Abstract

The title of this work suggests its substance very well. The author expounds and criticizes the views of George Herbert Mead, as found in Mind, Self, and Society and The Philosophy of the Present, and Jean-Paul Sartre, as set forth in Transcendence of the Ego and Being and Nothingness. He finds that Mead’s account of the self as a social object in which reflective consciousness arises and Sartre’s emphasis upon existential spontaneity provide an instructive study in contrasts but are not irreconcilable opposites. Indeed, he appears to be striving for a Hegelian synthesis in which the two views perish and are resurrected in a higher view which includes the truth of both.