LESSON 1: Philosophical Perspectives on the Self

Philosophy as a subject presents various philosophers offering multiple perspectives on just about many topics
including the self.

SOCRATES

 He reminds us to “know thyself,” a translation of an ancient Greek aphorism gnõthi seauton.

 He 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 I?,” “What is the purpose of my life?,” or”
What am I doing here?” are all predicated on the fact that human must be able to define these simple
things to move forward and act accordingly based on their definition of the self.
 For him, 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.

PLATO

 He was an ancient Greek philosopher who was a student of Socrates and a teacher of Aristotle.
 His 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
external and constitutes abstract universal essences of things. In
 He added that ideas are objects of the intellect known by reason alone and are objective realities that
exist in a world of their own.
 In terms of the concept of the self, Plato was one of the first philosophers who believed in an enduring
self that is presented 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

 His 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
presents of the 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 introduced the concept of the self in the past, present and future time. He argued that 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

 A French philosopher and mathematician, is best known for his dictum cogito, ergo, sum, translated as
“I think, therefore I am.”
 For him, the existence of anything that you register from your senses can be doubted. One can always
doubt 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.
 He 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.
 The self, for Descartes, is nothing else but a mind-body dichotomy. Thought (mind) always precedes
action (body). It has always been in the sequence. Everything starts with a thought.
 Humans are self-aware and being such proves their own place in the universe. Humans create their
own reality and they are the master of their own universe.

JOHN LOCKE

 His 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.
 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

 A Scottish philosopher, for him 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 (object of the
mind) of interrelated events. The assumption of a self as mental entity and thus as mental substance
does not exist.
 Hume stresses 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, and many others.
 He 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 him, one cannot point to the physical traits of the
body. 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. A mind, to simplify, would be
constituted by a set of private memories.
IMMANUEL KANT

 A German philosopher who 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 (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.
 Apperception is the faculty that allows for 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.
 He 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

 For him, 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 of wishes and obsessions related to
sexual and aggressive desires. It operates on the hedonistic or pleasure principle – seeking pleasure
and avoiding pain. It is also driven by the so-called libido (sexual energy) though it remains an
unknown and inaccessible part of the structure of personality.
 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. It
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.
 SUPERGO is the last layer to develop. It operates according to the morality principle. It I the reservoir
of moral standards. It ensures compliance with the norms, values and standards prescribed by society.
It 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.

GUILBERT RYLE

 A British philosopher. 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.
 His theory is called logical behaviorism or analytical behaviorism – a theory of mind which states that
mental concepts can be understood through observable events.
 As for Ryle’s concept of the self, the self is a combination of the mind and the body. For him, the
mind is not the seat of self but the behavior. The self is the way people behave.

PAUL CHURCHLAND AND PATRICIA CHURCHLAND

  They are both Neuroscientists, and 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”.
 For them, it is false to claim that folk psychology or common sense psychology is the capacity to
explain mental states of people.
 They 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.

MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY

 A French phenomenological philosopher 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. He regarded self as embodied subjectivity. It sees human
beings neither as disembodied minds nor as complex machines, but as living creatures whose
subjectivity is actualized in the forms of their physical involvement in the world. The body is the
general medium for having a world and we know not through our intellect but through our experience.