UNDERSTANDING THE SELF REFERENCE MATERIAL

Lesson1. Philosophical Perspectives

Philosophy has always sought to answer life’s difficult questions and has relentlessly pursued answers to
these no matter how seemingly futile the quest may be. This lesson will discuss selected philosopher’s answer to
the question, “WHO AM I?” That question may be one of the most difficult to answer and has garnered attention
tight from the start of man’s self-reflection.

Lesson Objectives:
 Understand the importance of knowing one’s self
 Recognize the different perspectives regarding the nature of man
 Compare and contrast how the self has been represented in different schools
 Examine one’s self against the different views of the self

Growing up, we were first taught as kids to articulate and write our names. Further, we were told to refer back to
this name when talking about ourselves. But really, who exactly are we? What do we mean by the “SELF”?
Are we souls, or minds or combination of body and mind? Will we survive bodily death because we are more than
a body or when our body is dead, that’s really the end?
The philosophical quest is aimed at unraveling who man is and his nature by looking, not just on the everyday
goals of a man, but to determine what ultimately is man, his goals, and his essence.
We will now take a look at how some great minds from our history approach the question, “WHO AM I?”

Socrates
- “Know Thyself”
- “Market Philosopher”
- “An unexamined life is not worth living”
For him, there was a soul first before man’s body. The soul has knowledge by direct intuition and all these
are stored in his mind. However, once he came to the material world, he lost it in the world of senses. He forgot
most of what he knew. This resulted in the lack of knowledge or ignorance which causes problems to a man.
But this can be restored through dialectic method or the Socratic Method, a sort of intellectual midwifery trying to
painfully coax knowledge out of man.
It is the exchange of question and answer that ultimately aims to make the person remember all the knowledge
that he has forgotten.

Plato
- Socrates’ prized student
- Founded the Academy (Academia) or the prototype of the modern university
Plato believed that man is composed of body and soul. The soul is the true self which is the unchanging and
permanent self. The body is the replica of true self that is changing, getting older, etc. The body is considered as
prison of our soul. We can free ourselves from the imprisonment of our bodily senses through contemplation or
the communion of the mind with universal and eternal ideas. For him, w e continue to exist even the absence of
bodies because we are souls only.
He also believed that the soul is composed of three components:
a. Rational soul – responsible for reason and intellect
b. Spirited soul – in charge of emotions
c. Appetitive soul – responsible for eating, drinking, sleeping, and even sexual needs
Augustine
- Self-confessed sinner
- Bishop of Canterbury
- Inspired by Plato

Taking his cue from Plato’s idea of ideal world or the world of forms, gave him a philosophical idea of
God and paved the way for his return to Christianity.
According to him, our world is only temporary home. The real world is where the God is, as God is the ultimate
expression of love. Out of that love, He created man in His image.
Man pursues happiness, but this can only be achieved in God alone. More so, moral law exists and imposed in the
mind so we can discern the distinction between right and wrong. However, we have the Eternal law which should
be universally followed because this is coming from the Eternal Reason or the God Himself. This is the law of
conscience that tells us if our action is morally good or bad.

Thomas Aquinas
- Most eminent 13th century scholar
- Supported Augustine’s view
For him, man is composed of two parts:
a. Matter or Body – “hyle” in Greek, “common stuff that makes up everything in the universe”
b. Form or Soul – “morphe” in Greek, “the essence of substance or thing”
The soul is what animates the body; it is what makes us humans.

Rene Descartes
- Father of Modern Philosophy
- “I think, therefore, I am.” (Cogito ergo sum)
Rene Descartes emphasized that man has the mind (cogito) and body (extenza) that are separate but the mind is
conjoined with the body.
This has led to his conclusion that the essence of the Self is in it being a thinking being, because even if he can
doubt whether he has real body or it’s just a trick of his senses, one thing he cannot doubt is that he is thinking.
For him, when the body is gone, the mind may continue to exist and function.

John Locke
 - Father of Classical Liberalism
- Inspired by Descartes

According to John Locke, our self is not locked in the mind, soul, or body only. He included the concept of
person’s memory in the definition of self.
He subscribes to the memory theory that we are the same person as the past as long as we can remember
something from that past. Personal identity is explained in terms of psychological connection between life stages
in the memory theory.
We are connected to that past as long as our memories are around, we are around.

David Hume
- Wrote the history book, “History of England”
- Considered as Empiricist

Empiricism is a school of thought that knowledge is possible if it is sensed or experienced.

David Hume believed that the mind is divided into two:

a. Impressions – what we perceive through our senses as we experience them

b. Ideas – what we create in our minds even though we no longer experience them
For David Hume, the self is a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an
inconceivable rapidity, and are in perpetual flux and movement. Simply, it is a combination of all experiences
with a particular person. We cannot observe any permanent self because we constantly undergo change, so there
is no self.

Immanuel Kant
- He refuted Hume’s idea of self
- “All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with the reason.
There is nothing higher than reason.”

Man is a free agent, capable of making a decision for himself. We are gifted with reason and free will. We have
the free will to be moral or not. He emphasized that every person should not be exploited or used. Man should not
be reduced to a thing but be valued as a person.
To know our duty, we have to rationally deliberate on it, not expect that higher authority will hand it to us, and not
let our emotion guide us.

Sigmund Freud
- Father of Psychoanalysis
- “The ego is not master in its own.”

Sigmund Freud believed that our mind has three components:

a. Id – desires and impulses

b. Ego – Self (negotiator)
c. Superego – moral standards or the ethical component of personality
He also stated that the Subconscious mind is where the battle between id and superego takes place. And the realm
of the ego is found in the Conscious mind.

Gilbert Ryle
His philosophy centers on language through linguistic analysis. He claims that the problems of philosophy were
brought about only because of the confusion due to misinterpretation, misunderstanding, etc. of words.
The mind expresses the entire system of thoughts, emotions, actions, and so on that make up the human self.
This mind is part of the body. The only way we can know how the mind is working is through behavior of the
person, hence we can only know a person though how he behaves, his tendencies, and reactions in certain
situations.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty
For him, the self is grounded on the experiences from the past, the possibilities for the future, and the present
cognition.
The self is a continuous flow of movement and expression from infancy and adulthood. It is the product of our
conscious human experience.
It is all about one’s perception of experiences and interpretation of those experiences.