Lesson 1 Proper

THE PHILOSOPHICAL VIEW OF SELF: VARIOUS PHILOSOPHERS

Socrates: Know Yourself
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.” – i.e., 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 Socratic 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. Since 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.
Plato: The Ideal Self, perfect self
Plato claimed in his dialogues that Socrates affirmed that the unexamined life is
not worth living. With this, he basically took off from his master and supported
the idea that man is dual in nature. He added that there are components of the
soul: a] rational soul; b] spiritual soul; and c] appetitive soul. The appetite is
likened to desires, both good and bad. This needs to be in moderation. The spirit
is what drives us to do this (courage) and the rational is our mind (wisdom). He
said that the rational spirit should rule over the spirit and the appetite.
Therefore, when this ideal state is attained, the human person’s soul becomes
just and virtuous. To make it simple, a man was omniscient before he came to
be born into this world. In practical terms, this means that man in this life
should imitate his former self; he should live a life of virtue in which true human
perfection exists.
“Love in fact is one of the links between the sensible and the eternal world.” - Plato
Rene Descartes: Cogito, ergo sum/ I think, therefore I am
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. Rene thought that the only thing
that one 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.
The self then for Rene is also a combination of two distinct entities, the COGITO,
the thing that thinks, which is the mind, and the EXTENZA of the mind, which
is the body, ie. like a machine that is attached to the mind. The human person
has the body but it is not what makes a man a man. If 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 and perceives.
To sum-up, although the mind and the body are independent of each other and
serve their own function, man must use his own mind and thinking abilities to
investigate, analyze, experiment, and develop himself.
David Hume: the self is the bundle theory of mind
He is an empiricist who believes that one can know only through the senses and
experiences. Example: Ana knows that Lenard is a man not because she has
seen his soul. Ana knows Lenard just like her because she sees him, hears him,
and touches him.
Hume posits that self is nothing else but a bundle of impressions. What are
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 in 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.
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 impressions 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 of the mind goes the self. Without the self,
one cannot organize the different impressions 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.
Gilbert Ryle: The Mind-Body Dichotomy
For Ryle, what truly matters is the behavior that a person manifests in his day-
today life. For him, looking for and trying to understand the self as it really exists
is like visiting your friends‟ university and looking for the “university.”
Ryle 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.
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 experiences are
all one.

Property of:

ROBERT L. CASTRO, LPT, MAED-H