GEC 11- UNDERSTANDING THE SELF

TOPIC 1: SELF FROM VARIOUS PERSPECTIVES OF PHILOSOPHERS

SOCRATES

 Unlike the Pre-Socratics, Socrates was more concerned with another subject, the problem of
self.
 The first philosopher who ever engaged in a systematic questioning about the self – this has
become his life-long mission, the true task of the philosopher is to know oneself.
 Socrates thought that the worst that can happen to anyone: to live but die instead. (not knowing
who they are)

HIS VIEW ON SELF

 The self has body and soul

o Body- imperfect and impermanent
o Soul- perfect and permanent
 Ultimate wisdom comes from knowing oneself
 The goal of philosophy was to “Know thyself”
 Human choice was motivated by the desire for happiness
 The more the person knows, the greater his or her ability to reason and make choices that will
bring true happiness (biography.com & A&E Television Networks, 2017)
 “The unexamined life is not worth living”

Of all knowledge, “KNOWLEDGE THYSELF” is the core and essence. It is the summary of his teachings.

PLATO

 Plato is a dualist – there is both immaterial mind (soul) and material body, and it is the soul that
knows the forms.
 Plato believed that soul exists before birth and after death. Thus, he believed that the soul or
mind attains knowledge of the forms as opposed to the senses.
 According to Plato, we should care about our soul rather than our body.

The soul has three parts

 The appetites- includes all myriad desires for various pleasures, comforts, physical satisfactions
and bodily ease.
 The spirited- the part that gets angry when it perceives an injustice being done. This is the part
that loves to face and overcome great challenges, the part that can steel itself to adversity, and
that loves victory, winning, challenge and honor.
 The mind- conscious awareness. This is the part that thinks, analyses, looks ahead, rationally
weighs options, and tries to gauge what is best and truest overall. (Dr. Kerns, T.)

Diagnosis – persons differ as to which part of their nature is predominant.

 Individual dominated by reason are philosophical and seek knowledge
 Individuals dominated by spirit/will/emotion are victory loving and seek reputation
 Individuals dominated by appetites are profit loving and seek material gain.
ST. AUGUSTINE

 Augustine saw himself as a sinner in “a purest sense”

 Augustine agreed that man is of a bifurcated nature.
 An aspect of man dwells in the world and is imperfect and continuously yearns to be with the
Divine and the other is capable of reaching immortality.
 The body is bound to die on earth and the soul is to anticipate living eternally in a realm of
spiritual bliss in communion with God.
 (Even) “If I am mistaken, I am”
 The body can only thrive in the imperfect, physical reality that is the world, where as the soul
can also stay after death in an eternal realm with the all-transcendent God.
 The goal of every human person is to attain this communion and bliss with the Divine by living
life on earth in virtue.

RENE DESCARTES

 “Father of modern philosophy”

 If we can apply doubt to every thing and belief that we have our self and the world, is there still
something left that cannot anymore be doubted, i.e., indubitable?
 What is the sole indubitable fact on which we can base our knowledge? "The fact that I am
doubting ... cannot be anymore open to doubt."
 Cogito ergo sum “I think, therefore I am”
 The Self is a thinking being
 SENSE OF SELF- if he is capable of doubting, which is precisely what he is doing- then he must
exist. He may doubt everything else, may be deceived about the existence of all other things,
but he must necessarily exist.
 Dualism- reality and existence is divided into two parts
o Mind is separate from the Physical Body
 Self is also a combination of two distinct entities, the cogito, the thing that thinks, which is the
mind, and the extenza or the extension of the mind, which is the body.

JOHN LOCKE

 Holds that personal identity is a matter of psychological continuity

 Posits an “empty” mind, a tabula rasa, which is shaped by experience, and sensations and
reflections being the two sources of all our ideas
 Locke creates a third term between the soul and the body. For the brain, as the body and as any
substance, may change, while consciousness remains the same. Therefore, personal identity is
not in the brain, but in consciousness.
 Locke suggests that the self is “thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can
consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places” and continues to
define personal identity simply as “the sameness of a rational being.
 So long as one is the same self, the same rational being, one has the same personality.
DAVID HUME

 An empiricist who believes that one can know only what comes from the senses and
experiences.

 THERE IS NO SELF- he 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.
 Self is nothing else but a bundle of impressions.
o Ideas, on the other hand, are copies of impressions. Because of this, they are not as
lively and vivid as our impressions. When one imagines the feeling of being in love for
the first time, that still is an idea.
o Impressions are the basic objects of our experience or sensation. They therefore form
the core of our thoughts. When one touches an ice cube, the cold sensation is an
impression. Impressions therefore are vivid because they are products of our direct
experience with the world.
 For Hume, there is no mind or self. The perceptions that one has are only active when one is
conscious. “When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep, so long am I
insensible myself, and may truly be said not to exist.”
 In reality, what one thinks is a unified self is simply a combination of all experiences with a
particular person.

IMMANUEL KANT

 Kant thinks that the things that men are perceive around them are not just randomly infused
into the human person without an organizing principle that regulates the relationship of all
these impression.
 There is necessarily a mind that organizes the impressions that men get from the external world.
Kant calls these the apparatuses of the mind.
 The self is not just what gives one his personality. It is also the seat of knowledge and
acquisition for all human persons.
 In Kant’s thought, there are two components of the self.
Empirical Ego
How others identify us- this is our body, what we look like, how we sound, etc.
This is the self which makes us an individual
Transcendental Ego
How we identify our self- an activity of consciousness which Kant called
“Transcendental Unity of Apperception”
This is the ‘self’ that what makes us human

SIGMUND FREUD

 Freud’s view of the self was multi-tiered, divided among the conscious, subconscious and
unconscious.
 Unconscious as the central core in Freud’s theory of the structure and dynamics of human
personality.

Two Levels of Human Functioning:

  Conscious
o Governed by the reality principle
o Behavior and experience are organized in ways that are rational, practical, and
appropriate to the social environment

 Unconscious
o Contains basic instinctual drives including sexuality, aggressiveness and self-destruction;
traumatic memories; unfulfilled wishes and childhood fantasies; thoughts and feelings
that would be considered socially taboo.
o Characterized by the most primitive level of human motivation and functioning. At this
level, the most basic instinctual drives seek immediate gratification.
o Governed by pleasure principle

GILBERT RYLE

 G. Ryle solves the mind-body dichotomy that has been running for a long time in the history of
thought by blatantly denying the concept of an internal, non-physical self.
 What truly matters is the behaviour that a person manifests in his day-to-day life.
 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.

PAUL CHURCHLAND

 Materialism
o The belief that nothing but matter exists, if it is somehow cannot be recognized by the
senses, then it’s akin to a fairy tale.
 Eliminative Materialism
o Developing a new, neuroscience-based vocabulary that will enable us to think and
communicate clearly about the mind, consciousness and human experience.
o Argues that ordinary folk psychology of the mind is wrong. It is the physical brain and
not the imaginary mind that gives us our senses
 Churchland asserts that since the mind can’t be experienced by our senses, then the mind does
not really exist.

MERLEAU-PONTY

 Is a phenomenologists who asserts that the mind-body bifurcation that has been going on for a
long time is a futile endeavour and an invalid problem.
 The mind and body are so intertwined that they cannot be separated from one another.
 One cannot find any experience that it is not an embodied experience. All experience is
embodied. 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 that has spelled so much devastation in the
history of man. For him, the Cartesian problem is nothing else but plain misunderstanding. The
living body, his thoughts, emotions and experiences are all one.