A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.
Interpretation
Our identity is shaped by how others perceive us, leading to multiple versions of ourselves based on different relationships.
In this quote, William James suggests that a person's identity is not fixed but rather fluid and dependent on social interactions. Each individual we encounter recognizes us in a unique way, which influences how we see ourselves and how we behave, effectively creating different 'selves' tailored to each relationship or social setting. This highlights the complexity of human identity and the profound impact of social recognition on our self-conception.
In practice
In a psychology lecture discussing identity formation.
Many persons nowadays seem to think that any conclusion must be very scientific if the arguments in favor of it are derived from twitching of frogs' legs (especially if the frogs are decapitated) and that, on the other hand, any doctrine chiefly vouched for by the feelings of human beings (with heads on their shoulders) must be benighted and superstitious.
The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.
All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.
The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association
As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.
It's hard for a Jew of my generation, an American Jew, who is philo-Zionistic, not to romanticize Israel.
The break from the supposedly culturally-narrow religious bases of knowledge in favor of supposedly trans-cultural scientific bases of knowledge served as the self-justification of a particularly pernicious form of cultural imperialism.
From the depths of the West of Europe, a young child will be born of poor people, he who by his tongue will seduce a great troop; his fame will increase towards the realm of the East.
The potential beauty of human life is constantly made ugly by man's ever-recurring song of retaliation.
Night thoughts have a different color than day thoughts, a different slant, more than anything else they know all the secret paths and chinks in the armor they can take advantage of to force their way into consciousness.
We need myths that will identify the individual not with his local group but with the planet.
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