subsequent sections of this article, the “Meadian” tradition in Sociology represents the interpretive, qualitative and anti-positivist approach which some sociologists favor, as opposed to the quantitative and statistical survey research which emulates the physical sciences, and which currently dominates the field. It is probably not a coincidence that much of the qualitative and ethnographic tradition in Sociology can be traced to the so-called “Chicago School.”

Mead published relatively little in his lifetime. When he died at the age of sixty eight, he had not published a single book. His greatest impact was upon his students, in his lectures. His major and best known work is the four-volume Mind, Self and Society, published posthumously by his students and edited by Charles W. Morris (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1934). This work contains a majority of Mead’s unpublished manuscripts and stenographic lecture notes.

Theories and Ideas

Mead’s central concern was to demonstrate man’s fundamentally social nature. He sought to explain the emergence of the human self from the social process, a process which is largely symbolic, i.e. linguistic.

Whereas conventional thinking posits the logical primacy of the individual over society, and assumes that the individual is the building block of society, Mead reverses this, arguing that society precedes the individual. A second conventional assumption which Mead reverses - revealing Darwin’s influence - is the notion that structure precedes function. To the contrary, according to Mead, birds do not fly because they have wings, but they develop wings as a consequence of attempting to fly. Thirdly, as a pragmatist, Mead reverses the classical causal analysis of (social) phenomena. Instead of emphasizing the importance of the prior causes of phenomena, Mead stresses the importance of consequences. Thus, Mead’s social philosophy is processual rather than static, and it leads to the only branch of modern social science which is relatively non-deterministic, because it is not necessarily concerned with the discovery of independent variables. That branch is called Symbolic Interactionism, the dominant school of sociological social psychology today. This may be the only school of thought in the social sciences at the present time which includes human free will in its analysis, and does not limit the domain of science to the study of Kant’s phenomenal world, but also dares to address Kant’s noumena. However, not all Symbolic Interactionists and followers of Mead agree on this.

It has been said that Charles Morris’ posthumous organization of Mead’s materials under the rubrics of Mind, Self and Society should have been reversed, to do justice to Mead’s own belief in the primacy of society. In the next few paragraphs, I do just that, starting with a few remarks about the social process, followed by a brief discussion of Mead’s idea of self, and ending with the (individual) mind.

Mead and Pragmatism

Mead was, along with his colleagues and fellow graduate students William James, Charles Peirce and John Dewey, one of the founders of pragmatism. To the pragmatist, knowledge is judged by how useful it is. Action is judged by its consequences. Objects are defined according to the use they have for us. Situations are defined, and the meaning of objects is determined by how humans respond to them, in a social context. Human beings interpret their environment and the stimuli which impinge upon them before they respond, and those interpretations are part of the human environment. Because the human environment is an interpreted environment, it is therefore fundamentally different from that of all other organisms.

Mead and Social Behaviorism

Mead was also influenced by John Watson, the founder of American Behaviorism. However, Mead’s Behaviorism differs a great deal from Watson’s. Whereas Watsonian behaviorism is strictly concerned with externally observable physical behavior, Mead’s social behaviorism also includes the study of action that is internal to the individual and that cannot be seen directly, notably action which we might call thinking. Unlike Watson, Mead felt that social science must also study what things mean to people and how humans experience events.

The Self, the I and the Me

According to Mead, a self is “that which can be object to itself,” (Mead 1964: 204), or that “which is reflexive. i.e. which can be both subject and object.” (Mead 1964: 201). The self, then, represents reflexive experience, simultaneous organic and mental activity. Only humans are capable of this. Only humans have and are selves. Lower animals have feelings such as pleasure and pain, but these belong to the organism, not to the self, for the feelings have no symbolic meaning (loc. cit).

Following William James, Mead finds it convenient to express the dual and reflexive nature of the self through the concepts of the I and the me. “The self is essentially a social process going on with these two distinguishable phases.” (op. cit.:233). In other words the I is the subjective and active phase of the self, the me the objective and passive phase.

Socialization and Symbolic Interaction

The social process which produces the self is called socialization. The sine qua non for socialization is symbolic thought, or language. Language consists of significant gestures or symbols, and it is an inherently social phenomenon, since a gesture is only significant if it evokes the same response in oneself as it is intended to elicit in another. Such meaningful communication occurs through role-taking, i.e. taking the role of the other. By taking the role of the other, Mead means putting onself in the place of another individual in such a manner that one arouses the same response in both. Only such symbolic interaction is truly social in the sense that it requires role-taking. The “social” organization of ants and bees, while complex and sophisticated, is based on instinct, not role-taking.

Mead distinguishes several phases of socialization, notably the play phase and the game phase. The former stage occurs when the young child begins to take the role of individual significant others. For the game stage, which is a later developmental stage, Mead uses baseball as a metaphor: In order to successfully participate in a game of baseball, the individual must take the role of the generalized other, i.e. the entire social structure and its rules. And so it is with participating in society.

The Mind

To Mead, the mind is a process, not an entity. It is the activity of thinking. “It is the process of talking over a problematic situation with one’s self, just as one might talk with another, that is exactly what we term ‘mental,’ and it goes on within the organism.” (Charon 101). Above all, mind cannot develop outside of the symbolic, social process.

His legacy

Mead’s most tangible legacy is the Symbolic Interactionist school of sociological Social Psychology. The name for this school was coined by Herbert Blumer, a sociologist who studied at the University of Chicago, went on to chair the Department of Sociology at the University of California in Berkeley and may be said to be the heir to George Herbert Mead.

During the second half of the twentieth century, two distinct branches of Symbolic Interactionism arose - the Chicago school under Herbert Blumer and the Iowa school under Manford Kuhn. The Chicago school has carried forward the interpretive, qualitative Meadian tradition, whereas the Iowa school opted for a more positivistic approach.

Other major contributors to Symbolic Interactionism during the last part of the twentieth century include Norman Denzin (UC Berkeley and Illinois) and Sheldon Stryker (Indiana).

Highly influenced by Mead is also Irving Goffman’s so-called Dramaturgical Sociology. From the 1960s onwards, Goffman (UC Berkeley) launched an approach which views all human social life as staged behavior. No other sociologist has had a greater influence on the field than Goffman, who himself in turn was a Meadian.

Ultimately, the importance and uniqueness of Meadian Social Psychology is that it represents an interpretive, qualitative and non-deterministic alternative to positivist social science. It has an affinity with Max Weber’s verstehende Sociology, which similarly stresses the importance of understanding the subjective meaning of experience, rather than objectifying the other.

The Meadian perspective can be termed humanistic, in that it focuses on man’s uniqueness rather than on our similarities with other species. Our ability to symbolize frees us from our environment and from our past. While much of human behavior is habitual, there always remains an element of unpredictability and freedom, which Mead conceptualized as the “I’ phase of the self. The lesson which Mead teaches us is that in the end, no social theorist will ever be able to fully predict human behavior, be he a Behaviorist, a Structural-Functionalist, a Marxist or a neuro-psychologist.

George Herbert Mead (February 27,1863 - April 26,1931) was a American philosopher, sociologist and psychologist, primarily affiliated with the University of Chicago, where he was one of several distinguished pragmatists. He is regarded as one of the founders of social psychology.

Mead is a major American philosopher by virtue of being, along with Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, one of the founders of pragmatism. Mead is also an important figure in 20th century social philosophy. His theory of how the mind and self emerge from the social process of communication by signs founded the symbolic interactionist school of sociology and social psychology. He also made significant contributions to the philosophies of nature, science, and history, to philosophical anthropology, and to process philosophy. Dewey and Alfred North Whitehead considered Mead a thinker of the first rank. He is a classic example of social theorist whose work does not fit easily within conventional disciplinary boundaries.

Mead the social psychologist argued the antipositivistic view that the individual is a product of society, the self arising out of social experience as an object of socially symbolic gestures and interactions. Rooted intellectually in Hegelian dialectics, theories of action, and an amended "anti-Watsonian" social behaviourism, Mead’s self was a self of practical and pragmatic intentions.

Mead grounded human perception in an "action-nexus" (Joas 1985: 148), ingraining the individual in a "manipulatory phase of the act" as the fundamental “means of living” (Mead 1982: 120). In this manipulatory sphere “the individual abides with the physical objects” of everyday life (Mead 1938: 267).

Mead also rooted the self’s “perception and meaning” deeply and sociologically in "a common praxis of subjects" (Joas 1985: 166) found specifically in social encounters. Understood as a combination of the 'I' and the 'me', Mead’s self proves to be noticeably entwined within a sociological existence: For Mead, existence in community comes before individual consciousness.

Philosophers whose inspiration is more metaphysical and ontological, e.g. Heidegger, emphasize the development of Being from the perspective of the experiencing human being, and how the world is revealed to this experiencing entity within a realm of things. Pragmatic philosophers like Mead focus on the development of the self and the objectivity of the world within the social realm: that "the individual mind can exist only in relation to other minds with shared meanings" (Mead 1982: 5).

In his lifetime, Mead published about 100 scholarly articles, reviews, and incidental pieces. At the moment of death, he was correcting the galleys to what would have been his first book Essays in Social Psychology, published only in 2001. His students and colleagues, especially Charles W. Morris, subsequently put together five books from his unpublished manuscripts and from stenographic records of his lectures. The Mead Project at Brock University in Ontario intends to publish eventually all of Mead's 80-odd remaining unpublished mss.

References
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Charon, Joel M.. 2004, Symbolic Interactionism: An Introduction, an Interpretation, an Integration, Pearson Prentice Hall
Cook, Gary A. 1993. G. H. Mead: The Making of a Social Pragmatist. University of Illinois Press.
Joas, Hans 1985. G. H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-examination of His Thought. MIT Press.
Mead, G. H. 1934. Mind, Self, and Society. Ed. by C. W. Morris. University of Chicago Press.
Mead, G. H. 1938. The Philosophy of the Act. Ed. by C. W. Morris et al. University of Chicago Press.
Mead, G.H. 1964. On Social Psychology. Ed. Anselm Strauss. University of Chicago Press.
Mead, G. H. 1982. The Individual and the Social Self: Unpublished Essays by G. H. Mead. Ed. by David L. Miller. University of Chicago Press.
Mead, G. H. 2001. Essays in Social Psychology. Ed. by M. J. Deegan. Transaction Books.
Schellenberg, James A. 1978. Masters of Social Psychology. Oxford University Press.

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