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1 THE PHILOSOPHICAL VIEW OF SELF: VARIOUS

PHILOSOPHERS

WHO AM I?

1. Socrates: Know Your Self

He is principally concerned with

man. He was the first philosopher
who engages in systematic
questioning about the self. “Every
man is composed of body and soul”

Dualism (Man is composed of two

important aspects of his
personhood) Therefore, all
individuals have an imperfect,
impermanent aspect to him, and the
body, while maintaining that there
is also a soul that is perfect and
permanent.

He considers man from the point of view of his inner life. The famous life
of Socrates tells each man to bring his inner self to light. A bad man is not
virtuous through ignorance.

The core of Socrates ethics is the concept of virtue and knowledge. VIRTUE
is the deepest and most basic propensity (Strong natural tendency to do
something of man) Knowing one’s own virtue is necessary and can be
learned.

Virtue is innate in the mind and self-knowledge is the source of all wisdom,
an individual may gain possession of oneself and be one’s own master
through knowledge.

2. Plato: The ideal Self, perfect self

Palto claimed in his dialogues that Socrates affirmed that unexamined life
is not worth living.
3 components of the soul
 Rational soul - Logical
 Spiritual soul - Emotional
 Appetitive soul – Physical Desire
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.
Therefore, when this ideal state is attained, the human person’s soul
becomes just and virtues.
A man was omniscient before he came to be born in this world. In practical
terms, this means that man in this life should imitate his former self; he
should live a virtue in which true human perfection exists.

“Love in fact is one of the links

between the sensible and the
eternal world”

- PLATO
3. RENE DESCARTES

He conceived of the human person as

having a body and a mind. He claims
that there is so much that we should
doubt since much of what we think
and believe is not infallible, they may
turn out to be false.

He only thought that the only thing

that one cannot doubt is the
existence of 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.
The self is combination of two distinct
entities, the COGNITO, the thing that
thinks, which is the mind, and the
EZTENZA of the mind, which is the
body.
The human person has the body, but
it is not what makes a man a man. It at all, that is the mind.

Descartes says: “What then am I? A thinking thing, that doubts, understands,

affirms, denies, wills, refuses: that imagines also ang perceives”

“Although the mind and body are independent of each other and serve their
own function, man must use his mind and thinking abilities to investigate,
analyze, experiment, and develop himself.”
-RENE DESCARTES
4. DAVID HUME: The self is the
bundle theory of mind

He is an empiricist who believes

that one can know only through the
sense and experience. Self is
nothing else but a bundle of
impressions. For Hume, they can
all be categorized into two:
Impressions and Ideas. The first
one is the basic objects of our
experience or sensation, So, it
forms the core of our thoughts.

 Example: When one

touches fire, the hotness
sensation is an
impression which is the direct experience.

On the Contrary, Ideas are copies of our impressions. Because of this, they
are not as lively and clear as our impressions.

 Example: the feeling of being love for the first time that is an idea.
According to Hume, the self is a bundle or collection of various
perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable
rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. Thus, the
self is simply a collection of all experiences with a particular
being.
5. IMMANUEL KANT: Respect for Self

Every man is thus an end in himself and

should never be treated merely as a
means-as per the order of the Creator
and the natural order of things. To Kant,
there is necessarily a mind that organizes
the impression that men get from the
external world. Time and Space are ideas
that one cannot find in the world but
built-in our human mind.

Kant calls these the apparatuses of the

mind. Along with the different
apparatuses f the mind goes the self.
Without the self, one cannot organize the
different impression that one gets in
relation to his own existence.
Thus, the self is not just what gives one
his personality. It is also the seat of
knowledge acquisition for all human
persons.

6. GILBERT RYLE: The mind-body dichotomy

For Ryle, what truly matters is the

behavior that a person manifests in is
day-today life. For him, looking for and
trying to understand the self as it really
exists is like your friends “university and
looking for the (university)”.
He says that 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.
 7. MERLEAU PONTY: Phenomenologist

He insisted that body and mind are so

intertwined from one another.
One cannot find any experience that is not an
embodied experience. All experience is
embodied. One’s body is his opening toward
his existence to the world. Because men are
in the world, For him, the Cartesian problem
is nothing but plain misunderstanding. The
living body, his thoughts, emotions, and
experience are all one.

A. The Christian or Biblical view of Self

1. THE HOLY BIBLE

“God created man in His Image; in

the divine image he created him;
male and female He created them.
God blessed them, saying, Be fertile
and multiply; fill the earth and
subdue it. Have dominion over the
fish of the sea, the birds in the air,
and all the living things that move on
the earth.” Geneses 1:24-28 Thus, it
is appropriate to think of the self as
the “multi-bejeweled crown of
creation-the many gems there of
representing and radiating the
glorious facets of man’s self that
include the physical, intellectual,
moral, religious, social, political,
economic, emotional, sentient,
aesthetic, sensual, and sexual aspects.”
2. Augustine: Love and Justice as the foundation of the individual
self
Augustine’s view of the human person reflects the entire spirits of the
medieval world it comes to man.
He combined the platonic ideas into Christianity perspective. Augustine
agreed that man is of a bifurcated/ dual nature. An aspects of man
dwells in the world and is imperfect and continuously years 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
communion with God. He believes that a virtuous life is the dynamism
of love. Loving God means loving one’s fellowmen; and loving one’s
fellowmen denotes never doing any harm to another.

3. Thomas
Aquinas:
Angelic

doctorAdapting some ideas from Aristotle, Aquinas

said that indeed, man is composed of two parts:
matter and form. Matter/hyle refers to common stuff
that makes up everything in the universe.
Forms/ morphe refers to the essence of the substance
of things. It is what makes it what it is. In the case of the human person,
the body of the human person is something that he shares even with
animals.
 What makes a human persona human person is his essence. Like
Aristotle, the soul is what animates the body; it is what makes us humans.

B. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW OF SELF

1. SIGMUND FRUED: Psychoanalytic theory of self

He asserts that the human psyche (personally) is
structured into 3 parts. These structures – ID (Internal
desires), EGO (reality), and SUPEREGO (conscience)-all
develop at different stages in a persons life.
Freud also argues that the development of an individual
can be divided into distinct stages characterized by
sexual drives.
As the person grows, certain areas become source of
pleasure, frustration, or both.
Freudian stages of psychosexual development: oral, anal,
phallic, latency, and genital.

2. ERIK ERIKSON: Psychosocial stages of self-

development
He primarily concerned with how both
psychological and social factors affect the
development of individuals.
He formulated 8 major stages of development,
each posing a unique development task and
simultaneously presenting the individual with a
crisis that s/he must overcome.