University of Antique

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Guintas, Hamtic, Antique

LESSON 1

The Self from Various Philosophical Perspectives

Who are you?

If someone ask you this question, your first response would probably be your name.
But when we think like philosophers, we give more than this.
A philosopher would be interested in one’s “personal identity” or the nature of the “self,” and your
name is not enough to establish that in an ambiguous way.
Two persons may have the same name, but they are not the same person.
Also, we usually do not think that we become a different person when we change our name.
If we decided to legally change our name to another, we would be essentially the same person.

Let’s find out these ideas that may have influenced the ways we look at our lives today.
1. SOCRATES (469-399 B.C.E.)
He is the first philosopher who ever engaged in a systematic questioning about the self. Socrates was more
concerned with the problem of the self. According to him, the true task of the philosopher is to “know oneself.”

Socrates affirmed, as claimed by Plato in his dialogues, that “the unexamined life is not
worth living.” Living a life without knowing your “self”, your purpose, your nature of
being, is “sleepwalking.” These “sleepwalking” individuals exist, but there is no life or
meaning in their existence. They are only going through the motions of life but they
lack happiness, significance and virtue. To live and die inside is the worst thing that
could happen to a man.
So, check on yourself. Are you “sleepwalking”?
In terms of the components or divisions of self, Socrates believed that every man is
composed of a “body” and a “soul”. Every human person is dualistic—composed of two
important aspects of his personhood: an imperfect, impermanent aspect called the “body”
and a perfect and permanent aspect called the “soul” (Dualism).

2. PLATO (428-347 B.C.E.) PLATO (428-347 B.C.E.)

Plato is Socrates’ student who supported Dualism, an idea that man is of dualistic
nature composed of body and soul. For Plato, however, the soul (psyche in Greek)
has three elements: the rational soul, the spirited soul, and the appetitive soul.
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Rational Self – composed of reason and intellect that governs the affairs of humans; enables
humans to think, make wise choices and understand eternal truths.
Spirited Self – also called Passion, is in charge of our emotions (love, aggressiveness, empathy,
etc.).
Appetitive Soul – in charge of base desires like eating, drinking, sleeping and even sexual
activities.

The focus of Plato is on the harmony of these three components of the soul. When the ideal state is
attained (meaning when the three components are working in harmony with each other), the person’s
soul becomes just and virtuous.

Imagine that you plan to travel by using a chariot being pulled by two horses. How
can you arrive at your intended destination? Of course, your chariot must have
wheels and the two horses must gallop harmoniously with each other. Take
these three elements (the chariot and the two horses) as the three components of
the soul, working in harmony to achieve the ideal state. Plato called this giving
JUSTICE to your human person.

3. ST. AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO, Northern Africa (354-430)

Following Plato’s ideas and infusing these with Christian doctrines,

Augustine agreed that man has a bifurcated nature or the self is divided
into two:
Body – can only thrive in the imperfect, physical reality (the
world)
–Bound to die on Earth
Soul – anticipated to live eternally in a realm of spiritual bliss in
communion with God.

He believed that happiness exists only in God’s love. Therefore, according to him, the goal of every
human person is to attain communion and bliss with God by living his life on earth in virtue. He created,
in his book “The Confessions”, a theology of self—a total, complete view of the self in relation to God.
Do you also consider your relationship with your God a basis in examining yourself?

4. ST. THOMAS AQUINAS (1225-1274)

Aquinas is another Christian priest who introduced Christian doctrines with philosophical ideas in
understanding the self. He supported Aristotle’s ideas of rejecting the dualistic belief that self is a
dualistic entity composed of body and soul. He maintained instead the idea of Aristotle that there are
two basic categories of things:
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Matter (hyle) which represents all matter; common stuff that makes up everything in the
universe.
Form (morphe) which represents the essence of a thing, what makes the thing what it is.

In the case of the human person, the body of the human person is something that 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 in Aristotle, the soul is what animates the body; it is
what makes us humans.

To allow the possibility of personal or individual immortality,

however, Aquinas diverged from Aristotle, declaring that the soul
was a substantial form, capable of existing separately from the matter.

Not only was personal immortality conceptually possible, according to

Aquinas; it was humans’ destiny. God would not have implanted the universal –
and therefore natural – human desire to live forever unless this desire had an object.

5. RENÉ DESCARTES (1596-1650)

Descartes is the “father of modern philosophy”. His philosophical ideas were

encapsulated in his major philosophical work, Meditations on First Philosophy. His
philosophy is focused on understanding the nature of reasoning process and its
relation to the human self. He questioned the integrity of beliefs accepted on
“faith.”

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 fallible, they may turn out to be false. One should only believe that since which can
pass the test of doubt.

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, I
am.”

The fact that one thinks should lead one to conclude without a trace of doubt that he
exists. The 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
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attached to the mind. The human person has it but it is not what makes a man a man. If at all, that is the
mind.

6. JOHN LOCKE (1632-1704)

John Locke, a British philosopher and physician, is famous in his tabula rasa theory of
the mind. Tabula rasa (literally means blank slate) concept of the mind suggests that
humans are born with an empty or clean mind. The mind is only filled in through
experiences as one grows and interacts with the environment.

In the study of self, John Locke holds the idea that personal identity (the self) is a
matter of psychological continuity. For him, personal identity is founded on
consciousness, and not on the substance of either the soul or the body. Consciousness is being aware that
one is thinking. It always accompanies thinking and is an important part of the thinking process.
Consciousness makes possible our belief that we are the same identity in different times and different
places.

Do you agree that you are the same you last night before you go to bed and, in the morning, when you
wake up? How about last year when you were still in high school? How about during the summer
vacation? If you believe so, then it is because of your consciousness of being the same person in all
those different contexts. Consciousness is very important in creating a coherent self-identity.

Additionally, personal identity, according to him, is the concept about oneself that evolves over the
course of an individual’s life. It may include aspects of life that man has no control over, such as where
he grew up or the color of his skin, as well as the choices he makes, like how he spends his time and
what he believes.

7. DAVID HUME (1711-1776)

David Hume is a Scottish philosopher, an empiricist, who believes that one can know only what comes
from the sense and experiences. (Empiricism is the school of thought that espouses the idea that
knowledge can only be possible if it is sensed and experienced.) Hume argues that the self is not an
entity over and beyond the physical body. 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 Hume, the self is nothing else but a bundle of impressions or a collection of

different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and
are in a perpetual flux and movement (Hume and Steinberg, 1992). For him, man has
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no “clear and intelligible” idea of the self. He posits that no single

impression of the self exists; rather, the self is just the thing to which all
perceptions of man are ascribed. Moreover, even if there was such an
impression of the self, it would have to remain constant over time to constitute
identity.

He said further that experiences are categorized into two: impressions and ideas.

Impressions are basic objects of your experience or sensation. They, therefore, form the core of your
thoughts; and are vivid because they are products of your direct experience with the world (e.g., pain,
pleasure, heat, cold, happiness, grief, fear, exhilaration, etc.).

Ideas, on the other hand, are copies of impressions. Because of this, they are not as lively and vivid as
your impressions. When one imagines the feeling of being in love for the first time, that still is an idea.

Simply, impressions are your direct experiences while ideas are acquired through
indirect means. For example, your impression of your trip to Paris, France is
more vivid than your ideas about it based on what you see in YouTube
videos, magazines, or your friend’s stories of their vacation trips.

It is believed that there is a unified, coherent self, a soul or mind just like
what some of the previous philosophers thought. But to Hume, what one
thinks as a unified self is simply a combination of all experiences with a
particular person because to him, there is no self.

8. IMMANUEL KANT (1724-1804)

To Kant, the self is a regulating and organizing factor of the apparatuses of the
mind. The idea of Hume that the self was a combination of impressions was
problematic for Kant. Although he recognizes the truth to Hume’s account that
everything starts with perception and sensation of impressions, Kant believes that
there is a mind that organizes these impressions that men get from the external
world.

For example, time and space are ideas that one cannot find in the world, but is built
in our minds. He 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 believes that the self is an actively engaged intelligence in man that synthesizes all knowledge and
experiences. The self is also the seat of knowledge acquisition for all human persons.
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9. GILBERT RYLE (1900-1976)

Gilbert Ryle is a British philosopher who solved 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. He said that
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 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. To him, the self is how you behave.

10. MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY (1908-1961)

Merleau-Ponty is a French phenomenological philosopher who

asserts that the mind-body bifurcation that has been going on for a
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 an embodied experience. This means that 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. The living
body (or lived body), his thoughts, emotions and experiences are all
one.

11. PATRICIA CHURCHLAND

Through time, more ideas and views about self-emerged. There are those who believe that all
aspects of the universe are composed of matter and energy that can be fully explained by
physical laws (Materialism, or Physicalism as its more contemporary counterpart).
These philosophers (and even psychologists) believe that mental states are identical to
physical brain states. They believe that there is no immaterial self that exists
independently from the brain or the body.

Patricia Churchland’s ideas on self are grounded on the perspectives of materialism or physicalism. She
argued that to fully understand the mind, one must understand the brain, using concepts of neuroscience
to explain mental concepts such as freewill. She asserted that there is no mind or soul beyond the
physical brain. Therefore, she proposed that the brain is the self; the brain is each of us.
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Congratulations!!! You've completed our first lesson. May you persevere throughout our lesson. Always
keep in mind that knowing yourself is the first step toward recognizing your goals and purpose in life. I will
continue to pray for your success and hard work. Have a good day, and may God bless you.