HOLY ANGEL UNIVERSITY

Angeles City
SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

Subject: UNDERSTANDING THE SELF

Instructor: Carlo M. Puno, MAGC, RGC
Date: Monday-Wednesday-Friday

Subject Outline

Chapter 1: The Self from Various Perspectives

Lesson 1: Philosophical Perspective on the Self

Lesson 2: The Self from the sociological Perspective
Lesson 3: The Self from the Anthropological Perspective
Lesson 4: The Self from the Psychological Perspective
Lesson 5: The Self in Western and Eastern Thoughts

Chapter 2: Unpacking the Self

Lesson 6: Physical Aspect of Self

Lesson 7: Sexual Aspect of Self
Lesson 8: Material Aspect of Self
Lesson 9: Spiritual Aspect of Self
Lesson 10: Political Aspect of Self
Lesson 11: Digital Aspect of Self

Chapter 3: Managing and Caring of the Self

Lesson 12: Becoming a Better Student

Lesson 13: Setting Goal for success
Lesson 14: Taking Charge of One’s Health

Reference: Corpuz, R.M., Estoque, R.S. & Tabotabo, C.V. (2019). Understanding the Self. C & E Pub. Inc.
 HOLY ANGEL UNIVERSITY
Angeles City
SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

Subject: UNDERSTANDING THE SELF

Instructor: Carlo M. Puno, MAGC, RGC
Date: Monday-Wednesday-Friday

Chapter 1: The Self from Various Perspectives

- Who am I? Usual question being ask by philosophy class which requires a lot of contemplation
to arrive in a particular perception about the self
- Philosophically speaking, one may point at religion in defining a human being as composed of
body and soul
- Scientifically, one may attempt to break down the body into parts, composed of heart, brain,
arms, legs and face.

LESSON 1: PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE SELF

- This lesson presents various philosophers offering multiple perspectives on just about any topic
including the self.
- Philosophically, discussion of the self is a basic search for meaning and purpose of life.
- Determination, rationalization, and identification of the self set the direction from which an
individual travels to fulfill his or her purpose in life

At the end of the lesson, student should be able to:

1. compare and contrast the philosophical perspective on the self
2. examine yourself against the different philosophical views on the self;
3. distinguish how the philosophical perspective on the self are applied; and
4. create own theory of the self

SOCRATES (Know thy self)

- No historical document proves that Socrates really existed. We only know him because of his
illustrious students (Plato and Aristotle)
- He left no know writings, but highly regarded student, Plato who wrote extensively about him.
- Socrates remind us to “know theyself”, a translation of an ancient Greek aphorism “gnothi
seauton”.
- Socrates posited that if a person knows who he or she is, all basic issues and difficulties in life
will vanish and everything will be clearer and simpler
- The technique of asking basic questions such as “who am I”, “what is the purpose of my life”,
“what am I doing here”, “what is justice”, all are predicted on the fact that humans must be able
to define these simple things so as to move forward and act accordingly based on their
definition of the self.
- Self-Acknowledge to Socrates, means knowing one’s degree of understanding about the world
and knowing one’s capabilities and potentials. It is only through self-knowledge that one’s self
emerges. Therefore, self is achieved and not just discovered, something to work on and not a
product of a mere realization
- Answers will always be subjective and there is no right or wrong answer to the questions
posited by Socrates
- Socrates is a Dualist

Reference: Corpuz, R.M., Estoque, R.S. & Tabotabo, C.V. (2019). Understanding the Self. C & E Pub. Inc.
 HOLY ANGEL UNIVERSITY
Angeles City
SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
- He believed that man has soul, which is divine, immortal, intelligible, uniform, indissoluble, and
ever self-consistent and invariable.
- He argued that the ruler of the body is the soul. For him, soul pre-existed the body, and soul is
what makes the body alive. If the soul gives life to the body, it makes the body and the soul
dependent on each other.
- However, their striking difference shows that they are two different substances united in the
body as the soul gives life to it.

PLATO (The self is an immortal soul)

- Student of Socrates and a teacher of Aristotle
- Plato’s idealism insisted that empirical reality we experience in the experiential world is
fundamentally unreal and is only a shadow or a mere appearance while ultimate reality is real
as it is external and constitutes abstract universal essences of things (the dog in this world is
unreal, but the dog essence is real
- All things that exist in the physical world are therefore unreal as they are all concrete objects
while the universal essences are real as they are immaterial blueprints of objects in the physical
world are therefore unreal as they are all concrete objects while the universal essences are real
as they are immaterial blueprints of objects in the physical world
- Plato added that ideas are objects of the intellect known by reason alone and are objective
realities that exist in a world of their own.
- For instance, man in this world is an illusion; the idea of a man is the real man.
- In terms of the concept of the self, Plato was one of the first philosophers who believed in an
enduring self that is represented by the soul
- The soul is eternal and constitutes the enduring self, because even after death, the soul is
continues to exist.

ST. AGUSTINE (The self has an immortal soul)

- His reflection on the relations between time and memory greatly influenced many fundamental
doctrines of psychology
- Time is something that people measure within their own memory.
- Time is not a feature or property of the world, but a property of the mind
- The memory of the past is significant in anticipation of the future and presence of the present.
- Introspection- awareness of one’s own mental processes
- He advanced the idea that past and future could be seen as equivalent entities that exist.
However, time past and time future are not real in themselves but hey only real as long as they
exist in the mind or consciousness.
- The existence of past and future for St. Augustine is only possible through memory and
expectations
- Doctrines brought by introspection confirm the superiority of humans over other organisms
since humans have self-consciousness

RENE DESCARTES (I think therefore I am)

- He is a philosopher and a mathematician
- Best known for his dictum “cogito ergo sum or I think, therefore I am”
- The existence of anything that you register from your senses can be doubted
- One can always doubt about the certainty of things but the very fact that one doubts is
something that cannot be doubted, This is what “I think , therefore I am”

Reference: Corpuz, R.M., Estoque, R.S. & Tabotabo, C.V. (2019). Understanding the Self. C & E Pub. Inc.
 HOLY ANGEL UNIVERSITY
Angeles City
SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
- Descartes believed that the self is “a thinking thing or substances whose whole essence or
nature is merely thinking”.
- The self is real and not just illusion
- He also reassured that the self is different from the body. Hence, self and body exist but differ in
existence and reality.
- The self for Descartes is nothing else but a mind-body dichotomy. Thought (mind) always
precedes action (body)
- Everything starts with a thought. Human thinks first about doing something and then do it.
(when one thinks that he or she will have a very busy week, then he or she will plan what to do
from Monday to Sunday)
- It is the thought that sets direction to human actions but humans are always free to choose
- Humans are self-aware and being such proves their own place in the universe.
- Humans create their own reality and they are the master of their own universe
- To acknowledge the writings of Descartes, Filipino have a unique term “diskarte”, a derivative of
the surname of Descartes, in which denotes finding a way to making things possible

JOHN LOCKE (The self is consciousness)

- His main philosophy about personal identity or the self is founded on consciousness or memory
- For him, consciousness is the perception of what passes in a Man’s own mind
- Locke rejected the idea that brain has something to do with consciousness as the brain, as well,
as the body may change, while the consciousness remains the same.
- Personal identity is not in the brain but in one’s consciousness
- He was the one who coined the notion “tabula rasa” or blank slate, and the content is provided
by one’s experiences over time

DAVID HUME (There is no self)

- There is no self as a mental entity for “what we call a mind is nothing but a heap or collection of
different perceptions.
- The self is a bundle of perceptions (object of the mind) of interrelated events
- Hume’s materialism views the soul as a product of the imagination
- Two distinct entities Impressions and ideas
- Impressions-Vivid perception and are strong and lively. (based on direct experience)
- Ideas-Thoughts and images from impressions.
- Hume stressed that there is no stable thing called self, for the self is nothing but a complex set
of successive impressions or perceptions. If you are looking for a self, you cannot find it; the only
thing that you can discover is a set of individual impressions like happiness or sadness, hotness
or coldness, hunger or fullness, hate or love.
- He reduced personality and cognition to a machine that may be activated or deactivated. Death,
according to Hume, obliterates (destroy/eliminates) the perception one has
- He rejected the idea that personal identity is reflected by the association of the self with an
enduring body (X is the same person as Y). One cannot point to the physical traits of the body. X
and Y are the same person if they share the same mind.

IMMANUEL KANT (We construct the self)

- Consciousness is formed by one’s inner and outer sense.
- The inner sense is comprised of one’s psychological state and intellect
- The outer sense consists of one’s senses and the physical world

Reference: Corpuz, R.M., Estoque, R.S. & Tabotabo, C.V. (2019). Understanding the Self. C & E Pub. Inc.
 HOLY ANGEL UNIVERSITY
Angeles City
SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
- Consciousness of oneself and of one’s psychological state (or inner sense) was referred to by
Kant as empirical self-consciousness while consciousness of oneself and of one’s state via acts
of apperception is called transcendental apperception
- The source of empirical self-consciousness is the inner self
- All representational states are in the inner sense such as moods, feelings, and sensations
including pleasure and pain.
- Apperception is the faculty that allows for application of concepts.
- Consciousness is the central feature of the mind. Mind should perform both the unity of
consciousness and the unity of apperception
- Consciousness makes the world intelligible
- It is the self that organizes sensations and thoughts into a picture that makes sense to a person
- As opposed to Hume, Kant stressed the self is something real, yet is neither an appearance nor a
thing in itself since it belongs to a different metaphysical class
- He believes in the existence of God and soul.
- He emphasized that it is only through experience that humans can acquire knowledge; however,
there are questions that humans have no answer to in the aspect of metaphysics

SIGMUND FREUD
- For him, self is multi-layered. It is composed of three structures of the human mind, id, ego and
superego
- ID exist since birth “instincts” and a storeroom for wishes and obsessions related to sexual and
aggressive desires. It operates on the hedonistic or pleasure principle
- It ignores reality, harmony, common sense and reason.
- It doesn’t recognize good or evil, laws or rules, morality or beliefs
- ID is driven by the so called “libido” or what we call sexual energy
- EGO operates to the reality principle.
- This structure maintains equilibrium between the demands of the ID and SUPEREGO
- Developed by individual personal experiences and adheres to the principles of reason and logic
- SUPEREGO operates to the moral principle
- it is the reservoir of moral standards. It ensures compliance with the norms, values and
standards prescribed by society.
- It is developed by means of socialization at home, school, church, etc.
- Superego has two system: conscience and the ideal self.
- Conscience can sanction the ego through the feeling of guilt
- The ideal self, an imaginary picture of one’s self, is rewarded by the superego when one
conforms to the standards imposed by society.
- The superego is dominant, a law-abiding, morally upright, god-fearing, and socially acceptable
individual appears

GILBERT RYLE
- He maintained that the mind is not separate from the body
- Mind consist of dispositions of people based on what they know, what they feel, what they
want, and so on.
- Individuals learn that they have their own minds because they behave in certain ways
- He supported the behavioristic psychology. His theory is called logical behaviorism or analytical
behaviorism- a theory of mind which states that mental concepts can be understood through
observable events

Reference: Corpuz, R.M., Estoque, R.S. & Tabotabo, C.V. (2019). Understanding the Self. C & E Pub. Inc.
 HOLY ANGEL UNIVERSITY
Angeles City
SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
- In his work concept mind, he described Descartes’ mind-body dualism as “ghost in the
machine”.
- The property of a person is better understood as adjectives modifying body, than as noun
(objects) parallel to it. (Ex. Kindness, is not a thing that exist apart from and parallel to the body,
but rather a collection of properties a body has. Properties include generosity, humble,
courteous, loyal, and honest. Someone who never exhibited any of these traits would not be
called kind).
- The only proof of mind’s operation is visible and evident in activities like singing, running,
walking, and the like.
- Knowing and believing are just dispositions but these influence people’s actions
- The disposition to know, believe, feel, and act is called the mind
- Ryle’s concept of the self is a combination of the Mind and the Body
- The self for Ryle is taken as whole with the combination of the body and the mind
- The concept of “I act, therefore I am” was posited by him
- He said that, the mind is not the seat of self but the behavior (opposed to Descartes’ immaterial
mind in a material body)
- The self is the way people behave

PAUL CHURCHLAND AND PATRICIA CHURCHLAND

- They introduced the Eliminative Materialism- a radical claim that ordinary, common sense
understanding of the mind is deeply wrong and that some or all of the mental states posited by
common sense do not actually exist.
- For them, it is false to claim that folk psychology, or common sense psychology, is the capacity
to explain mental states of people
- Our beliefs and attitudes are supported by our feelings, which include mental states like joy and
sorrow, or anxiety and relief.
- They stated in their book entitled “Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain” that, to understand the
self, one must study the brain, not just the mind

MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY
- A phenomenological philosopher
- He distinguished the body in two types:
o Subjective Body- as lived and experienced
o Objective Body- as observed and scientifically investigated
- He sees human beings neither as disembodied minds (existing without body) nor as complex
machines, but as living creatures whose subjectivity (consciousness) is actualized in the forms of
their physical involvement with the world.
- Ponty says that the mind and body are so intertwined that they cannot be separated from one
another
- One cannot find any experience that is not an embodied (alive) experience. All experiences are
embodied
- For him, consciousness cannot simply be immaterial but must be embodied
- Consciousness is both perceiving and engaging
- Man’s living body, thoughts, emotions and experiences are all one

Reference: Corpuz, R.M., Estoque, R.S. & Tabotabo, C.V. (2019). Understanding the Self. C & E Pub. Inc.