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Created: April 25, 2002
Latest Update: April 25, 2002
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The Cosmopolitan Self: George Herbert Mead and Continental Philosophy

By Mitchell Aboulafia
An e-book, available free on the Internet, thanks to the University of Illinois Press

This essay is based on Mitchell Aboulafia's The Cosmopolitan Self: George Herbert Mead and Continental Philosophy. The text is available free online at the University of Illinois Press, and hardcopy can be purchased at that site. The text was recommended by Bill Hord on the Hab List.

Scroll about an inch down the file for the Introduction to find:

" If there is a theme woven through Mead's work, it is that the self is integrally related to society, and if there is one goal that animates his intellectual projects, it is the realization of a democratically organized political system in which individuals can flourish. One of Mead's underlying assumptions is that a democratic temper entails a capacity for both universalism and pluralism, in particular, for locating the common and appreciating the different. These are themes that link Mead's work to contemporary debates in philosophy, and they are explored in this work. Drawing on Mead, I argue that the self emerges through taking the perspectives of others, and because it emerges in this fashion the individual can accommodate both the universal and plural when they are understood in a certain fashion. To be more specific, The Cosmopolitan Self offers a model of the social development of the self that shows how a democratically inclined subject embodies both a universalistic dimension and a sensitivity to particular others, and in the process it examines several different contemporary approaches to universalism and pluralism, namely those of Jurgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt, and Emmanuel Levinas.

We have traditionally taught George Herbert Mead's theory as that of a sociologist. Most of you have encountered his work in symbolic interaction and social psychology. So perhaps it is a little unusual for us to consider him as a philosopher. That's one of the reasons I generally prefer the term social theory to sociological theory. In today's world most disciplines spill out into others, and it's near impossible to draw firm discipline boundaries. As we discover more and more of the cosmos' secrets in the study of the stars, we are learning that our astrophysicists must now be trained in particle physics. Those used to be fairly well separated disciplines in physics, but now they are confronting their interdependence. Just so, sociology, in its beginnings, was closely related to philosophy and split off as the separate study of sociology.

About a third of the way down the Introductory file, you'll find:

"From the vantage point of those attuned to the cluster of sensibilities that have come to be called postmodern, Mead would be classified as a modernist. He promoted an ideal of social progress that drew on a host of notions typically associated with the Enlightenment. For instance, Mead was a booster of the empirical sciences, and he thought that their procedures and accomplishments could help develop and sustain democracy. He was a central figure in the history of pragmatism, and like many pragmatists he viewed himself as actively committed to important features of what might be called the modernist agenda. Yet certain elements of Mead's thought—for example, his antifoundationalism and perspectivism—hold much promise for building bridges between conflicting contemporary orientations."

One possibility of a bridge between Mead's work and the new sensibilities of postmodernism is illuminated by this text.

Ideas that Aboulafia ascribes to the modern include: social progress:
• Social progress that builds on what has gone before, moving toward ultimate Enlightenment. Teleological pattern assumed over time, so that we normatively expect progress.
• Faith in empirical science to add to that progress. The Enlightenment countered the magic and force that had preceeded, replacing it with a faith in science and the scientific method, i.e. empiricism and objectivity. Although the uprooting of magic and superstition helped to extend knowledge with scientific evidence, during the Enlightenment science came to be the exclusive focus with inadequate attention paid to the dominance of the metaperspective over the local perspective, and with the attendant loss of emphasis on "verstehen," or the understanding of the contextual and situational component of normative behaviors. It is this imbalance of the modern that we refer to when we speak of "Positivism."

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