LESSON 1: PHILOSOPHICAL VIEWS OF THE SELF

Why Everybody Needs a Life Philosophy:

Nothing gives a person a sense of purpose like a distinct understanding of where
they’re going. We all need personal philosophy in life or we risk wandering, and
responding to random stimuli and information with little to no impact on our long-term
goals. A philosophy of life is an overall vision or attitude toward life and the purpose of
it. Without a personal philosophy, we end up living without direction. The idea of life
philosophy comes back to a central question, one that Mary Oliver asks well: “What will
you do with your one wild and precious life?” Nothing gives a person inner wholeness
and peace like a distinct understanding of where they are going. Robert Bryne once
observed, “The purpose of life is a life of purpose.”
In order to get somewhere, you need to define your end goal. That is essential. And the
sooner you define it, the clearer everything else will become. A life without purpose is a
life without a destination. In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor says “Those
who have a ‘why’ to live can bear with almost any ‘how’.” Once you have defined your
aims and what you want, it is easier to deal with doubts. Easier to not get distracted
from what is important, keep your focus, and keep on moving.

The Philosophical Self

Philosophy is commonly defined as love of wisdom, but is essentially a special form of
activity, to philosophize. Articulo (2004) proposed that it is meant to be experienced,
living and doing philosophy. As an activity, Philosophy requires the cultivation of certain
quality in man: to wonder. Philosophy was said to have been born the very moment the
first humans began to experience such childlike wonderments, allowing one to wonder
and wonder about one’s human existence

The Self from Various Philosophical Perspectives

SOCRATES
Greek thinker
True task of a philosopher is to know one’s self
“The unexplained life is not worth living”
Worst thing that can happen to anyone: “To live but die inside”
We are supposed to know who we are and the virtues we are supposed to attain in
order to preserve souls after life.
• 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 or 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 the ultimate
reality is real as it is external and constitutes abstract universal essences of things.
• 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.

Supported the idea that man is a dual nature of body and soul
Three components of the soul: the Rational Soul, Spirited Soul, and Appetitive Soul.
1. Rational Soul – forged by reason and intellect; has to
govern the affairs of the human person
2. Spirited Soul – in charge of emotions; should be kept at
bay
3. Appetitive Soul – in charge of the base desires like eating,
drinking, sleeping, and having sexual desires

In his work The Republic, he emphasized that justice in the human person can only be
attained if the three parts are working harmoniously.
Ideal state = human person’s soul is just and virtuous.

ST. AUGUSTINE
Man is of bifurcated nature
• 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 present 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 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.

There is an aspect of man that dwell in the world that is imperfect and continuously
yearns to be divine while the other is capable of reaching immortality.
Body = bound to die on Earth
Soul = to anticipate living eternally in a realm of spiritual bliss in communion with God.
Goal of every human person is to attain this communion and bliss with the Divine by
living his life on Earth in virtue.

RENE DESCARTES
Father of Modern Philosophy
• 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's 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 a
mental entity and thus as a mental substance does not exist.
• Hume stresses that there is no stable thing called the 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 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
•Agerman 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. The 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 the 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 the 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 the 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, the 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 a 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 the 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.
• Superego is the last layer to develop. It operates according to the morality principle. It
is 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.

GILBERT RYLE
• A British philosopher. He maintained that the mind is not separate from the body. The
mind consists of the 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 behavior. The self is the way people behave.

PAUL CHURCHLAND AND PATRICIA CHURCHLAND

• Modern philosopher who studied the brain
• 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 the 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, the self is nothing else but the brain,or simply, the self is contained entirely within
the physical brain.
• The mind just is the brain.
• The physical brain allows us to say we are so different.

MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY
A Phenomenologist
Mind and body are so intertwined that they cannot be separated from one another.
All experience is embodied.
• 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 the 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.