The Self from Various Perspectives

Socrates
No historical document proves that Socrates really existed. We only know Socrates because his
illustrious students (from Plato to Aristotle) spoke eloquently and generously about his wit,
intellect, and wisdom. Socrates left no known writings, but his highly regarded student, Plato,
wrote extensively about him. Some would even claim that Plato, in positing his own radical 1deas
in his era, spoke through the character of Socrates in his writings. Despite this mystery in his
identity, Socrates is credited for his many contributions to western philosophy.
Socrates reminds us to "know thyself," a translation of an ancient Greek aphorism gnõthi seauton.
Socrates 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.
His technique of asking basic questions such as "Who am 1?," "What is the purpose of my life?, "
What am I doing here?," or "What is justice?" are all predicated on the fact that humans must be
able to define these simple things so as to move forward and act accordingly based on their
definition of the self.
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.
For Socrates, possession of knowledge is virtue and ignorance is vice. He argued that a person's
acceptance of ignorance is a springboard for the acquisition of knowledge later on. So, one must
first have the humility to acknowledge his or her ignorance so as to acquire knowledge.
Answers will always be subjective and there is no right or wrong answer to the questions posited
by Socrates. 1 n quality and quantity of answers are dependent on the person answering these basic
inquiries and one's subsequent actions are best understood on how one defines oneself, thus the
constant reminder to "know thyself."
Socrates is a dualist. He raised the question, "What is it that, when in a body, makes it living?" He
believed that man has soul, which is divine, immortal, intelligible, uniform, indissoluble, and ever
self-consistent and invariable. He argued that the ruler of the body is the soul. For him, soul pre-
existed the body, and soul is what makes the body alive. If the soul gives life to the body, it makes
the body and the soul dependent on each other. However, their striking difference shows that they
are two different substances united in the body as the soul gives life to it. For the body, according
to Socrates, is human, mortal, multiform, unintelligible, dissoluble and inconsistent. Death is the
release of the soul from the body for the human soul is immortal. The soul has life essentially, the
way fire has heat essentially.
He added that some mental states can be attributed to the soul while others are linked to the body.
The body is vulnerable to basic emotions and actions; the soul controls these emotions and actions
through proper judgment and reason. This differentia establishes the superiority of the soul over
the body.

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.
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. For example, the dogs in this
world are unreal, but the essence of dog is real. All things that exist in the physical world are
therefore unreal as they are all concrete objects while the universal essences are real as they are
immaterial blueprints of objects in the physical world. The concrete objects in this world are mere
copies of these abstract universal essences. The word "dog" means a certain ideal dog. Particular
dogs partake of the nature of the dog, but more or less imperfectly it is only owing to this
imperfection that there can be many of them. Thus, the ideal dog is real while particular dogs are
only apparent.
Plato added that ideas are objects of the intellect known by reason alone and are objective realities
that exist in a world of their own. For instance, man in this world is immersed in the universal idea
of man. "Man in this world" is an illusion; the idea of a man" is the real man. There are as many
ideas as there are common names and every name denotes an idea. John, Mark. Matthew, and Paul
are all men. What is common here is the fact that they are all men. What is common to all of them
is the essence or idea of man which, according to Plato, is an objective reality that exists in an
independent ontological domain,
In terms of the concept of the self, Plato was one of the first philosophers who believed in an
enduring self that is represented by the soul. He argued that the soul is eternal and constitutes the
enduring self, because even after death, the soul continues to exist.

St. Augustine
St. Augustine's reflections on the relations between time and memory greatly influenced many
fundamental doctrines of psychology. Time is something that people measure within their own
memory. Time is not a feature or property of the world, but a property of the mind. He believed
that the times present of things past, present, and future coexist in the soul; the time present of
things past is memory; the time present of things present is direct experience; and the time present
of things future is expectation. He emphasized that the memory of the past is significant in
anticipation of the future and presence of the present. In St, Augustine's method of introspection
(awareness of one's own mental processes), memory is the entity through which one can think
meaningfully about temporal continuity. This continuity is possible only by and through memory.
He advanced the idea that past and future could be seen as equivalent entities that exist. However,
time past and time future are not real in themselves but they are only real as long as they exist in
the mind or consciousness. In his work Confessions, he wrote: "We measure the passage ot time
when we measure the intervals of perception. But who can measure time past which now is no
longer or time future which is not yet? For if there are times past and future, I wish to know where
they are. Wherever they are and whatever they are they exist only as present. Although we tell of
past things as true, they are drawn out of memory, not the things themselves, which have already
passed, but words constructed from the images of the perceptions which were formed in the
mind...My childhood, for instance, which is no longer, still exist in time past which does not now
exist. But then I call to mind its image."
The existence of past and future for St. Augustine is only possible through memory and
expectation.
Introspection became the impetus to the doctrines of psychology which began with the inquiry of
the soul then of the mind, consciousness, and thought. These doctrines confirm the superiority of
humans over other organisms since humans have self-consciousness.
St. Augustine introduced the concept of the self in the past, present, and future time. He wrote,
"From this it appears to me that time is nothing other than extendedness; but extendedness of what
I do not know. This is a marvel to me - the extendedness may be of the mind itself." He argued
that as far as consciousness can be extended backward to any past action or forward to actions to
come, it determines the identity of the person.

Rene Descartes
Rene Descartes, a French philosopher and mathematician, is best known for his dictum cogito,
ergo sum, translated as "I think, therefore I am."
For Descartes, the existence of anything that you register from your senses can be doubted. For
example, it 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
about 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.
In Descartes methodic doubt, you can say, "I think I am bored, therefore I am bored" or "I think I
am strong, therefore I am strong." If you choose to think that you are bored, then you are bored. If
you choose to think that you are strong, then you are strong. In the same manner, it you choose to
think that you are busy then you are busy, or if you choose to think that you are weak, then you
are weak. Whichever thought a person chooses is the one that is carried over into his or her I am."
Only humans have the hubris (excessive pride) of musing such irreverent questions on existence
and purpose of life. And only humans have satisfied themselves with their own answers to their
own musings.
With all the groundbreaking technological advances, with a computer being able to do a trillion
computations within a second, they still fall short when compared to the greatest computer of all-
the human brain. More than the computations, memories, and capabilities for practical daily
purposes, n0 computer is ever self-aware of its own existence. Just as no animal would be musing
about the purpose of life. Only humans have the audacity and impertinence to try to figure out the
meaning of life and are actually self-aware of their own existence.
Descartes 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 body exist but differ in existence and reality. The self is a feature
not of the body but of the mind and thus a mental substance rather than a physical substance
(Northoff, 2013).
The self, for Descartes, is nothing else but a mind-body dichotomy. Thought (mind) always
precedes action (body). It has always been in that sequence. Everything starts with a thought.
Humans think first about doing something and then do it. When one thinks that he or she will have
a very busy week, then he or she will plan what to do from Monday to Sunday. It is the thought
that sets direction to human actions but humans are always free to choose. So, if one says he or
she will have a very busy week, then he or she can push through with the tasks he or she needs to
do for the week or not.
Humans are self-aware and being such proves their own place in the universe. Humans create their
own reality and they are the masters of their own universe. Western philosophy is largely based
on the writings of Descartes. If you have heard of the saying that man is a rational animal, one is
actually positing the ideas of Rene Descartes. To acknowledge him, Filipinos have a unique term,
"diskarte," a derivative of the surname of Descartes, which denotes finding a way or making things
possible.

John Locke
John Locke's 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. He
rejected that brain has something to do with consciousness as the brain, as well, as the body may
change, while consciousness remains the same. He concluded that personal identity is not in the
brain but in one's consciousness.
In his work, "Identity and Diversity" in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), he
pondered, "if the same Substance which thinks be changed, it can be the same person, or remaining
the same, it can be a different person." Here, he supports that consciousness can be transferred
from one substance (body and soul) to another. While the soul is changed, for instance,
consciousness remains the same, thereby maintaining the personal identity through the change. On
the other hand, consciousness may be lost involuntarily through forgetfulness while the soul stays
the same. With this, he claimed that there is the same soul but a different person. Thus, the same
soul is unnecessary or insufficient in the formation of one's personal identity over time when
consciousness is lost.
His philosophy can be understood easily in his illustration of "The Prince and the Cobbler."
Suppose a prince will die and have its soul resurrected in the body of a cobbler whose soul has
departed. With this exchange, the prince will still act and think as a prince even though he finds
himself in a new body. This idea supports the possibility that the same person may appear in a
different body at the time of resurrection and yet still be the same person.
The other remarkable contribution of this country lawyer was the notion of tabula rasa. This
concept posits that everyone started as a blank slate, and the content is provided by one's
experiences over time.

David Hume
For the Scottish philosopher David Hume, there is no self as a mental entity for "what we call a
mind is nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptions...The self is a bundle of
perceptions (objects of the mind) of interrelated events. The assumption of a self as mental entity
and thus as mental substance does not exist (Northoff, 2013). Hume's materialism views the soul
as a product of the imagination. There is no primordial substance that houses the self. Any concept
of the self is simply memory and imagination.
Hume stressed that there is no stable thing called self, for the self is nothing but a complex set of
successive impressions or perceptions. If you are looking for a self, you cannot find it; the only
thing that you can discover is a set of individual impressions like happiness or sadness, hotness or
coldness, hunger or fullness hate or love, and many others. What you think and what you feel
constitute what you are at this very moment. So, if at this moment, you are happy, then you are
happy. If you are hungry, then you are hungry. That is what you are; that is who you are.
He added "when my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep, so long am I
insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist and were all my perceptions removed by
death, and could I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate after the dissolution of my
body, I should be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what is farther requisite to make me a
perfect non-entity." He reduced personality and cognition to a machine that may be activated or
deactivated. Death, according to him, obliterates the perception one has.
Hume rejected the idea that personal identity is reflected by the association of the self with an
enduring body. He asked, Is X the same person as Y? For Hume, one cannot point to the physical
traits of the body. X and Y are the same person if they share the same mind. For instance, Z
represents the set of memories. X and Y are the same person only if they have the same Z. On his
account, minds are individuated by a collection of perceptions united under the idea of a unifying
self with awareness of entertaining those perceptions (Duque, 2009). A mind, to simplify, would
be constituted by a set of private memories.
Immanuel Kant
German philosopher Immanuel Kant theorized that consciousness is formed by one's inner and
outer sense. The inner sense is comprised of one's psychological state and intellect. The outer sense
consists of one's senses and the physical world.
Consciousness of oneself and of one's psychological state (or inner sense) was referred to by Kant
as empirical self-consciousness while consciousness of oneself and of one's state via acts of
apperception is called transcendental apperception.
The source of empirical self-consciousness is the inner sense. All representational states are in the
inner sense such as moods, feelings, and sensations including pleasure and pain. One must be
phenomenally conscious to be aware of something in the inner sense.
Apperception is the faculty that allows tor 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 (Brook, 2013), 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. For example, think about a moment when you shared
memorable experiences with someone but each of you had radically different experiences
Swimming, attending reunion or walking at a party. Reflect on the way each person instinctively
describes the situation from his or her perspective. This is the unity of consciousness that Kant
described. The self is able to perform this synthesizing and unifying function because it transcends
sense experience. The self is not an object located in one's consciousness with other subjects. The
self, your own self, is a subject. It is an organizing principle that makes a coherent experience
possible by using the faculties of the mind to synthesize sensations into a unified whole. The ability
of the mind to regulate those experiences into one experience makes the self a product of reason.
It is for this reason that Kant gives the self-transcendental status for it exists independently of
experience. The self is therefore a transcendental unifying subject, an organizing consciousness
that makes an intelligible experience possible.
As opposed to Hume, 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.
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud's contribution to psychology, the psychoanalytic theory, led to another
understanding of the philosophy of the mind.
For Freud, self is multi-layered. It is composed of three structures of the human mind-id, ego, and
superego. Id exists since birth, pertaining to instinct. It serves as storeroom or wishes and
obsessions related to sexual and aggressive desires. It operates on the hedonistic or pleasure
principle-seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. It ignores reality, harmony, common sense, and
reason. By nature, it is animalistic and always seeks immediate gratification. This structure does
not recognize good or evil, laws or rules, morality, or beliefs. Id is driven by the so-called libido
(sexual energy) though it remains an unknown and inaccessible part of the structure of personality,
1 it is dominant, an egoistic, boorish, and barbaric brute emerges,
Ego operates according to the reality principle. This structure's role is to maintain equilibrium
between the demands of id and superego in accordance with what is best and practical in reality.
Ego borrows some of the id's energy in order to deal with the demands of the environment. It is
developed by the individual's personal experiences and adheres to the principles of reason and
logic. Ego ensures the continuous existence and protection of the individual. If ego is successful,
it turns out a brilliant, creative, and emotionally-balanced individual.
Superego is the last layer to develop. It operates according to the morality principle. Superego is
the reservoir of moral standards. It ensures compliance with the norms, values, and standards
prescribed by society. It is developed by means of socialization in various agents like home, school,
church, and others. Superego has two systems: the conscience and the ideal self. Conscience can
sanction the ego through the feeling of guilt. The ideal self, an imaginary picture of one's self, is
rewarded by the superego when one conforms with the standards imposed by society. If superego
is dominant, a law-abiding, morally upright, god-fearing, and socially acceptable individual
appears.

Gibert Rvle
Gilbert Ryle, a British philosopher, opposed Rene Descartes that the self is a "thinking thing." He
maintained that the mind is not separate from the body. 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.
Ryle supported the basic notions of behavioristic psychology. His theory is called logical
behaviorism or analytical behaviorism-a theory of mind which states that mental concepts can be
understood through observable events.
In his work Concept of Mind (1949), he described Descartes mind-body dualism as ghost in the
machine." For him, Descarte's idea is a category mistake supporting that there is an immaterial
mind in a material body. Descartes thought that one has soul in the body that possesses talents,
memories, and character. The properties of a person are better understood as adjectives modifying
a body, than as noun (objects) parallel to it. Kindness, for example, is not a thing that exists apart
from and parallel to the body, but rather a collection of properties a body has. Kindness includes
properties such as being generous, humble, courteous, loyal, and honest. Someone who never
exhibited any of these traits would not be called kind; and anyone who is considered kind exhibits
some of these traits.
The only proof of the mind's operation is visible and evident in activities like singing, running,
walking, and the like. Knowing and believing are just dispositions but these influence people's
actions. To understand Ryle's illustration of the mind, think of this scenario: You went to a forest
and you saw the trees, animals, falls, and caves. You might ask, “Where is the forest?" This is
similar to asking, "Where is the mind? All the things you saw is the forest. Therefore, the
disposition to know, believe, feel, and act is called the mind.
As for Ryle's concept of the self, the self is a combination the mind and the body. While the focus
of other philosophers is towards the separation of mind and body (a dualist view), for Ryle, self is
taken as a whole with the combination of the body and the mind. Ryle also posited the maxim, "I
act, therefore I am." For him, the mind is not the seat of self but the behavior, opposing Descartes
immaterial mind in a material body. The self is the way people behave.

Paul Churchland and Patricia Churchland

Paul Churchland and Patricia Churchland, who are both neuroscientists, introduced eliminative
materialism-a radical claim that ordinary, common sense understanding of the mind is deeply
wrong and that some or all of the mental states posited by common sense do not actually exist
(Ramsey, 2013). For them, it is false to claim that folk psychology, or common sense psychology,
is the capacity to explain mental states of people. Most people think that we have a stream of
consciousness that contains images and conceptions of things about which we have beliefs and
attitudes. Our beliefs and attitudes are supported by our feelings, which include mental states like
joy and sorrow, or anxiety and relief. It is also a folk belief that our sense of the world and of
ourselves is a direct representation of how the world is formed, thus making our bodies reflect or
adapt the world is (Weed, 2011).
The Churchlands argued that talk of mental states would eventually be abandoned in favor of a
radically different view of how the brain works not identified with mental states. For them, self is
nothing else but brain, or simply, the self is contained entirely within the physical brain.
In Patricia Churchland's book Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain (2013), she wrote: "My brain
and I are inseparable. I am who I am because my brain is what it is. Even so, I often think about
my brain in terms different from those I use when thinking about myself. I think about my brain
as that, and about myself as me. I think about my brain as having neurons, but I think of me as
having a memory. Still, I know that my memory is all about the neurons in my brain. Lately, I
think about my bran in more intimate terms-as me." This supports the idea that to understand the
self, one must study the brain, not just the mind.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
A French phenomenological philosopher, Maurice Merleau- Ponty 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." The former is the body as-
it-is-lived. He wrote, "But I am not in front of my body, I am in my body, or rather I am my body."
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.
For phenomenological philosophers, to be a subject (a self essentially requires a body.
Consciousness cannot simply be immaterial but must be embodied. The "I think" implies "I can"
in the sense that "I can" go somewhere else as a being possessing a body. This is where Merleau-
Ponty opposed the dualist account of subjectivity. Mind and body are essentially correlated and it
is not possible to understand subjectivity without taking into account this essential correlation. He
also opposed the Cartesian cogito. For him, consciousness is both perceiving and engaging.
To sum it up, Merleau-Ponty's, I am my body cannot simply be interpreted as advocating a
materialist, behaviorist type position. He accepts the idea of mental states but he also suggests that
the use of the mind is inseparable from our bodily, situated, physical nature. The body cannot be
viewed solely as an object, or material entity of the world.