Towards a Phenomenological Account of the Collective Non-reflective Mind: The Family as a Case Study

The paper intends to investigate the nature of the family mind from a phenomenological point of view. To this end, in Section 2, drawing inspiration from Husserl, we present a phenomenological description of the salient components of collective family mindedness. According to Husserl, the normal family is a community of love, and the relationship between mother and child is the most fundamental origin of intersubjectivity. What is crucial for our line of reasoning is that the family mind is to some extent non-reflective and, in Husserl’s terms, instinctive. In Section 3, we examine four leading accounts of collective mindedness, particularly Gilbert’s account of collective belief, Schmid’s account of collective intentionality, and interpretationism and functionalism about collective mind. We argue that none of these accounts is successful in providing an adequate explanation of the non-reflective aspect of collective family mind. Finally, in Section 4, borrowing the idea of non-reflective mind from a recent reading of Dreyfus’s account of skill, we seek to develop an alternative account of collective mind that appreciates the non-reflective aspect of family mindedness. Employing the idea of non-reflective mind at a collective level, we suggest that a pre-reflective joint sense of smoothness between members of a family constitutes the nature of their non-reflective family mind. Everything, such as the distance between members of the family, that violates this sense of smoothness is experienced as a tension, creating a spontaneous pull among the members of the family to reduce the tension and to restore the smoothness.