2nd
George Mead on identity and self
‘In the process of communication the individual is an other before he is a self. It is in addressing himself in the rôle of an other that his self arises in experience.’
‘Reality “a field of situations”.’
‘The self is something which has a development; it is not initially there, at birth, but arises in the process of social experience and activity, that is, develops in the given individual as a result of his relations to that process as a whole and to other individuals within that process” ‘
‘The individual can enter as an object [to himself] only on the basis of social relations and interactions, only by means of his experiential transactions with other individuals in an organized social environment.’
‘Reality is the overall “organization of perspectives.”’
‘The very existence of the self implies a not-self; it implies a not-self which can be identified with the self. You have seen that the term “self” is a reflexive affair. It involves an attitude of separation of the self from itself. Both subject and object are involved in the self in order that it may exist. The self must be identified, in some sense, with the not-self. It must be able to come back at itself from the outside. The process, then, as involved in the self is the subject-object process, a process within which both of these phases of experience lie, a process in which these different phases can be identified with each other — not necessarily as the same phase but at least as expressions of the same process.’
‘We have to realize ourselves by taking the role of another, playing the part of another, taking the attitude of the community toward ourselves, continually seeing ourselves as others see us, regarding ourselves from the standpoint of those about us. This is not the self-consciousness that goes with awkwardness and uneasiness. It is the assured recognition of one’s own position, one’s social relations, that comes from being able to take the attitude of others toward ourselves.’
‘Interiors and exteriors co-create each other.’
‘The world is organized only in so far as one acts in it. Its meaning lies in the conduct of the individual; and when one has built up his world as such a field of action, then he realizes himself as the individual who carried out that action. That is the only way in which he can achieve a self. One does not get at himself simply by turning upon himself the eye of introspection. One realizes himself in what he does, in the ends which he sets up, and in the means he takes to accomplish those ends.’
