PREFACE

Understanding the Self is a fundamental course in the General Education Curriculum for tertiary
education. It is designed to help the students understand the nature of identity, including factors that
influence and shape personal identity.

Nowadays, adolescents are confronted with issues that pertain to self and identity. The main purpose
of this module is to help our students develop a more critical and reflective attitude in exploring issues and
concerns that pertain to the self for a better understanding of themselves and others. It will also help them
identify and play their significant role in our society.

This module is designed to guide students in understanding the concept of “the self" in various
contexts and perspectives. It is divided into three chapters, focused respectively on discussing the self as a
construct, the factors that make and break this self-concept, and the pointers on self-care and management. It
includes diversified activities that illustrate real-life experiences to deliberately steer the students into
reflection and self-assessment, both of which are golden keys to unlocking one's own sense of self and
personal identity. This module is a tool for students as they navigate the intricacies of the “SELF” amidst a fast-
changing world.

Propelled by a deep sense of mission to equip and empower the Filipino youth, the authors embarked
on developing this module as a humble contribution in building a great nation.

CHAPTER ONE

THE SELF FROM VARIOUS PERSPECTIVES

LESSON 1

Philosophical Perspectives on the Self

LESSON OBJECTIVES
At the end of the lesson, you should be able to:
 state the importance of understanding one's self;
 explain the various notions of the self from different philosophical perspectives;
 examine one's self in relation to the philosophical perspectives of the self.

INTRODUCTION
“Tell us something about yourself. Who are you?”

It is almost a common practice in every beginning of the school year that students as well as teachers
must tell something about themselves, and the introduction also usually follows this format: name, course or
year, address if the class is composed of mostly migrating students to the school's location, as well as interests
or hobbies.

A name can already tell a lot of things about a person. Some parents have certain stories surrounding
their children's name. Some surnames are stereotypically associated with rich or famous families. Some even
reflects the historical events of the year a person is born! It is a term that most of us will associate ourselves
with for the rest of our lives. It is the term that we will react to when we hear it mentioned in the streets. For
some, it creates some bond or sense of pride when we read it in a story, a book, or even as an example in an
exam. But, is our name us? Is it the only thing that defines us?

Your course or year level in school may say something about your interests, skills, and activities. Your
place of origins (i.e., your province) may provide others some idea, true or not, about what to expect from
you. Your interests and hobbies are probably your ways to express yourself, so to speak, and others may
associate themselves with you because of that. Yet, are they the self? Do they define who you are?

Who are you?

ACTIVITY
Try to know more about yourself by answering the following questions in the boxes provided.

1. Aside from your name, course, age, address, physical attributes, and interests, how would you characterize
yourself?

2. Reflect on your younger years, how did yourself develop? What external factors or personal decisions made
the biggest impact?

3. How is your ‘self’ related to others, and what makes it different from others?

4. What do you think is the connection of your ‘’self’’ to your physical body?

5. Do you think a separate ‘’self’’ exists after death? What do you think happens to this entity?

ANALYSIS
Let us summarize and examine your answers on the previous page through filling the following diagrams. You
are encouraged to share your answer with the class.

1. Based on your answer, how do you view your personal ‘’self’’ (internal) and its connection to others
(external)?

Internal External

2. Based on your answers, how do you view the development of the self?
The Self in Our Younger Years The Self During Adulthood
The Self After Death
(From infancy to teenage years) (20 years old and above)

From the above activities, were you able to know more about yourself as well as the concept of ‘’self’’?
Can we truly know about ourselves as well as the selves of others? And, if we at least understand ourselves
and others, what can we do with such knowledge?
ABSTRACTION
As a broad field about knowledge, thinking, reasoning, nature, as well as how we should live, among
others, it is almost inevitable that the study of philosophy would lead for the philosophers to reflect on
themselves and ask, "Who am l? What characterizes this 'self that I say l am?" Here are several philosophers
and their ideas that we can also reflect on.

Greek thinkers prior to Socrates, like Thales, Pythagoras, and Heracitus among others, focused on the
composition and processes of the world around them. Unsatisfied with mere mythological and supernatural
explanations, these so-called Pre-Socratic philosophers turned to observation, documentation, and reasoning.

Socrates and Plato

Socrates and Plato Socrates (469-399 BCE) provided a change of perspective by focusing on the self. His
life and ideas, documented by his students, the historian Xenophon and the philosopher Plato, showed how
Socrates applied systematic questioning of the self. Socrates believed that it is the duty of the philosopher to
know oneself. To live without knowing who you are and what virtues you can attain is the worst that can
happen to a person. Thus, he noted that an “unexamined life is not worth living.”

Socrates saw a person as dualistic, that is, every person is composed of body and soul. There is an
imperfect and impermanent aspect of every one of us, which is our physical body, and then, there is also the
perfect and permanent, which is our soul.

Plato (428-347 BCE) further expounded on the idea of the soul by stating that it has three parts or
components: the appetitive soul, the rational soul, and the spirited soul. The appetitive soul is the one
responsible for the desires and cravings of a person; the rational soul is the thinking, reasoning, and judging
aspect; and the spirited soul is accountable for emotions and also makes sure that the rules of reason is
followed in order to attain victory and/or honor.

In his work The Republic, Plato emphasized that all three parts of the soul must work harmoniously to
attain justice and virtue in a person. The rational soul must be well-developed and in-charge, the emotions
from the spirited soul are checked, and the desires of the appetitive must be controlled and focused to those
that give life, like eating, drinking, and sleeping among others.

St. Augustine
St. Augustine (354-430 CE) is considered as one of the most significant Christian thinkers, especially in
the development of the Latin Christianity theology. His idea of the “self" merged that of Plato and the then
new Christian perspective, which led him to believe in the duality of a person.

He believes that there is this imperfect part of us, which is connected with the world and yearns to be
with the divine, and there is a part of us that is not bound by this world and can therefore St. Augustine attain
immortality. The imperfection of the body incapacitates it from thriving in the spiritual communion with God,
thus, it must die for the soul to reach the eternal realm. However, this communion of the soul with God can
only be attained if the body lives in this world with virtue.

René Descartes
René Descartes (1596-1650) was a French mathematician, scientist, and philosopher. He claimed that
the person is composed of the cogito or the mind, and the extenza or the body, which is the extension of the
mind. He argues that a person should only believe the things that can pass the test of doubt (Descartes 2008).
In his “Discourse on the Method" and “Meditations on First Philosophy,” he therefore concluded that the only
thing that a person cannot doubt is the existence of his or her ‘’self" Because even doubt about the self proves
that there is a thinking or doubting self. Thus, his famous quote “cogito ergo sum.”

What makes a person a person is therefore the mind, and the body is just some kind of a machine that
is attached and controlled by it. In his words, “But what then, am!? A thinking thing. It has been said. But what
is a thinking thing? Itis a thing that doubts, understands (conceives), affirms, denies, wills, refuses; that
imagines also, and perceives" (Descartes 2008).

John Locke
Locke (1632-1704) was an English philosopher, political theorist, and physician. His works as a
physician provided him with an idea that deviated from the duality of the body or soul.

A person's mind is a blank slate or tabula rasa at birth. It is through experiences that this blank slate is
filled, and a personal identity or “self” is formed. This “self" cannot be found in the soul nor the body but in
one's consciousness (Nimbalkar 2011).

Note, however, that the consciousness is not the brain itself. It is something that goes beyond the
brain and thus, for Locke, the consciousness and the “self" that comes with it can be transferred from one
person or body to another (Nimbalkar 2011).

David Hume
Hume (1711-1776) was a Scottish philosopher and an empiricist who believes that all concepts as well
as knowledge come from the senses and experiences. Based on such perspective, he argued that there is no
self beyond what can be experienced. We do not know others because we have seen or touched their souls;
we know them because of what we can actually observe.

The “self,” according to Hume, is “a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each
other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement” (Hume and Steinberg1992).
Simply, the self is a combination of experiences of a person.

We can categorize these experiences into impressions and ideas. Impressions are real or actual
experiences or sensations, like feeling the rough edges of a stone or tasting a sweet ice cream. Ideas are
copies of impressions or representation of the world and sensations, like love, faith, or even an association
that this certain event is caused by something in the past could possibly create and their reaction in the future.

Immanuel Kant
One of the most influential philosophers in Western philosophy, Kant (1724-1804) contributed to the
fields of metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics among others.

While everything starts with sensations and impressions, Kant believes that there must necessarily be
something in us that organizes these sensations to create knowledge and ideas. Against the empiricist Locke,
Kant is a rationalist who thinks that reason, not mere experience, is the foundation of knowledge. It is like
seeing a visual effect in television, your experience say it is there, but reason says it is only a computer-
generated image.
 For Kant, it is the self that organizes and synthesizes our experiences into something meaningful for us.
It can do such thing because it is independent from sensory experiences. It is something that transcends or is
above even our consciousness.

Ryle, Churchland, and Merleau-Ponty

The debate on the duality of a person's self, of mind and body, of consciousness and substance,
internal and external, have been revised and adapted for a longtime that several modern-day philosophers
had to take drastic actions, so to speak. This action is the rejection of that duality.

A British philosopher mainly associated with the Ordinary Language Philosophy Movement, Gilbert
Ryle (1900-1976) proposed that we should instead focus on the observable behavior of a person in defining
the "self.” One of the things that the duality approach seems to state is that there can be a private,
unobservable aspect of a person, and a different public and observable part. One can describe one's "self" as
good but do otherwise in real life.

Ryle do not adhere to this idea and sees the self as an entirety of thoughts, emotions, and actions of a
person that relates to observable behavior. We get to know others by observing their behavior and inferring
about their "selves.” We can apply the same observation and reflection on ourselves.

Maurice Jean Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), a leading French existentialist and phenomenologist, also
contributes to the idea by stating that mind and body are interconnected with each other and therefore
cannot be separated. Our body is our connection to the external world, including other people, thus all
experiences are embodied. This also includes the thoughts and emotions of a person.

More recent philosophers, like Paul Churchland (1942-) further utilized knowledge from other
academic and research fields to talk about the self as well as the mind. He was one of those who proposed the
use of “eliminative materialism” or “eliminativism,” which claims that the old terms we use to describe the
mind are outdated, if not mere “folk psychology,” thus the need to use more accurate and scientifically proven
terms, especially based on neuroscience research.

Neuroscience somehow shows a connection of what we call mental states to that of the physical
activities of the brain. It can be argued therefore that the self is actually located in the brain, and that the
actions of the mind or the self are processes of the brain.

The dual perspective of the “self" continues to exist, perhaps because our brains are programmed to
think of dualities. Our religious beliefs, that of a mortal body and an immortal soul, also affects such
continuity. However, new ideas from other academic fields as well as findings from technological advances are
being considered and incorporated in this debate and the discovery of the self. Being open to such new ideas
may help us know more about our own “self.”

ASSESSMENT AND APPLICATION

“Invictus," written in 1875 by William Ernest Henley, is arguably one of the iconic poems ever written
that offers a strong message about the self. A Latin word meaning “unconquered," its last two lines are
notably utilized in speeches of historical figures, like Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, and Barack Obama, as
well as other literature and movies, such as Casablanca, Star Trek: Renegades, and even the biopic Invictus.

Read the poem and answer the questions.

 INVICTUS
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.

A. Research about the background or an

interpretation of the poem. Cite your
source/s
B. In your perspective, how was the ‘’self’’
represented in the poem?
C. Based on your reading of the poem as well as
the information your have researched, which
of the philosophical ideas discussed in this
lesson best describes the representation of
the idea about the self in this poem? Provide
a brief explanation.
D. From the discussion, what now is your idea
of the ‘’self’’?