Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: the influence of place
- 1 The obscurity of place
- 2 The structure of spatiality
- 3 Holism, content and self
- 4 Unity, locality and agency
- 5 Agency and objectivity
- 6 Self and the space of others
- 7 The unity and complexity of place
- 8 Place, past and person
- Conclusion: the place of philosophy
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Self and the space of others
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: the influence of place
- 1 The obscurity of place
- 2 The structure of spatiality
- 3 Holism, content and self
- 4 Unity, locality and agency
- 5 Agency and objectivity
- 6 Self and the space of others
- 7 The unity and complexity of place
- 8 Place, past and person
- Conclusion: the place of philosophy
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
When a self does appear it always involves an experience of another; there could not be an experience of a self simply by itself … When a self does appear in experience it appears over against the other, and we have been delineating the condition under which this other does appear in the experience of the human animal, namely in the presence of that sort of stimulation in the cooperative activity which arouses in the individual himself the same response it arouses in the other.
George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self and SocietyThe grasp of objectivity requires a grasp of spatiality as that within which objects can be located, related and distinguished both from one another and from oneself as the cogniser of those objects. Similarly, the grasp of other persons also requires a grasp of the externality of space. The idea of a connection between the subjectivity of others and spatiality is something explicitly recognised by Henri Bergson. As Bergson writes, ‘the intuition of a homogenous space is already a step towards social life … probably animals do not picture to themselves, besides their sensations, as we do, an external world quite distinct from themselves, which is the common property of all conscious beings. Our tendency to form a clear picture of this externality of things and the homogeneity of their medium is the same as the impulse which leads us to live in common and to speak.’
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Place and ExperienceA Philosophical Topography, pp. 138 - 156Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999