“Each Volk contained the principle of its individuality within itself; it was a self-respecting monad. The Christian Pietist conception of souls equal in the eyes of God was extended to peoples throughout world history.” Manuel, “Introduction,” in Herder, Reflections, xvii.
Herder, Reflections, 84.
I hasten to add that this assertion is not to be construed as defending peoples or states that act perversely and immorally, for example, Nazi Germany. I do not believe that the “right” to self-determination is an absolute right. It is a right, or perhaps more accurately, a good, when certain minimal normative criteria are met. However, for the purposes of the present discussion, I want to bracket the normative issues involved in judging different social groups or cultures. I will note that one of the characteristics of Nazi Germany was its xenophobia, which is an anticosmopolitan stance, to say the least.
One example of a set of sensibilities that is often associated with cosmopolitanism, an openness to and regard for those from different cultures and religious backgrounds, can be found in “The Edicts of Asoka.” A warlike Indian emperor (ca. 274–232 BC) who experienced a change of heart about morality and war, Asoka had his teachings and pronouncements about morality inscribed on rocks, pillars, and caves throughout his kingdom; for example, “Since I am convinced that the welfare and happiness of the people will be achieved only [through growth in dharma], I consider how I may bring happiness to the people, not only to relatives of mine or residents of my capital city, but also to those who are far removed from me. I act in the same manner with respect to all. I am concerned similarly with all classes. Moreover, I have honored all religious sects with various offerings.” Asoka, Edicts, 36. Asoka’s sensibilities bear comparison with those of the Stoics. However, both Asoka and the Stoics lived in times that accepted slavery.
I am using peoples and nations largely synonymously. I assume that nations by definition have unique cultures, whereas (nation-)states may or may not be (highly) culturally pluralistic, for example, the United States and Iceland. Because of increased mobility, migration, and communication, perhaps the notion of a “people” will someday seem passé. But we have not yet arrived at this world.
See Aboulafia, The Mediating Self and The Cosmopolitan Self.
“Sociality” refers to the way in which biological and social systems change and transition from one state to another.
See Lear, Radical Hope.
Taylor, Sources of the Self, 374–375 (emphasis added).
This statement would require qualification for several important existentialists, for example, S<sla>oren Kierkegaard.
“There is an ideal, natural way to self-fulfillment for each Volk analogous to an individual’s development from birth to the grave. Unfortunately, peoples have broken the bounds of their natural habitat, have destroyed and been destroyed, have contaminated other cultures and been contaminated. The tragic, unnatural episodes of world history are the subjection of cultures to the vicissitudes of such experience. Herder is a moral historical judge: the monad of Volk individuality can be lost and has been. That which is mixed is rarely good, that which imitates is a defilement, and that which is forced lacks authenticity.” Manuel, “Introduction,” in Herder, Reflections, xviii.
The mission of the cosmopolitan may be difficult, but it certainly isn’t impossible. As a matter of fact, it appears to be less a mission and more a daily challenge as we move into an increasingly mobile and transactional twenty-first century. Following Mead, I speculate about why cosmopolitanism may be on the rise, especially in Chapter 4, but this is a topic for another book, one that would draw on empirical work in the social sciences.
Sartre, Transcendence of the Ego, 98–99. The translation cited here is a revision of Williams and Kirkpatrick’s translation of Sartre by Robert Denoon Cummings, Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, 54. In Being and Nothingness Sartre modifies his position. The for-itself is not an impersonal spontaneity but one that has a “sense of self.”
Lear, Radical Hope, 42. The goal of Lear’s book is not to argue for determinism but to show that hope and transcendence are still possible in the face of the destruction of one’s culture. “The Crow hoped for the emergence of a Crow subjectivity that did not yet exist. There would be ways of continuing to form oneself as a Crow subject—ways to flourish as a Crow—even though the traditional forms were doomed. This hope is radical in that it is aiming for a subjectivity that is at once Crow and does not yet exist” (104).
Given the variety of standards for how cultures do or do not make forms of excellence central, certainly Lear would not wish to generalize about specific features of Crow culture. It is also worth noting that Lear, following Kierkegaard, is concerned to show that what becomes impossible, when a culture’s way of life is made impossible, is subjectivity understood as a “never-ending task.” In this case the chief, Plenty Coups, could no longer pursue his project of becoming an outstanding chief because the latter role no longer made sense in the new cultural context of the reservation. Lear is clear that his work is interpretive, as it must be when it imports a notion of subjectivity from a nineteenth-century Danish existentialist to assist in explaining the experience of a Crow chief.
See Aboulafia, The Mediating Self, especially 73–101.
In ancient Greece, before the Stoics were the Sophists, who may have been the first true philosophical cosmopolitans of the Greek world, leaving aside the clannish, and idiosyncratically broad-minded, Pythagoreans. However, neither the Stoics nor the Sophists argued for the notion that all peoples (as different and unique peoples) were inherently worthy of respect and entitled to develop themselves as they saw fit. And both camps, if the Sophists can be called a camp, accepted slavery.
No doubt there were individuals who held some of these attitudes, mutandis mutatis, before modern times. It’s the package and its pervasiveness that are unique.
See Sartre, Transcendence of the Ego; Being and Nothingness, part 1, chap. 1; part 2, chap. 1; and part 4, chap. 1; and Existentialism Is a Humanism.
Sartwell, “Rorty: In Memoriam.” Sartwell observes in the same piece that “Rorty had encyclopedic knowledge and an accessible public voice rare in academic philosophy. But above all else, he was a provocateur.” He also notes that Rorty misinterpreted others, but even when challenged, he continued to insist on referring to their works in ways that he found congenial.
Given Rorty’s concerns, his recent death brings to mind Sartre’s claim about death and the en-soi, that is, death as the end of transcendence and our ability to influence how we are defined by others.
In Richard Rorty, Neil Gross provides a careful account of Rorty’s intellectual development, which clearly shows that Rorty came to analytic philosophy after exposure to, and an interest in, nonanalytic readings of the history of philosophy.
Regarding the strong poet and creativity, a conversation that I had with Rorty during the same visit may be of interest. During this conversation he expressed his dismay over the state of philosophy in the United States. When I pitched the notion that the most confining versions of analytic philosophy, for example, those that excluded the history of philosophy, appeared to be contracting in influence, he would have none of it. He felt that “old-fashioned” analytic philosophy would continue to hold sway over the most established and influential philosophy departments in the United States for the foreseeable future. So what, I asked, is going to change things? Dick sank back into his seat and said (to paraphrase), “Probably nothing until the next pathbreaker [read, strong poet] turns up on the scene, and there is no predicting such an event.”
“When such edifying philosophers as Marx, Freud, and Sartre offer new explanations of our usual patterns of justifying our actions and assertions, and when these explanations are taken up and integrated into our lives, we have striking examples of the phenomenon of reflection’s changing vocabulary and behavior” (PMN, 386). Needless to say, it may seem peculiar to think of Freud, Marx, and Sartre as nonsystematic thinkers. One has to bear in mind Rorty’s idiosyncratic understanding of the differences between systematic thinkers, who build for eternity, and those thinkers who may seem systematic but who ultimately turn out to be primarily edifying.
See, for example, James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 1. All subsequent references refer to volume 1.
For example, for Mead, there are metaphysical dimensions to novelty; in fact, temporality is dependent on novelty. Mead, Philosophy of the Present.
Sartre would certainly challenge an exclusive connection between the pour-soi and reflection, since the for-itself is primarily a prereflective spontaneity. However, I don’t believe that Rorty intended to confine the pour-soi solely to reflection by this comment. In any case, continuing to follow my course of an “unfettered” reading of Rorty, I would prefer to focus here on his notion of “choosers of alternative vocabularies.”
“Thus, there is no human nature since there is no God to conceive of it.” Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 22.
Rorty appears to believe that Sartre was not radical enough in his approach to the notion of “essence.” Hence we find him stating in a footnote in Mirror of Nature, “It would have been fortunate if Sartre had followed up his remark that man is the being whose essence is to have no essence by saying that this went for all other beings also. Unless this addition is made, Sartre will appear to be insisting on the good old metaphysical distinction between spirit and nature in other terms, rather than simply making the point that man is always free to choose new descriptions (for, among other things, himself)” (361–362).
See, for example, James, Principles of Psychology, especially 314–316; and Mead, Mind, Self, and Society. (In a personal note that Rorty sent me years ago, he mentioned that he had felt a special attachment to Mead because his mother, Winfred Raushenbush, had lived with the Meads while she was in school at the University of Chicago.)
Rorty goes on to say, “The torturers and the brainwashers are, in any case, already in as good a position to interfere with human freedom as they could wish; further scientific progress cannot improve their position” (PMN, 354).
Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 23.
Dewey, Experience and Nature.
Dewey to Daniels, November 17, 1947, Correspondence of John Dewey, vol. 3.
Dewey to James, May 6, 1891, Correspondence of John Dewey, vol. 1. Quoted in Good, Search for Unity in Diversity, 146. Dewey goes on to note, “But Hegel seems to me intensely modern in his spirit, whatever his garb, and I don’t like to see him dressed up as Scholasticus Redivivus—although of course his friends, the professed Hegelians, are mainly responsible for that.”
James, Principles of Psychology, 304.
See James, “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” and “The Notion of Consciousness,” in Writings of William James, 169–194.
Mead, “The Social Self,” in Selected Writings, 142–149.
Dewey interprets James’s account as in line with his reading of Hegel. It seems that for Dewey in 1891, Hegel offers an account of consciousness that does not posit a unifying ego, and Dewey believes that he is following Hegel when he claims that one does not need to posit a unifying thinker or consciousness to produce a unified self. The world will supply the unity.
Good, Search for Unity in Diversity, 187; Dewey, Psychology, 216. A major difference between the early Sartre and Dewey appears to center on the extent to which Sartre stresses the destabilizing, detotalizing “nature” of consciousness, whereas Dewey emphasizes unity as a necessary condition for the self and, as a corollary, for self-consciousness. But so stated, this difference, which seems undeniable, is misleading. When one actually delves more deeply into the positions of these thinkers, similarities become more apparent. Both, for example, would have agreed that James was on the right track when he sought to undermine the role of a transcendental ego, and this undermining is tied to ideas that are central to the positions of both thinkers. Dewey, as a committed post-Darwinian, targets many of the same types of thinkers whom Sartre appears to have in his sights when he criticizes those who treat the self as an essence or substance.
An exception to the dearth of work on Dewey and Sartre is William R. Caspary’s article, “Dewey and Sartre on Ethical Decisions,” 367–393. Caspary’s piece focuses on the relationship between Dewey’s notion of dramatic rehearsal and Sartre’s commitment to radical choice. The article also provides a summary of several points of comparison between Sartre and Dewey; specifically, the author mentions ten points of comparison between Dewey and Sartre, for example, engagement, invention, freedom and responsibility, contingency, anxiety, self-formation, and the ethical dilemma. The heart of Caspary’s piece is an analysis of Sartre’s famous example of the student who must decide whether to go to war or stay home with his mother, in light of the role of dramatic rehearsals in Dewey’s approach to ethical dilemmas. There is something to be said for this sort of comparison, although there is a danger of exaggerating the extent to which Sartre himself would be willing to employ the method of dramatic rehearsal, especially if the result is a notion of a harmonized or unified self or act, which is the goal for Dewey, according to Caspary.
Detmer, Freedom as a Value, 154.
Cohen-Solal, “Introduction,” in Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 10.
Jean-Paul Sartre, “Post-Lecture Discussion,” in Existentialism Is a Humanism , 55 (emphasis added).
Ibid., 57 (emphasis added).
See Detmer, Freedom as a Value, 177–215.
See ibid., 56–80.
If we take Sartre at his word in Being and Nothingness, he is attempting to present an ontology, and a dualistic one at that. Dewey would no doubt dismiss this approach as old school, in spite of the jargon of twentieth-century phenomenology. But without rehearsing the debates here about whether or not Being and Nothingness is a successful and consistent phenomenological ontology, we can certainly say that informed readers have argued that Sartre imports empirical observations in a manner that raises difficulties for his ontology. One of the most significant challenges that Sartre faces in this regard involves his claim that the Other does not alter the ontological structure of the for-itself, yet nevertheless permanently alters the relationship of the for-itself to itself. Sartre declares, “Being-for-others is not an ontological structure of the For-itself. We can not think of deriving being-for-others from a being-for-itself.... Of course our human-reality must of necessity be simultaneously for-itself and for-others, but our present investigation does not aim at constituting an anthropology. It would perhaps not be impossible to conceive of a For-itself which would be wholly free from all For-others and which would exist without even suspecting the possibility of being an object. But this For-itself simply would not be ‘man.’” Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 282 (hereafter cited as BN). From the perspective of the pragmatist, this passage suggests that Sartre is seeking to create a difference that doesn’t make a difference. There is a hypothetical that is invoked here, the possibility of a for-itself without others that is simply not man. The invocation of this hypothetical is supposed to help us avoid philosophical anthropology. It is a reasonable question to ask whether in this and other cases Sartre manages to do so. In my view, much of Being and Nothingness can be read as philosophical anthropology, not ontology, and this is the language that Sartre appears to translate his philosophy into in “Existentialism Is a Humanism.”
Sartre, BN, 565.
Detmer, Freedom as a Value, 40–50.
Sartre, BN, 483.
Detmer, Freedom as a Value, 63. Sartre asserts, “It is necessary, however, to note that the choice, being identical with acting, supposes a commencement of realization in order that the choice may be distinguished from the dream and the wish. Thus we shall not say that a prisoner is always free to go out of prison, which would be absurd, nor that he is always free to long for release, which would be an irrelevant truism, but that he is always free to try to escape (or to get himself liberated); that is, that whatever his condition may be, he can project his escape and learn the value of his project by undertaking some action” (BN, 483–484).
In one place in “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” Sartre warns his readers not to confuse will and choice. “What we usually understand by ‘will’ is a conscious decision that most of us take after we have made ourselves what we are. I may want to join a party, write a book, or get married—but all of that is only a manifestation of an earlier and more spontaneous choice than what is known as ‘will’” (23). This passage is in line with statements in Being and Nothingness. The problem is that in other passages in “Existentialism Is a Humanism” Sartre is not so careful about making this distinction, and a reader can easily come away with the impression that he is talking about something like free will and self-conscious choice. In fact, even this passage appears to suggest the possibility of self-conscious decisions, which involve reflection or deliberation, if one thinks about wanting to join a party, write a book, or get married as being in the same ballpark as deciding to go off to war and leave one’s mother behind, that is, as having at some point involved a weighing of options. (It turns out that the “confusion” about “choice” is no accident. In spite of Sartre’s commitment to the spontaneity of consciousness, a form of deliberation appears to be a feature of practical freedom. Sartre is being less than careful in his presentation, but he is not just being lax. The topic is complex for him.)
Sartre distinguishes impure and pure reflection. The former deals with the objectification of psychic states and is oriented to the past, whereas the latter entails an unmediated transparency of (self-)consciousness to itself. “Pure reflection [is] the simple presence of the reflective for-itself to the for-itself reflected-on” (BN, 155). We will be concerned with impure reflection in this chapter. See ibid., 150–170.
Sartre, Transcendence of the Ego, 98–99. The translation cited here is a revision of Williams and Kirkpatrick’s translation of Sartre by Robert Denoon Cummings, Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, 54. Sartre continues in the same paragraph, “The will orients itself toward states of consciousness, emotions, or things, but it never turns back upon consciousness. We are well aware of this from the occasions on which we try to will a consciousness (I will fall asleep, I will no longer think about that, etc.). In these various cases, it is essentially necessary that the will be maintained and preserved by the consciousness which is radically opposed to the consciousness the will would bring about (if I will to fall asleep, I stay awake; if I will not to think about this or that, I thereby think about it).”
Dewey declares, “Unless there is a direct, mainly unreflective appreciation of persons and deeds, the data for subsequent thought will be lacking or distorted. A person must feel the qualities of acts as one feels with the hands the qualities of roughness and smoothness in objects, before he has an inducement to deliberate or material with which to deliberate. Effective reflection must also terminate in a situation which is directly appreciated, if thought is to be effective in action.” Dewey and Tufts, Ethics, 268–269. The passages of Ethics quoted in this chapter were written by Dewey.
Dewey, Ethics, 286.
Sartre, BN, 462.
Ibid., 95.
Ibid., 102.
This may in part be due to the influence of a Hegelian notion of negativity. For Dewey, the synthetic aspect of Hegel’s dialectic remains congenial. For the early Sartre, his model of consciousness can be approached as a truncated Hegelian dialectic, in which the negative is linked to the subject, as it is in Hegel, but is transformed into a negative that separates consciousness from itself, yielding a prereflective and then a reflective consciousness.
Dewey, “Need for a Recovery in Philosophy,” in Middle Works, 9–10.
Dewey, Logic, 189.
Dewey, “Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” in Early Works, 96–109.
Sartre, BN, 483.
Dewey, “Need for a Recovery of Philosophy,” 44–45.
Sartre, BN, 23.
Ibid., 476.
Dewey, Ethics, 290–291.
Sartre, BN, 476–477.
Dewey, Ethics, 306.
Ibid., 296.
Ibid., 306–307.
Sartre, BN, 468.
A long discussion is possible here regarding the relationship of projects to what Sartre calls an original or initial project, but this would take us too far afield. For our purposes it is sufficient to acknowledge that Sartre argues that there are initial projects that frame our other projects, for example, “choosing myself as inferior in the midst of others” (BN, 471). These original projects may be pursued in different ways without changing the original project. What is crucial for the analysis offered in this chapter is that no project is fixed for Sartre. “I can refuse to stop [walking to the city] only by a radical conversion of my being-in-the-world; that is, by an abrupt metamorphosis of my initial project—i.e., by another choice of myself and of my ends. Moreover this modification is always possible” (464, emphasis added).
Ibid., 450.
For Dewey, groups engaged in intelligent or scientific inquiry have a decided advantage over individuals in determining successful courses of action.
See Sartre, Search for a Method.
Detmer, Freedom as a Value, 136–137.
Dewey, Ethics, 267. Dewey also notes, “The results of prior experience, including previous conscious thinking, get taken up into direct habits, and express themselves in direct appraisals of value. Most of our moral judgments are intuitive, but this fact is not a proof of the existence of a separate faculty of moral insight, but is the result of past experience funded into direct outlook upon the scene of life” (266).
Sartre, BN, 444.
Dewey, Ethics, 286.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Sartre, BN, 450–451.
Ibid., 451.
Ibid., 450.
Ibid.
A turn to Sartre’s account of existential psychoanalysis might prove helpful in further clarifying Sartre’s position, but this is beyond the scope of this chapter. See ibid., 557–575.
See note 15 in this chapter, and Aboulafia, Mediating Self, especially 45–69, for a discussion of ways in which Sartre’s ontology is intertwined with the empirical.
Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 23–25.
Dewey, Ethics, 303–304.
An earlier version of this chapter was published as “A (neo) American in Paris: Bourdieu, Mead, and Pragmatism,” in Bourdieu: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Shusterman (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999); reprinted by permission of Blackwell Publishers.
Bourdieu describes fields in the following fashion:
The school system, the state, the church, political parties, or unions are not apparatuses but fields. In a field, agents and institutions constantly struggle, according to the regularities and the rules constitutive of this space of play (and, in given conjunctures, over those rules themselves), with various degrees of strength and therefore diverse probabilities of success, to appropriate the specific products at stake in the game. Those who dominate in a given field are in a position to make it function to their advantage but they must always contend with the resistance, the claims, the contention, “political” or otherwise, of the dominated. (Bourdieu and Wacquant, Invitation, 102)
See Kestenbaum, Phenomenological Sense of John Dewey; and Ostrow, Social Sensitivity.
Bourdieu and Wacquant, Invitation, 122. Bourdieu goes on to say: “At bottom and in short—I cannot consider here all the relevant commonalities and differences—I would say that the theory of practical sense presents many similarities with theories, such as Dewey’s, that grant a central role to the notion of habit, understood as an active and creative relation to the world, and reject all the conceptual dualisms upon which nearly all post-Cartesian philosophies are based: subject and object, internal and external, material and spiritual, individual and social, and so on.” In contrast to the Platonic vision of like nurturing like, perhaps we should refer to Bourdieu’s speculations here as his prototheory of the reactive habitus: opposition to the same breeds the similar.
Given Bourdieu’s repeated disparagements of theory for theory’s sake, or the mere comparison of theories for the sake of contrasting them, I find myself in a bit of a quandary. Bourdieu would no doubt prefer that my time be spent utilizing his approach to investigate the genesis of fields that could produce such similarities. Since this is neither the place nor the time to analyze or dispute Bourdieu’s complex relationship to the theoretical, I suggest that those who share his aversion to the merely theoretical view this chapter as supplying information for a possible future study. See, for example, Bourdieu and Wacquant, Invitation, 159–160.
This chapter will also prove of assistance in discussing Neil Gross’s new sociology of ideas in Chapter 6. Gross both accepts and criticizes important features of Bourdieu’s social theory.
Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, 50 (hereafter cited as LP).
Bourdieu, “A Lecture on the Lecture,” in In Other Words, 190. (Translators differ on whether to italicize the word habitus. In Transcendence I have followed the translators’ wishes. In my own text, I have not italicized it.)
James, Psychology: The Briefer Course, 10.
Ibid., 11–12.
Mead, Mind, Self, and Society, 352–353 (hereafter cited as MSS).
Mead, “Scientific Method and the Moral Sciences,” in Selected Writings, 258. See also “Philanthropy from the Point of View of Ethics,” in Selected Writings , 397.
Bourdieu would in all likelihood respond to Mead on ethics and politics as he has to Dewey on art and education. “Dewey, however laudable his stances in matters of art and education, did not escape this kind of moralism [that is, by rejecting the dichotomy between popular and high culture, one could make it disappear] fostered by both his epoch and his national philosophical and political traditions” (Invitation, 84).
The parentheses around self in this chapter are meant to draw attention to the distinction between a fully developed consciousness of self, in which one is directly reflecting on who one is—that is, one’s identity—and the awareness one has of one’s actions or the meaning of one’s words. In the latter case the parentheses will be used. This distinction is suggested by Mead’s approach; whether and to what degree it can be maintained are beyond the scope of this chapter.
Bourdieu, LP, 80.
Mead, MSS, 43.
Bourdieu, LP, 80–81.
Ibid., 50–51.
Mead, MSS, 47.
Mead is well aware that hand sign languages allow one to respond to one’s own gestures as the other does, because one can see and feel a hand sign as the other sees it. Mead, however, views the vocal gesture as ultimately more suited to this task.
Mead, MSS, 134.
Cook, George Herbert Mead, 79.
Bourdieu, LP, 19.
Habermas, “Individuation Through Socialization,” in Postmetaphysical Thinking, 149–204.
There are times when Mead refers to the self as a combination of the “I and the “me,” a self, as opposed to solely the “me,” while at other times the “me” does not appear to require quite the level of sophistication that is suggested here. Part of the problem lies in the fact that so much of what we have from Mead is drawn from students’ or Mead’s lecture notes. Mead never published a book on his social psychology or philosophy. In addition, it appears that he wanted to retain some flexibility in his functional distinctions.
Mead, MSS, 154 (emphasis added).
There is an agonistic dimension to fields that is not typically a basic feature of Mead’s “systems.” See Bourdieu’s comments in note 1 in this chapter.
Mead, MSS, 157.
Bourdieu, LP, 60. Bourdieu goes on to tell us that “‘personal’ style, the particular stamp marking all the products of the same habitus, whether practices or works, is never more than a deviation in relation to the style of a period or class” (ibid.).
Mead, MSS, 175.
Ibid., 174.
Bourdieu appears to associate project-oriented or “controlled” spontaneity with Sartre, but the absence of a posited self on the prereflective level for Sartre complicates this reading.
Bourdieu, LP, 56.
Whether Mead can succeed here is beyond the scope of this chapter. See Aboulafia, The Mediating Self, 45–69.
Mead, Philosophy of the Present, 1, 33. No doubt the metaphysical questions surrounding the status of novelty—just how novel is novelty?—are rather breathtaking and worthy of attention but are clearly beyond the scope of this chapter.
Bourdieu, LP, 60–61.
Bourdieu and Wacquant, Invitation, 132–133.
Ibid., 133. Bourdieu continues, “Having said this, I must immediately add that there is a probability, inscribed in the social destiny associated with definite social conditions, that experiences will confirm habitus, because most people are statistically bound to encounter circumstances that tend to agree with those that originally fashioned their habitus.... From [the categories already constructed by prior experiences] ... follows an inevitable priority of originary experiences and a relative closure of the system of dispositions that constitute habitus (Invitation, 133; bracketed comment by Bourdieu). This is not Bourdieu’s complete answer. He goes on to discuss the relation of habitus to certain social structures.
Bourdieu, “A Reply to Some Objections,” in In Other Words, 116.
Bourdieu, LP, 55.
Mead, Philosophy of the Present, 47.
See Aboulafia, The Mediating Self, 73–101.
Bourdieu, LP, 91.
Socrates, as Nietzsche glibly and humorously teaches, was a dialectician and educator, and as such, a degenerate, one who fell from true excellence, and this sort of excellence needs none of his rhetorical strategies. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, 473–479.
Bourdieu, LP, 103.
Bourdieu, In Other Words, 5.
Rosenthal and Bourgeois read Mead as very close to Merleau-Ponty; hence they tend to see a prereflective sphere in Mead’s thought that has many of the attributes of Merleau-Ponty’s lived body. My own view is that Mead bifurcated the reflective and nonreflective at times to an unnecessary degree, although I find his approach generally more congenial than Bourdieu’s with regard to the relationship between reflective and nonreflective experience. I agree with Rosenthal and Bourgeois that there is a sensitivity to experience in Mead that could easily be developed in the direction of Merleau-Ponty’s work. Our disagreement is over the degree to which he actually accomplished this end. I discuss the relationship between the prereflective and the reflective in my book The Mediating Self. See Rosenthal and Bourgeois, Mead and Merleau-Ponty.
Mead, MSS, 196.
This, of course, would not surprise Bourdieu, who has few compunctions about categorizing Dewey’s moralism in terms of American cultural traditions.
Bourdieu and Wacquant, Invitation, 116–117. This reference to the Stoics brings to mind Adam Smith, who was influenced by them. Bourdieu seems to take a special delight in criticizing what he takes to be the notion of the impartial spectator, which suggests to him objectivity from the mountaintop, the aloofness of the theoretician (LP, 31). Mead, on the other hand, would feel comfortable with this notion if it were understood in the spirit of certain aspects of Adam Smith’s work, that is, not as objectivity from on High but as a constant claim on us to attempt to take the perspective of others and thereby gain some distance from our own interests. Smith may have increasingly moved toward a notion of the Judge on High as he revised successive editions of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, but from the first there was a strong social bent and practical impulse behind the phrase.
Mead, MSS, 386.
Membership in these groups allows for “definite social relations (however indirect) with an almost infinite number of other individuals ... cutting across functional lines of demarcation which divide different human social communities from one another, and including individual members from several (in some cases from all) such communities” (MSS, 157). Mead took this process to be part and parcel of the growing interdependence of the modern world. He did not view such groups as necessarily destroying more localized ones but as existing at different levels of abstraction.
Material in this chapter derives from my essay “Mead on Cosmopolitanism, Sympathy, and War,” in Pragmatism, Nation, and Race: Community in the Age of Empire, ed. Chad Kautzer and Eduardo Mendieta (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009); reprinted by permission of Indiana University Press.
There is much riding on the term “undeserved”: what are the source and nature of the judgment that this suffering is in fact undeserved? For the purposes at hand, all I ask is that the reader accept the claim that people suffer through no fault of their own, whether because of the calculations of human beings or to natural disasters.
See Aboulafia, Cosmopolitan Self, 7–27.
Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture,” in Between Past and Future, 220. Arendt continues, “The power of judgment rests on a potential agreement with others, and the thinking process which is active in judging something is not, like the thought process of pure reasoning, a dialogue between me and myself, but finds itself always and primarily, even if I am quite alone in making up my mind, in an anticipated communication with others with whom I know I must finally come to some agreement. From this potential agreement judgment derives its specific validity.”
The way in which I am using the term “empathy” is in line with the nonevaluative dimension of Martha Nussbaum’s definition of the term. “‘Empathy’ is often used, as I shall later use it, to designate an imaginative reconstruction of another person’s experience, without any particular evaluation of that experience; so used, obviously, it is quite different and insufficient for compassion; it may not even be necessary for it.” Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 301–302. As we will see, if empathy simply refers to “taking the perspective of others,” it can be viewed in nonevaluative terms. However, for Mead there are circumstances in which the evaluative dimension of taking the perspective of others comes directly into play, for example, with certain generalized others.
Mead, Movements of Thought, 60.
Ibid., 63.
Mead asserts, “It is only because this new self had gone back into the past that such an organized past arose at all.... [W]e have to recognize that history does not exist except in so far as the individuals of the present in some sense put themselves back into the past. It is only in a process of memory—memory of the people, if you like, that history can be created. And such a reconstruction of the past is possible only when we have, so to speak, reached some such point that we can become aware of ourselves” (ibid., 70).
I will sidestep here the immensely challenging question of the relationship between the sensibility that we call romantic and the material conditions that helped to generate it. Mead was certainly aware of the importance of material conditions, but in my view he did not have sufficiently critical tools to assess them.
If one thinks of the significance of a figure such as Herder, and the resonance of his position regarding cultural diversity, Mead’s hypothesis is at least plausible, even if what we call romanticism is due at least in part to a transformation in material conditions.
I am confident that Mead would have argued that this sensibility did not remain confined to the West.
Mead, “The Social Self,” in Selected Writings, 148 (emphasis added).
Arendt, Lectures, 74–75.
I am simplifying the story of how selves became more expansive in the modern world for Mead. It is a story that involves the rise of modern science as well as new methods of communication, and it would require its own chapter. In passing I should note that romanticism’s role in this development is complex, for it tends to focus us on the individual self, but it does so in a manner that opens up the possibility of relating to others in new ways. While the reflexivity it emphasizes can turn us inward, it also sets the stage for enlarging our social lives.
Mead, “Philanthropy,” in Selected Writings, 392.
Ibid., 400 (emphasis added).
Mead, “National-Mindedness,” in Selected Writings, 358.
No doubt membership in different groups influences how we behave within a specific group. But even allowing for this influence, I think it fair to say that there are differences in behavior that cannot be explained solely by this sort of sociology, that is, there still remain psychological differences.
Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 9.
There has been considerable debate in social-psychological circles regarding the sources of empathy, or what I have been referring to as “sympathy.” There are those who argue for an empathy-altruism model, in which altruism is viewed as fundamentally independent from egoism (see, for example, Batson et al., “Is Empathy-Induced Helping due to Self-Other Merging?” 495–509). And there are those who find the source of empathy (sympathy) in the perception of an overlap between self and other, which grounds empathy in self-interest (see, for example, Cialdini et al., “Reinterpreting the Empathy-Altruism Relationship,” 481–494). Needless to say, this is a debate that we cannot enter directly into here. In a sense, features of both positions can be found in the model that is being developed, and they both support one of its important assumptions, that empathetic (sympathetic) attachment to others increases the likelihood that people will seek to help those in need.
It is important to emphasize that sympathetic attachments, insofar as we are defining sympathy as a synonym for compassion, are not the original source of perspective-taking. Role-taking in developmental terms is related to language development and therefore is weighted to the cognitive, although it can and does have emotional resonances.
Dewey states in his Ethics,
To put ourselves in the place of others, to see things from the standpoint of their purposes and values, to humble, contrariwise, our own pretensions and claims till they reach the level they would assume in the eye of an impartial sympathetic observer, is the surest way to attain objectivity of moral knowledge. Sympathy is the animating mold of moral judgment not because its dictates take precedence in action over those of other impulses (which they do not), but because it furnishes the most efficacious intellectual standpoint. It is the tool, par excellence, for resolving complex situations. Then when it passes into active or overt conduct, it does so fused with other impulses and not in isolation and is thus protected from sentimentality. In this fusion there is broad and objective survey of all desires and projects because there is an expanded personality. (270)
Dewey appears to be combining “empathy” and “sympathy” in the section of the Ethics from which this quotation is drawn, that is, if the terms are understood as they have been defined in this chapter.
Mead, Mind, Self, and Society, 157 (hereafter cited as MSS).
What Mead says about rights sheds light on how he views universality. “In the community there are certain ways of acting under situations which are essentially identical, and these ways of acting on the part of anyone are those which we excite in others when we take certain steps. If we assert our rights, we are calling for a definite response just because they are rights that are universal—a response which everyone should, and perhaps will, give” (ibid., 260–261).
Ibid., 90.
Mead, “Behavioristic Account of the Significant Symbol,” in Selected Writings, 245.
I would add that this feature of Mead’s thought is one that he shares with many other pragmatists, in particular Dewey.
Mead, MSS, 167–168.
No doubt material conditions play a significant, if not primary, role in this process, for example, new technologies for communication and transportation, and the corporate organization of labor.
Both Dewey’s and Mead’s appeal to impartiality is qualified by an appreciation for the role of interest in our lives.
For example, religions in earlier eras have certainly laid the groundwork for, or supported, forms of universalism. Mead tells us, “Even in the immediacy of the situation that seemingly involves only the giver and the recipient, there is the implication of a community in which the good has a universal value—‘which of them was neighbor to him that fell among thieves?’ It is, however, an implication that can become explicit only when the social structure and the ideas behind it make it possible to regard others as neighbors. The generalization of the prophetic message, its conception of the community as the children of Jehovah, made this possible” (“Philanthropy,” in Selected Writings, 401).
New York Times, January 2, 2005, 1, 9.
Note the appeal for assistance made by Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Indonesia’s president: “I appeal to the world community to contribute to the reconstruction of Indonesia that has been hit by disaster and we welcome those contributions as a manifestation of global unity” (New York Times, January 2, 2005, 1). After the disaster(s), U.S. newscasts talked about the potential dangers of earthquakes and tsunamis in the United States. While these newscasts can be viewed as cynical attempts to increase ratings through appeals to fear and self-interest, they also had the practical effect of motivating viewers to take the perspective of those who were suffering, that is, those with whom they may have had more in common than they realized.
It’s important to note that Mead preferred the term “impulse” to “instinct” because he saw the former as more malleable than the latter.
Human behavior, or conduct, like the behavior of lower animal forms, springs from impulses. An impulse is a congenital tendency to react in a specific manner to a certain sort of stimulus, under certain organic conditions. Hunger and anger are illustrations of such impulses. They are best termed “impulses,” and not “instincts,” because they are subject to extensive modifications in the life-history of individuals, and these modifications are so much more extensive than those to which the instincts of lower animal forms are subject that the use of the term “instinct” in describing the behavior of normal adult human individuals is seriously inexact. (“Supplementary Essay I,” in Mead, Mind, Self, and Society, 337)
Kant, “Idea for a Universal History,” in On History, 11–26.
Mead, “National-Mindedness,” in Selected Writings, 362–363.
Ibid., 358–359.
Ibid., 359.
Ibid., 364–365.
Ibid., 365.
Ibid., 367.
Previously published as “W. E. B. Du Bois: Double-Consciousness, Jamesian Sympathy, and the Critical Turn,” in The Oxford Handbook of American Philosophy , ed. Cheryl Misak (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.
Du Bois, Souls.
Du Bois, “Strivings of the Negro People,” 194–198. “The Strivings of the Negro People” is not identical to the first chapter of Souls. For example, in the article we find the following line: “The freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land” (195). In the first chapter of Souls the line reads, “The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land” (7).
Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro.
Du Bois, “On The Souls of Black Folk,” in Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader, 304–305.
Reed, Du Bois and American Political Thought, 22.
Souls, 1–2. Du Bois also states, “Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows” (4).
Ibid., 178.
Ibid., 76.
Zamir, Dark Voices, 51.
Ibid., 44.
James, Principles of Psychology, 401 (hereafter cited as PP).
At the beginning of the chapter, James has little problem providing a rather striking definition of the nontranscendental self, which, as Shamoon Zamir points out in Dark Voices, is weighed down with a good deal of ideological baggage. “It is telling that James begins his chapter titled ‘The Consciousness of Self’ with a definition of self as a structure of commodity fetishism. ‘In its widest possible sense,’ he writes, ‘a man’s Self is the sum total of all that he CAN call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children [!], his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account’” (157–158; bracketed exclamation added by Zamir).
These insights are developed by Mead when he discusses the generalized other in Mind, Self, and Society. For James, the individual who has the greatest power over us in terms of recognition is the person with whom we are in love.
We must bear in mind that James is speaking of the spiritual self here as an empirical self. As such it is “a man’s inner or subjective being, his psychic faculties or dispositions, taken concretely; not the bare principle of personal Unity, or ‘pure’ Ego” (PP, 296).
James claims that the common experience of the “spiritual self” is of an “active element in all consciousness” (PP, 297). We can also address the spiritual self in terms of the stream of consciousness, either as a segment of the stream or in terms of its totality. In so doing “our considering the spiritual self at all is a reflective process ... the result of our abandoning the outward-looking point of view, and of our having become able to think of subjectivity as such, to think of ourselves as thinkers” (296). James is not suggesting that the spiritual self is always actively reflective, that is, actively thinking about itself as a thinker. The spiritual self may arise due to one’s awareness of bodily adjustments, actions and reactions, which generate a form of awareness of self that does not entail active reflection.
Lemke, “Berlin and Boundaries,” 63–64. “Obviously, it would be simplistic to ascertain a direct connection between Herder and Du Bois. But it is very likely that Du Bois came across Herder’s writings in William James’s philosophy course at Harvard and in Wilhelm Dilthey’s lectures on the history of philosophy at the University of Berlin. Herder’s insistence on the elevating effect of poetry, his definition of the Volk, and his sustained concept of Seele literally resonate throughout The Souls of Black Folk.” (Although it should be noted that Herder actually opposed the notion of race. He argued that there is in fact only one human race with an almost endless number of Volk. See Reflections , 6–7.)
Herder, Reflections, 84.
Du Bois, “Conservation of the Races,” in Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader, 46. In the same speech Du Bois makes the following claims about race.
If [the division of human beings into races] be true, then the history of the world is the history, not of individuals, but of groups, not of nations, but of races, and he who ignores or seeks to override the race idea in human history ignores and overrides the central thought of all history. What, then, is a race? It is a vast family of human beings, generally of common blood and language, always of common history, traditions and impulses, who are both voluntarily and involuntarily striving together for the accomplishment of certain more or less vividly conceived ideals of life. (40)
Although there is little doubt that Du Bois insisted on racial difference during the period that he wrote Souls, it is also the case that he was familiar with challenges to strict, essentializing definitions of race. This can be seen in his report “The First Universal Races Congress,” in Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader, 55–59.
Manuel, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Reflections, xx–xxi.
It’s worth highlighting the reference to corruption in Manuel’s account of Herder. Peoples can be tarnished and damaged by outside forces. This is a problem that Du Bois worries about in terms of the repercussions of slavery, which he believes may have left some African Americans with unacceptable sexual mores and a general lack of discipline.
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 104–138.
Zamir, Dark Voices, 113, 248–249n2.
Ibid., 144.
Hegel’s master-slave dialectic is sufficiently familiar to require little by way of introduction, and it will be discussed in detail in Chapter 8. However, given the previous discussion of James’s and Du Bois’s relationship to Scottish philosophy, we should note that Hegel was familiar with Adam Smith, as well as the Scottish theorists of sentiment. Smith’s influence can readily be seen, for example, in the introduction to Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History (see Hegel, Reason in History). The notion that the self can judge itself only through the looking glass provided by the other would have been well known to any reader of Smith. Of course, the influences on Hegel are legion. But let us speculate. Let us consider the possibility that when Hegel was thinking about the relationship of master and slave, and developing his model of mutual recognition, he drew on the social interactionism of Smith. No doubt Hegel radicalized the interaction, for instead of assuming that the self learns about what is right and wrong from its interactions with others, the self is viewed as coming into being through its interactions with others. And it does this in such a way that the spirit of different times informs its constitution. We are only selves insofar as we are recognized as selves, and this is precisely why neither master nor slave can be said to have a fully developed sense of self. Each self is contaminated by its relationship with an other who is either idealized or seen as less than human. The power of the negative leads to the eventual sublation of the asymmetry between master and slave.
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 110.
Du Bois, Souls, 5. In Du Bois’s article “The Strivings of the Negro People,” he refers to “self-consciousness” in this passage and not to “true self-consciousness” as he does in Souls. From a Hegelian vantage point this is a significant clarification. Forms of alienated self-consciousness are “self-consciousnesses” for Hegel, but they are not yet truly and fully self-conscious. This achievement requires historical development. Du Bois’s addition of “true” can be interpreted as an attempt to avoid leaving his readers with a false impression about those who experience double-consciousness, namely, that they lack any form of self-consciousness. What they lack is true self-consciousness. Du Bois goes on to assert, “The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost” (Souls, 5).
Souls, 11–12. Both Herder and Hegel would have a problem with how Du Bois conceptualizes historical “progress” in this passage, but for different reasons. For Herder, Du Bois would be insufficiently attuned to cultural differences, blending what should not be blended. For Hegel, Du Bois’s treatment would be insufficiently dialectical. It would be mere edifying discourse.
Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 129.
Another very good book on this issue is Hall, Richard Rorty. (All page citations in this chapter are to Gross’s Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher unless otherwise indicated.)
I am focusing here on Bourdieu, rather than Collins, because of my familiarity with the former and because he was the subject of Chapter 3. But it makes little difference to a presentation of Gross’s basic ideas since they serve similar functions in his model and are often treated as a package. Although ultimately critical of Bourdieu, Gross is sympathetic to his analysis of how actors employ cultural, social, economic, and symbolic capital in a strategic fashion (237–246).
Notice that the problem here for Gross is not about whether the individual has a greater capacity to make decisions that are not law governed than Bourdieu would allow. On the contrary, his problem with Bourdieu is that he doesn’t have a theory that yields psychological laws. However, as we saw in Chapter 3, the problem with Bourdieu isn’t a lack of psychological laws; it is that the capacity to improvise is circumscribed and not readily explicable. Or perhaps I should say, undertheorized. Yes, there is improvisation, but it appears to arise when one has a foot in more than one “field,” so to speak, and can transfer elements of the habitus from one field to another. There is a good case to be made that this “mechanism” is simply insufficient to account for the diverse forms of improvisation of which people are capable. In other words, Bourdieu doesn’t have a theory to address adequately the pluralism of the improvisational. And Gross does not appear to be concerned about this.
Although Gross is clear that his theory is meant to apply to American academic philosophers (265), he doesn’t always confine himself to this group, especially in his more general theoretical claims. In fact, he utilizes a theoretical apparatus that by definition includes populations that are not American academics. (Who doesn’t behave strategically? Who doesn’t have a self-concept?) In other words, the pool that he is studying via Rorty, American academic philosophers, depends on utilizing conceptual tools that by definition apply to a larger pool. On one level, there is no problem with this. He is merely giving us an example of how ideas that may have wider applicability work in one case or for one set of individuals. But my point here is that Gross’s theoretical claims often go far beyond American academics, or academics in general. So a rather peculiar situation arises. The concepts have so much breadth that the evidence used to support them, Rorty’s trajectory, is underwhelming. And Gross’s recognition of the fact that he needs to gather more evidence does not dig him out of the hole here. Why? Because the problem with the theory is not only due to a lack of evidence. The problem is a lack of evidence combined with a theory that itself needs refinement, and until it is refined, the evidence provided, Rorty’s life, can seem like special pleading.
Gross may have a somewhat jaundiced and narrow view of American philosophers, which is on display in his convictions about how they deal with status. In his conclusion, Gross discusses status in his summary of the main themes of his book. Point eleven begins, “Given the relatively small number of assistant professor slots that open up each year in elite departments and the relatively large number of Ph.D.’s such departments produce, it is inevitable that a significant number of young academicians will experience downward mobility with their first jobs, winding up with lower-status positions than they may have hoped to attain. The majority of such persons end up adjusting their expectations downward and come to live more or less productive and happy lives at second- or third-tier institutions.... Some, however, will formulate a plan to move up to a higher-status job after a few years” (345). Leaving the issue of tone aside, is Gross describing a large number of philosophers? Yes. Is he describing as many philosophers as he thinks that he might be describing? I don’t think so, and it would be interesting to do an empirical study to examine these claims. I can’t help suggesting at this juncture, although it smacks of ad hominem, that Gross’s own position as an assistant professor at Harvard (at the time of his book’s publication) may be coloring how he views academic life. There is certainly considerable attention paid to prestige among those whose academic lives are centered around research departments. But some folks choose other paths, and it is not because they have failed to attain the holy grail of Big Name research. For example, involvement with the latter can at times produce an intellectual conservatism, which some people shun. Also, some people prefer teaching. (Of course, Gross is aware that philosophers take different paths. However, in places he seems to forget or sidestep the multiplicity of reasons for these paths.)
There are times that Gross will just use the term “philosopher” or “intellectual,” but it’s clear from other passages that he has in mind those who work in universities and colleges.
See Mead, Mind, Self, and Society; and “The Social Self,” in Selected Writings.
Gross states, “I take it as axiomatic that all social actors have self-concepts. ... I also assume, borrowing from that strain of social-psychological work on the self that attempts to tie together self-processes and theories of social roles, that people have different self-concepts for different domains of social activity” (267).
Gross quotes Morris Rosenberg, Conceiving the Self, 57.
Gross has little to say here regarding how processual symbolic interactionists might explain the mechanisms in question. His account does little more than gesture to features of the ways in which symbolic interactionists could address aspects of this issue, for example, variations in self-concept. He does not explain how they would account for the mechanisms through which self-concepts are sustained. Gross invokes Mead’s notion of the “me,” which could be of some assistance, without discussing it.
One might say that this is not an issue for Gross since he is talking about academia in America, and his reference to “output” can be seen purely in terms of American society. Yet, when one uses a phrase like “overall drive for ego coherence,” one surely doesn’t mean to confine this notion to at most 150 years of American academic history. Gross’s theoretical aspirations appear to be in tension with his caveats regarding the scope of his theory. So it is reasonable to raise questions about the place of “output” in his model. Implicit and explicit in his book is the claim to be developing a theory that may have implications for those outside academia in America.
Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man.
Although Gross will utilize and criticize Bourdieu’s views on the strategic, Nietzsche is only mentioned once in the book, and this is in reference to a letter Rorty wrote to the Guggenheim Foundation in support of Alexander Nehamas’s work on Nietzsche.
In making this claim, Gross refers to “Christian Smith’s ‘subcultural identity’ model of the growth of religious denominations” (281).
Bourdieu declares, “Illusio is the very opposite of ataraxy: it is to be invested, taken in and by the game.... Each field calls forth and gives life to a specific form of interest, a specific illusio, as tacit recognition of the value of the stakes of the game as practical mastery of its rules” (Invitation, 116–177).
Bourdieu tends to see the strategic as transhistorical and inescapable, in spite of his alleged sensitivity to the historical and institutional. And his linking of the idea of struggle and conflict to fields only reinforces this conclusion. Notice the way that Bourdieu speaks of struggle and fields in the following passage.
The school system, the state, the church, political parties, or unions are not apparatuses but fields. In a field, agents and institutions constantly struggle, according to the regularities and the rules constitutive of this space of play (and, in given conjunctures, over those rules themselves), with various degrees of strength and therefore diverse probabilities of success, to appropriate the specific products at stake in the game. Those who dominate in a given field are in a position to make it function to their advantage but they must always contend with the resistance, the claims, the contention, “political” or otherwise, of the dominated.... There is history only as long as people revolt, resist, act. Total institutions—asylums, prisons, concentration camps—or dictatorial states are attempts to institute an end to history. Thus apparatuses represent a limiting case, what we may consider to be a pathological state of fields. But it is a limit that is never actually reached, even under the most repressive “totalitarian” regimes. (Bourdieu and Wacquant, Invitation, 102) I don’t know how to read a passage of this sort without coming to the conclusion that fields, and their inherent modes of conflict, are a fundamental feature of the human condition. Institutions or regimes that seek to totally undermine fields are, we are told, pathological and can’t fully succeed. Is making assertions about “struggle,” and the strategic that is inevitably bound to conflict, in this manner a difference that makes a difference when compared with the claim that “struggle” is transhistorical and even natural? I find myself at a loss to say that it does.
I would argue that Habermas tends to downplay other ways of thinking about freedom. In my view, he too closely associates freedom with a Kantian notion of autonomy.
Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, 155–157. Habermas is arguing against interpreting the results of Benjamin Libet’s experiments as proof of determinism. In one experiment subjects were instructed to move their arms in a spontaneous fashion. The conscious decision, or the experience of a decision, to move their arms occurred after unconscious processes in the cerebral cortex, leading some to conclude that freedom or free will is an illusion. Habermas argues, “The Libet experiments can hardly bear the entire burden of proof ascribed to them in defending the thesis of determinism” (154). The comments quoted on pages 155–157 regarding deliberation are part of his critique.
One can give a good sociological account for contexts that foster the emergence of creativity, insofar as it entails processes of anticipation and reflection, for example, by building on Dewey’s and Mead’s work.
It is certainly true for Gross that one’s self-concept can include the notion of oneself as a source of original ideas (272). But a self-concept that involves originality tells us very little about whether the individual is actually creative. She may or may not be. I don’t believe that Gross would want to conflate the two. (And to take this from the opposite angle, according to Dewey, Mead had very little sense of himself as an original thinker, one who generated novel ideas. One can be original without having a conception of oneself as original.)
Marcuse has his own concerns about the ultimate efficacy of a maternal libidinal morality.
However, even if a maternal libidinal morality is traceable in the instinctual structure, and even if a sensuous rationality could make the Eros freely susceptible to order, one innermost obstacle seems to defy all project [sic] of a non-repressive development—namely, the bond that binds Eros to the death instinct. The brute fact of death denies once and for all the reality of a non-repressive existence. For death is the final negativity of time, but “joy wants eternity.” (231, emphasis added)
Marcuse then quotes Hegel, “‘Something has its Determinate Being only in Limit’ and the ‘Limits are the principle of that which they limit’” (RR, 136). And he continues, “Hegel summarizes the result of this new interpretation by saying that the existence of things is ‘the unrest of Something in its Limit; it is immanent in the Limit to be the contradiction which sends Something on beyond itself ’” (136).
Perhaps a more obvious way to address negation is by linking it with Thanatos. Negation would then be viewed as the work of Thanatos, while the negation of the negation could be viewed, paradoxically, as Thanatos overcoming itself, that is, succumbing to a process of unification, which would transform it into a form of Eros. But this would be an Eros that “contained” negation or Thanatos.
Marcuse’s language of self-determination and alienation here suggests that he is thinking of Eros not only in terms of barriers and negation but as a type of subject or as related in a specific way to a subject. One reason that this is a plausible hypothesis follows from Marcuse’s own concerns about a dialectic of nature, that is, a dialectic that does not relate to humanity and to human history but deals merely with nature. This sort of dialectic lends support to a crude mechanistic Marxism.
I use the phrase “the biological or physiological dimension of emotions” in order to bypass the complex question of the relationship between emotions and biology. For the arguments of this chapter, it is only necessary to acknowledge that emotions and feelings have a physiological component, which I take to be a noncontroversial claim. Certainly there is also a social dimension.
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit. “Self-consciousness is faced by another self-consciousness; it has come out of itself. This has a twofold significance: first, it has lost itself, for it finds itself as an other being; secondly, in doing so it has superseded the other, for it does not see the other as an essential being, but in the other sees its own self ” (111).
Many years ago I published an article that addressed the relationship between men and women in light of Hegel’s dialectic. See “From Domination to Recognition,” in Gould, Beyond Domination, 175–185.
We, the observers of the dialectic, know that knowledge entails mediation, but self-consciousness, the I = I, at this juncture does not comprehend the point that in order to be aware of oneself as a self-consciousness, there must be a distance from self, a moment of negativity, a moment of mediation. Without such a moment consciousness would be an undivided whole and, therefore, incapable of self-consciousness. For Hegel, the self-conscious unity of the subject is achieved, not given. It is the result of alienation and development, and it exists in ideality, as a unity of differences.
“In this sphere, self-consciousness exhibits itself as the movement in which this antithesis [between the awareness of the objects of sense certainty and selfconsciousness itself] is removed, and the identity of itself with itself becomes explicit for it” (105). But this identity is fraught because of the presence of “otherness.”
Hegel now speaks of how that which appears to self-consciousness, what we have been referring to as the sensuous world, returns into itself, just as selfconsciousness returns into itself on its side. As such the sensuous world becomes Life. Self-consciousness “is the unity for which the infinite unity of the differences is; [life], however, is only this unity itself, so that it is not at the same time for itself ” (106).
The first chapters of the Phenomenology show just how unsophisticated it is to believe that objects are simple givens, as if consciousness is not involved in the experience of them. Hegel is a post-Kantian philosopher, after all.
Notice that this is not a purely conceptual realization. Self-consciousness doesn’t simply understand that objects have their own life. It must sweat, so to speak, their reality, their material reality, if you will. Hegel is a peculiar idealist. The development of the dialectic cannot escape elements of material conditions. He tells us, “Desire and the self-certainty obtained in its gratification, are conditioned by the object, for self-certainty comes from superseding this other; in order that this supersession can take place, there must be this other” (109).
Natural objects cannot achieve the independence and self-determination of spirit. They cannot remain themselves while being different from themselves. Human beings can achieve this in communities of mutual recognition. Natural objects lose their determinate being, that is, they are destroyed or die, when they are forced to become other than themselves. This is what it means to be intrinsically finite and limited.
“The differentiated, merely living, shape does indeed also supersede its independence in the process of Life, but it ceases with its distinctive difference to be what it is. The object of self-consciousness, however, is equally independent in this negativity of itself; and thus is for itself a genus, a universal fluid element in the peculiarity of its own separate being; it is a living self-consciousness” (110).
“It is aware that it at once is, and is not, another consciousness, and equally that this other is for itself only when it supersedes itself as being for itself, and is for itself only in the being-for-self of the other. Each is for the other the middle term, through which each mediates itself with itself and unites with itself; and each is for itself, and for the other, an immediate being on its own account, which at the same time is such only through this mediation. They recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another” (112).
Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit.” Here is Hyppolite’s reading of this section of Hegel’s text: “Unlike animals, men desire not only to persevere in their being, to exist the way things exist; they also imperiously desire to be recognized as self-consciousnesses, as something raised above purely animal life.... It is a fight—in which the spiritual vocation of man is manifested—to prove to others as well as to oneself that one is an autonomous self-consciousness” (169).
Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 114, paragraph 166 (emphasis added).
Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 75; also see xix–xxxvi, 66–81, 716–732. On pp. xxxiv–xxxv, she writes, “Our perspective is that of existentialist ethics. Every subject plays his part as such specifically through exploits or projects that serve as a mode of transcendence; he achieves liberty only through a continual reaching out toward other liberties. There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future. Every time transcendence falls back into immanence, stagnation, there is a degradation of existence into the ‘en-soi’—the brutish life of subjection to given conditions—and of liberty into constraint and contingence.”
Hegel tells us, “They speak of the existence of external objects, which can be more precisely defined as actual, absolutely singular, wholly personal, individual things.... If they actually wanted to say ‘this’ bit of paper which they mean, if they wanted to say it, then this is impossible, because the sensuous This that is meant cannot be reached by language, which belongs to consciousness, i.e. to that which is inherently universal. In the actual attempt to say it, it would therefore crumble away; those who started to describe it would not be able to complete the description” (66). My point here is not that this mode of consciousness always speaks. My point is that it can speak. It possesses language. (In speaking, for Hegel, it happens to undermine its own claims about sense-certainty.)
Ibid. One could try to get Hegel off the hook here by claiming that it is “we” the readers of the Phenomenology who are aware of the importance of language. This will not work because the consciousness described in “sense-certainty” is already a language bearing consciousness.
A qualification is necessary. There is a sense in which one is “self-conscious” when one is aware of significant symbols, that is, when one is aware of their meanings. And this can happen before or after there is a self. For Mead, however, self-consciousness properly understood is related to a self, which requires a generalized other.
One might argue that the “I” is always prereflective in the early chapters of the Phenomenology. But besides the fact that this position can’t hold up because of the presence of reflection in certain kinds of consciousness—for example, in “The Understanding”—in general the Hegelian position on mediation would make it difficult to draw a distinction between the prereflective and reflective. One might say that the former is continually transcended by the latter. This is one way of thinking about the relationship of the implicit to the explicit in Hegel.
There is, of course, a sense in which the first sort of recognition that one receives is not fully mutual, ontogenetically speaking, because an adult can recognize others in ways that a child cannot, for example, in terms of respect or dignity. However, mutual respect or reciprocal relations between adults should not be the sole criterion for mutual or reciprocal recognition. The adult and child can recognize each other in terms of specific attitudes, which then reinforce each other, and that’s all we need for the kind of mutual or reciprocal recognition being addressed. If you ask why an adult or parent needs “recognition” from a child, the answer is straightforward: as confirmation that the parent or adult is being understood. This sets the stage for more complex interactions eventually involving generalized others. See Chapter 3 for a discussion of Mead on the genesis of the self.
Interestingly, in a certain sense Mead falls between Habermas and Hegel here. For Habermas, communication for the purpose of understanding precedes strategic communication, at least logically. And this form of communication assumes a degree of mutuality. For Hegel, the dialectic calls for an agonistic moment (actually many) before we can proceed to mutual recognition. For Mead, the strategic and communicative are more intertwined than in Habermas’s account of communicative action in The Theory of Communicative Action, but he certainly doesn’t assume that the sort of agon that Hegel suggests is necessary for the development of self-consciousness. This is in part because Mead doesn’t see mutual recognition as a telos in the way that Hegel does. It’s present from the outset in human interactions, although more sophisticated and morally praiseworthy versions become possible as children mature.
Miller, Toward a New Psychology of Women. Miller’s work is informed by psychoanalysis and object relations theory, and she cites figures such as Heinz Kohut, Harry S. Sullivan, and Karen Horney. She also draws on her experience as a clinician in this work.
After noting this point, she discusses the objectives of what she refers to as the movement’s more radical spokeswomen: physical frankness, sexual frankness, emotional frankness, human development, protesting against objectification, private and public equality, and personal creativity (24–25).
Not accepting the “rightness of weakness” does not translate into the conviction that one must always try to transcend vulnerability and fragility. “That women are better able than men to consciously admit to feelings of weakness or vulnerability may be obvious, but we have not recognized the importance of this ability. That women are truly much more able to tolerate these feelings—which life in general, and particularly in our society, generates in everybody—is a positive strength” (31). I think it important to bear in mind that Miller’s book was originally published in 1976. It’s an interesting question how much of this language might change if Miller were to write this book today. I doubt that she would think that the basic dynamic has changed, although there has been more talk of “male vulnerability” in the United States since the book was published.
Hegel, Phenomenology, 117.
Hegel appears to argue that the extent to which the slave is aware of the master’s dependence on him is limited, at least at first. However, even if the slave became aware of this dependence, he might not or would not have the power or self-assurance to overthrow the master. It’s no accident that the section that follows the master-slave dialectic is on Stoicism.
See Aboulafia, The Cosmopolitan Self, 7–27.
Hegel makes a fundamental distinction between the Understanding and Reason. One of the characteristics of the Understanding is that it avoids contradictions by placing opposing sides in different frames of reference, as opposed to dealing with conflict and overcoming it. This “trick” of the Understanding has its counterpart in the dominant/subordinate, male/female relationships when the partners obscure conflicts by too readily viewing their partners’ interests as their own, avoiding basic inequities because it serves to keep the peace, so to speak.
Miller does not explicitly focus on the “instincts” in her book. But the importance of the body and “instinct” can be inferred from the way in which she discusses emotional and social life, in particular, sexuality. For example, “When one is an object, not a subject, all of one’s own physical and sexual impulses and interests are presumed not to exist independently.... Any stirrings of physicality and sexuality in herself would only confirm for a girl or woman her evil state” (60). Notice that Miller uses the term “impulse” here. See note 33 in Chapter 4 for Mead’s view on the distinction between “impulse” and “instinct.”
Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 56–74.
In Chapter 4 I quoted Mead on his preference for the term “impulse” over “instinct.” His statement reminds us that acknowledgment of the “instinctual,” when it is understood in terms of modifiable impulses, need not lead us to the position that physiology or genetics is destiny.
Mead, “National-Mindedness and International-Mindedness,” in Selected Writings, 358–359.
Mead, “Philanthropy from the Point of View of Ethics,” in Selected Writings , 392.
Ibid.
Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 114, paragraph 166 (emphasis added).
On how the biological plays a role in Mead’s work that it does not in Bourdieu’s, see Chapter 3.
Mead, “National-Mindedness and International-Mindedness,” in Selected Writings, 358.
For example, see Dewey’s remarks in Chapter 2 on how preferences are organic. They should not be confused with conscious choices and judgments.
Quoted in Cook, George Herbert Mead, 33.