George Herbert Mead Quotes on Mind
George Herbert Mead’s Mind, Self and Society (1934, posthumous) gave classical American pragmatism its most systematic statement of the social genesis of mind. The central thesis is that mind is not an antecedent natural endowment of the individual organism but emerges through the social process of significant gesture — the human animal becomes a self-conscious mind through the internalization of the gestures and roles of others within the social process from which the I and the me are dialectically constituted. The framework, drawing on Mead’s long Chicago colleagueship with Dewey and the broader pragmatist tradition, shaped subsequent symbolic-interactionist sociology through Herbert Blumer, the social-constructivist tradition in social psychology, and the broader pragmatist philosophy of mind through Habermas’s reconstruction of communicative action.
Quotes
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Attributed to George Herbert Mead:
“The self is not present at birth; it arises in the process of social experience and activity.”
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Attributed to George Herbert Mead:
“The 'I' acts in response to the 'me' of accumulated experience.”
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Attributed to George Herbert Mead:
“We must be others if we are to be ourselves.”
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Attributed to George Herbert Mead:
“Society shapes the self, and the self in turn shapes society.”
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“The proximate goal of all perception is what we can get our hands upon. If we traverse the distance that separate us from that which we see or hear and find nothing for the hand to manipulate, the experience is an illusion or a hallucination. The world of perceptual reality, the world of physical things, is the world of our contacts and our manipulations, and the distance experience of the eye and the ear means first of all these physical things. Physical things are not only the meaning of what we see and hear; they are also the means we employ to accomplish our ends.”
George Herbert Mead (1926). "The Nature of Aesthetic Experience." International Journal of Ethics, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Jul., 1926), pp. 382-393; p. 382 -
“p. 187. Essay 13. "Perception and the Spatiotemporal”
There is, of course, the critical difference between the pressure of hands against each other, and that of the stone against the hand: that in the case of the pressure of the hands against each other there is the sense of effort in each hand, while in the case of the stone there is only the sense of resistance in the stone against the pressing hand. However, the resistance remains an identical con