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UNIT 1

THE SELF FROM VARIOUS PERSPECTIVES

Learning Outcomes:

At the end of this part, you will be able to:

a) discuss the different representations and conceptualizations of the self

from various disciplinal perspectives;
b) compare and contrast how the self has been represented across different
disciplines and perspectives;
c) examine the different influences, factors, and forces that shape the self;
and
d) demonstrate critical and reflective thought in analyzing the development
of one's self and identity by developing a theory of the self.
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LESSON
1

PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE SELF

Learning Outcomes
At the end of this lesson, you will be able to:
a) recognize the importance of independent thinking in understanding
the self;
b) respond to a thinker’s concept of self;
c) describe one’s personal view of self; and
d) restate and evaluate conceptions of self by some philosophers;

Pretest
Directions:Group the following words into three by theme or motif.

Theme 1: Theme 2: Theme 3:

___________________ _____________________ _____________________
___________________ _____________________ _____________________
___________________ _____________________ _____________________
___________________ _____________________ _____________________
___________________ _____________________ _____________________
___________________ _____________________ _____________________
___________________ _____________________ _____________________
___________________ ______________________ _____________________
___________________ ______________________ _____________________
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1. What themes or motifs unify the words in your lists? How are you able to
find these themes?
_________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________

2. Is there an overall prevailing theme or motif? What is it?

_________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________

Learning Content
One who understands others is clever.
One who understands the ‘self’ is enlightened.
One who conquers others is forceful.
One who conquers the ‘self’ is strong…

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

Philosophy is often labelled the “mother of all sciences,” and rightly so as

modern-day disciplines such as physics and psychology originate from it. As you
may have known already from your studies in high school, it can be
etymologically defined as “the love of wisdom,” the Greek philia meaning love
and sophia wisdom.

It may perhaps be said that the work of a philosopher is a work of

speculation. This is mostly true of our early thinkers who lack instruments and
established methodology. In the course of the centuries, thinkers either applied
newly-invented tools to their reflections or altogether moved their explorations
away from pure speculation towards the paradigm of the new sciences.
Interestingly, philosophy remains to be a subject in universities and colleges
worldwide.

Today, what remains in the academic field of philosophy are mostly issues
that would not, or at least not yet, qualify for scientific validation. The question
concerning the self is one such issue. Here are some of the most influential
philosophers who offered their thoughts about this issue.
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Socrates and Plato: The self is a soul

Often designated the title of “father of

Western philosophy,” Socrates (470-399 BCE) was
one of the first known thinkers to reflect on the
concept of the self. He lived in Athens, Greece
around the 5th Century BCE. His philosophy was
grounded on the Delphic oracle’s command to
“Know Thyself”. One of Socrates’ most popular
statements is. He also advanced the idea that
knowledge is a virtue and that people do evil things “The unexamined life is not
because of ignorance. In his lifetime, he went about worth living.”
conversing with people and questioning traditional
Athenian beliefs. Although doing this, he made a few friends, authorities mostly
felt threatened by his unorthodox views. He was eventually put to death by
poison in front of a large crowd.

Socrates believed that reality consists of two different

"The first and greatest victory is
to conquer yourself; to be
conquered by yourself is of all
things most shameful and vile."
intellectual enlightenment is the person’s real self.
realms. First, there is the physical world of
appearances that comprises all that we can
perceive with our senses. All aspects of this realm are
continually changing. In contrast, there is an
unchanging and perfect realm where universal
essences (called Forms or Ideas)such as truth and
beauty reside. This, according to Socrates, is the
realm of the soul, which is the divine and immortal
element in each person. To Socrates and his followers
over the centuries, this soul which is superior to the
body and which finds its ultimate fulfillment in union
with the eternal and transcendent realm through

Plato (428-347 BCE) was Socrates’ leading student. In fact, it was through
the writings of Plato that we know of his teacher’s thoughts today. As a student,
the character of a heroic teacher figured much in his work.

In the Phaedrus, Plato, with Socrates as his main character, writes of the
soul as having three parts: reason, physical appetite and spirit or passion.
Reason, as the divine essence, enables us to reflect on and understand eternal
truths or essences. Physical appetite is that which ties us to our basic biological
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needs like food and water, allowing for our survival. Spirit enables us to feel basic
emotions such as love and anger. These three are in a dynamic relationship with
one another, sometimes in cooperation and at other times in quarrel. In case of
the latter, Plato believes that it is reason’s duty to sort things out and exert
control over the other parts of the soul in order to restore harmony within the
person.

In relation to their idea on the self, Socrates and Plato maintained that, in
this life,we are able to contemplate the Forms because we ourselves have had
experience of these Ideas before our birth in this world of appearances.
Therefore, we know them already, only that this knowledge became ‘latent’ in
the soul. However, a recovery or recollection of our innate knowledge of these
Forms may be attained in three ways: 1) perception of things that resemble the
Forms; 2) teaching by another person; and 3) inquiry into the Forms by
intellectual conversation (Taylor, 2003).

Augustine: The self seeks for God

So far, it is remarkable that Socrates’ and Plato’s

idea of the self-soul does not sound foreign to us at all.
That is partly due to another thinker’s synthesis of their
ideas with the Christianity which we have come to know
today. This thinker was St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430), a
Christian bishop and one of the early doctors of both the
Western and Eastern Churches. His philosophy is based
on Socrates’ and Plato’s views (e.g. that the mortal body
is inferior to the immortal soul, etc.), but with a religious
twist. For him, Platonism and Christianity were partners.
“In yourself you rouse us,
He identified Socrates’ and Plato’s perfect realm of giving us delight in
universal essences to be the Christian God with whom glorifying you, because you
made us with yourself as
the soul can achieve union through faith and reason. our goal, and our heart is
restless until it rests in
In his writings, Augustine grapples with the problem you.”
of selfhood. He notes that the self is a mystery, a known-
unknown. This paradox is the source of our restlessness which sets us seeking.
Hence, the process of understanding the self is for him a long and difficult
journey. To him, God and the soul are inevitably linked such that one’s search
for the self is ultimately connected to that person’s search for God who, in
Augustinian terminology, is called “the Selfsame”. God is the heart of our hearts,
the light of our thinking and the very self of ourselves. This means that God is
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found within the self, although He is above (Sweeney, 2014). All of this suggests
that we cannot arrive at a full understanding of the mystery of our individual
selves, except through and with God, who is the ground of our being.

Rene Descartes: The self is a thinking thing

The French intellectual Rene Descartes (1596-1650) is a

distinguished figure in the fields of mathematics, science and
philosophy. Earlier philosophers were mostly concerned with
the nature of reality, how we ought to behave, the existence
of God, and the nature of the soul. Descartes, on the other
hand, was more concerned with the thinking process used
to address such questions. He is today regarded as “father of
modern philosophy,” both for breaking away with the
“I think, therefore I Scholastic-Aristotelian tradition of the middle ages, and for
exist.” providing a philosophical groundwork for the possibility of
the sciences (Smith, 2018; Skirry, n.d.).

One of Descartes’ most enduring legacies is his emphasis on the

importance of independent thinking. One cannot claim to be a thinker, he
writes, only by manifesting knowledge of the great ideas in the history of
thought, much less by referring to revered “authorities” handed down by
tradition. Instead, one needs to exercise one’s own power of reasoning and
apply all means available to that end. Descartes demonstrates this in his famous
Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) where he starts with an attempt to doubt
everything in order to know where to start and establish a sure foundation of his
ideas. This methodic doubting of all things led to his famous first principle:
Cogito, ergo sum(“I think, therefore I exist”), which became the basis of his
concept of self.

In relation to his concept of self, Descartes argues for the existence of

God by our very idea of His perfection. He remarks that, to those who diligently
discern, this is a self-evident truth very much like the basic truths in arithmetic or
geometry, for to think that God does not actually exist diminishes that
perfection. He also points out the cause of human imperfection as the
disproportion between a person’s understanding and will. From his certainty that
the self exists, at least as a thinking thing that is aware of itself, and that there is a
perfect God who wills the best for His creation, it follows for Descartes that
material things like the body exist. Thus, Descartes defines the self as a thinking
thing that doubts, understands, wills, forms judgments, imagines and perceives.
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This last characteristic is primarily associated with the body, which, although
secondary to the mind, plays a role in self-identity.

John Locke: The self is consciousness

John Locke (1632–1704) was an English thinker and

physician who explored issues dealt with by Descartes,
such as the nature of the self. However, Locke
approached these issues from a very different
perspective, that of a physician, which is his profession.
An empiricist, he believed that sense experience is the
primary source of a person’s knowledge while, on the
other hand, reason plays a secondary role of arriving at
intelligent conclusions. He also rejects theories of innate
conceptions, holding that at birth, the mind is a tabula
“Consciousness always
accompanies thinking, and rasa, a blank tablet upon which experience will be
it is that which makes inscribed.
everyone to be what he
calls self, and thereby Locke identifies two defining features of a person,
distinguishes himself from
namely self-consciousness and the idea of persisting
all other thinking things.”
over a period of time. These at a first glance seem to
conform to Plato’s and Descartes’ views. However, this
persistence is deemed by Locke more in terms of psychological characteristics
and relations rather than its identity as a material body or as an immaterial soul.
Your self, therefore, is not tied to a body or substance.

Locke claims that it is possible to remain as the same human being and
not remain as the same person. For example, a human being has a different
consciousness by day (when he or she is awake) than by night (when he or she
is asleep). Interestingly, recent developments in science tell of individuals with
Dissociative Identity Disorder which feature in popular films like Split (2016) and
TV shows like Rhodora X(2014).This dissociation of persons within the same
human being also applies to experiences in the past that an individual has
forgotten and, therefore, not part of his or her present consciousness. Following
Locke, we may say that, although the same human being is involved, such an
individual is not the same person who experienced those forgotten things in the
past. Six-year-old Justin, for example, is not the same person as sixty-year-old
Justin, because different experiences, relations and desires occupy each one of
them.
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David Hume: There is no self

David Hume(1711-1776) was a Scottish historian,

essayist and one of the most important philosophers to
write in the English language. Following the empiricist
approach of Locke, he became primarily known for his
controversial ideas which influenced other thinkers as
diverse as Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Jeremy Bentham
and Charles Darwin(Morris & Brown, 2019).

According to Hume, if we truly examine the “Reason is, and ought only
contents of our mind, what we would find are only two to be the slave of the
passions.”
classes of things, namely impressions, which are vivid
perceptions like pain, pleasure or the color red, and ideas which are copies of
impressions in the memory or fictions in the imagination. True to his empiricism,
Hume writes that only those ideas that arise from impressions have real
existence; all else are fictions. Unfortunately, personal identity or the self is one
such fiction, derived from a succession of impermanent states and events.

Hume acknowledges that, when it comes to

putting this very personal idea to the test, most people
are unlikely to remove bias from their imagination, which
has a tendency to perceive sameness and continuity
instead of diversity and change. This relation (whether by
resemblance, succession or causation) between
perceptions is facilitated by the slowness, imperceptibility
or triviality of the change in proportion to the whole. Thus,
it yields to the more popular and comfortable idea of the
persisting self. Still, no matter how related they are, it
“Space and time are the remains a mistake to think of diverse things as the same,
framework within which the that is, diverse perceptions as one unified experience.
mind is constrained to
Thus, for Hume, a “person” is no more than a collection
construct its experience of
reality.” or a “bundle” of different perceptions that continually
pass and succeed each other, very much like the scenes
or characters in a theater.

Immanuel Kant: We construct the self

A central figure in modern philosophy, German Enlightenment thinker

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)tried to reconcile the opposing philosophical schools
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of rationalism and empiricism, and provided a comprehensive framework that

continues to influence philosophical thinking to this day (Rohlf, 2020).

Kant’s notion of self is, in part, a reaction to Hume. He was troubled by the
latter’s view that the mind is only a passive container of random impressions and
ideas to which it conforms. Responding to this, Kant argues that our minds take
an active role in synthesizing different sensations to create an organized
experience of the world. He affirms that knowledge begins with sense
experience, but he goes on to say that it does not necessarily follow that all
knowledge comes from experience, categorizing between a priori or
knowledge independent of experience and a posteriori or empirical
knowledge. According to Kant, we have fundamental organizing rules or
principles built into our minds, which are a priori and which aidus in making
sense of the world. So, instead of perceiving a disconnected stream of
sensations, what we experience is an organized world of objects, relationships
and ideas. We enjoy listening to a musical composition, for example, rather than
to individual notes.

Hume’s mistake, according to Kant, was in looking for the self in the wrong
place. Kant points out that, contrary to Hume’s assumption, the self is not an
object of consciousness, because it transcends
consciousness: it is the dynamic organizing principle
that makes consciousness possible. He coins the
phrase “unity of consciousness” to denote that
thoughts and perceptions are bound together in the
consciousness of a human being. It is the self that
synthesizes, unifies or binds together the contents of
consciousness, making the world intelligible. Thus, the
“Unexpressed emotions will
individual, at the center of his or her world, views it never die. They are buried
from his or her own perspective. alive and will come forth
later in uglier ways.”
Sigmund Freud : The self is multilayered

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was an Austrian neurologist who founded the

psychoanalytic school of psychology. Although not, strictly speaking, a
philosopher, his theory on the nature of the self made a significant impact to
philosophers and scientists alike. A fundamental idea in Freud’s perspective on
the human person is the unconscious, which he describes as the level of human
functioning that contains the basic instinctual drives that seek immediate
gratification as well as unfulfilled wishes that have been repressed. Freud refers
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to dreams, slips of the tongue and neurotic behavior as evidences to the

existence of this level. Governed by the “pleasure principle”, this, to him,
constitutes a greater chunk of the mind than the conscious level and therefore
has the dominant influence in our personalities. On the other hand, the
conscious self takes into account the realistic demands of the situation and the
consequences of various actions, thus regulating the constant pressures of the
unconscious as it continually seeks to be satisfied. A further division in the
unconscious is the preconscious which Freud says contains processes that easily
become conscious before becoming unconscious again, as when something is
recalled and then forgotten.

In addition to this topographical model, Freud later developed a related

structural model that divided the mind into three agencies: the id, the ego, and
the superego. The id is the most primitive agency of the mind, which, like the
unconscious, contains the basic instinctual drives that motivate the person to
seek pleasure. However, the other two agencies consist of aspects that are both
conscious and unconscious. The superego performs an idealistic, critical and
moralizing role, bidding the person to act according to his or her conscience.
Lastly, the ego is the rational and realistic agent that mediates between the id
and the superego.(Lapsley & Stey, 2012, p. 396)

Like Hume’s analysis, Freud’s multilayered notion of the human mind,

especially its emphasis on the unconscious, marks a stark contrast to the popular
definition of the self as a single entity that persists over time. It, therefore,
challenges the traditional philosophical assumption that the self can be
explored and understood primarily through rational reflection and analysis.

Gilbert Ryle: The self is how you behave

An important figure in the field of Linguistic

Analysis, which treats philosophical puzzles by analyzing
language, Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976) was a British
philosopher who adopted a ‘behaviorist’ theory of mind.
He is known for attacking the mind/body dualism
endorsed by Descartes, which is analogous to that of
other eminent thinkers such as Socrates, Plato and
Augustine, and which pervades academic, cultural and
religious thinking to this day.

“In searching for the self,

one cannot simultaneously
be the hunter and the
hunted.”
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In his best-known work, The Concept of Mind (1949), Ryles crutinizes the
traditional distinction between body and mind as outlined by Descartes. For him,
instances of dualism such as this are logically absurd, being practically
misunderstandings of the use of language for which he coins the term “category
mistake”, i.e., a type of informal fallacy in which things that belong to one
category are mistakenly placed in another. Ryle points out that ‘mind’ and
‘matter’ cannot be polar opposites in that, at the language level, properties
considered as mental are merely negations of physical properties, hence they
belong to the same category or logical type.

Ryle further says that, although most people would assume a mind-body
dualism as a general theory, where the mind wills and the body performs while
at the same time sending perceptions to the mind, in reality we have no idea
how or why this happens. And yet we act and speak as if
we have direct knowledge of other minds. This “ghost in
the machine” dualism therefore conflicts directly with our
everyday experience, revealing itself to be a defective
notion. He ends up dismissing the Cartesian view, arguing
that the mind is really just the intelligent behavior of the
body (R. Watson, n.d.). No wonder that, in defining the
self, he focuses on observable behavior. For him, the self
is best understood as a pattern of behavior, the
tendency or disposition to behave in a particular manner
under particular circumstances. Although this may be
“We do have an organ for
contrary to what most people hold true, Ryle’s work as
understanding and able to point out the difficulty of a dualistic perspective
recognizing moral facts. It (especiallyits failure to account adequately for mental
is called the brain.”
causation), setting the focus of subsequent thinkers on a
more scientific view of the self.

Paul Churchland: The self is the brain

Paul Churchland (b. 1942) is a contemporary Canadian philosopher who

teaches at the University of California, San Diego, and is currently making an
impact in the areas of neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind through his
writings which include Matter and Consciousness (1984),The Engine of Reason,
The Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey into the Brain (1995) and Plato’s
Camera: How the Physical Brain Captures a Landscape of Abstract Universals
(2012).
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When it comes to viewing the mind and consciousness, Churchland

advocates eliminative materialism, the claim that our common understanding
of the human mind, including concepts of “folk psychology” like belief, desire,
fear, sensation, pain and joy, are deeply wrong and therefore should be
eliminated in favor of a better science. For him, to fully understand the nature of
the mind we have to fully understand the nature of the brain. He recognizes
that, with the help of today’s increasingly advanced technology, scientists are
gradually becoming able to relate areas in the brain with mental functioning,
such as which areas are activated when a person is speaking, hearing or
reading words, and that it is only a matter of time before the mental life of
consciousness can be fully explainable in terms of the neurophysiology of the
brain.

However, despite his optimism, Churchland acknowledges the radicalism

of his view. Manywould argue for the richness of personal human experience,
something that neuroscientific descriptions of the brain’s operation would, for
these people, provide no clue.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The self is an embodied

subjectivity

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) was a

French thinker who used a philosophical approach
known as phenomenology, which attempts to
describe (not to explain) experience as it is in itself
and clarify our understanding of it.

Merleau-Ponty complains about philosophies

that treat the body as second only to the mind,
“The world and I are within
when, in fact, it is an entity that cannot be reduced one another.”
to an object. From the phenomenological
standpoint, the division between mind and body is but a result of confused
thinking. Our personal “lived experience” of the world tells us that mental and
physical are seamlessly woven together as to form a unity. The “I” that each of
us refers to in candid moments of immediate prereflective experience is a single
integrated entity, a coordination of mental, physical, and emotional structured
around a core identity: the self. Merleau-Ponty suggests that the unified
experience that we have of our self, such as when we are dancing, playing a
sport or performing musically, is model we should use to understand our nature.
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Merleau-Ponty writes that although perception is fundamental, it is our

consciousness that enables us to perceive and have knowledge about the
world. Everything that we know is contained within our consciousness. The world
around us initially exists only as objects of our consciousness. However, what
usually happens is that we seem to think of the space-time world as primary and
our immediate consciousness as secondary, an inversion of the way things
actually are, resulting to varying theories that in the first place wouldn’t have
been possible if not for the primal reality of lived experience to serve as their
foundation.

Learning Activities

Activity 1. Respond
Directions: Choose a thinker whose concept of self catches your interest and
videotape your 5-7-minute live response in a form of audio performance. See
Rubrics in Page ______.

Activity 2.Create
Directions: In a 3-5 paragraph essay, describe your own concept of self. Your
essay will be graded based on the rubric that you can find on
http://rubistar.4teachers.org/index.php
?screen=ShowRubric&rubric_id=2838298. Consequently, use that rubric as a
guide when writing youressay and check it again before turning in.

Mastery Test

Directions:Complete the sentences in the second column based on what you

learned from this lesson. Then write your own evaluation of these conceptions of
self in the third column.

Philosophers Philosopher’s view of the My personal view or reaction

self on the Philosopher’s
concept of the self)
Example: Example: Example:
David Hume The self is the Bundle The self is not all a bundle
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Theory of mind. theory of the mind. It is the

product of thinking and
doing.
Socrates and The self is
Plato

Augustine The self is

Descartes The self is

Locke The self is

Hume The self is

Kant The self is

Freud The self is

Ryle The self is

Churchland The self is

Merleau-Ponty The self is