For Mead, our actions are never isolated incidents nor are they explicable as such. Sounding like Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty, but emphasizing the neural basis of the act, he writes in Mind, Self, and Society (p. 11):
If one approaches a distant object he approaches it with reference to what he is going to do when he arrives there. If one is approaching a hammer he is muscularly all ready to seize the handle of the hammer. The later stages of the act are present in the early stages–not simply in the sense that they are all ready to go off, but in the sense that they serve to control the process itself. They determine how we are going to approach the object, and the steps in our early manipulation of it. We can recognize, then, that the intervention of certain groups of cells in the central nervous system can already initiate in advance the later stages of the act. The act as a whole can be there determining the process.
Our bodies are not just reactive sensors; they possess ‘attitudes’ (a term Mead gets from James). These attitudes are neither housed in the CNS, or exclusively rooted in any bodily location, but exist somewhere between the doer and the deed. Both action and attitude are environmental and social events, and can only be explained at the level of the individual by first going through the social/environmental.
