UNIT 1: THE SELF FROM VARIOUS PERSPECTIVES

CHAPTER 1: THE PHILOSOPHICAL SELF

Lesson 1: The Self according to Ancient Philosophers

A. SOCRATES
➢ Socrates believed that the self exists in two parts. One part is the physical,
tangible and mortal aspect of us that can be/is constantly changing. The
second part is the soul, which he believed to be immortal.
➢ Socrates believed that when we are alive our body and soul are attached,
therefore making both parts of our ‘self’ present in the physical realm. When
we die however, our body stays in the physical realm while our soul travels
to the ideal realm, thus making our soul immortal.
➢ The true self is not to be identified with what we own, with our social status,
with our reputation, or even with our body. Instead, Socrates maintained
that our true self is our soul.
➢ Socrates reminds us to “know thyself,” a translation of an ancient Greek
aphorism gnõthi seauton. He 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. One could now act according to his or her own
definition of the self without any doubt and contradiction.
➢ Self-knowledge, for 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.
➢ He was known for his dictum “Ignorance is the beginning of wisdom.” It is
accepting our ignorance that prods us to know ourselves, our power and
limitations.
➢ Socrates is also famous for this quote “The unexamined life is not worth
living.” In other words, an examining, a thinking and an investigating self is
what the self essentially is. In fact, he preferred to continue to seek the truth
to the answer to his question in the after-life so he preferred death to exile
because for him exile was tantamount to not being able to identify the
answer to his questions on life while on exile on earth.

B. PLATO
➢ An ancient Greek philosopher who was a student of Socrates and a
teacher of Aristotle, Plato produced a substantial body of work that
became the basis for western thought.
➢ For Plato, the self is an “immortal soul in a mortal perishable body.” The soul
has tripartite nature. This tripartite nature consists of a) a soul or an immortal
rational part which existed before it became part of the body, b) a
 courageous or “spirited” part and c) an appetitive part. These courageous
and spirited parts of the soul are mortal and they perish when we die.
➢ Plato’s idealism insisted that the 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 eternal and constitutes
abstract universal essences of things.

C. ARISTOTLE
➢ For Aristotle, the self is composed of body and soul, mind and matter, sense
and intellect, passion and reason.
➢ Reason is supreme in a human person and so should govern all of life’s
activities. When the senses, the lower nature of a human person, dominate
a human person’s life, he/she tends to live a chaotic life. When reason rules
over the senses, mind over matter, the human person tends to live a happy
life.
➢ Aristotle put emphasis on reason, he does not neglect the development of
a human person’s physical, economic, and social powers. For him,
happiness comes from the harmonious development of the whole self.
➢ Furthermore, for Aristotle, perfection and happiness come from wisdom
and virtue. Wisdom is true knowledge and virtue is doing what is best for
you that which leads you to the attainment of your own perfection and
happiness.
➢ He, likewise, taught the theory of the Golden Mean. The Golden Mean
means moderation; avoid the extremes; avoid too much and too little.
Living a life of moderation is doing things in consonance with reason.

Lesson 2: The Self according to Medieval Philosophers

A. ST. AUGUSTINE
➢ St. Augustine combined Greek philosophy and truths contained in the
Scriptures. The self is made up of a body and a soul, “a soul in possession of
a body” which “does not constitute two persons but one man.”
➢ His concept of self is in the context of his relation to God. Every human
person is created into the image and likeness of God. Every human person
is made for God. It is only upon his/her recognition of God’s love and his/her
response to the invitation to love that he/she finds inner peace.
➢ According to St. Augustine, virtue is “the order of love.” To love God means
necessarily to love one’s fellowmen. Never to do any harm to another as
you would not want others do unto you. This is Aristotle’s Golden Mean.

B. ST. THOMAS AQUINAS

➢ Aquinas proclaimed the supremacy of reason in a human person. A human
person can know the truth with certainty by the use of his reason. However,
he stressed that there are some truths which cannot be known by human
 reason alone and which can be perceived only with the aid of the light of
divine revelation. Yet these two truths – those known through reason and
those from Divine Revelation can never contradict each other because
they emanate from the same source, God, who is TRUTH itself.
➢ Like Aristotle, Aquinas taught that man’s longing for happiness on earth
comes with the full development of man’s powers. But Aquinas pointed to
a higher form of human perfection beyond this life because of the
immortality of the human soul – found in God alone. In this sense, St. Aquinas
was like St. Augustine who taught about the human soul that is restless and
imperfect until it rests in God.

Lesson 3: The self according to Modern and contemporary Philosophers

Modern Day Philosophers
A. RENE DESCARTES
➢ A French Philosophers and mathematician, is best known for his dictum
cogito, ergo sum, translated as “I think, therefore I am.” The rationality and
activity of the mind are at the center of man’s being.
➢ For him, the existence of anything that you register from your senses can be
doubted. For example, if you are staring at a burning building, you are not
certain if that building is really burning or it is something you are only
reconstructing from your dream. One can always doubt 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” means.
➢ The self is an immaterial mind and a material body. He believed that the
mind is the seat of consciousness. The body which includes the human
senses is unreliable hence, should not be trusted. To instill virtue and to give
primacy to the mind, Descartes’ advice is for us to understand and work
hard enough on our passion so these passions are put under our control.
➢ He also believed that the self is “a thinking thing or a substance whose
whole essence or nature is merely thinking.” The self is real and not just an
illusion. He also reassured that the self is different from the body. Hence, self
and the body exist but differ in existence and reality. The self is a feature
not of the body but of the mind thus a mental substance rather than
physical substance.

B. JOHN LOCKE
➢ His main philosophy about personal identity or the self is founded on
consciousness or memory. For Locke, consciousness is the perception of
what passes in a man’s own mind.
➢ In his essay concerning human understanding, he explained that at birth
the (human) mind is a tabula rasa which means “blank slate.” The mind is
empty at birth. It is without rules for processing data and that data is [sic]
blank. According to him, impressions during infancy have very important
and lasting consequences. He argued that the “association of ideas” that
 individuals make when young are more important than those made later
because they are the foundation of the self.
➢ While impressions during infancy serve as the foundation of the
development of the self, this does not mean that individuals can no longer
unmake negative effects of not-so-good earlier experience. Locke
emphasized the “freedom of individuals to author their won soul.”
Individuals are free to define the content of their character except for their
basic identity as a member of the human species.

C. IMMANUEL KANT
➢ He is a German philosopher, and according to him, a human person has
an inner and an outer self which, together, from his/her consciousness. The
inner self consists of her/his psychological state and rational intellect. The
outer self is a human person’s senses and physical world.
➢ Consciousness of oneself and of one’s psychological state (inner state) was
referred as empirical self-consciousness while consciousness of oneself and
of one’s state via acts of apperception is called transcendental
apperception.
➢ Apperception is the faculty that allows for application of concepts. The act
of apperceiving allows one to synthesize or make sense of a unified object.
Transcendental apperception makes experience possible and allows the
self and the world to come together.
➢ Consciousness being unified, Kant argued, 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. This picture constitutes the “you” at the center of the universe,
looking at the universe from one’s point of view. Reflect on the way each
person instinctively describes the situation from his or her perspective. This is
the unity of consciousness that Kant described.
➢ Kant stressed that self is something real, yet it is neither an appearance nor
a thing in itself since it belongs to a different metaphysical class. He
believed 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 answers to in the aspect of
metaphysics.

Contemporary Philosophers
A. MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY
➢ According to him, the self is an inextricable union between mind and body.
For him, there is no experience that is not embodied experience.
➢ With him, it is clear that “the mind and the body are so intertwined that we
cannot even distinguish where the work of the mind ends and where the
work of the body begins.
➢ He distinguished the body into two types: the subjective body, as lived and
experienced, and the objective body, as observed and scientifically
investigated. For him, these two are not different bodies.
➢ He regarded self as embodied subjectivity. It 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. The body is the general
medium for having a world and we know not through our intellect but
through our experience. The latter is the body as observed and scientifically
investigated. It is the body that is known to others. These are bodies that
people see, admire, imitate, criticize, or even dissect.

B. GUILBERT RYLE
➢ A British philosopher who believes that “the workings of the mind are not
distinct from the actions of the body but are one and the same.” The mind
is asset of capacities and abilities belonging to the body. The mind is a
mysterious entity that controls the mechanical workings of the body.
➢ According to him, mind consists of dispositions of people based on what
they know, what they feel, what they want, and so on. People learn that
they have their own minds because they behave in certain ways.
➢ As for Ryle’s concept of the self, the self is a combination of the mind and
the body. The self is taken as a whole with the combination of the body
and mind. He also posited the maxim, “I act, therefore I am.”

C. PAUL CHURCHLAND
➢ He adheres to materialism, the belief that nothing except matter exists. If a
thing can’t be recognized by the senses, then it is not real. He asserts that
since the mind can’t be experienced by our senses, then the mind doesn’t
really exist. It is the physical brain and not the mind that gives us our sense
of self.
➢ For him, decision making and moral behavior are biological phenomena.
Human behavior must be explained rather by a mature cognitive
neuroscience. Human behavior must be explained materially in terms of
“recurrent neutral network.”