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Is the Self of Social Behaviorism Capable of Auto-Affection? Mead and Marion on the "I" and the "Me"
- Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy
- Indiana University Press
- Volume 42, Number 2, Spring 2006
- pp. 242-265
- 10.1353/csp.2006.0021
- Article
- Additional Information
The purpose of this manuscript is to bring Mead's pragmatism into contact with Jean-Luc Marion's phenomenology. Taking as its focus the question of the I-pole of the self, the paper points to the absence and the need of a concept like auto-affection in Mead's analysis of selfhood. A pragmatic appropriation of this concept does not undermine the social framework of selfhood because the most rudimentary self-givenness is immediate and direct, yet simultaneously a posteriori. The social and biological genesis of mind, self and society reserves a prominent place for auto-affection, which liberates the self from his estrangement within the horizon of objecthood by acknowledging a multiplicity of types of self-givenness besides that of self-objectification.