Що е социално действие: по Джордж Хърбърт Мийд и Джон Дюи
What is Social Action: Based on George Herbert Mead and John Dewey

Summary/Abstract: Thе paper reconstructs the way George Herbert Mead and John Dewey thematized the social self in the context of their understandings of the interaction, meaning, and temporal dynamics of social action. Dewey's critique of the reflex arc model is reconstructed as a starting point for a deconstruction of stimulus-response dualism and of organism-environment opposition. In this critique also emerges the basis of functionalism in Dewey and Mead's social philosophy, in which stimulus and response are functional derivatives rather than ontologically pre-existent elements. Mead's key contribution is in the unfolding of the triadic structure: gesture, response and reaction. It is in this triadicity that the social self emerges as a result of the ability to take another's perspective. The social self is structured by the dramaturgy between the impulsive ‚I‘ and the interiorized ‚me‘. The ‚me‘ is a historical figure, a product of signification, of social interactions that sets the stage on which the ‚I‘ can appear. The ‚I‘ reacts to the ‚me‘ and so modifies it, a dynamic that makes the social self a process rather than a structure. In light of this dynamic, we can understand our seemingly irrational responsiveness to demagoguery and calls to hate not as a symptom of an internal ‚evildoer‘ but as the result of a conflicted organization of the social self; we can understand how evildoing is not sociopathy, but a manifestation of our socialized self. This opens a pragmatist prospect in ‚misanthropology‘ (Gary Saul Morson): how to understand ourselves being both, socialized, and – by the same token – malevolent.

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