Japanese Sociological Review
Online ISSN : 1884-2755
Print ISSN : 0021-5414
ISSN-L : 0021-5414
Act, Temporality, and the Self
G.H. Mead's Concepts Revisited
Naohito Tokugawa
Author information
JOURNAL FREE ACCESS

1993 Volume 44 Issue 1 Pages 16-29

Details
Abstract

Mead's standpoint of “behaviorism” is not one in which he made his social psychological research method clear, but one by which he marked his own philosophical mode of thinking with Bergson and Dewey against any form of epistemological “bifurcation of nature” and for his philosophy of the act. This standpoint “in-terms-of-the-act” is linked with his notions on temporality asserted against the teleological conceptions on history and Spencerian social evolutionism. The present is the locus of reality, because present possible act would make a new relatedness with a past event so that a new order or consentient set of events in Whitehead's term would emerge ; that it is not knowledge about the past but an act that makes the past a different past, the accident a necessary. This objectifiability of the past is the ground for the genesis of the reflective, social self. In order to have some meaning and to be a past, it is necessary for a passed event to be put into some ordering or line of acts, to be refered reflectively or backward from the standpoint of the present act. There functions a rhetoric or the “logic of a game”, made possible with the present act, to provide the way of reference and to thread acts into a line, which is of a sociological interest.

Content from these authors
© The Japan Sociological Society
Previous article Next article
feedback
Top