Understanding the Self

Articulate the various Philosophical views

about the self;
Examine one’s thoughts and experiences
according to the Philosophical views of the
self;
Propose an answer to the question “Who am
I?”.
 PHILOSOPHY

From the Greek word philia which

means love, and Sophia which means
wisdom.
1. Socrates, Plato, Augustine
2. Descartes, Locke, Hume and Kant
3. Freud, Ryle, Churchland and Merleau-Ponty
“Know thyself”
The real meaning of knowing thyself, then, is
a requirement for self-moderation, prudence,
good judgment, and excellence of the soul
(Ortiz de Landazuri, 2014).
This means that the greeting is not only an
imperative of self-knowledge but is also a
requirement that one has to have self-
moderation.
The ethics in knowing thyself is very
important because such will bring the person
to the excellence of the soul.
Like any other loving relationships, one must
be able to bring about the excellence of the
soul of the other as a result of such
relationship.
Socrates: “The unexamined life is not worth
living.”
Living a good life means having the wisdom
to distinguish what is right from wrong.
“Only a self-controlled man, then, will know
himself and will be capable of looking to see
what he actually knows and what he
doesn’t know.”
Socrates rightly pronounced that “I know that
I do not know.”
For Socrates, only in the recognition of one’s
ignorance that a person can truly know one
self.
Socrates the wisest among philosophers.
For Plato, the psyche is composed of three
elements.
◦ appetitive,
◦ spirited,
◦ and the mind.
The nous is the superpower that controls the
affairs of the self.
In his Confessions, he pronounced: “You have
made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our heart
is restless until it finds rest in You.”
He dedicated his Christian life to the pursuit
of contemplative ideals. He practiced
extreme self-denial and self-mortification.
He was not afraid to accept to himself and tell
the people about his sinfulness.
Thus his journey toward the understanding of
the self was centered on his religious
convictions and beliefs.
Descartes claimed that we cannot really rely on
our senses because our sense perceptions can
often deceive us.
Descartes started to doubt whether the events he
experiences at the moment are only products of
his dreams and therefore illusions.
“Cogito, ergo Sum.” This is translated as “I
think therefore I am” or “I doubt therefore I
exist.”
Only after the certitude of the “doubting I” can
all
the other existence (e.g. God, the universe,
things, events, etc.) become certain.
His proposition is that the self is comparable
to an empty space where everyday
experiences contribute to the pile of
knowledge that is put forth on that empty
space.
The validity of sense perception is very
subjective.
Example: “Congratulations! You won
1M pesos in an online lottery.”
Hume claimed that there cannot be a
persisting idea of the self.
Impressions are subjective, temporary,
provisional, prejudicial and even skewed –
and therefore cannot be persisting.
This means that for Hume, all we know about
ourselves are just bundles of temporary
impressions.
The self is always transcendental
For Kant, ideas are perceived by the self, and
they are connecting the self and the world
Perception here does not belong to the world;
it belongs to the self through its temporal-
spatial faculty.
In other words, the thing-in-itself cannot
provide the idea but it is only the spatial-
temporal faculty of the self that makes the
idea sensible.
Freud, refusing to take the self or subject as
technical terms, regarded the self as the “I”
that ordinarily constitute both the mental and
physical actions.
Admittedly, the question “Who am I?” will not
provide a victorious unified answer but a
complicated diverse features of moral
judgments, inner sensations, bodily
movements and perceptions.
Topographical Model. According to
Freud’s concept of hysteria, the individual
person may both know and do not know
certain things at the same time.
Freud’s solution to this predicament is to
divide the “I” into conscious and the
unconscious.
Structural Model. Similar to the disintegration
of the self in Topographical Model, Freud’s
Structural Model will also represent the self in
three different agencies.
The id is known as the primitive or instinctive
component. The ego is described by Freud as
that part of the id which has been modified by
the direct influence of the external world.
Many interpreters of Freud see the ego as the
“I” and the super ego as “above I.”
The superego synthesizes the morals, values
and systems in society in order to function as
the control outpost of the instinctive desires of
the id (McLeod, 2007).
He proposed that physical actions or
behaviors are dispositions of the self.
Ryle continued that the mind will depend on
how words are being told and expressed and
delivered.
Churchland promoted the position they called
“eliminative materialism” which brings forth
neuroscience in the fore of understanding the
self.
Churchlands wanted to predict, when people
wanted to ask what is going on with
themselves, they might as well go for MRI
scan or CT Scan to understand the present
condition of the brain and how it currently
works.
Phenomenology of Perception draws heavily
from the contemporary research Gestalt
psychology and neurology.
What Merleau-Ponty proposes is treating
perception as a causal process. It simply
means that our perceptions are caused by the
intricate experiences of the self, and
processed intellectually while distinguishing
truthful perceptions from illusory.
This section discussed the philosophical
perspective of understanding the self through
historical approach.
In the Ancient and Medieval times, we have
identified the self as the perfection of the soul.
To achieve this requires self-examination and
self-control.
In the Modern period, understanding the self is
recognized in the dialectic synthesis between
Rationalism and Empiricism. Contemporary
philosophy takes a wide variety of theories in
understanding the self.
In the end we realize that we are not yet done
in answering the question “Who am I?”
although we already have achieved a lot in
our philosophical reflections about it.
We continue our quest for understanding who
we really are.