La Carlota City College

Business and Management Department

GE 1: Understanding the Self Engr. Khrisna Mae C. Gelogo, ECE, LPT

Chapter 1: Defining the Self: Personal and Developmental Perspectives on Self and Identity
Lesson 1: The Self from Various Perspectives
• Philosophy – it is the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, especially
in an academic discipline.
- Its history is full with men and women who inquired into the fundamental nature of the self. Along
with the substratum that defines the multiplicity of things in the world.

• Greeks – The earliest thinkers in the history of philosophy that questions things about the “self”.
- They seriously questioned myths and moved away from them in attempting to understand reality and
respond to perennial questions of curiosity, including the questions of self.

Philosophers who Worked on the Different Perspectives and Views of the Self
❖ THE PRE-SOCRATICS
- Greek thinkers who preceded Socrates that are preoccupied with the questions of the primary
substratum, arché, that explains the multiplicity of things in the world.
- These men are Thales, Pythagoras, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Empedocles, etc.
- They were concerned with answering questions such as: (a) what is the world really made up of?
(b) why is the world the way it is? and (c) what explains the changes that happen around us?
- Arché is the origin or source or the primal matter or the “soul”. The soul’s movement is the ultimate
arché of all the movement. It has no origin outside itself and cannot be destroyed.

❖ SOCRATES AND PLATO

Image 1. Socrates (left) and his student, Plato (right)

- Socrates is an ancient Greek philosopher whose way of life, character, and thought exerted a
profound influence on ancient and modern philosophy.
- Plato is an ancient Greek philosopher, student of Socrates, teacher of Aristotle, and founder of the
Academy, best known as the author of philosophical works of unparalleled influence.
- Socrates was concerned with the problem of the self.
- He is the first philosopher who ever engaged in a systematic questioning about the self.
- To Socrates, and his has become his life-long mission, the true task of the philosopher is to know
oneself.
- Socrates affirms, claimed by Plato in his dialogues, that the unexamined life is not worth living.
- During Socrates’ trial for allegedly corrupting the minds of the youth and for impiety, he declared
without regret that his being indicted was brought about his going around Athens engaging men,
young and old, to question their presuppositions about themselves and about the world, particularly
about who they are.

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 La Carlota City College
Business and Management Department
GE 1: Understanding the Self Engr. Khrisna Mae C. Gelogo, ECE, LPT

- Socrates took it upon himself to serve as a “gadfly” that disturbs Athenian men from their slumber
and shakes them off in order to reach the truth and wisdom.
- Most men, in his reckoning, were really not fully aware of who they were and the virtues that they
were supposed to attain in order to preserve their souls for the afterlife.
- Socrates thought that this is the worst that can happen to anyone. To live but to die inside.
- For Socrates, every man is composed of body and soul which means that every human person has
duality and is composed of two important aspects of his personhood.
- For Socrates, this means all individuals have an imperfect, impermanent aspect, the body, while
maintaining that there is also a soul that is perfect and permanent.
- Plato, supported the idea of Socrates that man is a dual nature of body and soul. In addition, Plato
added that there are parts or three components to the soul: the rational soul, the spirited soul and
the appetitive soul.
- The rational soul forged by reason and intellect has to govern the affairs of the human person.
- The spirited soul which is in charge of emotions should be kept at bay.
- The appetitive soul is in charge of base desires, like eating, drinking, sleeping, and having sexual
intercourse, it is controlled as well.
- In Plato’s magnus opus, 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. When this ideal
state is attained, the human person’s soul becomes just and virtuous.
“The unexamined life is not worth living.” – Socrates
“Courage is knowing what not to fear.” – Plato

❖ AUGUSTINE AND THOMAS AQUINAS

Image 2. Saint Augustine (left) and Saint Thomas Aquinas (right)

- Saint Augustine (St. Augustine of Hippo) is a fourth century philosopher whose view of the
human person reflects the entire spirit of the medieval world when it comes to man.
- Following the ancient view of Plato and infusing it with the newfound doctrine of Christianity,
Augustine agreed that man is of bifurcated nature.
- Bifurcated nature: an aspect of man which “dwells in the world”, that is imperfect and
continuously yearns to be with the divine, and the other is “capable of reaching immortality”
- Body: it is bound to die on earth and it can only thrive in the imperfect physical reality that is the
world
- Soul: it is to anticipate living eternally in a realm of spiritual bliss in communion with God.
- St. Augustine: The goal of every human person is to attain this communion and bliss with the Divine
by living his life on earth in virtue.
- Saint Thomas Aquinas appended something to this Christian view of St. Augustine. Adopting
some ideas from Aristotle, Aquinas said that, indeed is composed of two parts: matter and form.
- Matter (“hyle” in Greek): it refers to the common stuff that makes up everything in the universe.
Man’s body is part of this matter.

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 La Carlota City College
Business and Management Department
GE 1: Understanding the Self Engr. Khrisna Mae C. Gelogo, ECE, LPT

- Form (“morphe” in Greek): it refers to the essence of a substance or thing. It is what makes it
what it is. For a human person, it’s his soul.
- To Aquinas, just as for Aristotle, the soul is what animates the body, it is what makes us humans.

❖ RENE DESCARTES

Image 3. Rene Descartes

- Father of Modern Philosophy who conceived that the human person as having a body and a mind.
- The Meditation of First Philosophy: a famous treatise of Descartes where he claims that there is
so much that we should doubt. In fact, he says that much of what wwe think and believe, because
they are not infallible, may turn out to be false.
- Descartes thought that the only thing that 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.
- Descartes: “Cogito ergo sum” or “I think therefore, I am.”
- The fact that one thinks should lead one to conclude without a trace of doubt that he exists.
- For Descartes, the self is a combination of two distinct entities: cogito and extenza.
- Cogito: the thing that thinks which is the mind.
- Extenza: the extension of the mind which is the body.
- In Descartes’ view, the body is nothing else but a machine that is attached to the mind. The human
person has it but it is not what makes a man. If at all, that is the mind.
“But what then, am I? A thinking thing. It has been said. But what is a thinking thing? It is a
thing that doubts, understands (conceives), affirms, denies, wills, refuses; that imagines also, and
perceives.”

❖ DAVID HUME

Image 4. Rene Descartes

- Hume is Scottish philosopher that has a very unique way of looking at man.

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 La Carlota City College
Business and Management Department
GE 1: Understanding the Self Engr. Khrisna Mae C. Gelogo, ECE, LPT

- He is an empiricist who believes that one can know only what comes from the senses and
experiences.
- Empiricism: the school of thought that espouses the idea that knowledge can only be possible if it
is sensed and experienced. Man can only attain knowledge by experiencing.
- Hume argues that the self is nothing like what his predecessors thought of it. The self is not an
entity over and beyond the physical body but a bundle of impressions.
- For David Hume, if one tries to examine his experiences, he finds that they can all be categorized
into two: impressions and ideas.
- Impressions: these are the basic object of our experience or sensation and form the core of our
thoughts. Impressions are vivid because they are products of our direct experience with the world.
For example, when one touches an ice cube, the cold sensation is an impression.
- Ideas: these are copies of impressions and are not as lively and vivid as our impressions. For
example, when one imagines the feeling of being in love for the first time, that still is an idea.
- Self, according to Hume, is simply “a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed
each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.”

❖ IMMANUEL KANT

Image 5. Immanuel Kant

- Kant was a German philosopher of the Age of Enlightenment who is regarded as one of the most
important thinkers of modern Europe.
- Kant recognizes the truth in Hume’s account that everything starts with perception and sensation
of impressions. For Kant, there is necessarily a mind that organizes the impressions that men get
from the external world. He calls these the apparatus of the mind.
- He thinks that the things that men perceive around them are not just randomly infused into human
person without an organizing principle that regulates the relationship of all these impressions.
- For example, time and space are ideas that one cannot find in the world but is build in our minds.
- Self: it organizes the different impressions that one gets in relation to his own existence.
- Self: it is an actively engaged intelligence in man that synthesizes all knowledge and experience.
- Self: it is not just what gives one his personality but it is also the seat of knowledge for all human
persons.

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 La Carlota City College
Business and Management Department
GE 1: Understanding the Self Engr. Khrisna Mae C. Gelogo, ECE, LPT

❖ GILBERT RYLE

Image 6. Gilbert Ryle

- Ryle is a 20th century British philosopher who had an enormous influence development in the areas
of Philosophy of Mind and Philosophy of Language.
- He solved the mind-body dichotomy or division by denying blatantly the concept of an internal,
non-physical self.
- For Ryle, what truly matter is the behaviors that a person manifests in his day-to-day life.
- He 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.

❖ MAURICE MERLEAU – PONTY

Image 7. Maurice Merleau-Ponty

- Merleau-Ponty is a phenomenologist who asserts that the mind-body bifurcation that has been going
on for a long time is a futile endeavor and an invalid problem.
- His work is commonly associated with the philosophical movement called existentialism and its
intention to begin with an analysis of the concrete experiences, perceptions, and difficulties, of
human existence.
- He said that the mind and body are so intertwined that they cannot be separated from one another.
- “All experience is embodied.” One cannot find any experience that is not an embodied experience.
- “One’s body is his opening toward his existence to the world.” Because of these bodies, men are
in the world.
- Merleau-Ponty dismisses the Cartesian Dualism. For him, the Cartesian problem is nothing else
but plain misunderstanding.
- The living body, his thoughts, emotions, and experiences are all one.

5|P age Module 1_Lesson 1

 La Carlota City College
Business and Management Department
GE 1: Understanding the Self Engr. Khrisna Mae C. Gelogo, ECE, LPT

Assessment 1: In your own words, state what is the meaning of self for each of the following
philosophers. After doing so, explain how your concept of self is compatible with how they
conceived of the self. Answer in to five to seven sentences.
1. Socrates
2. Plato
3. Augustine
4. Descartes
5. Hume
6. Kant
7. Ryle
8. Merleau-Ponty

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