It is the purpose of this essay to suggest that these two chronic difficulties which have beset the study of consciousness have come about in part at least from a failure to appreciate the extraordinary role of the symbol, especially the language symbol, in man’s orientation to the world. I am frank to confess a prejudice in favor of Mead’s approach to consciousness as a phenomenon arising from the social matrix through language. It seems to me that the psychological approach possesses the saving virtue that it tends to be self-corrective, whereas in transcendental phenomenology everything is risked on a single methodological cast at the very outset, the famous epoché. But I wish to suggest first that positive psychology, in its allegiance to the sign-response as the basic schema of psychogenesis, has failed or refused to grasp the peculiar role of the language symbol. I would further suggest that an appreciation of this role will (1) confirm in an unexpected way Mead’s thesis of the social origin of consciousness, (2) reveal intersubjectivity as one of the prime relations of the symbol meaning-structure, (3) provide access to a phenomenology of consciousness, not as a transcendental idealism, but as a mode of being emerging from the interrelations of real organisms in the world.
SYMBOL AND INTERSUBJECTIVITY
I do not think it would be too far from the truth to say that the phenomenologist, having ruled out intersubjectivity in his reduction, has the greatest difficulty in reinstating it thereafter; and that the positive psychologist simply takes intersubjectivity for granted. It is one thing to be aware, as the phenomenologists are aware, that a fundamental connection with the other self must be seized, in Sartre’s words, at the very heart of consciousness. Whether such a connection is allowed by the rigor of the phenomenological reduction is something else again. It is also one thing to be aware, as Mead was aware, of the social origin of consciousness. Whether this connection between consciousness and the social matrix can be demonstrated in terms of a sign-response psychology is something else again. But there is this difference: If Mead’s social behaviorism is too narrow a theoretical base, it can be broadened without losing the posture from which Mead theorized, that of an observer confronting data which he can make some sense of and of which he can speak to other observers. For this reason I shall be chiefly concerned with the general approach of George Mead.
The most conspicuous divergence between Husserl’s and Mead’s approaches to consciousness is the opting of one for the individual cogito character of consciousness and of the other for its intrinsically social character. In the phenomenological reduction all belief in existents and in one’s theoretical attitude toward existents is suspended. What remains over as a residuum, as the subject matter of an apodictic science? Only consciousness itself, “a self-contained system of being, into which nothing can penetrate and from which nothing can escape; which cannot experience causality from anything nor exert causality upon anything….” Mead, on the other hand, is quite as emphatic in regarding mind and consciousness as developing within the social process, “within the empirical matrix of social interactions.” Let us suppose for the moment that Mead is right — I have not the space here to go into a critical comparison of Mead and Husserl on this point: I only wish to offer a suggestion from the objective-empirical point of view — let us suppose that we may study consciousness as we study anything else, and that, moreover, “it is absurd to look at the mind from the standpoint of the individual organism.” Let us also suppose that Mead, along with many others, is probably right in focusing upon language as a key to the mysteries of mind. “Out of language arises the field of the mind.” The question which must be asked is whether this seminal insight is confirmed by Mead’s behaviorism or whether Mead did not in fact fall short of his goal precisely because of his rigid commitment to the sign-response sequence and his consequent failure to grasp the denotative function of the language symbol. Mead, along with most other American psychogeneticists, has felt obliged to construe the symbol as a variety of sign, and symbolic meaning as a refinement of sign-response. Mead saw no other alternative and was frank to declare that, once you abandon social or biological response, there only remains “transcendentalism.”
It would perhaps not be too gross a simplification to observe that the phenomenologist starts with consciousness but never gets back to organisms and signs, and that the positive psychologist starts with organisms and signs but never arrives at consciousness. Mead’s problem, once he had limited himself to the response as the ground of consciousness, was to derive a set of conditions under which a stimulus evokes the same response from the organism who utters it as it does from the organism who hears it. This is accomplished through role-taking, when the speaking organism comes to respond to its own signs in the same way as the hearing organism. Consciousness is the response of the organism to its own responses. We cannot fail to be aware of the forced character of Mead’s response psychology in coping with human meaning when, for example, he is obliged to say that, when I ask you to get up and fetch the visitor a chair, I also arouse in myself the same tendency to get up and fetch the chair. This strained interpretation is fair warning, as Mrs. Langer has pointed out, that the most important feature of the material is being left out.
What is missing, of course, is the relation of denotation. It may be correct in a sense to say that a word “calls forth a response,” “announces an idea,” and so on. But more important, it names something.’
Now of course there is nothing new in this. Semioticists take due notice of the relation of denotation in semantics, which is that dimension of semiotic which has to do with the rules by which a symbol is said to denote its denotatum. What concerns us, however, is what one is to make of this relation from an objective-empirical point of view, rather than a logical one, as something which is actually taking place in the “data” before us, as assuredly it is taking place. To put the problem concretely: Given the phenomenon in which the normal child or the blind deaf-mute discovers that this stuff “is” water, what we wish to know (and what Mead always wished to know) is not the semantic “rule” by which Helen and Miss Sullivan agree to call the stuff water—this is a convention, not an explanation — what we wish to know is what happens. Certainly, whether we approve or disapprove, something very momentous has taken place when a sign which had been received as a signal — go fetch the water — is suddenly understood to “mean” the water, to denote something. Then what is it that happens? Semioticists dodge the issue by parceling out sign function to “behavioristics” and symbolic denotation to “semantics,” leaving the gap in limbo. Morris, for example, refuses to consider the symbol as anything other than a sign in behavioristics, allowing its denotative function only in semantics. Mead’s objective, however, was to bring all entities, mind, consciousness, sign, symbol, under the single gaze of the objective-empirical method. If, therefore, there is such a thing as denotation, naming, and if it does assuredly take place in the public realm we are studying, then what exactly happens and what relevance does this happening have for the phenomena of intersubjectivity and consciousness? How does it illumine these realities which no refinement of signification seems to get hold of? What would happen if instead of trying to get rid of denotation by calling it semantics, or by reducing it to a response sequence, we examined it as a real event among organisms?