Final essay outline - Explain Mead’s theory of the self PDF

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Explain Mead’s theory of the self
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Title Introduction (½ page) - Explain Mead’s theory of the self - Divided into two parts: me and I - “Mead argues, entails that individual selves are the products of social interaction and not the (logical or biological) preconditions of that interaction.” (86) - To be self conscious is to be able to take oneself as an object - Thesis statement - Claim mead’s theory (choose) - 1- correct to make sociological claims - Regarding to me - Changed exixtential clames regarding I - 2- correct to give an existential reading of the I - Should change his position regarding me as a social phenomenon alone - 3- he should have underlined the tention and ambiguity that self is both - Seperated from the social - not only social - Socially dependent and independent - A participent in a game and a freedom to respond to it Mead’s Sociological Account of the Me (1 ½ page) - Explain Mead’s notion of me - When wer refer to our self as an image or a role - Capable on reflecting upon - Something we perform for others = superego for Freud - Only exist in social performances = have many me in various social performances - Playing vs gaming - Playing: - First steps of having a me is through imitating others - Ex: when a child imitates their mother - a specific person - Gaming - Go into social games - Ex: when a child identifies itself with a more generalized version of a mother - Internalization of the generalized other - Learning to be someone, for example, a mother - A social determined role - Like the baseball analogy - Baseball analogy

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Be conscous about all your roles as a first bace player Also know what other can or can not do Know that others can count on you and vice versa Only applicable “if he understands all the social roles and the nature of the game as a whole” (99) - Similar of knowing for example, understanding what a mother is for a child is when he/she understands the social games in which he/she plays Relevance of Nachbar on stereotypes and of Shusternman on self-other relations - Knowing who you are is about knowing who you are not - “The limites of any entity, hence its individuation, are determined by what lies outside those limits, by what constitutes the environment field in which these limits can be constructed” (105) - One’s self-definition and sense of self varies from different contexts - For example: when a man finds himself in a big group with only woman, he will suddently find one self as what he is (a man) and reject what he is not (a woman)

Mead’s Existential Account of the I - Explain Mead’s notion of I - Dimension of the self = not an object but a subject - Capable of freewill - choose to invent self - Use knowledge of existentialism - “Like Sartre existential account of consciousness and its absolute freedom” (100) - Explain centrality of time for the existential account of the self - I in the present: storyteller that decides - Actions slips into the past = me - What belongs to the past is crucial for future actions/decisions - Explain how procrastination illustrates freedom of consciousness - Choose to procrastinate - Can’t make a date to one self - Always in the process of choosing - inventing/choosing one self - can always change decisions - Understanding of myself is always up to revision - According to Orthega “man has no constitutive identity” - “To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity” (73) - You always have the freedom to change your identity in a way you want it to be. - Existentialists one ought to be the “author of oneself” even if as McAdams says one is always “thrown” into a social/historical situation - “Author of oneself”

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The I can be an author of its self when the self is “precisely a story that is being written by its self” (98) - Self has the freedom to be the author of its own story - McAdams - Determins aspects of our lives - “Thrown” into a social/historical situation - With the challenge to make life meaningful In what sense is consciousness a freedom and transcendence - A temporal phenomenon (existing in time) - A transcendence or subjectivity (not an object but an ability to give meaning to its experience) What did Sartre mean by the idea of bad faith - Bad faith is when you look at yourself as a subject in someone else eyes. - When you wish that you had another identiy to fit better in society or when you want to feel better about yourself

Your potition (create own heading) - 1- Mead’s theory is contradictory - Can’t claim that the self is both a “social even through and through” ot that “consciousness is a pure freedom” - 2- tension in the self - I best described as an author or narrator… - 3- have to live with ambiguity - Self is best described as a co-author, co producer, DJ or other better metaphor suited - Correct about the distinction of “Me” and “I” - “I” is the creator, author - “Me” is the different social self - “Mead argues, entails that individual selves are the products of social interaction and not the (logical or biological) precondtions of that interaction.” (86) - Fail to contradict between the two - Ambiguity that the “I” is not only a social phenomenon - has its own self - The self is socially dependent and independant - A participant in a game - A freedom to respond to the game - Individual caught between - like during adolescence - Leave no space for fundamental modalities according to David Bakan (60) - Agency: to be seperated from society

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- Me = socially accepted one, like others - I = based on various mes, based on social Communion: strive to lose own individuality - Mead says that the self is simply the “internalization of the generalized other” - Self is an image, role or a participant who appears in a socially generated game - playing or gaming Lack responds to the corporeal demands like Plato and Freud insisted - Plato: body in his metaphysical dualism - “pleasures and pains with sexuality” (35) - Freud: ID - pleasure principles, to satisfy desures, to reduce tensio

Mead correct about me & i Fail: contradiction between two Individual caught between I make sense: giving self meaning Choosing between me Decision social context about i os with me Internalizing social meanings Conclusion - Brief summary of major points - Restate position Work Cited (MLA format) https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/

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Theory of individual self-consciousness Not immediately present at birth Develops through social interaction Develops a consciousness of self when learns to respond to itself Arises with social experience and activity Develops with social relations Have a self when person takes the attitude of other members of the social group towards itself - social process Sense of self through experiences: pain and pleasure can be here without being the experience of the self

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Self not always involved in the life of the organism nor our sensuous experiences CAN distinguish between the self and the body Self has characteristics that self is an object to itself - distinguish it from other objects and from the body Self = reflexivity of the self that “distinguishes it from other objects and from the body” (86) Two phases of the self - 1- Reflects the attitude - 2- responds to the attitude Distinguish between the me and the i - Me = social self, conventional, habitual individual, the self that is reflected upon - I = response to me, “novel reply” of the individual to the generalized other, the self that does the reflecting Direct experiences of the body are not experiences of the self Mead argues First steps to have a self is through imitation of others = playing

https://www.academia.edu/11738158/The_Self_and_Morality_in_Mead_The_Problems_with_th e_I_and_the_Me_ \

Hunting John, “Mead’s Theory of the Self,” in The Self: Theories and Construcions, ( Montreal: Dawson College, 2017) 98-103 Shusterman Richard, “Understanding The Self’s Others,” in Cultural  Otherness and Beyond, ed. by Chhanda Gupta. Leidin: Koninklijke. 107-114 Nachbar Jack, “Introduction Breaking the Mold: The Meaning and Significance of Stereotypes in Popular Culture,” in Popular  Culture: An Introductory Text, ed. By Nachbar Jack and Lause Kevin. University of Winscosin Press, 1992. 236-245 Orthega y Gasset, “Man has no Nature,” in The Self: Theories and Constructions, e dited by John Hunting (Montreal: Dawson College, 2017) 228-235 Cronk George, “Self and other: The Self as Social Emergent,” in George  Herbert Mead (1863-1931). Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 14 Nov. 2017

McAdams Dan, “Theme and Ideological Setting,” in The  Stories We Live By: Personal myths and the making of the self. New York: Guilford Press, 1993. 67-91 Hunting John, “Freud’s Tripartite Division of the Self (Id, Ego and Superego) and its Defense Mechanisms,” in The Self: Theories and Constructions ,  ( Montreal: Dawson College, 2017) 35-41...