THE SELF FROM

VARIOUS PERSPECTIVE
PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVE
Activity: Do you truly know yourself?
Answer the following questions about your self as fully and
precisely as you can

 1. How would you characterize yourself?

 2. What makes you standout from the rest? What makes yourself special?
 3. How has yourself transformed itself?
 4. How is your self connected to your body?
 5. How is yourself related to other selves?
 6. What will happen to your self after you die?
ANALYSIS: Were you able to answer the question with
ease? Why? Which question did you find easiest way to
answer? Which ones are difficult
1. Self identity is the way you characterize yourself as individual
2. Self identity is what makes you the same person over time
3. What is it that allow us to be an individual people at all?

3. Self consciousness refers to being aware of oneself, whether as other

see you or just looking into yourself. Self consciousness requires having
some concept of your self and accordingly, it is logically tied to
question of self-identity
Ideas of Socrates
1. His exhortation to ‘care for your soul’.
2. His conviction that knowledge of virtue is
necessary to become virtuous, and in turn that virtue
is necessary to attain happiness.
3. His belief that all evil acts are committed out of
ignorance and hence involuntarily…
4. Committing an injustice is far worse than suffering
an injustice.
 The Importance Of Philosophy
“For you see what our discussions are all about – and is there anything about which a
man of even small intelligence would be more serious than this: what is the way we
ought to live?” (Gorgias)
 what is the way we ought to live?”
In order to contemplate this question one must strive after self-knowledge
 The unexamined life is not worth living
“Once we know ourselves, we may learn how to take care for ourselves but otherwise
we never shall”
 What is the nature of our true self
 The true self is our soul
 The nature of the soul did not have the same religious connotation for them as it has or us
 In calling our true self our soul Socrates was referring to the “Thinking and willing subject”
 (Fredrich Copleston)
 The state of one’s soul determines the quality of our life
 Virtue as the one supreme good
 Knowledge = Virtue= Happiness
 Evil as the result of Ignorance
 It is better to commit injustices than to commit injustices
 The self is the psyche or the soul
 Tripartite theory of the soul
1. Appetitive – the elements that enjoys sensual experiences,
such as food, drink, and sex
2. Spirited – the elements that is inclined towards reason but
understand the demands of passion; the part that loves
honor and victory
3. The rational the elements that forbids the persons to enjoy
the sensual experiences; the part that loves the truth,
hence should rule over the parts of the soul through the use
of reason.
For Aristotle self identity was essentially bodily identity, without
reference to self consciousness
 The psyche is the form of the body
 The soul or the Psyche refers to a set of system of capacities
that gives life to something
 Aristotle believed that it is impossible to affect the body
without affecting the soul and to affect the soul without
affecting the body. There is no way to reach the soul without
except through bodily organs, and there is no way for the
soul to act or communicate except bodily
 Three types of Soul
 Vegetative or nutritive soul – enables plats to perform the
activities necessary for the nourishment, growth, and
reproduction
 Sensitive soul enables the animals to perform the activities
necessary for the nourishment, growth, reproduction,
sensation and locomotion
 Rational Soul enables humans to perform the activities
necessary for nourishment, growth, reproduction, sensation,
locomotion, rational thinking and freewill
 Man is composed
1. Hyle or matter refers to common stuff that makes up in the
Everything in the universe
2. Morphe or substance refers to the essence or substance of a
thing
 Thomas Aquinas concept of the “self” was that we don’t
encounter ourselves as isolated minds or selves but rather
always as agents interacting with our environment. And that
our self-knowledge is dependent on our experience of the
world around us. And that the labels we apply to ourselves are
always taken from what we feel or think towards other things.
THE SELF AS CONSCIOUSNESS
Descartes insisted that his identity is his mind as the thinking thing or
mental state
The self is the thought or consciousness
I think Therefore I am (Cogito ergo sum)
Self-identity depends on consciousness .Our identity does not depends in
anyway on our body running the same, and so human identity is different
from the identity of anything else in the world. Therefore the continuity of
our identity is to be found in the continuity of our consciousness rather
than our body.
The self identity is in the mind, in our thinking, doubting, feeling,
perceiving, imagining and I am essentially a thing which thinks
For Locke personal identity is based upon self consciousness, in
particular, upon memories and out one’s former experience
John Locke like Descartes, see self-consciousness as the key to
self identity but unlike Descartes, he argues that this identity
does not depend on our remaining the same thinking
substance, that is , on our having the same soul.
Locke argued that personal identity is based upon self
consciousness, in particular upon memories about one’s former
experiences. In this, he argues, man is different from animals,
whose identity is based on the continuity of the body, just as you
would say that you have had the same car for then years even
if almost every part except the chassis has been replaced
Locke idea that memory is what constitute a self-identity is
inspired by the distinctly Cartesian notion that a person’s
relationship to her own thoughts is unique
THE SELF AS AN ILLUSION BUNDLE OF IMPRESSION
 the idea of the self is simply a fiction
 Hume completely undercuts Descartes and Locke view of
self identity. Relying on his belief that any idea must be
derived from an impression. Hume argues that when we are
self conscious we are only aware of fleeting thought, feeling
and perceptions, we do not have any impression of the self
as thinking substance.
 Bundle theory of the self refers to the idea that the self or
person as a bundle or collection of different perceptions that
are moving in a fast successive manner
 “Were all just ever changing bundles of impression that our
minds are fooled into thinking of as constant ,because
they're packaged in these fleshy receptacles that basically
look the same from one day to the next.
THE SELF AS THE TRANSCENDENTAL UNITY OF APPERCEPTION
Kant agrees with Hume that the enduring self is not to be found in
self consciousness. The enduring self is not an object of experience-
Hume was right on this point and both Descartes and Locke were
mistaken. In Kant’s words, the enduring self is not empirical, it is
transcendal
Transcendental means what is necessary condition for the possibility
of any experience
The self of I for Kant, then is the necessary logical subject of any
thought, feeling and perception. It is not an object of experience
but transcends and is presupposed by all experience.
The self is the activity of consciousness, in particular the activity of
organizing our various experience
The enduring self is not empirical it is transcendal by transcendental
means what is necessary conditions for the possibility of any
experience
The self is the activity of consciousness
Transcendal unity of apperception
THE SELF AS BEHAVIOR AND ACTIONS
 Gilbert Ryle subscribed to the concept of “behaviorism”. He
denied or ignored the existence of a non-physical self and
instead believed we should focus on the dimensions of the self
we can observe. He denied the existence of: inner selves;
immortal souls; states of consciousness; unconscious entities; and
of “the ghost in the machine”. He contended that the self was
best understood as a pattern of behavior.
 The 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.
 Category mistake refers to the mistake to analyze the relation
between the mind and body as if they were ters of the same
logical category
 Ghost in the machine refers fundamental distinction between
mind and matter.; there is no hidden identity or ghost called sou
inside the machine called body.
 Materialism is a belief that nothing but matter exist
 The immaterial ,unchanging soul/self does not exist because it
cannot be experienced by the sense
 Eliminative Materialism or the claim that people’s common-
sense understanding of the mind or folk psychology is false, and
that certain classes of mental states which most people believe
in do not exist
The self as embodies subjectivity
 Reflected the mind-body dualism and insisted that the mind and body are
body experience
 Merleau-Ponty emphasized the body as the primary site of knowing the
world. He maintained that the body and that which it perceived could not
be disentangled from one another.
 “There is no duality of substance, but only the dialectic of living being in its
biological milieu
 Our bodies open our existence to the world because our bodies, we are in
the world
 Being-in-the-world refers to oneness and harmony between the body and
the world
 The body has a knowledge that is the body is not a mindless tool waiting
for the spirit to move it. The body learns things long before we become
conscious of what it learns
 The mind and the body are intertwined, we cannot even begin to
distinguish when the works and that of the body begins the body’s
functions is not just pure mechanical action. The body knowledge show
that the body is also intelligent. Conversely the mind is not pure spirit
detached from material world, though its cognitive activity, the mind
always think in embodied way
 There is no free floating self. for a self is always a self of
someone, says mine, your or his or hers
 Two kinds of self
1. Authentic self The person truly own the self that he/she has
2. Inauthentic self the person does not truly own the self the
he/she has
 Manifestation of Inauthenticity
1. Idle talk is a superficial groundless communication
2. Curiosity is a way of seeing or knowing things for the sake of
talking
3. Ambiguity refers to the difficulty of distinguishing between truth
and sincerity and insincerity or between truth and pretension