NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY,INC

Laoag City, Ilocos Norte

What Is the Self?

The self, in contemporary literature and even
Unit 2 common sense, is commonly defined by the
following characteristics:
The Self, Society and Culture - Separate means that the self is
distinct from other selves. The self is always
unique and has its own identity.
- Self-contained and independent
because in itself it can exist. Its distinctness
allows it to be self-contained with its own thoughts, characteristics, and volition.
- Consistency means that a particular self’s traits, characteristics, tendencies, and
potentialities are more or less the same.
- Unitary in that it is the center of all experiences and thoughts that run through a
certain person
- Private means that each person sorts out information, feelings and emotions, and
thought processes within the self. This whole process is never accessible to
anyone but the self.

The Self and Culture

- According to Marcel Mauss, every self has two faces:
Moi refers to a person’s sense of who he is, his body, and his basic identity,
his biological givenness.
Personne is composed of the social concepts of what it means to be who he is.
- Language is another interesting aspect of this social constructivism; it is a salient
part of culture and ultimately, has a tremendous effect in our crafting of the self.
- If a self is born into a particular society or culture, the self will have to adjust
according to its exposure.

The Self and the Development of the Social World

- More than his givenness (personality, tendencies, and propensities, among
others), one is believed to be in active participation in the shaping of the self.
- Men and women in their growth and development engage actively in the shaping
of the self.
- The unending terrain of metamorphosis of the self is mediated by language.

Mead and Vygotsky

- For Mead and Vygotsky, the way that human persons develop is with the use of
language acquisition and interaction with others.
- Both Vygotsky and Mead treat the human mind as something that is made,
constituted through language as experienced in the external world and as
encountered in dialogs with others.

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 NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY,INC
Laoag City, Ilocos Norte

Self in Families
- The kind of family that we are born in, the resources available to us (human,
spiritual, economic), and the kind of development that we will have will certainly
affect us.
- Human beings are born virtually helpless and the dependency period of a human
baby to its parents for nurturing is relatively longer than most other animals.
- In trying to achieve the goal of becoming a fully realized human, a child enters a
system of relationships, most important of which is the family.
- Human persons learn the ways of living and therefore their selfhood by being in a
family. It is what a family initiates a person to become that serves as the basis for
this person’s progress.

Gender and the Self

- Gender is one of those loci of the self that is subject to alteration, change, and
development.
- The sense of self that is being taught makes sure that an individual fits in a
particular environment, is dangerous and detrimental in the goal of truly finding
one’s self, self-determination, and growth of the self.
- It is important to give one the leeway to find, express, and live his identity.
- Gender has to be personally discovered and asserted and not dictated by culture
and the society.

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 NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY,INC
Laoag City, Ilocos Norte

Explain MIND, SELF AND SOCIETY FROM THE STANDPOINT OF A

SOCIAL BEHAVIORIST
The process out of which the self arises is a social process which
implies interaction of individuals in the group, implies the preexistence of the group. It
implies also certain co-operative activities in which the different members of the group are
involved. It implies, further, that out of this process there may in turn develop a more
elaborate organization than that out of which the self has arisen, and that the selves may be
the organs, the essential parts at least, of this more elaborate social organization within which
these selves arise and exist. Thus, there is a social process out of which selves arise and
within which further differentiation, further evolution, further organization, take place.

It has been the tendency of psychology to deal with the self as a more or less isolated and
independent element, a sort of entity that could conceivably exist by itself. It is possible that
there might be a single self in the universe if we start off by identifying the self with a certain
feelingconsciousness. If we speak of this feeling as objective, then we can think of that self as
existing by itself. We can think of a separate physical body existing by itself, we can assume
that it has these feelings or conscious states in question, and so we can set up that sort of a
self in thought as existing simply by itself.

Self-consciousness, on the other hand, is definitely organized about the social individual, and
that, as we have seen, is not simply because one is in a social group and affected by others
and affects them, but because his own experience as a self is one which he takes over from
his action upon others. He becomes a self in so far as he can take the attitude of another and
act toward himself as others act. It is the social process of influencing others in a social act
and then taking the attitude of theothers aroused by the stimulus, and then reacting in turn to
this response, which constitutes a self.

Our bodies are parts of our environment; and it is possible for the individual to experience
and be conscious of his body, and of bodily sensations, without being conscious or aware of
himself -without, in other words, taking the attitude of the other toward himself. According to
the social theory of consciousness, what we mean by consciousness is that peculiar character
and aspect of the environment of individual human experience which is due to human
society, a society of other individual selves who take the attitude of the other toward
themselves. The physiological conception or theory of consciousness is by itself inadequate;
it requires supplementation from the socio-psychological point of view. The taking or feeling
of the attitude of the other toward yourself is what constitutes self-consciousness, and not
mere organic sensations of which the individual is aware and which he experiences. Until the
rise of his self-consciousness in the process of social experience, the individual experiences
his body-its feelings and sensations-merely as an immediate part of his environment, not as
his own, not in terms of self-consciousness. The self and self-consciousness have first to
arise, and then these experiences can be identified peculiarly with the self, or appropriated by
the self; to enter, so to speak, into this heritage of experience, the self has first to develop
within the social process in which this heritage is involved.

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 NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY,INC
Laoag City, Ilocos Norte

We may now explicitly raise the question as to the nature of the "I" which is aware of the
social "me."If one determines what his position is in society and feels himself as having a
certain function and privilege, these are all defined with reference to an "I," but the "I" is not
a "me" and cannot become a "me." We may have a better self and a worse self, but that again
is not the "I" as over against the "me," because they are both selves. We approve of one and
disapprove of the other, but when we bring up one or the other they are there for such
approval as "me's." The "I" does not get into the limelight; we talk to ourselves, but do not
see ourselves. The "I" reacts to the self which arises through the taking of the attitudes of
others. Through taking those attitudes we have introduced the "me" and we react to it as an
"I."

The simplest way of handling the problem would be in terms of memory. I talk to myself, and
I remember what I said and perhaps the emotional content that went with it. The "I" of this
moment is present in the "me" of the next moment. There again I cannot turn around quick
enough to catch myself. I become a "me" in so far as I remember what I said. The "I" can be
given, however, this functional relationship. It is because of the "I" that we say that we are
never fully aware of what we are, that we surprise ourselves by our own action. It is as we act
that we are aware of ourselves. It is in memory that the "I" is constantly present in
experience. We can go back directly a few moments in our experience, and then we are
dependent upon memory images for the rest. So that the "I" in memory is there as the
spokesman of the self of the second, or minute, or day ago. As given, it is a "me," but it is a
"me" which was the "I" at the earlier time. If you ask, then, where directly in your own
experience the "I" comes in, the answer is that it comes in as a historical figure. It is what you
were a second ago that is the "I" of the "me." It is another "me" that has to take that rôle. You
cannot get the immediate response of the "I" in the process. The "I" is in a certain sense that
with which we do identify ourselves. The getting of it into experience constitutes one of the
problems of most of our conscious experience; it is not directly given in experience.

The "I" is the response of the organism to the attitudes of the others;,, the "me" is the
organized set of attitudes of others which one himself assumes. The attitudes of the others
constitute the organized "me," and then one reacts toward that as an "I."

If one meets a person on the street whom he fails to recognize, one's reaction toward him is
that toward any other who is a member of the same community. He is the other, the
organized, generalized other, if you like. One takes his attitude over against one's self. If he
turns in one direction one is to go in another direction. One has his response as an attitude
within himself. It is having that attitude within himself that makes it possible for one to be a
self. That involves something beyond the mere turning to the right, as we say, instinctively,
without self-consciousness. To have self-consciousness one must have the attitude of the
other in one's own organism as controlling the thing that he is going to do. What appears in
the immediate experience of one's self in taking that attitude is what we term the "me." It is
that self which is able to maintain itself in the community, that is recognized in the
community in so far as it recognizes the others. Such is the phase of the self which I have
referred to as that of the "me."

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 NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY,INC
Laoag City, Ilocos Norte

Over against the "me" is the "I." The individual not only has rights, but he has duties; he is
not only a citizen, a member of the community, but he is one who reacts to this community
and in his reaction to it, as we have seen in the conversation of gestures, changes it. The "I" is
the response of the individual to the attitude of the community as this appears in his own
experience. His response to that organized attitude in turn changes it. As we have pointed out,
this is a change which is not present in his own experience until after it takes place. The "I"
appears in our experience in memory. It is only after we have acted that we know what we
have done; it is only after we have spoken that we know what we have said.

Both aspects of the "I" and "me" are essential to the self in its full expression. One must take
the attitude of the others in a group in order to belong to a community; he has to employ that
outer social world taken within himself in order to carry on thought. It is through his
relationship to others in that community, because of the rational social processes that obtain
in that community, that he has being as a citizen. On the other hand, the individual is
constantly reacting to the social attitudes, and changing in this cooperative process the very
community to which he belongs. Those changes may be humble and trivial ones. One may
not have anything to say, although he takes a long time to say it. And yet a certain amount of
adjustment and readjustment takes place. We speak of a person as a conventional individual;
his ideas are exactly the same as those of his neighbors; he is hardly more than a "me" under
the circumstances; his adjustments are only the slight adjustments that take place, as we say,
unconsciously. Over against that there is the person who has a definite personality, who
replies to the organized attitude in a way which makes a significant difference. With such a
person it is the "I" that is the more important phase of the experience. Those two constantly
appearing phases are the important phases in the self.

Human society as we know it could not exist without minds and selves, since all its most
characteristic features presuppose the possession of minds and selves by its individual
members; but its individual members would not possess minds and selves if these had not
arisen within or emerged out of the human social process in its lower stages of development-
those stages at which it was merely a resultant of, and wholly dependent upon, the
physiological differentiations and demands of the individual organisms implicated in it. There
must have been such lower stages of the human social process, not only for physiological
reasons, but also (if our social theory of the origin and nature of minds and selves is correct)
because minds and selves, consciousness and intelligence, could not otherwise have emerged;
because, that is, some sort of an ongoing social process in which human beings were
implicated must have been there in advance of the existence of minds and selves in human
beings, in order to make possible the development, by human beings, of minds and selves
within or in terms of that process.

In socio-physiological way that the human individual becomes conscious of himself he also
becomes conscious of other individuals; and his consciousness both of himself and of other
individuals is equally important for his own self-development and for the development of the
organized society or social group to which he belongs.

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