George Herbert Mead

George Herbert Mead is cited for a social account of the Self’s emergence: people form a sense of themselves by imagining how they appear to others and internalizing others’ perspectives. The book treats this account as an explanation of personhood and self-image, but draws a boundary around what it can explain: the formation of the subject itself remains distinct.

Social Formation of the Self

In a brief account of the evolutionary emergence of self-consciousness, Mead’s theory is presented as locating the formation of the Self in social interaction. A person imagines how they appear to another and takes that other’s view into themselves. Conscience exemplifies this process: in silent inner speech, a person rehearses possible reproaches that others might direct at their actions. The Self thus develops through an imagined relation to other people, rather than in isolation.

Personhood and the Subject

The passage distinguishes the socially formed Self from the subject. Dieter Henrich’s objection, as reported there, is that the dialectic of self-reflection as internalized social interaction accounts for personhood: the features that make up a person’s self-image and their imaginary or symbolic identifications. It does not account for the emergence of the subject itself. Mead’s role in the discussion is therefore both substantial and delimited: his account explains how a socially mediated self-image takes shape, while the book reserves the question of the subject for a different theoretical problem.