LESSON 1- THE SELF FROM VARIOUS
Form (morphe in Greek) refers to the essence or
PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVES
Ancient Greek Philosophers
A. Socrates
- While many of his contemporaries were concerned with
explaining what the world is really made up, Socrates
focused his attention on another subject – the problem of
the self
- For Socrates, the true task of the philosopher is to know
oneself “gnōthi seauton”
- The self emerges from self-knowledge or one’s degree of
understanding
about the world and knowing one’s capabilities and
potentials
- He believed that an unexamined life is not worth living
- Socrates believed every human person is dualistic:
a. an imperfect and impermanent body
b. a perfect and permanent soul (divine, immortal,
intelligible,
uniform, indissoluble, and ever self-consistent and
invariable)
- The ruler of the body is the soul.
B. Plato
- Plato subscribed to idealism which holds that the
empirical reality we experience in the experiential world is
fundamentally unreal, only the ultimate reality is real as it is
eternal and constitutes abstract universal essences of
things
- The word self then means a certain ideal self, particulars
selves partake of the nature of the self, but more or less
imperfectly
- It is through imperfection that there are variations to the
self, the ideal self is real while particular selves are only
apparent
- Was one of the first Philosophers to believe in an
enduring self that is represented by the soul
- Plato supported Socrates’ idea on the duality of human
person and further
posited that there are three components of the soul:
a. a rational part that govern the affairs of the human
person
b. a spirited part in charge of emotions
c. an appetitive part in charge of base desires like
eating, drinking, sleeping, and having sex
- Plato believed that the human person’s soul become just
and virtuous when
the spirited and appetitive parts are kept at bay.
C. St. Augustine
- Medieval perspectives on the self-infused philosophy with
doctrines of Christianity
- Augustine’s interest on the relations between time and
memory inspired him to develop the method of
introspection or the process of being conscious of
one’s own mental processes
- He believed that it is through memory that one can think
of temporal continuity (passage of time)
- He introduced the concept of self in the past, present, and
future time and argued that one’s identity can be
determined by the mind’s extendedness or
its ability to extend back to any past action or forward to
actions to come
- Augustine echoed Socrates’ view on the bifurcated nature
of the human person:
a. an imperfect aspect that dwells in the world yet
yearns to be with the divine
b. an aspect that is capable of reaching immortality
- The goal of the human person is to attain communion and
bliss with the Divine by living a virtuous life on earth
D. Thomas Aquinas
- Adapting some ideas from Aristotle, Aquinas held that the
human person is composed of two parts:
a. Matter (hyle in Greek) refers to the common stuff that
makes up everything in the universe
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b.
substance of a thing
-To Aquinas, the body is akin to the makings of any other
living being in the world. The soul is what animates the
body and makes us humans.
E. Rene Descartes
-Descartes held that we should only believe those which
can pass the test of doubt (verifiable by empiricist
standards)
-He believed that the only thing we cannot doubt is the
existence of the self. Thus, his famous, cogito ergo sum, “I
think therefore, I am.” The fact that one thinks should lead
one to conclude without a trace of doubt that he or she
exists.
-He argued that only humans the hubris (excessive pride)
and impertinence to
be actually self-aware of their own existence and try to
figure out the meaning of life
-Tried to resolve the mind-body problem by clarifying their
dynamics. He stressed that the body exerts a greater
influence on the mind than previously
supposed.
-For Descartes, the mind had only a single function which is
that of thought, all other processes (e.g. reproduction,
perception, movement) are that of the
body
-His focus on a physical-psychological duality shifted the
mind-body discourse from subjective metaphysical/
theological analysis to objective observation
and experimentation.
-Descartes believed that the mind and body mutually
interacted in the conarium, the only part of the body that is
not divided and duplicated in each
hemisphere.
F. John Locke
-Locke argued that humans are born blank slate or tabula
rasa. The mind acquires knowledge through experience.
-His main philosophy about the self is founded on
consciousness or the perception of what passes in one’s
own mind.
-He argues that one personal’s identity (self) lies not in the
brain but in one’s consciousness. This is because one’s
brain (as well as body) may change overtime whereas
consciousness always remains intact.
-This view could be illustrated by Locke’s story of the
Prince and the Cobbler. Suppose the Prince dies and is
resurrected in the body of a cobbler whose soul has also
just departed, his consciousness will dictate him to still act
as a
prince despite finding himself in a new body.
-Thus, it is one’s consciousness that maintains the self
despite changes in the body and soul.
G. David Hume
-As an empiricist, Hume espoused the idea that knowledge
can only be possible if it is sensed and experienced
-Hume argued that all experiences can be categorized into
two:
a. as impressions/perceptions or the basic objects of
our experience or sensation, their being direct
products of our direct experiences with the world
make them vivid
b. as ideas or mere copies of impressions
-For Hume, the self is nothing but a bundle of impressions
-He rejected the existence of the soul holding that the
notion of a soul or a unified self is nothing but a bundle of
sensory experiences. Any concept of self is simply memory
and imagination.
-He reduced personality and cognition (the awareness of
one’s self) as something which can be activated or
deactivated, such as when you are asleep or when you die
H. Immanuel Kant
-Rejected Hume’s idea of the self as a mere combination of
impressions
 -Kant proved the existence of the mind by defining it as the
organizing
principle that regulates the impressions that one gets from
the external world
-Defined the self as the seat of knowledge acquisition for all
humans
-Kant spoke of a unified consciousness as the central
feature of the mind. The goal of the human person is to
achieve unity between one’s inner (psychological and
intellect) and outer senses (experience of the physical
world).
I. Gilbert Ryle
-Resolved the mind-body problem by blatantly denying the
existence of an internal, non-physical self
-For Ryle the “self” is not an entity one can locate and
analyze, it is simply the name that people use to refer to all
the behaviors they make.
-Ryle instead views the mind as consisting of dispositions
based on what people know, feel, want, etc.
-The mind’s existence is made visible and evident in one’s
activities like singing, dancing, running, etc. not as a thing
existing apart from and parallel to the body (e.g. a soul).
-While Ryle acknowledges that the self is a combination of
the mind and body, he maintains that they are not separate.
He challenged the dualistic view espoused by many earlier
thinkers.
J. Maurice Merleau-Ponty
- As a phenomenologist, Merleau-Ponty believes that the
human person is embodied through lived experiences
- Merleau-Ponty problematized the mind-body problem
asserting that it is futile and invalid
- The phenomenological perspective stresses that the self
is best understood by studying experiences as they occur
and not reducing them to their elementary components
(e.g. mental vs physical states)
- He regarded the self as an embodied subjectivity, not so
much as disembodied minds (existing without a body) or
complex machines, but as living creatures whose
consciousness is actualized by their involvement with
the world.
- He opposed the Cartesian cogito stating that the “I think”
implies an “I can”
- For Merleau-Ponty, the living body, one’s thoughts,
emotions, and all experiences are one