윌리엄 제임스의 의식이론에 대한 교육학적 고찰 -행동이론을 중심으로

Abstract

The aim of this article is to explicate which meaning the consciousness theory of William James(1842-1910) can give us from the point of pedagogical view. In that James as a psychologist and philosopher had never written articles about the science of education in the true sense, I could not help coming close to the pedagogical structure of the James' consciousness theory by means of the conceptual schemata. Here I found three constructs ; action(in German, Handlung), sensuality(Sinnlichkeit) and sociality(Sozialität), which are not only simple conceptual instruments for the theoretical finding but also results of the theoretical reconstruction. But in this article I concentrate on the first concept. In particular I made conspicuously the peculiarity of James in the tradition of the social action theory of G. H. Mead and J. Habermas that was inspired deeply by the consciousness theory of James. First of all it is indicated that the "theory of communicative action" is too abstract to applicate to the context of pedagogical practice. This is because the social action theory of Mead and Habermas was formed through the hasty and one-sided 'cognitivistic' development of holistic perspectives of human action that James had intended at the beginning. From this point of view I interpreted the consciousness theory of James as the initiative of perception phenomenology of M. Merleau-Ponty. It is therefore the very point that the action-concept of James can contribute to understanding the mode of action and perception of children and adolescent. In addition I investigated the connotations of consciousness theory of James in terms of learning theory and 'Bildung'-theory.