Abstract
The essay seeks to address the problem of the social formation of the self. Divided in four parts, in the first one, it reconstructs aspects of Mead’s interactionist theory of education, emphasizing its social, intersubjective dimension. In the second part, it recounts the short story “Negrinha”, by Monteiro Lobato, to show, against the grain, how human action can easily fall into unrestricted obedience and how it destructively marks the ways of life. In the third part, the essay confronts Monteiro Lobato’s short story with aspects of Mead’s theory of action, evidencing the constitutive tension of human formation as self-formation. Finally, it reconstructs a trait of formation as self-formation, inherited from Modernity by Mead, helping it place cooperative sympathy as the ethical core of self-formation. The essay concludes that intersubjective perspectives are more appropriate, in plural social contexts, to rid humans of different forms of servitude.
Keywords
self; education; self-formation; freedom; servitude