“Unexamined life is not worth living”

Philosophers with Significant views and perspective on the Self:

Socrates
-every man is composed of body and soul. This means every human
person is dualistic, that he is composed of two important aspects of his
personhood. All individuals have an imperfect, impermanent aspect---the
body, while maintaining that there is also a soul that is perfect and
permanent.

Plato
Three components of the soul:
1. rational soul-which is forged by reason and intellect has to
govern the affairs of the human person.
2. spirited soul-which is in charge of emotions should be kept at
bay.
3. appetitive soul-which is in charge of base desires eating,
drinking, sleeping, and having sex are controlled as well.
Augustine
-view of the human person reflects the entire spirit of the medieval
world when it comes to man.

Man is bifurcated in nature. An aspect of man dwells in the world

and is imperfect and continuously yearns to be with the Divine and
the other is capable of reaching immortality.

The goal of every human person is to attain this communion and

bliss with the Divine by living his life on earth in virtue.

Thomas Aquinas
Man is composed of two parts: matter and form.

Matter or hyle –common stuff that makes up everything in the

universe.
Form or morphe-essence of a substance or thing.
Soul is what makes a human person a human person.
Rene Descartes

-conceived that human person as having a body and a mind.

The Meditations of First Philosophy, he claims that there is so much
that we should doubt.

Self is a combination of two distinct entities, the cogito, the thing

that thinks and the extenza, extension of the mind. In Descartes’s
view, the body
is nothing else but a machine that is attached to the mind.

David Hume-is an empiricist that argues that the is nothing like what
his predecessors thought of it.

Empiricism is a school of thought that espouses the idea that

knowledge can only be possible if it is sensed and experienced.
Self is nothing else but a bundle of impressions.
--impressions and ideas---
Impressions-are the basic objects of our experiences and sensation.

Ideas-are copies of impressions.

Self-is a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with
an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.

Immanuel Kant

-there is necessarily a mind that organizes the impressions that men get from
the external world., one cannot organize the different impressions that one
gets in relation to his own experience.

Gilbert Ryle

-what truly matters is the behavior that a person manifest 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.
Merleau-Ponty
is a phenomenologist who asserts that the mind-body bifurcation
that has been going on for a long time is a futile endeavor and an
invalid problem.

-according to him mind and body are so enterwined that they cannot
be separated from one another. One cannot find any experience that
is not an embodied experience All experience is embodied.

The living body, his thoughts, emotions and experiences are all
alone.

Lesson 2: The Self, Society and Culture

Human are gifted with intellect and the capacity to rationalize

things but at the end of the day, our growth and development and
consequentially, our selves are truly products of our interaction with
external environment.
Self
-separate, sef-contained, independent, consistent , unitary and private.

Social Constructionist

“understand the vibrant relationship between the self and and external reality”.

-argue for a merged view of the person and their social context where the
boundaries of one cannnot easly separated from the boundaries of the other.

“the self is capable of morphing and fitting itself into any

circumstances it finds itself in”.

The Self and Culture

Marcel Mauss (French Anthropologist)

-every self has two faces: personne and moi.
Moi-refers to a person's sense of who he is, his body, basic identity and
and hi biological givenness.
Personne-is composed of the social concepts of what it means to be who he is.
Personne has much to do with what it means to live in a particuler
institution, a particular family, a particular religion, a particular
nationality, and how to behave given expectations and influences of
others.

“if a self is born to into a particular society or culture, the self will have to adjust
according to its exposure”.

The Self and the Development of the Social World

“most often, we think the human persons are just passive actors, in the
whole process of the shaping of selves. That men and women are born with
particularities that ehy can no longer change.....men aand women in their
growth and development engage actively in the shaping of the self. The
unending terrain of metamorphosis of the self is mediated by language.
“Language as both publicly shared and privately utilized symbol system is the
site where the invidial and the social make and remake eact other.
Mead and Vygotsky

-the way human persons develop is with the use of language acquisition
and interaction with others. The way that we process information is
normally a form of an internal dialogue in our head.”

“human mind is something that is made, constituted through language as

experienced int he external world and as encountered in dialogs with others.”

Mead (child assumes the “other “ through language and role play. A child
conceptualizes his notion of “self” through this.

Vygotsky (a child internalizes real-life dialogs that he hasad with others, with his
family, his primary caregiver or is playmates. They apply this to their menatl and
practical problems along with the social and cultural infusions brought about by
the said dialogs).
Self in Families

-”while every child is born with certain givenness, disposition, coming

from his parents ' genes and general condition of life, the impact of one's family
is still deemed as a given in understanding the self.”

“in trying to achieve the goal of becoming a fully realized human, a child enters
a system of relationships, most important of which is the family”.

“without a family, biologically and sociologically, a person may not even survive
or become a human person.”

Gender and the Self

-another important aspect of the self is gender; it is one of the aspect of the self
that is subject to alteration, change and development.

From the point of view of the social sciences and the self, it is important to give
one the leeway to find, express, and live his identity. This forms of selfhood that
one cannot just dismiss. One maneuvers into the society and identifies himself as
who he is by also taking note of gender identities.

“Oftentimes, society forces a particular identity unto us depending on our sex

and/or gender”.

Nancy Chodorow-a feminist, argues that because mothers take the role of taking
care of the children, there is the tendency for girls to imitate the same and
reproduce the same kind of mentality of women as care providers in the family.
The way that little girls are given dolls instead of guns or any other toys or are
encouraged to play with the makeshift kitchen also reinforces the notion of what
roles they should take and the selves they should develop. In boarding school for
girls, young women are encuraged to act like fien ladies, are trained to behave in a
fashion that befits their status as women in the society.

Men on the other hand are taught , to learned masculinity as integrated by the
society.

The gendered self is then shaped withinthe contex t of time and space. The sense
of self that is being taught make sure that an individual fits in a particular
environment. This is dangerous and detrimental in the goal of truly finding one's
self, self determination, and the growth of the self. Gender has to be personally
discovered and asserted and not dictated by culture and the society.

Thank you!
ASSIGNMENT:

IS THE KNOWLEDGE OF ONESELF COMING FROM

ONESELF OR COMING FROM OUTSIDE?

WHAT IS MORE IMPORTANT, WHO YOU ARE NOW,

OR WHO YOU WANT TO BE?

ARE YOU THE PERSON YOU THINK YOU ARE OR

THE PERSON OTHER PEOPLE THINK YOU ARE?

WHICH PHILOSOPHY YOU ARE MOST

COMFORTABLE WITH AND MOST DISTURBED
WITH? WHY?