Eden Joy Pastor Alata » Bernardo Nicolas Caslib, Jr. Janice Patria Javier Serafica - R. A. Pawilen gs ss Hers = goring toliaa Getter tourerContents Preface .. velopmental Lesson 1: The Self from Various Philosophical Perspective: Lesson 2: The Self, Society, and Culture Lesson 3: The Self as Cognitive Construct ... 35 Lesson 4: The Self in Western and Eastern Thoughts... Lesson 1; The Physical and Sexual Self... Lesson 2: To Buy or Not to Buy? That Is the Questiont... Lesson 3: Supernaturals: Believe It or Not!. - 87 Lesson 4: The Political Self and Being Filipino .. Lesson 5: Who Am | in the Cyberworld? (Digital Self) ... 100 oe Lesson 1: 2 113 Lesson 2: Do Not Just Dream, Make It Happen : ee Lesson 3: Less Stress, More Care .. E . 145 Photo Credits .. 163 Index 169 Se Vie SS bePreface Understanding the Self is a fundamental course in the General Education Curriculum for tertiary education. It is designed to help the students understand the nature of identity including factors that influence and shape personal identity. Today, issues of self and identity are very critical to adolescents. This book was conceptualized to aid undergraduate students develop a more critical and reflective attitude in exploring the issues and concerns of the self and identity for a better and proper way of understanding one’s self. It emphasizes the integration of personal daily experiences of the students with their learning experiences inside the classroom to encourage them to improve themselves for a better quality of life. This book has three major parts. The first chapter enables the students fo understand the construct of the self from various disciplinal perspectives: philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and psychology including the more traditional division between the East and the West. The second chapter deals with some of the various aspects that make up the a self like the biological self, the material self, the spiritual self, the political self, and the digital self. The third and final chapter provides a discussion on some issues ‘or concern for young students these’ days, which are learning, goal setting, and stress. This book provides opportunities for students to gain new skills for practical application of the concepts learned that aim to help them become better and significant individuals of our society. Propelled by a deep sense of mission to empower the Filipino youth, the authors embarked on writing this book as a humble contribution in building a great nation. The AuthorsCHAPTER | DEFINING THE SELF: PERSONAL AND DEVELOPMENTAL PERSPECTIVES ON SELF AND IDENTITY Lesson 1: The Self from Various Philosophical Perspectives Lesson Objectives At the end of this lesson, you should be able to: 1. explain why it is essential to understand the self; 2. describe and discuss the different notions of the self from the points- of-view of the various philosophers across time and place; 3. compare and contrast how the self has been represented in different philosophical schools; and 4. examine one’s self against the different views of self that were discussed in class. INTRODUCTION Before we even had to be in any formal institution of learning, among the many things that we were first taught as kids is to articulate and write our names. Growing up, we were told to refer back to this name when talking about ourselves. Our parents painstakingly thought about our names. Should we be named after a famous celebrity, a respected politician or historical personality, or even a saint? Were you named after one? Our names represent who we are. It has not been a custom to just randomly pick a combination of letters and number (or even punctuation marks) like zhjk756!! to denote our being. Human beings attach names that are meaningful to birthed progenies because names are supposed to designate us in the world. Thus, some people get baptized with names such as “precious,” “beauty,” or “lovely.” Likewise, when our parents call our names, we were taught to respond to them because our names represent who we are. ‘As a student, we are told to always write our names on our papers, projects, or any output for that matter. Our names signify us. Death cannot even stop this bond between the person and her name. Names are inscribed even into one’s gravestone.Aname is not the person itself no matter how intimately bound it is with the bearer. It is only a signifier. A person who was named after a saint most probab™ will not become an actual saint. He may not even turn out to be saintly! The self thought to be something else than the name. The self is something that a persor perennially molds, shapes, and develops. The self is not a static thing that one & simply born with like a mole on one's face or is just assigned by one's parents jus like a name. Everyone is tasked to discover one’s self. Have you truly discoveres yours? ACTIVITY Do You Truly Know Yourself? Answer the following questions about your self as fully and precisely as you can. 1. How would you characterize your self? 2. What makes you stand out from the rest? What makes your se® special? 3. How has your self transformed itself? 4. Howis your self connected to your body?5. Howis your self related to other selves? 6. What will happen to your self after you die? ANALYSIS Were you able to answer the questions above with ease? Why? Which questions did you find easiest to answer? Which ones are difficult? Why? Questions Easy or difficult to answer? Can one truly know the self? Do you want to know about self? ABSTRACTION The history of philosophy is replete with men and women who inquired into the fundamental nature of the self. Along with the question of the primary substratum that defines the multiplicity of things in the world, the inquiry on the self has preoccupied the earliest thinkers in the history of philosophy: the Greeks. The Greeks were the ones who seriously questioned myths and moved away from them in attempting to understand reality and respond to perennial questions ofcuriosity, including the question of the self. The different perspectives and views on the self can be best seen and understood by revisiting its prime movers ane identify the most important conjectures made by philosophers from the anciew times to the contemporary period. Socrates and Plato Prior the Socrates, the Greet thinkers, sometimes collectively called the Pre-Socratics to denote that some of them preceded Socrates while others existes around Socrates's time as well, preoccupied theinselves with the question of the primary substratum, arché that explains the multiplicity of things in the world. These men like Thales. Pythagoras, Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Empedocles, to name a few, were concerned with explaining what the world is really made up of, why the world is so, and what explains the changes that they observed around them. Tired of simply conceding to mythological accounts propounded by poet-theologians like Homer and Hesiod. these men endeavored to finally locate an explanation about the nature of change. the seeming permanence despite change, and the unity of the world amidst its diversity. onto Omak neegenmenns tare! After a series of thinkers from all across the ancient Greek world who were. disturbed by the same issue, a man came out to question something else. This man was Socrates. Unlike the Pre-Socratics, Socrates was more concerned with another subject, the problem of the self. He was the first philosopher who ever engaged in a systematic questioning about the self. To Socrates, and this has become his life-long mission, the true task of the philosopher is to know oneself. Plato claimed in his dialogs that Socrates affirmed that the unexamined life is not worth living. During his trial for allegedly corrupting the minds of the youth and for impiety, Socrates declared without regret that his being indicted was brought about by his going around Athens engaging men, young and old, to question their presuppositions about themselves and about the world, particularly about who they are (Plato 2012). Socrates took it upon himself to serve as 2 “gadfly” that disturbed Athenian men from their slumber and shook them off in order to reach the truth and wisdom. Most men, in his reckoning, were really not jfully aware of who they were and the virtues that they were supposed to attain in order to preserve their souls for the afterlife. Socrates thought that this is the worst that can happen to anyone: to live but die inside. For Socrates, every man is composed of body and soul. This means that every human person is dualistic, that is, he is composed of two important aspects of his personhood. For Socrates, this means all individuals have an imperfect, impermanent aspect to him, and the body, while maintaining that there is also a soul that is perfect and permanent. Plato, Socrates’s student, basically took off from his master and supported the idea that manis a dual nature of body and soul. In addition to what Socrates earlier espoused, Plato added that there are three components of the soul: the rational soul, the spirited soul, and the appetitive soul. In his magnum opus, “The Republic” (Plato 2000), Plato emphasizes that justice in the human person can only be attained if the three parts of the soul are working harmoniously with one another. The rational soul forged by reason and intellect has to govern the affairs of the human person, the spirited part which is in charge of emotions should be kept at bay, and the appetitive soul in charge of base desires like eating, drinking, sleeping, and having sex are controlled as well. When this ideal state is attained, then the human person's soul becomes just and virtuous. Roprasi(Pone Augustine and Thomas Aquinas Augustine's view of the human person reflects the entire spirit of the medieval world when it comes to man. Following the ancient view of Plato and infusing it with the newfound doctrine of Christianity, Augustine agreed that man is of a bifurcated nature. An aspect of man dwells in the world and is imperfect and continuously yearns to be with the Divine and the other is capable of reaching immortality. The body is bound to die on earth and the soul is to anticipate living eternally in a realmof spiritual bliss in communion with God. This is because the body can only thrive in the imperfect, physical reality that is the world, whereas the soul can also stey after death in an eternal realm with the all-transcendent God. The goal of every human person is to attain this communion and bliss with the Divine by living his on earth in virtue. Thomas Aquinas, the most eminent thirteenth century scholar and stalwart of the medieval philosophy $ appended something to this Christian view. Adapting som: F ideas from Aristotle, Aquinas said that indeed, man is "composed of two parts: matter and form. Matter, or Ayle in Greek, refers to the “common stuff that makes up everything in the universe.” Man’s body is part of this matter. Form on ~ the other hand, or morphe in Greek refers to the “essence of a substance or thing.” It is what makes it what it is. In the “case of the human person, the body of the human person is something that he shares even with animals. The cells in man’s body are more or less akin to the cells of any other living, organic being in the world, However, what makes a human person a human person and not a dog, or a tiger is his soul, his essence. To Aquinas, just as in Aristotle, the soul is what animates the body; it is what makes us humans. Descartes Rene Descartes, Father of Modern Philosophy, conceived of the human person as having a body and a mind. In his famous treatise, The Meditations of First Philosophy, he claims that there is so much that we should doubt. In fact, he says that since much of what we think and believe are not infallible, they may turn out to be false. One should only believe that since which can pass the test of doubt (Descartes 2008). If something is so clear and lucid as not to be even doubted, then that is the only time when one should actually buy a proposition. In the end, Descartes thought that the only thing that one cannot doubt is the existence of the self, for even if one doubts oneself, that only proves that there is a doubting self, a thing that thinks and therefore, that cannot be doubted. Thus, his famous, cogito ergo sum, “I think therefore, | am.” The fact that ‘one thinks should lead one to conclude without a trace of doubt that he exists. The 6 Understanding the Selfself then for Descartes is also a combination of two distinct entities, the cogito, the thing that thinks, which is the mind, and the extenza or extension of the mind, which is the body. In Descartes’s view, the body is nothing else but a machine that is attached to the mind. The human person has it but it is not what makes man a man. If at all, that is the mind. Descartes says, “But what then, am 1? A thinking thing. It has been said. But what is a thinking thing? It is a thing that doubts, understands (conceives), affirms, denies, wills, refuses; that imagines also, and perceives” (Descartes 2008). Hume David Hume, a Scottish philosopher, has a very unique way of looking at man. As an empiricist who believes that one can know only what comes from the senses and experiences, Hume argues that the self is nothing like what his predecessors thought of it. The self is not an entity over and beyond the physical body. One can rightly see here the empiricism that runs through his veins. Empiricism is the school of thought that espouses the idea that knowledge can only be possible if it is sensed and experienced. Men can only attain knowledge by experiencing. For example, Jack knows that Jill is another human person not because he has seen her soul. He knows she is just like him because he sees her, hears her, and touches her. To David Hume, the self is nothing else but a bundle of impressions. What are impressions? For David Hume, if one tries to examine his experiences, he finds that they can all be categorized into two: impressions and ideas. Impressions are the basic objects of our experience or sensation. They therefore form the core of our thoughts. When one touches an ice cube, the cold sensation is an impression. Impressions therefore are vivid because they are products of our direct experience with the world. Ideas, on the other hand, are copies of impressions. Because of this, they are not as lively and vivid as our impressions. When one imagines the feeling of being in love for the first time, that still is an idea. What is the self then? Self, according to Hume, is simply “a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.” (Hume and Steinberg 1992). Men simply want to believe that there is a unified, coherent self, a soul or mind justlike what the previous philosophers thought. In reality, what one thinks is a unified self is simply 4 combination of all experiences with a particular person. Kant Thinking of the “self as a mere combination of impressions was problematic for Immanuel Kant, Kant recognizes the veracity of Hume's account that everything starts with perception and sensation of impressions. However, Kant thinks that the things that men perceive around them are not just randomly infused into the human person without an organizing principle that regulates the relationship of all these impressions. To Kant, there is necessarily a mind that organizes the impressions that men get from the external world. Time and space, for example, are ideas that one cannot find in the world, but is built in our minds. Kant calls these the apparatuses of the mind. Along with the different apparatuses of the mind goes the “self.” Without the self, one cannot organize the different impressions that one gets in relation to his own existence. Kant therefore suggests that it is an actively engaged intelligence in man that synthesizes all knowledge and experience. Thus, the self is not just what gives one his personality. In addition, it is also the seat of knowledge acquisition for all human persons. Ryle Gilbert Ryle solves the mind-body dichotomy that has been running for a long time in the history of thought by blatantly denying the concept of an internal, non-physical self. For Ryle, what truly matters is the behavior that a person manifests in his day-to-day life. For Ryle, looking for and trying to understand a self as it really exists is like visiting your friend’s university and looking for the “university.” One can roam around the campus, visit the library and the football field, and meet the administrators and faculty and still end up not finding the “university.” This is because the campus, the people, the 8 Understanding the Selfsystems, and the territory all form the university. Ryle suggests that the “self is not an entity one can locate and analyze but simply the convenient name that people use to refer to all the behaviors that people make. , Merleau-Ponty Merleau-Ponty is a phenomenologist who asserts that the mind-body bifurcation that has been'going on fora long time is a futile endeavor and an invalid problem. Unlike Ryle who-simply denies the “self,” Merleau-Ponty instead 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 am embodied experience. All experience is embodied. One’s body is his opening toward his existence to the world. Because of these bodies, men are in the world. Merleau-Ponty dismisses the Cartesian z Dualism that has spelled so much devastation in the history of man. For him, the Cartesian problem is nothing else but plain misunderstanding. The living body, his thoughts, emotions, and experiences are all one. APPLICATION AND ASSESSMENT In your own words, state what “self” is for each of the following philosophers. After doing so, explain how your concept of “gelf" is compatible with how they conceived of the “self.” 1. Socrates