Republic of the Philippines

UNIVERSITY OF EASTERN PHILIPPINES

University Town, Northern Samar

UNDERSTANDING
THE SELF GEC3
Prepared by: JAN NIÑO U. ACEBUCHE
 Unit 1

THE SELF FROM VARIOUS

PERSPECTIVES
“Who Am I?”

Module 1

PHILOSOPHICAL
PERSPECTIVES
1: PHILOSOPHICAL
PERSPECTIVES

We might have been overwhelmed by the new environment that we are in today being
in college. There are so many things to adjust to in a big school. The systems sometimes
are completely different from what we are used to in the Senior High School. Intellectual
discourses, academic requirements, course demands and healthy competitions are
present in all corners of the campus. There are also institutional systems that are
sometimes totally new to us. Amidst these challenging adjustments we are often pinned
with questions unfortunately not all are answered. We want to explore the boundless
horizon, we want to tell the world about something very important but we feel so powerless
to do so. All these confusions bring about existential questions that we may want to
explore.
In this module, we shall once and for all get in touch with ourselves. Let u go back to
those hanging questions that you almost wanted to forget. We will spend time to reflect on
the issue that we think are important to us. To aid us in this endeavor we will seek the
wisdom of Philosophers like Socrates, Plato, Augustine, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant,
Freud, Ryle, Churchland and Merleau-Ponty. They have all braved to answer the question
“Who Am I?” way ahead of us. We learn with them as we also attempt to answer the same
questions.

Learning Outcomes:
At the end of this module, the students should be able to:

1. articulate the various Philosophical views about the self;

2. examine one’s thoughts and experiences according to the Philosophical views of the
self; and,
3. propose and answer to the question “Who Am I?”
 Many Philosophers grappled to understand the meaning of human life. They have attempted
to answer the question “Who Am I?” and most of their views have influenced the way we look at
our lives today.

SOCRATES, PLATO, AUGUSTINE

The dictum “Know thy Self” as we hear today is an ancient greeting of the highly civilized
Greeks. It was believed that the temple Gods greet the people with this salutation as they enter
the holy sanctuary. The ancient Greek Philosophers manifested to the people their various
interpretations of the greeting. In the onset, the greeting may seem to be epistemological. Knowing
oneself is only about measurable facts that pertain to the self such as age, height, color, blood
type or cholesterol level but the philosophers insisted that knowing oneself is more than just the
basic fact to know thy self is first an imperative and then requirement. It is imperative to know the
limits of the self so that one knows what one is capable of doing and what one is not. The real
meaning of knowing thy self, then, is a requirement for self-moderation, prudence, good
judgement, excellence of the soul ( Ortiz De Landazuri, 2014).
The ethics in knowing thyself is very important because such
will bring the person to the excellence of the soul. For the ancient
Greeks, the soul is the essence of the person. 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. To know
thyself, therefore is to examine whether we have achieved
moderation, have prudently what is good, and have brought about
excellence of the soul.
To be able to demonstrate this, Socrates proposed a very
emphatic philosophy. In Plato’s Apology sec. 38-A Socrates
narrates;
…[ And if again I say that to talk everyday about virtue and the
other things about which you hear me talking and examining myself
and others is the greatest good to man, and that the unexamined
life is not worth living, you will believe me still less. This is as I say,
gentlemen, but it is not easy to convince you. Besides, I am not Socrates
accustomed to think that I deserve anything bad. If I had money, I
would have to post a fine…
Here Socrates insisted that, “The unexamined life is not worth living”. This is perhaps the most
satisfying philosophical assertion that Socrates claimed in order to protect human beings from the
shallowness of living their lives. An examined life is a life that is duty bound to develop self-
knowledge and a self-dignified with values and integrity. Not only that; living a good life means
having the wisdom to distinguish what is right from wrong. Socrates further argued that the
unexamined life is no better off than animal life.
Insisting on the examined life, Socrates maintained that only those who have at least achieved
self-moderation and distinguished what is good from bad, in this case- Socrates referred to the life
of the Philosophers, are capable of condemning those who are pretentious to be knowing
themselves when the fact is contrary. He also rightly pronounced that “I know what I do not know.”
This perhaps is what makes Socrates the wisest among Philosophers. For Socrates, only in the
recognition of one’s ignorance that a person can truly know oneself.
Influenced by the wise pronouncements of Socrates, Plato proposed his own philosophy of the
self. He started on the examination of the self as a unique experience. The experience will
eventually better understand the core of the self which he called the Psyche.
 For Plato, the Psyche is composed of three elements.
These are the Appetitive, Spirited and the Mind.
1. The Appetitive element of the Psyche include one’s
desires, pleasures, physical satisfactions, comforts,
etc.
2. The Spirited element is part of the Psyche that is
excited when given challenges, or fights back when
agitated, or fights for justice when unjust practices
are evident. In a way this is the hot-blooded part of
the Psyche.
3. The mind, however, is what Plato considers the as the
most superior of all the elements. He refers to this
element as the nous which means the conscious
awareness of the self. The nous is the super power
that controls the affairs of the self. It decides analyzes,
things ahead, proposes what is best, and rationally
controls both the appetitive and spirited elements of
the psyche. Plato

We take as an example–college life–to illustrate Plato’s Psyche. College student want to hang out with their
friends, spend time on computer games, eat the favorite food, do thrilling activities that will excite the whole
gang. These satisfy the appetitive element of the psyche. However, when professors throw challenging projects
and assignments that would require tremendous time and effort, the spirited psyche kicks in to face the
challenges head on. All these are going on because the mind or the nous is orchestrating these pursuits
according the quality of the nous a person has. In other words, in order to have a good life, one has to develop
he nous and feel it with the understanding of the limits of the self and ethical standards.

Another concrete example of a highly self-controlled nous is the

life of St. Augustine. He hailed from Tagaste, Africa in 354 B.C. He
succumbed two vices and pleasures of the world. Augustine was
unsettled and restlessly searched for the meaning of his life until
his conversion ti Christianity.
The development of the self for St. Augustine is achieved through
self-presentation and self-realization. He was not afraid to accept to
himself and tell the people about his sinfulness. However, the
realization of the wasted self is achieved through his conversation
to the faith. Thus, his journey toward the understanding of the
self was centered on his religious convictions and belief.

St. Augustine
DESCARTES, LOCKE, HUME AND KANT
Rene Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, deviated from theocentric philosophies on
the years before him. He was in fact able to redress the question concerning the self in a very
different rational method. He started his quest of discovering the self by his methodic doubt.
In his Mediations on First Philosophy, Descartes, claimed that we cannot really rely on our
senses because our sense perceptions can often deceive us. There are many times when we hear
something when in fact there is nothing, and that we are deceived by our sense of hearing.
There are also times when we see someone or something in the peripheries of our eyes when
in fact there is nothing that resembles with what we thought we saw. This will be true to our sense
of smell, touch, hearing and so on. Therefore Descartes refused to believe in the certainty of his
sense perceptions and started to doubt everything.
 Here, Descartes stated that to doubt whether the events he
experiences at the moment are only products of his dreams and
therefore illusions. He started to doubt about every realities that
he had been accepting as true and only illusionary creations of
an evil genius who designed all these false impressions in the
world. Eventually Descartes is left nothing but his doubt.
Nonetheless, this same doubt redeemed him from slumber.
He claimed that since he could no longer doubt that he is
doubting, therefore there should be a level of certitude that there
must be someone who is doubting-that is him. Then he said
“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.
Descartes’ discovery of the cogito revolutionizes the way we
view ourselves and the world around us. It has also dramatically changed the way we evaluate
ourselves. The primary condition, therefore of the existence of the self, at least according to
Descartes, is human rationality. Simply put, we need reason in order to evaluate our thoughts
and actions.
Contrary to the primary reason as proposed by Descartes, one British
philosopher and politician, John Locke, suggested another way of
looking at the self. Locke opposed the idea that only reason is the source
of knowledge of the self. His proposition is that the self is comparable
to an empty space where every day experiences contribute to the pile of
knowledge that is put forth on that empty space. Experience, therefore
is an important requirement in order to have sense data which,
through the process of reflection and analysis, eventually becomes
sense perception.
These sense data are further categorized by Locke according to primary qualities such as
numbers, solidity, figure, motion, among others and also secondary qualities such as color, odor,
temperature and all other elements that are distinguishable by the subjective individual. Sense
perception becomes possible when all these qualities are put together in the faculty of the mind.
Challenging the position of John Locke, David Hume, a Scottish philosopher and historian put
forward his skeptical take on the ideas forming the identity of the self. Hume claimed that there
cannot be a persisting idea of the self. While Hume agreed that all ideas are derived from
impressions, problematically, it follows that the idea of the self is also derived from impressions.
However impressions are subjective, temporary, provisional, prejudicial and even skewed –and
therefore cannot be persisting.
In as much as we wanted to be persistent, constant and stable with our knowledge about
ourselves, Hume asserted that this is just impossible. As long as we derive our knowledge from
impressions, there will never be the “self.” This means that for Hume, all we know about
ourselves are just bundles of temporary impressions. Perhaps this supports the difficulty of
answering the question “Who am I?” because what we can readily answer are impressions such
as name, height, color of hair, affiliations, skills, achievements and the like. All these are temporary
and non-persisting. In fact, Hume harshly claimed that there is no self.
Hume could have made us all agnostic about our knowledge of the self and be content with
whatever fragmented idea at least we have about ourselves had it not by the rescue efforts of
Immanuel Kant. Kant is a Prussian metaphysicist who synthesized the rationalist view of
Descartes and the empiricist views of Locke and Hume. His new proposition maintained that the
self is always transcendental. In fact he calls his philosophy the Transcendental Unity of
Apperception.
 His theory explains that being the self is not in the body, it is outside the body and even outside
the qualities of the body-meaning transcendent. For Kant, ideas are perceived by the self, and
they are connecting the self and the world. The similarity of ideas between individuals is made
possible because, for Kant, we all have sensory apparatus by which we derive our ideas. This
means that we need not reject our ideas, unlike Hume, no matter how temporary and non-
persistent they are because there is unity in ideas.
In short, Kant is only saying that our rationality unifies and makes sense the perceptions
we have in our experiences and make sensible ideas about ourselves and the world. This
ingenious synthesis saved the empirical theories of the sciences and the rational justification
innate ideas. Kant also solved the problem of the ability of the self to perceive the world.

FREUD, RYLE, CHURCHLAND and MERLEAU-PONTY

Just as the philosophers celebrate the “unity” of the self as achieved by Kant, the Psychologist
Sigmund Freud lamented the victory and insisted on the complexity of the self, 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. Freud sees the “I” as a product of multiple
interacting processes, systems and schemes. To demonstrate this, Freud proposed two models:
The Topographical and structural models (Watson, 2014).
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. We may say, for example, that we know
the disadvantage and perils of missing classes without any reason, but we are not really sure why
we still do it anyway. We are certain about the many wrongs that may be brought about by
premarital sex, i.e. early pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections, ruined relationships and
depression, but we never understand why there is this something somewhere inside us that makes
many of us do what we know is wrong.
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:
1. The Id is known as the primitive or instinctive
component.
2. Ego is described by Freud as that part of the id which
has been modified by the direct influence of the external
world.
3. 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).
In an attempt to offer an explanation to some behaviors that are difficult to justify by reason,
Gilbert Ryle, a British philosopher, proposed that his positive view in his “Concept of the mind.”
It started as a stem critique of Descartes’ dualism of the mind and body. Ryle said that the thinking
“I” will never be found because it is just “a ghost in the machine.” It means he finds the philosophy
of Descartes totally absurd. The mind is never separate from the body. He proposed that
physical actions or behaviors are dispositions of the self. These dispositions are derived from our
inner private experiences. In other words, we will only be able to understand the self-based from
the external manifestation-behaviors, expressions, language, desire and the like. The mind
therefore is nothing but a disposition of the self.

“I act therefore I am” or “You are what you do”.

Bringing the argument a little further, couple Paul and Patricia Churchland promoted the
position they called the “eliminative materialism” which brings forth neuroscience into the
fore of understanding the self. For centuries, the main concern of philosophy and even psychology
is the understanding the state of the self, and still they failed to provide satisfactory position in
the understanding of the self. For Churchlands, these philosophical and psychological directions
will eventually be abandoned only to be replaced by a more acceptable trend in neuroscience that
provides explanation on how the brain works.
This position is a direct attack against the folk psychology. Eliminative Materialism sees the
failure of folk psychology in explaining basic concepts such as sleep, learning, mental illness and
the like. Given the length of time that these sciences have investigated these concepts and yet
there is no definitive explanation offered to understand the mind that is tantamount to
“explanatory poverty” (Weed, 2018). It is not remotely impossible that folk psychology will be
replaced by neurobiology. As the 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.
Interestingly, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a French philosopher, seemed to support the emerging
trends in understanding the self. His philosophy, the Phenomenology of Perception draws
heavily from the contemporary research Gestalt Psychology and neurology. He developed a kind
of phenomenological rhythm that will explain the perception of the self. The rhythm involves the
three dimensions. First is the empiricist take on perception, followed by the idealist-
intellectual alternative, and lastly, the synthesis of both positions. Marleau-Ponty is saying
that our perceptions are caused by the intricate experiences of the self, and processed
intellectually while distinguishing truthful perceptions from illusory. Therefore the self is taken as
a phenomenon of the whole-a Gestalt understanding of perceptual analysis.
LEARNING EXERCISE 1.1
Textual Analysis. Explain each of the following passages. Do you agree with the statements of the
following philosophical figures? (5 points each)

1. “I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is, that I know nothing.” – (Socrates)
Plato, the Republic
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2. “All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding and ends with
reason. There is nothing higher than reason.” – Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
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3. “Look into the depths of your own soul and learn first to know yourself, then you will understand
why this illness was bound to come upon you, perhaps you will thenceforth avoid falling ill.” –
Sigmund Freud, Character and Culture
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4. “Whether it’s a question of my body, the natural world, the past, birth or death, the question is
always to know how I can be open to phenomena that transcend me and that, nevertheless,
only exist that I take them up and live them.” – Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
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Summary
In closing, this section discussed the philosophical perspective of understanding the self
through historical approach. In the ancient 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.
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