Reflect of the following:
What do we even mean by the “SELF”?
Are we souls, organic bodies or merely a
figment of another’s imagination?
Are we just minds or a combination of body
and mind?
Will I survive bodily death because I am
more than a body or when my body is dead,
that’s really the end?
•Or maybe… I am actually
controlled by some entity?
•“WHO
AM I?”
HOW WELL DO WHY IS GETTING
YOU KNOW TO KNOW
YOURSELF YOURSELF SO
NOW? IMPORTANT?
The Tao the Ching says. . .
“Knowing others is intelligence; knowing
yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is
strength; mastering yourself is true power. If you
realize that you have enough, you are truly rich”
CHAPTER 1
THE SELF FROM VARIOUS
PERSPECTIVES
PHILOSOPHY
The Self from Various
Philosophical Perspectives
WHAT IS A PHILOSOPHER?
• Traditionally, he is thought of a lover of wisdom.
• An intellectual who has devoted time to study the
meaning of life.
PHILOSOPHERS AND THEIR IDEAS
1. Socrates 7. David Hume
2. Plato 8. Immanuel Kant
3. Augustine of 9. Sigmund Freud
Hippo 10. Gilbert Ryle
4. Thomas Aquinas 11. Paul Churchland
5. Rene Descartes 12. Maurice Merleau
6. John Locke Ponty
SOCRATES : Know Thyself.
The true task of a philosopher is to know oneself.
He was the first philosopher who ever engaged in a
systematic questioning about the self.
DUALISTIC - every man is composed of Body
and Soul.
For him, there was soul before man’s body.
“Unexamined life is not worth living”
“One thing only I know, and that is that I
know NOTHING.”
PLATO Student of Socrates
Dichotomy
FORMS & MATERIALS
1. World of Forms- the permanent, unchanging reality self.
2. World of Materials- keeps on changing. It is what we see
around us, and for him, this-where we live, is just a replica
of the real self found in the world of Forms.
THREE COMPONENTS OF SOUL
1. Rational soul - reason
2. Spirited Soul - neutral
3. Appetitive soul - desire
AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO
Man is of a bifurcated nature
The body is bound to die on earth and the soul is
to anticipate living eternally.
The body can ONLY thrive in the imperfect, physical
reality - WORLD, whereas the soul can also stay after
death in an eternal realm with GOD.
Our World (World of Materials)
Real World (God)
AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO
SOUL is fully real-as the unchanging, permanent being and he sees God as the
ultimate expression of love.
Man has an immortal soul whose main pursuit is to have an everlasting life with
God.
MORAL LAW – distinction between right and wrong.
ETERNAL LAW – Universal law from God.
THOMAS AQUINAS
Man is composed of two parts: matter
and form.
Matter or hyle in Greek - “common
stuff that makes up everything in the
universe.” (Man’s body)
Form or morphe in Greek - “essence of
a substance or thing.” (Soul)
“The soul is what animates the body; it is
what makes us humans.”
RENE DESCARTES
Father of the modern Philosophy.
“I think, therefore, I am” or Cogito ergo
sum – he doubts the existence of everything
physical, including his own body.
For him, the existence of the body is not a
proof that YOU exist.
The mere fact that I can The body is nothing
DOUBT, is the evidence else but a machine
that I exist. attached to the mind.
RENE DESCARTES
The body can be described in a precise, structured manner
(Physical self) but the mind is not contained like that, and it’s
allowed to pursue its own thoughts.
When the body is gone, the mind may continue to exist and
function.
JOHN LOCKE
His starting point is the claim that all knowledge must
come from experience. There are no innate ideas.
Tabula rasa – blank slate
Unlike the first few philosophers discussed, he thinks
that our identity is not locked in the mind, soul, or
body ONLY.
He included the concept of a person’s memory in the
definition of the self.
He subscribes to the memory theory that holds we are
the same person as we were in the past for as long as
we can remember something from the past.
DAVID HUME
SELF is just a combination of ALL
experiences.
a. Impressions- those things we perceive through
our senses as we experience them.
b. Ideas- are those that we create in our minds
even though we are no longer experiencing
them.
The “I” will be constantly changing because the
different experiences one has for every constant
change will affect and reshape that person.
There is no permanent and unchanging self.
A person is a bundle of perception.
IMMANUEL KANT
Kant believes that man is a FREE AGENT, capable of
making decisions for himself.
A MORAL person is one who is driven by duty and acts
towards the fulfillment of that duty.
For us to know what is our duty, we have to rationally
deliberate on it and not expect that a higher authority will
hand it automatically to us.
In refuting Hume’s idea, he (1781) said that since man is
gifted with reason and free we can have a good idea of the
SELF.
SIGMUND FREUD
father of psychoanalysis.
One of his famous ideas was the tripartite division of
man’s mind:
a. ID- represents man’s biological nature; the impulses and
the bodily desires.
b. EGO- the self; the reality principle
c. SUPEREGO- represents ethical component of the
personality and provides the moral standards by which
the ego operates.
GILBERT RYLE
Denies the existence of internal, non-physical
self; what truly matters is the behavior that
a person manifests in his day-to-day life.
“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.
We can only know a person through how a man
behaves, their tendencies and reactions in certain
circumstances.
PAUL CHURCHLAND
• In partnership with his wife, Churchland believes that
the self is the brain.
• The term “mind”, our moods emotions, actions,
consciousness are deeply affected by the state of our
brain.
• It is only a matter of time before we can fully
comprehend how the brain works for us to
understand how it creates the Self.
MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY
To be a self is to be more than one’s
body.
It includes all the things that I will do with my
body, how I will act on it and how I will make
it act in consonance with other human beings.
The SELF is the sum of ALL the things that
you do.
