Impulsos y naturaleza humana en el pragmatismo de John Dewey y George Mead

Abstract

In the present paper I would like to approach some problems for the psychology of John Dewey’s and George H. Mead’s classical pragmatism originated in the adoption of the concepts of impulses or instincts. First, I begin by examining the notion of socio-physiological impulses in Mead’s analysis in the last section of his Mind, Self and Society (1934). There I try to show that the author is commited to three theses about the mind and human nature, required by the adoption of the notion of socio-physiological impulses, which are incompatible with his social behaviorism (or symbollic interactionism) and come into conflict with the spirit of classical pragmatism inspired on the darwinian revolution. These three theses are, first, a kind of psychological individualism that assumes the existence of impulses constitutive of personhood, or the Self, antecedent to the individual’s process of socialization; second, a type of essentialism in respect to human nature: the idea that human nature is constitued by certain original impulses seems to go hand in hand with a fixist understanding of human nature, that is, with the existence of a inmutable human nature; finally, a committment to a human nature structured in such a way seems to conduce to a kind of teleology: the idea that human nature imposes a télos (end or purpose) by itself. 

In the second place, I reconstrue Dewey’s critique of explanations of social phenomena of traditional psychology in therms of originary impulses. Said critique, I suggest, can be applied to the aforementioned analysis by Mead and it warns us against the adoption of an understanding of drives such as the one adopted by it. 

Finally, I present the deweyan notion of drives and I try to show that the functionalist psychology that is built from them is not committed to the problematic theses identified above.