Mind and Institution

Abstract

My proposal here is to attempt a display of mind turned towards the world for the particulars and pattern of its experience. I want to show how one would broach a conception of wild sociology which only gradually comes to self-possession as it unfolds or “brings into play, beneath what I know, my sensory fields which are my primitive alliance with the world.” ¹ From the outset I want to refuse the temptation to be on top of my subject. In particular, although I am drawing from Merleau-Ponty the connection between mind and institution,² I shall not make the test of these notions my ability to marshall texts, substituting the coherence and logic of their arrangement for the originality of speech and its solicitation of a thought which listens in harmony with its own way and is beholden to its topic as an exemplar of our collective life.