Temporality, Selfhood, and Creative Intentionality: Mead’s Phenomenological Synthesis

Abstract

Mead’s understanding of temporality and selfhood, couched as it is in the language of biological activity, is frequently interpreted by phenomenologists to be rooted in a derived, reductivistic scientific level, far removed from the phenomenological concern with lived experience.¹ There are, however, two dimensions of human behavior as it develops in Mead’s philosophy, for there is two-fold philosophical sense of purposive activity running throughout Mead’s position, one biological, the other phenomenological, both of which undercut the level of the biological in terms of the contents of scientific analysis. Human behavior, in its biological dimension, is understood as a process of the purposive adjustment of the organism to the conditions of the environment. In this sense Mead speaks of the adequacy of meanings in terms of the ongoing conduct of the biological organism immersed in a natural world.² Behavior, in its phenomenological dimension, is partially constitutive of its field of awareness and involves an intentional mind-object relationship as a field of meanings that can be phenomenologically studied from within. In this second sense Mead speaks of the adequacy of meanings in terms of the appearance of what is meant.³