NORTHERN ZAMBALES COLLEGE INC.

BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION

LESSON 1.
The Philosophical view of Self: Various Philosophers

UNDERSTANDING THE SELF JADE LEE T. BUTLER-DE LEON

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Philosophy is derived from the Greek words

“Philos” and “Sophia” which literally means “Love for Wisdom”.

It is the study of acquiring knowledge through rational thinking and

inquiries that involves in answering questions regarding the nature and
existence of man and the world we live in.

As such, it is imperative to look into the various explanations from

different philosophers their notion of what the “Self” its nature and how
it is formed in order to have a better picture on how people develop their
behaviors, attitude and actions and to be able to identify and understand
who we are and how we came to be.

UNDERSTANDING THE SELF JADE LEE T. BUTLER-DE LEON

 NORTHERN ZAMBALES COLLEGE INC.
BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION

Socrates: Know Yourself

 He is principally concerned with man.
 He was the first philosopher who engages in systematic questioning about the self.
“Every man is composed of body and soul.” –
i.e. DUALISM [Man is composed of two important aspects of his personhood].
 Socrates believe that the answer to our pursuit in knowing ourselves lies in our own
abilities and wisdom, and that the only way for us to understand ourselves is through
internal questioning or introspection. This method of questioning oneself, where
the person assumes the 6 role of both the teacher and the student is known to the
world as the Socratic Method or Socratic Conversation.

By continuously asking and evaluating who we are we as a person will also be able to understand our strengths and
weaknesses, the things that we like and dislike, how we want people to treat us and how we want ourselves to be treated, so
by knowing these things we can act in accordance to what we know we are and live our lives following our knowledge of
ourselves.

• “An unexamined life is not worth living”

• “One thing only I know, and that is that I know nothing”

UNDERSTANDING THE SELF JADE LEE T. BUTLER-DE LEON

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Plato: The Ideal Self, perfect self

• He supported the idea of Socrates that man is dual in nature. He added that there are
components of the soul:

a.) Appetitive Soul –Plato’s idea of the appetitive soul is the part of the person that is driven by
desire and need to satisfy oneself. This satisfaction both involves physical needs and pleasures
and desires. As long as the person find an object or situation good or satisfying, the Appetitive
soul can drive the person to lean towards those objects and situations.

b.) Spirited Soul – this part of the soul can be attributed to the courageous part of a person, one
who wants to do something or to right the wrongs that they observe. Spirited soul are very
competitive and is very active, his competitiveness drives one to expect positive results and
winning.

c.) Rational Soul – The last part of the soul could be said is the driver of our lives, this is the part
that thinks and plan for the future “the conscious mind” it decides what to do, when to do it and
the possible results one could have depending on their actions.

The republic – he 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/ copied by reason and intellect that govern the affairs of the human person; the
spiritual soul which in charge of emotions; and appetitive soul in charge of base desires.

Therefore, when this ideal state is attained, the human person's soul becomes just and virtues. To make it simple, a man was omniscient
before he came to be born into this world. In practical terms, this means that man in this life should imitate his former self; he should live
a life of virtue in which true human perfection exists.

“Love in fact is one of the links between the sensible and the eternal world.” - Plato
UNDERSTANDING THE SELF JADE LEE T. BUTLER-DE LEON
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Augustine: Love and justice as the foundation of the individual self

• Augustine‟s view of the human person reflects the entire spirit of the medieval world when it comes to
man.
• He combined the platonic ideas into Christianity perspective.

• Augustine agreed that man is of a bifurcated/ dual nature. An aspect of man dwells in the world and is
imperfect and continuously years to be with the Divine and the other is capable of reaching immortality.

• He believes that a virtuous life is the dynamism of love. Loving God means loving one's fellowmen; and
loving one's fellowmen denotes never doing any harm to another.

• St. Augustine follows the idea that God encompasses us all, that everything will be better if we are with
God.

• His idea of a man and how to understand who we are as a person is related to our understanding of who
we are and how we question ourselves, though St. Augustine also relates our existence to God being
modeled in his likeness though being alive means that we are still far from God and has yet to be truly
with him.

• He emphasized that we may not be able to give our agreement to everything other people tell us but we
can still agree to those who we, from our own perception, think is right or wrong based from our
perception.

• He believes that our notion of ourselves and our idea of existence comes from a higher form of sense in
which bodily senses may not perceive or understand, and the more one doubts and question his life
means that, that person is actually living.

UNDERSTANDING THE SELF JADE LEE T. BUTLER-DE LEON

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BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION

Rene Descartes: I think, therefore I am

• Rene Descartes is a French Philosopher known to be the father of modern
philosophy because of his radical use of systematic and early scientific
method to aid his ideas and assumptions.

• Descartes is known for the statement “Cogito Ergo Sum” which means in
English as “I think therefore I am”.

• The self then for Rene is also a combination of two distinct entities, the
COGITO, the thing that thinks, which is the mind, and the EXTENZA of the
mind, which is the body, ie. like a machine that is attached to the mind.

• The human person has the body but it is not what makes a man a man. If
at all, that is the mind. Descartes: says: “What then am I? A thinking thing,
that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wills, refuses; that imagines
also and perceives.

• To sum, although the mind and the body are independent of each other
and serve their own function, man must use his own mind and thinking
abilities to investigate, analyze, experiment, and develop himself.

UNDERSTANDING THE SELF JADE LEE T. BUTLER-DE LEON

 NORTHERN ZAMBALES COLLEGE INC.
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David Hume: the self is the bundle theory of mind

• The Scottish Philosopher David Hume, focused his work in the field of Empiricism, Skepticism, and
naturalism.
• Being an Empiricist which believes in concrete evidences and observable experiences that meld a person,
his notion on the self contradicts to the ideas of the philosophers before him which said that at the notion of
self, one’s identity and behavior does not exceed the physical realm and that the “Self” is only the
accumulation of different impressions.
• Example: Ana knows that Lenard is a man not because she has seen his soul. Ana knows Lenard just like her because she sees him,
hears him, and touches him.

• According to him, there is no permanent “self”, that since our impressions of things based from our experiences
and from such impressions we can create our ideas and knowledge which leads to the argument that since our
impression and ideas change, it may improve or totally be replaced means that one change occurred the same
phenomenon of will happen to ones idea of who he is and what he can do.
For Hume, they can all be categorized into two: impressions and ideas.
The first one is the basic objects of our experience or sensation. So, it forms the core of our thoughts.
Example: when one touches fire, the hotness sensation is an impression which is the direct experience.
On the contrary, Ideas are copies of our impressions. Because of this, they are not as lively and clear as our
impressions. Example: the feeling of being in love for the first time that is an idea.

UNDERSTANDING THE SELF JADE LEE T. BUTLER-DE LEON

 NORTHERN ZAMBALES COLLEGE INC.
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Immanuel Kant: respect for self

• Immanuel Kant, a German Philosopher that is known for his works on Empiricism
and Rationalism.

• Kant responded to Hume’s work by trying to establish that the collection of

impressions and different contents is what it only takes to define a person.

• Kant argued that the sense called “Transcendental Apperception” is an essence of

our consciousness that provides basis for understanding and establishing the
notion of “self” by synthesizing one’s accumulation of experiences, intuition and
imagination goes.

• Which means that this idea goes beyond what we experience but still able to
become aware of.

For example the idea of time and space, we may not be able to observe the movement
of time and the vastness of space but we are still capable of understanding their
concept based from what we can observe as their representation.

Without the self, one cannot organize the different impressions that one gets in
relation to his own existence. Thus, the self is not just what gives one his personality.
It is also the seat of knowledge acquisition for all human persons

UNDERSTANDING THE SELF JADE LEE T. BUTLER-DE LEON

 NORTHERN ZAMBALES COLLEGE INC.
BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION

Sigmund Freud: Psychoanalytic theory of self

• Sigmund Freud, an Austrian Psychologist and Physician, he is also known as the father of
psychoanalysis and is known for his work on human nature and the unconscious.
• Man governed by 2 drives: EROS (pleasure) and Thanatos (pain).

• He asserts that the human psyche [personality] is structured into 3 parts. These structures – ID
[internal desires], EGO [reality], and SUPEREGO [conscience] – all develop at different stages in a
persons‟ life.

Aspects of Personality
ID - also known as the child aspect of a person, The ID’s attention is on satisfaction of one’s needs
and self-gratification. It is driven by the pleasure principle.
SUPEREGO- is the conscience of the one’s personality, Superego has the inclination to uphold
justice and do what is morally right and socially acceptable actions.The superego is involved in the notion
of right or wrong that is imparted to us by our parents or people that tool care for us during childhood.
EGO - Sometimes known as the Police or the mediator between id and superego. It operates within
the boundaries of reality, primary function is to maintain the impulses of the ID to an acceptable degree.

• Freud believed that we are a by-product of our experiences in the past. And that are actions are driven
by the idea of resisting or avoiding pain, and are molded from our need for pleasure or being happy.

• Freud also argues that the development of an individual can be divided into distinct stages
characterized by sexual drives. As the person grows, certain areas become sources of pleasure,
frustration, or both. Freudian stages of psychosexual development: oral, anal, phallic, latency, and
genital.
UNDERSTANDING THE SELF JADE LEE T. BUTLER-DE LEON
 NORTHERN ZAMBALES COLLEGE INC.
BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION

Gilbert Ryle: The mind-Body dichotomy

 Gilbert Ryle with his Behavioristic approach to self, said that self is the behavior
presented by the person, his notion of dualism is that the behavior that we show,
emotions and actions are the reflection of our mind and as such is the manifestation
of who we are.

• For Ryle, what truly matters is the behavior that a person manifests in his day-to- day
life. For him, looking for and trying to understand the self as it really exists is like
visiting your friends‟ university and looking for the “university.”

• Ryle does not believe that the mind and body, though some say can coexist, are two
separate entities which is said to be evident in the unexplainable phenomenon or
abilities of the 12 mind where the soul is considered.

• To him, once we encounter others, their perceptions of what we do, how we act, and
the way we behave will then result to the understanding of other people and
establishing of who we are.

• His explanation of self is further exemplified in his “ghost in the machine” view.

• This view said the man is a complex machine with different functioning parts, and the
intelligence, and other characteristics or behaviour of man is represented by the
ghost in the said machine.

UNDERSTANDING THE SELF JADE LEE T. BUTLER-DE LEON

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Merleau Ponty: Phenomenologist

• Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty is a French philosopher that is known for his works on
existentialism and phenomenology.

• His idea of the self, regarded that the body and mind are not separate entities, but rather those
two components is one and the same.

• His idea that follows the gestalt ideation where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts
in which pushed his idea on the unity of the function of the mind and body,this idea is called
the Phenomenology of Perception.

• The idea of Phenomenology of Perception according to Merleau-Ponty is divided into three (3)
division, The Body, The Perceived World, and the People and the world.

• The body that both receives the experience as well as integrates such experiences in the different perception.

• The Perceived world, which are the accumulation of the perception as integrated by the experiences of the
body.

• And the People and the world that enable one to not only be able to integrate the other objects in the world but
also to be able to experience the cultural aspect and relate to others.

• His idea of perception follows the idea of Gestalt psychology which gives important on the whole than the sum of its
part. For him, perception guides our action based from what our experiences are, the body perceives while our
consciousness provides the meaning or interprets the various perception we have in the world and the self could be
established by the perceptions we have in the world, whereas one’s action, behaviour and language used could be said
to be the reflection of our united perception of the world.

UNDERSTANDING THE SELF JADE LEE T. BUTLER-DE LEON

 NORTHERN ZAMBALES COLLEGE INC.
BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION

Prepare for oral recitation and short quiz.

ENJOY READING 

“The beautiful thing about learning is that nobody can

take it away from you.”
― B.B. King

UNDERSTANDING THE SELF JADE LEE T. BUTLER-DE LEON