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John Dewey's
Prefactory Remarks
to The Philosophy of the Present
PREFACTORY REMARKS
The difficult task of drawing for the reader a
map in which the main features of George Mead's thought are set before
us (as is the business of a good map), in their proper relations to
one another has been performed by Dr. Murphy in his Introduction. It
would be of little or no assistance to the reader were I to go over
the ground which he has traversed. There is, however, a trait of Mr.
Mead's mind which when it is recognized will help protect the reader
from some of the pitfalls into which one is likely to fall in dealing
with an original thinker. While Mr. Mead was an original thinker, he
had no sense of being original. Or if he had such a feeling he kept
it under. Instead of bringing to the front as novelties the problems
which were occupying his own mind (which they were even as problems),
he chose to link them to ideas and movements already current. An excellent
instance of this trait is found in the pragmatic theory of knowledge
to which Professor Murphy refers. Mr. Mead does not seem to have had
any consciousness of the way and the degree in which his own conception
was a novel contribution; he preferred to treat it as if it were a natural
outgrowth with at most some change of emphasis in statement.
When I first came to know Mr. Mead, well over forty years ago, the
dominant problem in his mind concerned the nature of consciousness as
personal and private. In the 'eighties and 'nineties, idealism prevailed
in Anglo-American thought. It had a solution of the problem of consciousness
ready to offer. Mind as consciousness was at once the very stuff of
the universe and the structural forms of this stuff; human consciousness
in its intimate and seemingly exclusively personal aspect was at most
but a variant, faithful or errant, of the universal mind. I almost never
heard Mr. Mead argue directly against this view. I suppose that it never
seemed real to him in spite of the fact that it was the official doctrine
of most of his own teachers and was, in some form or other, the philosophic
conception most generally put forward in the philosophical writings
of the period. When, however, it was urged upon him, instead of combating
it, he took the ground that it did not touch the problem in which he
was interested. Even if it were true and were accepted as such, it did
not explain how states of mind peculiar to an individual, like the first
hypotheses of a discoverer which throw into doubt beliefs previously
entertained and which deny objectivity to things that have been universally
accepted as real objects, can function as the sources of objects which
instead of being private and personal, instead of being merely "subjective,"
belong to the common and objective universe.
As I look back I can see that a great deal of the seeming obscurity
of Mr. Mead's expression was due to the fact that he saw something as
a problem which had not presented itself at all to the other minds.
There was no common language because there was no common object of reference.
His problem did not fall into the categories and classifications of
either idealism or realism. He was talking about something which the
rest of us did not see. It lay outside of what used to be called "apperceptive
masses." I fancy that if one had a sufficiently consecutive knowledge
of Mr. Mead's intellectual biography during the intervening years, one
could discover how practically all his inquiries and problems developed
out of his original haunting question. His sense of the rôle of subjective
consciousness in the reconstruction of objects as experienced and in
the production of new customs and institutions was surely the thing
which lead him to his extraordinarily broad and accurate knowledge of
the historical development of the sciences -- a knowledge which did
not stop with details of discoveries but which included changes of underlying
attitudes toward nature. His interest in the problem of self led in
one direction to the study of the organism as the biological unit corresponding
to the self. In the other direction it necessitated that study of the
self in its social relations which carried him into social psychology-the
field in which, I suppose, he had the greatest immediate influence through
the effect of his teaching upon his students. The nature of his problem
was such, as one can readily see, to make him acutely sensitive to the
doctrines of Whitehead, especially the effort to include matters usually
relegated to an exclusively subjective realm within the constitution
of nature itself. Since his problem was (and that long before the words
"emergent evolution" were heard), essentially that of the
emergence of the new and its ultimate incorporation in a recognized
and now old world, one can appreciate how much more fundamentally he
took the doctrine of emergence than have most of those who have played
with the idea. Against this background, his generalization of the idea
of "sociality" and his interpretation of emergence in evolution
take on a meaning which they do not otherwise have.
There is a passage to be found in the recently published first volume
of Peirce's work which explains to me the kind of originality which
marked Mr. Mead. "It is," Peirce said, "extremely difficult
to bring our attention to elements of experience which are continually
present. For we have nothing in experience with which to contrast them;
and without contrast, they cannot excite our attention.... The result
is that round-about devices have to be resorted to in order to enable
us to perceive what stares us in the face with a glare that, once noticed,
becomes almost oppressive with its insistency." The power of observing
common elements, which are ignored just because they are common, characterized
the mind of George Mead. It accounts for the difficulty which he had
in conveying what he observed to others. Most philosophical thinking
is done by means of following out the logical implications of concepts
which seem central to a particular thinker, the deductions being reinforced
by suitable concrete data. Mr. Mead's philosophical thinking often,
perhaps usually, reverses the process. It springs from his own intimate
experiences, from things deeply felt, rather than from things merely
thought out by him, which then seek substantiation in accepted facts
and current concepts. His interest in the concept of emergence is, for
example, a reflex of that factor of his own intellectual experience
by which new insights were constantly budding and having then to be
joined to what he had thought previously, instead of merely displacing
old ideas. He felt within himself both the emergence of the
new and the inevitable continuity of the new with the old. So too he
experienced within himself the struggle of ideas, hypotheses, presentiments,
at first wholly private, a matter of intimate personal selfhood, to
find and take their place in an objective, shared, public world. His
sense of "sociality" as simultaneous existence in two different
orders seems to me to have something in common with the combination
of great originality and unusual deference to others which marked his
own personality.
In contrast with the kind of originality which marked his thinking
I realize that much which passes for original thinking is a reworking,
in the light of some new perspective, of intellectual attitudes already
pretty well conventionalized; the working of a vein of ore previously
uncovered but not adequately exploited by others. I realize also that
in much of what seems like clearness of literary expression, the clearness
is but another name for familiarity rather than something intrinsic
to the thought. The loss which American philosophy has suffered by Mr.
Mead's untimely death is increased by the fact that there is every reason
to think that he was beginning to get a command of his ideas which made
communication to others easier and more effective. The manuscript of
his Carus lectures--for whose careful editing we owe so much to Dr.
Murphy--gives hardly more than hurriedly prepared notes of extreme condensation.
He was planning to expand them to three or four times their present
length, an expansion which would have clarified the thought and not
merely swelled the number of words. But in spite of all limitations,
I believe that a widening public will increasingly find in his writings
what personal students have found for many, many years: a seminal mind
of the very first order.
JOHN DEWEY
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Lloyd
Gordon Ward and Robert
Throop
The Mead Project, Department of Sociology, Brock University, St. Catharines,
Ontario, Canada L2S 3A1
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