On The Sociology Of The Theory Of Mead Philosophy Of Self-steering

Habermas, the contemporary well-known philosopher, has ever said that Mead was one of the founders of modern sociology who laid a foundation for the theory of social communication and opened a new way to resolve the predicament of conscious philosophy. This thesis points out that Mead's achievement is realized by his self-theory's sociological turn. The thesis attempts to roughly sketch broad outline of the development of self-theory in the history of western philosophy, tries to make clear the history position of Mead's self-theory, so that we can research how Mead revealed the connotation of his self-theory from the perspective of society and how he brought about its sociological turn in the field of pragmatism. It is divided into four parts to demonstrate the argument.Part One reviews the development of self-consciousness in the history of western philosophy. The western philosophy has experienced two general great turns: from ancient ontology to modem epistemological turn and from modem epistemological turn to contemporary linguistic turn or intersubjective turn. Along with these two turns, we can see the self that developed at every step from sprout, development to establishment in western philosophy investigation. In modem times, traditional self regarded dualism as antecedence, which more and more exposed its theoretical limitations. With the sublimating of subjectivity, the self finally sank into "self-radius predicament". With the linguistic turn or intersubjective turn of philosophy, Karl Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl, Freud, and many other thinkers researched this problem from their own theoretical field of vision respectively. Conforming to the history trend, Mead opened up self-theory's new way to sociology.Part Two briefly generalizes Mead's philosophical foundation and theoretical background of his self-theory. They show in three aspects: the first is the methodology of natural science; the second is Darwin's evolutionism; the third is the organic unity of the tradition of German classic philosophy and the achievements of western philosophy in his time.Part Three reveals Mead's self-theory by analyzing some basic concepts. There are three levels in his theory: 1. the act makes up his self-theory's foundation; 2. the subject "I" and the object "me" form the inner dialogue mechanism of self; 3. the society is a community in which selves cooperate and communicate each other. Mead studied mind, self and society in turn, which actually shows the process of interaction between the individuals and the society.Part Four gives commends on Mead's self-theory: it kept the history logic of self-theory from the past and creates a new way to sociology. The thesis holds the views below: Mead's self-theory tried hard to overstep modem dualism and overcome "self-radius predicament"; It takes sociality as its logic starting point, which distinguish itself with the individual self-theory; It focuses on the living world and is an ever-open process. Therefore, from its logic starting point, theoretical connotation to the direction of its theory gist, we can come to the conclusion that Mead's self-theory had realized its sociological turn. Part Three and Part Four are main parts of this thesis.At last, the thesis summarizes the influences of Mead and his self -theory on human thought in the history.