Tags
Mead, Mind and World
George Herbert Mead is the fourth major figure in Classical
American Pragmatism. Mead studied philosophy at Harvard while William James
chaired the department. He taught with John Dewey at the University of Michigan
before they both left there to teach at the University of Chicago. Mead is
known more as a sociologist than a philosopher and he can be seen as an early
pioneer of intersubjective consciousness and integral theory.
Mead’s book Mind, Self and Society is fascinating. The first thing that Mead discusses is the idea
of parallelism in relationship to the mind and the world. Mead makes the point
that we generally relate to our minds as if there is some causal relationship
between our experience of thought and feeling in the mind and the world outside.
If someone asks us why we did something we will generally
have an answer. I drove to the store because I wanted milk. I screamed because
I was angry. Etc. We think that we do things “be-cause” of things in our heads.
We assume that ideas or feelings that exist in our minds cause us to act in
certain ways. And the assumed causal relationship between mind and world goes
both ways. We believe that we feel sad “be-cause” something bad happened. We
feel happy because the sun is shining. Etc.
This idea of there being a causal relationship between mind
and world is so familiar to us that you would probably think that it was crazy
to say that there is in fact no causal relationship between mind and world.
Luckily Mead is not saying that. What he does say is that there may not be a causal relationship between
mind and world – or at least there may not be one that we can understand that
is totally different from the way we think it is. Most importantly he is saying
that the causal relationship between mind and world is an assumption that we
are better off not making. He then begins to envision a powerful way to look at
the world and mind as a co-arising/integral event.
He advocates a view, or at least a modified version of a
view, called parallelism. The experience of the mind and the experience of the
world undoubtedly do appear to run in parallel. Certain external circumstances seem
to necessarily correspond to specific internal states. If there is a tree in
the external world and I look at it, I see a tree. If I close my eyes and open
them again, I still see a tree. I can close my eyes a thousand times and every
time I look at the tree I will see a tree. I will never open my eyes and see a
frog.
Mead’s point is that any philosophy of psychology has to be
based on an assumed parallelism, but parallelism doesn’t necessarily imply
causality. Mead is anticipating or building toward Ken Wilber’s later Integral
Theory by stating that the inner states of mind co-arise with the outer
circumstances of the world. The experience of mind and the outer world arise
together. Our thoughts and feelings are not produced by outer circumstance as
much as they change simultaneously with changes in outer circumstance. The
assumption of a causal relationship is something we add.
Thank you for the beautiful blog. It is really interesting to learn more about that man and it seems to connect to a lot of things, on the one side looking back at history of philosophy, but also to the future. What I like so much about Wilber in this context, is that he shows clearly all sides of the mind. In this case the parallel between tree and reality is obvious, even though an alien who never saw a tree would never have the same amount of ideas connected with inner states as we have, he just would see a tree. If I relate to the tree and his quadrants and my experience, looking at a tree would have many aspects, it depends from which aspect I am looking.
From the UL(personal feelings), I remember a course where I had to ‘huge’ a tree, I still do not exactly know why, but it had to with ‘feeling’ the tree, become one with nature, probably it was about that, Oneness in a feeling sense. Most important feeling I had with a tree was the Bodhi tree under which the Buddha got enlightened. I still have a leave from it.
From the UR (objective truth about the tree), I have been studying cabinet-making for a while and of course so many facets of wood are important than, like it is alive, so it will always crimp and grow still after cutting a few millimeters, and the beauty of a tree is that it gets every year a new ‘ring’ so, for example when they were trying to find out how old houses in Amsterdam where, they were looking at the structure of these rings and they could exactly tell where the wood came from (because of the weather rings are different in tropical countries than in Sweden), there are agencies who have lists with the exact size per country of these rings are in lists for many ages.
Thinking about the LL (cultural perspective) my ideas goes from the two names with a heart, carved in trees to feeling of closeness that arises around a campfire to the idea that Eskimo;s built houses of snow, in India they make them of clay and in Sweden they make them of wood, which is part of the culture. Think of what it does to native culture if trees are all taken down by money makers and what it does to the world! Even thought that is more LR.
If we look at the LR (social perspective) wood was of course of immense influence. Yesterday I was on a tour in an old city in Holland and they told that only the very rich could afford a house in stone in 1100-1300 BC when the city was first starting. The people who first came to live there, where threatened by others who lived they burned their houses, so the new ones were forced to ask for city-rights and built a wall around it.
It reminds me of Kant’s philosophy…
I’m writing this comment *because* I enjoyed this post. Thanks for sharing your thoughts about Mead!
Debora, it just so happens that I will relate some of this to Kant in my next post….thanks Greg and Elizabeth.
Pingback: Mead, Mind and World | Evolutionary Philosophy «