SUMMARIZE LESSON

UNDERSTANDING THE SELF

PHILOSOPHERS

• SOCRATES – An unexamined life is not worth living.

✓ Self is synonymous with soul.
✓ Know thy self.
✓ 1st philosopher who questioned about the self.
✓ Self is like avocado. The seed is the core and is the self.
✓ Artichoke self, continue to grow each time.
✓ Reality consists of two dichotomous realms.
1. Physical realm – changeable, transient, and imperfect.
2. Ideal realm – unchanging, eternal, and immortal.

• PLATO – The self is an immortal soul.

✓ Introduced the idea of 3 parts of soul/self:
1. Reason – enables to think deeply, make wise choices, and
understand eternal truths.
2. Physical appetite – basic biological needs such as hunger, thirst,
and sexual desires.
3. Spirit or passion – basic emotions such as love, anger, ambition,
aggressiveness, and empathy.

• Aristotle – The soul is the essence of the self.

✓ Introduced 3 kinds of soul:
1. Vegetative – includes physical body that can grow.
2. Sentient – includes sensual desires, feelings, and emotions.
3. Rational – includes the intellect that allows man to know and
understand things.

• St. Augustine – The self has an immortal soul

✓ The self is created in the image and likeness of God.

• Rene Descartes – I think therefore I am

✓ The father of modern philosophy.
✓ There 2 dimensions of human self:
1. The self as a thinking entity.
2. The self as a physical body.

• John Locke – The self is consciousness

✓ All knowledge comes from experience or perception.

• David Hume – There is no self

✓ Self is unified combination of all the experiences of a person which he attains
through experience.
✓ Self is a bundle of different perceptions with inconceivable rapidity and are in
perpetual movement.
• Immanuel Kant – we construct the self.
✓ The self construct its own self, actively creating a world that is familiar and
predictable.
• Sigmund Freud – the self is multi layered.
✓ He divided ‘’I’’ into two which are:
1. Conscious
2. Unconscious
✓ The self in 3 different agencies:
1. ID – displays it self as selfish and demands gratification. Please
principle. (I want it now)
2. EGO – reduces the conflict between ID and SUPEREGO by
implementing defense mechanisms. Reality principles
(We need to plan and wait in order to have it)
3. SUPEREGO – Morality principles. Punishes our ego for any
wrong through guilt.
(You can’t have it, it’s not right)

• Gilbert Ryle – The self is the way people behave.

✓ The self is synonymous with bodily behavior.
✓ How it acts in certain ways in particular situations.

• Paul Churchland – the self is the brain.

✓ We have an organ for understanding and recognizing moral facts. It is called
the brain.

• Maurice Merleau – Ponty – The self is embodied subjectivity.

✓ All knowledge about the self is based on the “phenomena” of experience.

• Macrina the younger - God is without gender.

➢ In the Islamic tradition, humans (male and female) are created in the “form of God” (ALLAH).

• Sayyed Hossein Nasr –

✓ “humans have dual status, as servant and viceregent of God”

• Iraj Anvar –
✓ NAFS-AL-AMMARAH – imperious self, one that commands.
✓ NAFS-AL-LAWAMMAH – One that scolds, tells that this is not right.

• Protean self - The ``protean self,'' as psychiatrist Lifton defines it, feeds on bits and pieces of experience
in our fragmented, deracinated society and continuously reinvents itself.

• Robert Lifton – The self is composed of many layers.

• Jill Bolte Taylor – Peace is only a thought away, and all we have to do is to access it is silencing the voice
of our dominating left mind.
• Existentialism –

✓ the basic definition of existentialism is, “the philosophy that individuals create their own
meaning in their lives, as opposed to having a deity or higher power creating it for them”
✓ An existentialist will find “self” and the meaning of life through free will, choice and personal
responsibility.

• Jean Paul Sartre –

✓ “Humans are not squeezed into society’s preconceptions and are therefore free to become
whatever they choose to create themselves.”

• Jose Ortega Gasset – “We are dealing with an entity whose being consists not in what it is already, but
in what it is not yet, a being that consists in not-yet-being”.