[Editor’s Note: Today’s post is a listener submission by Adam Arnold, graduate student at the University of Warwick. You too can be a guest blogger.]
I once thought this habit of mind was simply due to lack of self-esteem and insecurity (this is exactly the kind of place I would add a footnote about the difference between a lack of self-esteem and insecurity with a plethora of juicy names). I would always think, “I am not intelligent enough to think of these things myself (self-esteem) and everyone knows it (insecurity).”
However, I no longer think this. I now tend to think (hopefully not in mauvaise foi, or bad faith) that this is simply the way my mind works. Or even how all our minds work.
Lately, I have been reading about George Herbert Mead’s intersubjective theory of the self
The ephemeral nature of the I promises that one is never all that one appears to be. Others can know only the me. Furthermore, you too can only know yourself as an object, as others know you. You are blind to your own I. The Delphic command to “Know thyself!” will in this sense always remain an open question. Self-knowledge comes against its permanent limit in the I. To this extent, one remains mysterious to oneself, and the capacity for creative innovation, that which will pro-duce from the unknown into being, belong to every human. (Miller, Mimesis and Reason)
Personally, I do it through philosophy. It is how I come to understand the world around me; as far as I know, it has nothing to do with lack of confidence nor with pretentiousness. It is simply the way my mind makes sense of things; it is the hermeneutic tool which I use to decode our shared Lebenswelt.
Therefore, the guys (and occasional gals) of PEL, if they are anything like me, will not be able to stop themselves from name-dropping because it is simply the way the mind functions. We cannot help but take the role of another when reflecting on what we think about something.
Bear in mind that this does not excuse name-dropping in a style that is intended to dominate or destroy a conversation, but only condones name-dropping in an attempt for clarity through connections to the history of philosophy.
-Adam Arnold
I always think of name-dropping, at its best, as footnoting, giving credit, and referring others to.
It can obviously also be a kind of in-group/technical shorthand which can be useful but runs the risk of replacing the actual texts (especially these days with little emphasis on careful readings of primary texts) with sound-bites and or mere signs of being able to signal one’s group alliance.
On to the point of your post I’m all for highlighting the dialogical/polyphonic aspects of our identity but than wonder if you are not than undermining such an understanding by confusing a kind of prescriptive philosophical task for a description of a fundament of developmental psychology when you say:
“The way our minds work, due to their essentially social nature, is through drawing connections to the social world outside of us, then, through reflection, creating a comprehensible narrative”
it is my understanding that while our minds are ‘extended’ in all kinds of ways that we are not, outside of specialized circumstances like doing academic work or memoir, by and large creating “comprehensible narrative(s)” and certainly not living out one as a kind of script and or play-book.
Is narrative theory (not ordinary/habitual speech acts) an essential part of Mead’s work?
http://www.psy.herts.ac.uk/pub/sjcowley/docs/cradle.pdf
Sorry for the late reply. I have been busy traveling and then moving to a new house.
What mead was trying to do is find a way between the subjectivism of high German thought and the determinism of the behaviorism of his time. This gives his philosophy of the self a peculiar quality of having overdetermined “me”s as well as a Kantian empty transcendental “I”. Mead was concerned with saving the idea of genius of the I (see Kant’s third critique). This “I” is what is doing the reflecting and narrative creation. The “I” however is something that only emerges overtime and is not something that is constantly present but only occurs during an ad hoc reflection. So, if you interpreted what I was saying as “by and large creating ‘comprehensible narrative(s)” then it was my lack of clarity. For Mead, like Dewey, we only reflect in certain situations that are not habitual, e.g. philosophic reflection or artistic activities.
I am not familiar enough with narrative theory to comment on that aspect of your comment.
Hope that clarifies things.
yes thanks, except it leaves open the question of the role of such self-consciously creative activities in terms of shaping, or not, our habitual lives.
Narrative theory, by and large, makes the cognitive-behavioral error of assuming that we are living out scripts, or even more comprehensive life-stories/philosophies, as if the story telling directs/rules the behaviors instead of being occasional, and largely after the fact, justifications.
If I understand you properly, it would be the reflection of the “I” and its quality of genius. That is, the “I” through reflection on the habitual can diverge from the rules. Like the artist who diverges from the rules of tradition to create something new, the normal person has this same ability in regard to their roles. So, the roles are ontologically primary and are what gives birth to the “I” which through its “genius” can break (and change) the rules of these roles creating new habitual paths.
I see it was common until quite recently to underestimate the complexity/capacity of infants but this raises some parallels to our ongoing discussion of Nietzsche as the “first” psychologist and the Nietzschean/Bloomian/Freudian developmental line that Rorty takes on the anxiety of influence, poetics, and our blind impresses in his Contingency book that I hope we come to some time down the road.
good piece
As I understand it, Mead’s view of the self is a lot like Dewey’s. In terms of growth and development, we are social beings first in the sense that we learn to think and speak within the context of social “games”. This could include games in the literal sense, like football or checkers, but it more generally refers to any social activity in which one plays a role. As these roles increase in number and complexity we develop an increasing need to prioritize, balance and negotiate the various demands and so individuality begins to form to meet that need. Individuality is born because all the various social selves within us need a leader, so to speak.On this view, individuality is achieved fairly late in the developmental process and can only be achieved in a social context, is a product of the social context.
Oh, and I very much agree that name-dropping is a good thing when it’s used as a footnote or example. But it’s annoying and unhelpful when it’s not used in connection with an actual idea, assertion or something of substance. It should never be used as substitute for actual conceptual content. You gotta say what mean first, then you can add a quick footnote.
You are right, Dewey and Mead are very close on many issues. This probably comes, in part, from their similar intellectual development. Thanks for the comment.
Good post. Mead is foundational to a lot of work on the ‘interactionist perspective’ on language and mind. What I’ve read of his work, he does seem to be a bit ahead of its time, but contemporaries of his like Vygotsky had similar notions as well. Here is a short intro to the influence of Mead’s perspective on understanding the socially mediated nature of our ‘lebenswelt’ (pp. 5-7 in the PDF):
http://leakygrammar.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/ei-ch-1-streek-goodwin-and-lebaron.pdf
As for name-dropping, you wrote, ‘Personally, I do it through philosophy. It is how I come to understand the world around me…’
The activity we are involved in, whether it’s playing jazz or doing philosophy, seems to push our experience of the the activity itself along certain lines of thinking. I’m not sure where I read it (get ready for a few name drops…Bourdieu, Wittgenstein, Bateson maybe?) but in the social sciences (as opposed to the natural sciences), much of our intellectual currency seems to find its value in categorizing ideas with certain individuals who first had those ideas, and this seems to help us not only access those ideas, but also substantiate our position with some hint of authority. This may be part of the reason why name dropping has this dual quality to it, of helping us think through complex ideas, as well as pissing people off as a fairly annoying practice at times…
that makes more sense as it sounds more like Dewey/James and not a cognitive-behavioral/narrative theory.
“The actions occurring in Transcript 1.1 are not orga
nized within a single medium, such as talk, but are
instead constructed through the simultaneous use of
multiple semiotic resources with quite different proper
ties”
my sense is that when philosophy starts to take an interactionist/enactivist approach that the line between philosophy and anthropo-logos gets pretty blurry, and whether he meant to or not when Nietzsche started replacing teleological/theological ‘why’ questions about human behavior with genealogical/evolutionary ‘how’ questions he was a pivotal figure in this new field, Gay science or not…
Yes, Mead was ahead of his time in many respects. However, he seemed to still be caught in the tradition of subjectivity with his transcendental “I”. He was certainly ahead of the phenomenological tradition (Husserl and Schutz) who tried to account for intersubjectivity from a logic of subjectivity but he still couldn’t help but to save the the empty “I”.
Insecurity? Maybe to a degree but it is also a defense for your standpoint, to cite the works of others as logical backup. This said actual experience cannot be referenced, only gone through. By this I mean intelligence and intelligence gathering, leads to a complex castle of defenses but the new will throw you because it sneaks through these layers, to reveal the unknown, which there are no words for / no rehearsed reactions to. It always leads to death of the former life / beliefs and birth of the new (Blessed are the cracked, for they let in the light as the poster goes).
Why can’t experience be referenced? Isn’t this exactly what reflection is doing? I am also not sure why reflection cannot make room for the new? Isn’t this the purpose of, for example, Adorno’s negative dialectic or Derrida’s deconstruction of Nietzshean/Foucauldian genealogies? They all seem to be attempting to open up the new through a critical reflection on the past (and the present), to attempt to account for the non-identical in thought and experience.