Self and others

This chapter reviews James’s influential views on the human self and considers his thoughts about others, including both remarkably democratic thoughts on the dignity of all persons and historically biased comments related to ethnicity, class, and gender. Beginning with a statement about the centrality of the self to James’s entire psychology, the chapter discusses his analysis of the self into an empirical “Me” (the self as known) and a pure ego or “I” (the self as knower). The discussion of the “Me” focuses on the material, social, and so-called spiritual (psychological) aspects of the experienced self, while the discussion of the “I” considers different ways in which the ultimate nature of the knower – the conscious self – can be understood. The chapter also shows how his treatment of the “Me” underscores the embodied, socialized, and experiential dimensions of the self, including the grounding of self-identity in bodily feelings; and it explains how, in rejecting the theory of the soul, associationist theory, and transcendental theory as adequate accounts of the nature of the “I,” James settled for the minimalist assumption that “the thought” itself, in its capacity to appropriate prior thoughts of the self, is “the thinker.”