Gabriel Tarde Quotes on Mind
Gabriel Tarde (1843–1904), the French sociologist whose Laws of Imitation (1890) and Social Logic (1895) gave late-nineteenth-century social theory a serious rival to the developing Durkheimian programme, defended a fine-grained psychological account of social life in which the fundamental phenomena are the imitations, oppositions, and inventions of individual minds in interaction with one another. The framework treats mental life as constitutively intersubjective rather than monadically interior, with the consequent case that the social and the psychological are not two separate orders to be reconciled but a single phenomenon analyzed at different scales. Deleuze's later rehabilitation of Tarde recovered him for late-twentieth-century social theory.
Quotes
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Attributed to Gabriel Tarde:
“Society is imitation, and imitation is a kind of somnambulism.”
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Attributed to Gabriel Tarde:
“The social is the inter-mental.”
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Attributed to Gabriel Tarde:
“The crowd is the social body in its inferior state; the public, in its superior.”
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“Is there such a thing as being? What is it? etc. Yet immediately an abyss opens under my feet: I who ask these questions about being, how can I be sure that I exist? Yet surely I, who formulate this problem should be able to remain outside it - before or beyond it? Clearly this is not so. The more I consider it the more I find that this problem tends inevitably to invade the proscenium from which it is excluded in theory: it is only by means of a fiction that Idealism in its traditional form seeks to maintain on the margin of being the consciousness which asserts or denies it.”
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“I am therefore led to assume or to recognise a form of participation which has the reality of a subject; this participation cannot be, by definition, an object of thought; it cannot serve as a solution - it appears beyond the realm of problems: it is metaproblematical.”
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“The great pessimists in the history of thought [...] have prepared our minds to understand that despair can be what it was for Nietzsche (though on an infra-ontological level and in a domain fraught with mortal dangers) the springboard to the loftiest affirmation.”
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